Teaching intermediate students

[pengyou]

I have taught English in China for more than 10 years now and have received certification from UCLA - somewhat useful to me but I found that since I had already taught for more than 7 years I know most of it.

I am comfortable taking raw beginners and beginning intermediate students. I am somewhat at a loss as to how to take an advanced intermediate student and help him/her move on. Are there any models to help me out? It is especially difficult because of my students have already studied a considerable amount of English but still cannot use it. Yet, when they see the textbook and can recognize the words, they say "we know that"...but I still don't see/hear it in their English.

Any ideas?

[ouyang]

I would suggest planning your lessons around reading and writing assignments. You don't have to turn it into a formal writing class. You can organize some interesting communicative activities based on reading and writing tasks. Most intermediate and advanced students need opportunities to work with complex sentences.

[OxfordBlues]

Most students don't want to hear the bad news. If they want to ever move to higher levels they have to READ!

Reading lots of books and newspapers and magazines are the only way to realistically incorporate the various natural patterns of English into their repertoire.

This is exactly how native speakers improve their grasp of the language in school. For some reason though, students like to believe that teachers can give them some magic formula for becoming proficient, but that's not the case.

They have to do the work -- they have to read!

[dave-b]

I completely agree with the above posts. Students need to read more.

Apart from that, I think they need to improve their conditionals for grammar. Native speakers use them so much in conversation and many advanced students still don't have the hang of it.

So in addition to all the reading described in the other posts, when you want to teach some grammar, the conditionals are a good start.

Good luck!

[Heath]

As an extension to reading activities, I find it can be very useful and engaging to encourage advanced learners to look for lexical patterns. It's also quite rewarding for teachers too, so it can be great to, every now and then, work through a text together trying to find interesting things.

There are lots of ways to do it. I'd suggest starting off with things they're bound to be relatively familiar with. Tasks like, "Find 5 phrasal verbs", or "Find 2 expressions starting a sentence related to time and 2 related to 'opinion/belief'" (eg. "In the beginning...", "Soon after that...", "I couldn't really say whether it's true or not, but..." "It seemed to be...")

Later you can ask them to describe three expressions using (loose) terminology like this, and see if you can find them (eg. the student sees "every now and then" in this passage, and tells the teacher to look for "a 4 word expression with 'and' in it" or "an expression about 'how often'", etc, and the teacher tries to find it based on that information only).

I'm sure you can think of more creative ways... but the idea is that any pattern or fixed or loosely fixed expression, large or small, can be targeted, and it both raises their awareness of the language and helps them to develop their own study skills further (and yours).


Here are 5 questions to try it out based on just my post (including this part!):
1) Find a V + to V phrase expressing certainty.
2) Find a 3 word phrase starting with "I" expressing certainty.
3) Find a V + prep + prep phrasal verb about sequencing.
4) Find a 4 word expression that means 'attempt to do sth'.
5) Find a phrasal verb meaning 'trial sth'.