I would like your opinons on 'free' conversation

[pbear8]

I am an ESL instructor and have been for 4 years. Throughout my career I have heard some collegues agree and others disagree with the idea of free conversation time.

What do you think are its benefits? OR Why do you think that it is not beneficial?
Do you have free conversation in your class. How do you work it into your lesson?

Thanks in advance!

[lolwhites]

If, by free conversation, you mean a conversation class with no stimulus material to get things going (e.g. an article, video clip...) then I think you need very outgoing, talkative students for it to work. The worst kind of conversation class is a group of students who say they want "speaking" practice but can never think of anything to say!

A lot depends on whether the students are ready - the incomprehensible pre-intermediate student who just wants "conversation" may be too lazy to do any proper study and hope they can learn English by a couple of hours a week of osmosis in a "conversation" class. I once had a couple of students abandon my Spanish class because they wanted "speaking" - the trouble was they couldn't string more than three words together, but wouldn't accept they might have to learn more than one tense properly before they could converse meaningfully.

If I were to do a photography course but said "I don't want to learn about filters, picture composition and focussing, I just want to take photographs", I could reasonably expect the response "Well, you need to know these things in order to take good photos". Likewise for speaking in a foreign language. I'm not saying "no conversation till you've done all the grammar" but a sensible balance is needed here.

You don't say which country you work in, which makes a huge difference. As a teacher in the UK, I've had students remark to me that they can get "free conversation" in the pub and don't need to pay for it in a class. However, in a non-English speaking country with monolingual groups a different approach is obviously required.

[pbear8]

Hi and thanks for your reply.

I'm in Toronto , Canada. And while there are many ways in which they can meet native English speakers, they never do. None of them have Canadian or English speaking friends. The only exposure to English is in my classroom, two hours a day, five days a week. They are an intermediate group. Most of them are Chinese. Their grammar is great as is their writing. However, that can't be said about their speaking and listening.

When I say 'free conversation' I meant with a list of thought provoking questions of sorts. Not free as in 'talk about anything'.

Thanks for your input, I appreciate it.

[joshua2004]

I always try and work in free conversation in my classes. For very low students, this might just comprise me saying something and them responding in Spanish. But I think you MUST have a conversation component that is unstructured. Speaking a language is dynamic, so should be the instruction.
The free conversation is generally spun off a video, song, or other material we are studying. I will ask a question that comes to my mind such as "so, have you ever been to denmark?" if that thought occurs to me. Is that clear? You can't just put people together and expect them to talk. Likewise, I have had bad experiences in just giving them a topic.
Conversation is a natural activity, you can work it in to your lessons and have the students practicing, without them being aware of it.

[pbear8]

Thanks for your reply.

Well, I had , for the first time, one of my new students tell me that she didn't think that free conversation (topic based) was going to help her to learn English. Not to mention she wasn't crazy about the topic; cloning. She didn't feel that speaking with other people who made errors would help her at all. She saw it as a waste of time.

She completely threw me off!

What would you have told her are the benefits of non-structured conversation?
What do you tell your students if they are 'bored' or not interested in a topic you have chosen?

I know I should not let this bother me, but it has.

Thanks so much...this is a great site!

[joshua2004]

I think you might want to build greater interdependence between her and the others. This can be done a little bit at a time at the start of each day, doing an activity where everyone gets to know each other more or at least one other person better. Once she is working with others more and seeing the benefits of teaching and working with others, she will change her attitude.
An important thing you want to do, is structure the lessons so that the students have to interact. You don't have to make sure their working together all the time, ideally it is a mix of group and a little bit of independant work. Stepping away from lecture dominated classes, you will find that you minimize the problems of people not working together. People have to get to know each other and spend time working together in order to learn how to do it well and enjoy it.

[Lorikeet]

I don't have trouble anymore with students complaining that speaking with other ESL students won't help them progress. I just ask them who is working at the bank, the post office, the supermarket, etc. Many non-native speakers (as well as assorted native speakers!) with their plethora of accents work in our city (San Francisco). In order to understand, you have to practice. In addition, I explain that speaking to someone who doesn't understand you gives you good practice in learning how to figure out what problems people have understanding you, as well as how to explain something so they can understand.

In my classes, I use an over all topic, like "Shopping" and add different questions. For example, Do you like to shop? Where do you usually buy groceries? Do you ever shop at secondhand stores? Have you used the Internet to buy things? Do you enjoy going to garage sales? Is shopping in the U.S. the same as shopping in your country? What do you think about malls?

I explain that they are to work in groups of 3. I tell them that answering "yes" "no" and "sometimes" is not a conversation, and that it's entirely appropriate to get off the topic. They are supposed to ask follow up questions and continue like in a real conversation. I have students from many different language backgrounds, and they enjoy doing this. I usually keep it to about 20 minutes, and I walk around commenting and answering questions. After the conversation, I often have them write a short paragraph about their opinion on the subject, and I put it on the Internet. (You can see an example of their writing at http://fog.ccsf.cc.ca.us/~lfried/writin ... iting.html if you are interested.)

[Sally Olsen]

I, too, had difficulty with Chinese students who didn't think that they could learn anything without a structured format. They had done so well in China. memorizing, following rules and learning grammar that they couldn't see any other way of learning. So we did the "theme" of "Learning" and how that is accomplished and what people think about the ways we learn. First they wrote an essay on how they learned English up to this point. We really had to work to get them to think about their experiences because they were so used to them, they didn't think they were unusual for me. I got articles from the university on teaching classes (it promoted group work and projects and portfolios) and articles from psychology magazines on the lastest thinking about learning and used them as the "readings" for the class. They also interviewed students in the class who weren't from their country or outside the classroom and asked how they learned. We had a formal debate and learned the rules to do that. I got a list of what "good students" do to learn from the Second Language Acquisition research and we made posters about that to hang up around the classroom. The students wrote personal journals about their learning in my class and others and compared those in small groups and submitted them to me once every two weeks. This attitude toward learning is very deeply ingrained and as one Chinese student said to me, "You are torturing me to think for myself and to talk without a purpose. I want you to set up the learning in steps for me and then give me a test." At the end of the course, some students still believed in the methods they had learned in their home countries but they had thought about the deeper issues of what coming to Canada to study meant to them. I had gained many insights into their education and since they were extremely successful students in their country had to respect that some of their ways of learning must be successful. It was equally hard for me though to think that I might use them in my teaching or learning.