Coursebooks can be a great help when it comes to establishing the structure of a course, but they might lack what your students need at the moment. The topics that textbooks cover are sometimes outdated or simply not adjusted to quickly-changing reality. Authentic materials are a great way of supplementing these deficiencies. Take the Functional language for online meetings lesson, for example. It uses a funny video to teach what is of the utmost importance for any student working in English nowadays.
Textbooks don’t always revisit topics or grammar constructions taught at lower levels. But even if they do, each group of students is different and has different needs. So don’t hesitate to use authentic materials to revise topics which have not been fully understood by your students in the past. What we do and why we do it is a lesson aimed at A2 students, but the language addressed in it often turns out to be a challenge for higher-level students as well.
If you find yourself teaching students of a certain profession, there might not be a coursebook meeting their language needs. This is where real-life materials come in handy. If your students work in IT, try the lesson about blockchain. Are they in HR? Why do we glamourise overwork more than ever? will spark a great discussion on employees’ wellbeing. Do they work in logistics? Check out the How smart can a warehouse be? lesson plan. Are your students engineers or architects? Use the lesson about micro living.
Grammar is often labelled as dull by students. The good news (for them, as well as you) is that a grammar lesson doesn’t have to be limited to gap filling exercises. Using authentic materials can turn it into something enjoyable and interactive. They will show students that grammar is an essential part of language because they will be presented with broader contexts for its use. For example, learning how to use comparative and superlative adjectives while sharing opinions on old and new technologies in the Better. Faster. Stronger lesson can be a real hit! And if your students hate reported speech lessons, use the Practise reported speech with Vogue interviews lesson plan to show your students how useful this grammar construction can be.
From reading the news to researching a topic of interest to finding a perfect cake recipe, your higher-level students can do it in English rather than in their first language. They just need to develop the habit. The amazing thing is that making your students read in English is easier than it has ever been, given the range of topics available online. The only obstacle is their reluctance, as it is challenging and takes more time. You can help students overcome these difficulties by using our Critical Reading Club lessons. Try Are we lonelier than ever? and other CRC lessons to encourage your students to read in English outside the classroom.
ESL Brains is more than happy to help you make the most of authentic materials. Find the lessons you need using our search engine or browse through the topics you can find near the bottom of the main screen. Have you been teaching with authentic materials? Tell us about your experience!
We sometimes get so hung up on teaching our students to speak that we forget about another important skill they need to express themselves. For example, when they want to leave a complaint about a foreign online shop. Or when they need to message customer support because they have forgotten their password or login. Or both. Or when they need to respond to a message in a work-related chat. Not to mention writing an email. All these things have become essential in our students’ day-to-day activities and very often they have to do them in English. Below, we would like to share a few ideas on how to make students practise writing in English and integrate it seamlessly into their lives, without causing too much stress or discomfort.
The ways to exploit social media are endless. We can ask students to leave comments under the posts of people they follow. We can also find a post we like (there are hashtags to help us out) that ignites a discussion, choose a couple of existing comments and ask our students to start a thread with one of them. We can even suggest our students give it a try and write their own posts in English (provided they are active users and have something to say to their followers). We also have a couple of lessons where students can practise writing comments or blog posts.
All our students are customers or users of various services. And they are often either pretty happy with them or incredibly disappointed. Either way, they might have something to say about their experience. So we as teachers can help them communicate their thoughts and feelings and urge them to write reviews. They can either go directly to the website or leave a Google review. Along with restaurant reviews, we might appeal to our students’ other interests and encourage them to leave a film review on IMDb or a book review on Goodreads. You might start with one of these lessons if you want to make your students practise writing reviews: The power of reading or Let’s go to the movies.
Another useful thing connected to user experience and a way for our students to practise writing in English is customer service. Students often face difficulties and need help resolving something. But not everyone feels comfortable writing to a customer service representative straight away because they don’t know what to say or how to say it. Even if our students are not experiencing any problems at the moment, we can always make them remember something or model the situation for them and ask them to imagine they have to write about it to customer services. By doing so, we practise clarity of thought and politeness, and not just writing sentences. Here’s our lesson on problems and solutions which can come in handy here.
We sometimes overlook the value of these short but essential messages. Whether it’s to wish someone a speedy recovery, send greetings on their birthday or thank them for their help, it requires some knowledge of what and how to say it. Teaching it is simple: use different occasions. Someone is missing a lesson because they’re not feeling well? Make the rest of the group write something to them along the lines of ‘get well’ or ‘we missed you here’. Or when a holiday is approaching, prompt students to exchange greetings. We can even devote part of a lesson to creating greeting cards in Canva with special wishes that students come up with themselves. Here are some of our lessons that might help with writing these short but useful messages: Have yourself a merry little Christmas or Time to say goodbye.
An easy-to-implement way to make our students practise writing in English is online petitions. Platforms like Change.org allow anyone to create a petition on a topic they are passionate about. And if we’ve been discussing some global issues in the class, creating a petition is a great extension/homework task. However, we shouldn’t encourage students to actually post their petitions unless they are genuinely concerned about the issue. Sometimes simply showing students that they can do it is enough.
If your goal is to make students improve their debating skills, Kialo is a superb tool to help you out. It’s a public discussion platform that allows people to participate in various debates by writing their ‘pros’ or ‘cons’ comments. Students can join an existing debate or start their own. It’s also great for developing critical thinking.
We must keep in mind that writing is not only about creating concise, well-structured emails or writing a sophisticated and comprehensive essay. There are plenty of other areas of life that require this practical skill. And, of course, we don’t always have to go the extra mile to practise it. Sometimes writing is simply about that: making your students write. But now and then we need to resort to a bit of creativity and imagination to capture our students’ interest and maybe teach them how intertwined writing is with their everyday lives and how rewarding it might be to be able to write skilfully and effortlessly in English. And here at ESL Brains we hope to be your asset in trying to deliver that to students by creating more and more lessons that include writing skills practice.
Every teacher knows the advantages of incorporating group tasks into ESL lessons. Discussions, debates, controlled conversations, games, role play and project work considerably increase the amount of practice for students. They get an opportunity to work independently, which enhances their motivation and makes them concentrate on the task. Groupwork provides more of a natural linguistic environment, reducing stress due to more intimate group dynamics. By helping one another, students discover things together and are likely to complete their tasks more successfully, which in turn boosts their confidence.
Using group activities with one-to-one classes may not seem particularly exciting or even doable for some teachers. Have you ever wondered how to adapt group activities to provide variety, as well as ensuring your one-to-one students enjoy and benefit from them? Below are a few tips to consider.
One of the most common activities combining elements of pair and groupwork is debates. Students and teachers love them as they give an opportunity to practise important skills, such as turn-taking or presenting. They can be used not only as speaking tasks, but also as preparation for written assignments. The easiest way to perform this activity in a one-to-one class is by becoming your student’s partner. You may want to try several ideas to add variety to this activity.
Of course, you can just let your student choose to argue a particular side in the debate, but you can also assign them one. It may present an extra challenge, but it can also be a positive learning experience for them to argue on the side of the debate they don’t actually believe in.
On a different occasion, and with a stronger and more confident student, you can prepare five arguments in favour before the class and ask them to come up with counter arguments, setting a time limit. While they are working on their arguments, take the role of a facilitator and guide your student when they need assistance, providing vocabulary, or clarification of the task.
ESL LessonsWith a weaker student, you can set the topic of the debate as homework and ask them to do research and prepare a few arguments in favour and a few against. Once in class, flip a coin to decide who will be arguing in favour of and against the proposition. That will bring an element of surprise but also boost your student’s confidence (as they’re already prepared!) and increase your chances of sparking an interesting discussion.
The role of a teacher during group activities shifts from resource to monitor or consultant in one-to-one lessons. Becoming your student’s partner in group activities, although the easiest solution, makes it complicated to focus on their mistakes and provide them with immediate feedback. One possible way to overcome this problem is by turning a debate into a short speech (one or two minutes, depending on level) on a topic discussed in the lesson, and therefore delaying your feedback. You can either give your student some time to prepare, ask them to improvise or even set a persuasive speech for homework and use it at the start of your next class. Once the speech is finished, your student receives feedback on different aspects of their performance, such as grammar or pronunciation.
But what about activities such as role play, which require interaction? Giving up on doing them would be a shame as they’re a perfect way for ESL teachers to ease students’ transition into using English in real-world situations.
One possible way of including them in a one-to-one class would be by dividing the roles (teacher: employer, student: employee) and recording the role play using a mobile phone. Once it’s finished, you can listen to the recording together and analyse the mistakes (one time you may want to focus on pronunciation, another time on grammar). Make it more memorable by letting your student try and identify their own mistakes first.
Apart from being fun and motivating, group activities appeal to many ESL instructors because they broaden the world of the classroom and allow students to rehearse situations they’re likely to experience in the outside world. Implementing this ‘real-life’ context in our one-to-one classes is also possible (and extremely important!). Here is how to do it:
If your student is quite confident, you could ask them to make phone calls to real places and put into practice what they’ve learnt (this could include making an enquiry about a hotel room, feeding times at the zoo, or even asking a restaurant about their menu). Do it during your class and note down their mistakes while they speak.
If they don’t feel ready to talk to strangers yet, switch off your Zoom video and simulate a phone call. It’ll be less stressful, but at the same time, more challenging than what they’re used to.
If your student has friends or relatives who speak English, you could ask them to record an interview/conversation with them as homework (putting into practice the language you worked on in class), then listen to the recording together and comment on strengths and weaknesses.
