Off the paper - into the brain exercises

[Hannibal Jim]

I teach primarily one-person classes in Japan. I've been at it about two years. I have always worked with basic to low-intermediate students where there was plenty of work to do. I just hooked up with a school that has provided me with my first intermediate to advanced students, and I am overjoyed and overwhelmed! I can't keep up.

I have one guy who can look at a text exercise and fly right through it without a hitch. When I engage him in free conversation, he has trouble employing complex constructions. Put him back on paper, no sweat.

I'm looking for activities something like this -- I introduce (or review) the grammar, do some text-based exercises, then move off the paper and into something like very minimal oral drills.

Problem is, most of the texts I've looked at for drills are simply more advanced grammar presented in the same format as for beginners. Anything I've seen called oral drills are no more than paper drills that you speak.

For example,

I say: You are eating in a restaurant. The waiter thinks you have finished and starts to take your plate away.
Student responds: I haven't finished

I say: After lunch, you go to a friend's house. She says, "Would you like something to eat?"
Student responds: I've already eaten.

In these kinds of exercises, I provide so much information that it eliminates natural, impromptu conversation and provides no generative opportunity. How can I stimulate natural conversation that employs the target grammar? If I simply say "Create a small conversation that uses lots of examples of

I have gone to ____
I haven't been to _____
I have never done ____

then he is going to freeze up for lack of an imaginative scenario.

What am I looking for? Am I looking for prompts? Yeah, I think that's what it is. I'm looking for texts or activities that provide enough of a prompt to get a scenario in his head, but far less than a typical 'fill in the blank' exercise.

Where can I look for these kinds of activities? Are they called something that I can search for? Furthermore, am I describing a methodology for which I can research classroom applications?

HELP!

[fluffyhamster]

I wouldn't say that a limited response ("short vs. long turn") using present perfect is much of a stretch for intermediate going on advanced students; you could get the student to think of the possible contexts (i.e. do all the work that you seem to have been doing), extend or make more appropriate the conversations, but the target grammar (and lexis) doesn't seem that new, difficult, or pregnant, and employing 'lots of examples' of the same or similar forms may not be the best way to build natural discourse (you'll end up with something like a Streamline textbook).
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 0102#30102

I'd suggest that you take a more lexical approach, and read a few books on discourse, such as Thornbury & Slade's Conversation: From Description to Pedagogy, Brown and Yule's Teaching the Spoken Language, Hatch's Discourse and Language Education, or McCarthy's Spoken Language and Applied Linguistics (Carter and McCarthy's other CANCODE-based publications are also well worth a look, especially their recent Cambridge Grammar of English).
http://www.cambridge.org/elt/elt_projec ... id=2500598
http://www.cambridge.org/elt/elt_projec ... id=2500463
http://www.cambridge.org/elt/elt_projec ... id=2500442
http://www.cambridge.org/elt/elt_projec ... id=2500545
http://www.cambridge.org/elt/elt_projec ... id=2500122

A recent grammar thread (on question tags) where I hint at wider syllabuses, that incorporate/try to account for more than more than just grammatical structures:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?t=59997

Might also be of interest:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... =5422#5422

Me, I try to find time to work through or at least browse advanced learner dictionaries, noting those words which enter into seemingly interesting and/or (usually and!) functionally useful phrases (by way of their examples/contexts) that students may not be aware of: there is so much that is hardly ever (or never/is yet to be) incorporated into any syllabus. You could do whole lessons (or indeed, a whole series of lessons) on words/notions such as irony/ironic, embarrassment/embarrassing/embarrassed etc. And what about associations, connotation etc:
http://www.eat.rl.ac.uk/
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?t=32579

Another few threads that I just remembered (many links inside the first!):
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 7239#37239
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... =5522#5522

Do also a search for 'Dogme' and take a look at the threads that I started or was the last to reply to.

Sorry this reply is such a mishmash, but my own syllabus is still very much a work in progress!

I guess that ultimately, some learners (especially Japanese) can be hard work to get talking and doing their conversational share, no matter how stimulating or helpful the stimulus (or they can at the other extreme be very selfish and self-indulgent!).