What’s the most important thing that will keep your students coming back for more lessons?
Is it your well designed grammar exercises? Your refined pronunciation drills? Or maybe your charisma?
These are all great, but unless you build lessons that are relevant to your students, you will eventually lose them.
In this article you will learn exactly how to find the perfect material and match it with your students, keeping them happy and making your retention rates stay sky high.
How to Find Magnetic Material
1. Learn About Your Students
Each student has their own reasons for learning English, they have their own interests and own motivations. They are investing their time and money in you because they believe that you can help them move towards their goals.
So, how do you find out what your students’ goals and interests are? Well, there’s this beautiful thing called conversation that can be used to ask these things called questions…
Joking aside, I use the first part of a trial class to do my investigation. One of the earliest questions I ask is
“Why do you want to improve your English?”
Now, this is quite simple and you will usually get similar basic answers:
“For work”
”For study”
“Want to speak with friends”
This will give you a rough idea, but you will need to dig deeper.
For example, if they say they are learning for work then you need to find out how they use English.
Do they just send the occasional email to foreign clients?
Do they have to give presentations?
Do they have to manage a team?
Get as much information as you can. This will help you much more when you structure your lessons later on.
Paul… the Software Engineer (A)
Paul is a software engineer. He works in a local team where he speaks his native language (German) but occasionally has to send emails to English speaking workers from divisions in other countries. He isn’t sure about his grammar and would like to appear as professional as possible when communicating with these people.
It’s also vital to ask what they do for work / study. Once you know the field of study / work then you can use vocabulary / terms that are specific to that field. This will add massive value to your students who are taking one-to-one lessons. Even if you are teaching a group class, you can find areas that are relevant to as many of your students as possible.
Janet… the Architect (B)
Janet is a college student who wants to one day be an Architect. She has decided to study Architecture in the UK (providing she passes her IELTS). As well as helping her with her exam it turns out that expanding her vocabulary relating to Architecture is something she would be interested in.
Finally, find out your students’ hobbies. Tying lesson material to a student’s interests is a quick way to get them hooked on your lessons!
Ben… a Fan of Sitcoms (C)
After some discussion, it turns out that Ben is a huge fan of American sitcoms. He finds them funny but can’t always understand what’s happening. Although he didn’t say he is specifically wanting to improve his English for the purpose of watching sitcoms, he seems much more interested when you mention you would like to include these things into your lessons.
2. How to Build ESL Lessons
Once we have plenty of information to go on, we are ready to make our lesson plans. First, it’s a good idea to think about which area you want to develop and then get the materials to fit that.
Let’s look at our examples again:
Paul… the Software Engineer (A)
Paul mentioned already that he wants to improve his grammar. With regard to him needing to improve it for work emails, it makes sense to focus on writing ability.
Now, from here, what would you do?
We could set some exercises and role play some scenarios for Paul to reply to. However, if Paul has some past emails from work or ones that he needs to work on then it makes sense to use this as your source material. This is as relevant as it gets, you are using material that the student would be using on a regular basis in their English-speaking world.
This is now moving on to our second step, finding the right material. This was fairly simple with Paul as we already had the material to work with.
What could we do with Janet in Example B though?
Janet… the Architect (B)
We mentioned already that Janet would benefit from expanding her vocabulary relating to architecture. For this, it’s as simple as finding material that has a lot of relevant vocabulary. This can be found in Architectural news articles and magazines. We can have Janet read these articles, check her comprehension of certain words and then get her to use these words in a sentence to drill them to memory.
Finally let’s look at the kind of student who has a hobby (such as watching sitcoms) you want to incorporate into a lesson and the ways of doing this:
Ben… a Fan of Sitcoms (C)
The student could write a review or summary of a lesson. You could discuss the episode in class, favourite parts etc. for the purpose of speaking. Your student could read scripts (found online) to check pronunciation and comprehension when reading. You could also have your student listen to the episode without looking at the screen and then summarise the situation to focus on listening.
Not only are these developing the students’ skills in a relevant way but because it’s fun for them you will find them to be highly motivated and more likely to keep going with their studies!
3. Reviewing Your Lessons
This last step is equally as important as the other two. We need to review and refine what we do.
Sometimes the activities we are doing aren’t as effective as they could be and need some tweaking. Often our students’ life situations change and we need to adapt to keep ourselves relevant. Let’s look at those examples one last time:
Paul… the Software Engineer (A)
After studying with you for a year it turns out that Paul doesn’t actually send that many emails anymore but he now reports to a different boss who speaks in English. We asked how he was finding the lessons when we discovered this news. Now we can adapt the lessons and focus more on speaking to keep things relevant.
Janet… the Architect (B)
After asking how things were going for Janet at the start of the lesson we discover that she has an interview for her dream university, great! The interview is in English so let’s put the vocabulary on hold for now and we can practise interview techniques and have a few mock interviews in class.
Ben… a Fan of Sitcoms (C)
Although Ben likes using a wide range of skills in class, he still struggles with speaking the most. Due to this we can focus more on his speaking fluency and pronunciation. We can still have the lessons focus on sitcoms but we are now making the skill being developed more relevant to him.
In each of these cases we found out about these changes just from asking questions.
In example B (Janet) we discovered this news just from some light chit chat at the start of the lesson. This is a great time to find things out in a natural way. Just by asking about your student’s week and what’s happening, they will tell you plenty to inform your decisions about future lessons.
In example A (Paul) and example C (Ben) we got this information by having a review session at the end of class. It’s also important to have more structured reviews occasionally. Pick a certain frequency (for example every 5 lessons) and then ask questions such as:
How are you finding the lessons?
Are the lessons the right difficulty?
Are there any exercises you would prefer to do more or less of?
Asking these things and adjusting the lesson accordingly will ensure your lessons are perfectly tuned to your students and will keep your retention sky-high!
Bonus Tips for Business ESL Lessons
As we saw in Example A (Paul), these principles work really well when teaching business English.
Let’s take this one step further and see how we can provide even more value to these students.
Occupational Niche
Learning about a student’s occupational niche is what will really make you stand out from general online courses or other online teachers regurgitating the same cookie-cutter business lessons.
You have a student that wants to improve their English to help with their work. Sure, they will need the basics:
Making arrangements
Sending Emails
Answering the phone
But to really help them shine, you need to learn about your student and what it is they actually do at work.
Learn About Your Students’ Role in the Workplace
Make sure to ask these questions:
What do they do?
Who do they have contact with?
What equipment do they use?
From here, we can find vocabulary that is going to be extremely useful and relevant to their role.
You don’t need to learn everything there is to know about the role. Just a little background reading will go a long way in showing your students that you care about their language development.
Let’s look at 3 different example students and how we can find the right vocabulary for them:
Jane… the Doctor (D)
Jane is studying to become a Doctor and will study in an English speaking country soon. She will need a lot of specialist vocabulary.
Even without being specialists in the subject, we can find articles on medicine and health online. We can then have her read these articles to check her pronunciation and find new words for her vocabulary.
Dennis… the Web Designer (E)
Dennis has just started work as a web designer for a large multinational company. He deals with clients and colleagues from English speaking countries often, and wants to build his confidence when speaking with them.
With a bit of background research into web design through a google search, we’ve managed to find some useful vocabulary to test him on in class.
We can also make sure to have conversations on topics related to web designing for him to practise this new vocabulary.
Thomas… the Finance Manager (F)
Thomas is applying for a few jobs in the finance sector and wants to be prepared for his interviews.
After getting him to send over the details for the jobs he is applying for, we have some very niche vocabulary that we can test him on.
We can also include this vocabulary in a mock interview so he has even more relevant practice with the vocabulary.
It’s worth noting that none of this takes a massive amount of preparation time. You can find this stuff in minutes but the good impression of being a prepared teacher will last with your student forever! If you’re still struggling to find material for these lessons then here are 20 business activities and topics to help you get started.
Conclusion
This is the stuff that really makes one-to-one lessons different from a group class.
If you use generic material that doesn’t connect with your students then expect them to find someone else that does.
However, spend a little time learning about your students, their dreams, their motivations. This small investment of time and energy at the beginning will pay dividends so many times over later down the line!
Teaching abroad is a great idea: an enriching, rewarding and life-changing experience.
You’re given the unique platform to educate and impact young minds while becoming immersed in diverse cultures and worldviews. As a teacher, this is an excellent opportunity to combine your passion for the classroom with your desire to travel across the globe.
But depending on where you choose to teach abroad, the living expenses can often be higher than the cash-flow you generate each month.
From groceries and accommodations to entertainment and public transportation, maximizing your time spent overseas can be rough on the wallet.
Fortunately, there are various easy side jobs that teachers can take advantage of to supplement their income and subsidize their wanderlust.
Private Tutor
Average Pay
Salaries typically range from around $10 to $50 per hour, depending on a number of factors such as your teaching subject and experience level.
As this world becomes more globalized, being fluent in English is a sought-after skill you can segue into a profitable tutoring business.
Many students and often their family members could be eager to receive more intensive English training outside the classroom, so offer private sessions to help them expand their comprehension of your native language while boosting that paycheck at the same time.
You’ll be responsible for planning, preparing and delivering lessons to your students and making sure that they are improving their skills.
Another option is to increase your bandwidth outside academics and capitalize on other talents you might have too.
Whether it’s teaching the ukulele, hosting a pottery class or leading group fitness, advertise it on social media, a local community center, websites like Craigslist, and even hand out fliers.
If you put in the marketing legwork, then word of mouth is going to spread and make your side job a bountiful source of income.
When teaching online, you’ll have the option to either work as an individual freelance teacher, or you can try to find work with a company.
If working as an individual, you’ll be required to find your own students and build your client base, while those working for a company will likely be connected directly with students — but have to accept the company’s working conditions.
Content writers are either be paid per project, per hour, or per word depending on your client’s requirements. When you are starting out, you usually will make anywhere between $10 to $25 per hour.
Since you’re more than likely going to document the experience to keep family and friends back home updated on your adventures, you might as well get paid for the writing.
Even if you’ve never written anything besides a sporadic journal entry, numerous travel websites or blogs are interested in publishing original pieces from any globe-trotter with a fresh and dynamic perspective to share.
Reflect on the different cultural nuances you’ve encountered, the laughable communication barriers you’ve fumbled through, or the eye-opening lessons you’ve been exposed to, and brainstorm a creative angle from which to tell that story.
Next, familiarize yourself with travel-centric media outlets and which types of content they look for. Then find an email address for article submissions and pitch your idea to the editor.
You never know who might want to read about your life as a teacher in a foreign country or about your most effective methods in teaching and classroom management.
Besides that, you can always make quick cash by editing and writing students’ papers or doing other ghostwriting jobs.
There are virtually no limits on what you might end up writing about.
You can create news articles, press releases, business proposals, stories, sales emails or anything else that may be required by your client.
Being a content writer usually doesn’t require much experience, although most clients want to see that you have a solid understanding of the English language and are capable of producing high-quality copy, that is informative, well-written and free of errors.
Local Tour Guide
Once you know the regional customs, attractions, and scenery that make your area unique, share that knowledge with tourists.
You’re passionate about where you live and want visitors to feel that same energy, so register as an independent tour guide on websites like Show Around. They connect you to sightseers and eliminate the guesswork of building a client base on your own.
You might be required to complete an interview process, undergo a background check or obtain a license, but becoming a tour guide is a simple and interactive money-making option that also taps into your existing skills as a teacher.
You don’t have to be an expert on the country to provide educational and cultural enrichment for people.
Just introduce them to the festivals, traditions, architecture, cuisine, music, artwork and other points of interest that made you fall in love with this distinct corner of the world.
Affiliate Marketer
While it takes dedication, time and effort to carve out a niche for yourself in the affiliate marketing sector, once you’re established, it’s one of the most lucrative side jobs for teachers out there.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, affiliate marketing is when you endorse another brand’s product and earn a commission if someone orders it through your promotion.
After becoming an affiliate, you’ll receive a customized link to share on your blog or social media accounts, so when people make a transaction using that link, a percentage of the sale is yours.
This is called generating passive income which means that if you work hard on the front-end, over time you could bring in a consistent revenue stream with minimal exertion.
Just be selective about which brands you choose to support — it goes without saying that if you don’t have firsthand experience with a product, you won’t come across as reliable or authentic.
Selling Lesson Plans
Instead of discarding last year’s teaching materials, turn them into an e-commerce business that benefits other teachers and serves as extra income for you.
Monetizing your lesson plans, student activities, worksheets and other forms of a curriculum is a resourceful way to earn back the money spent out-of-pocket for classroom supplies – and even turn a profit.
There are multiple websites that streamline the process of retailing these items and allow you to keep as much as 85% of the revenue. Teachers Pay Teachers certainly is the most popular marketplace.
You’ll receive the earnings through PayPal, making it simple and direct to cash out anytime, and you can choose between a free option or a premium subscription with nominal membership fees.
The one caveat is the lesson plans must be your intellectual property, giving you the right to sell them.
Online Translator
Average Pay
Entry-level translation jobs typically start at over $20 per hour.
If you can write and speak fluently in another language besides English, you could secure an online translator gig on a flexible and remote basis.
Whether you’re proficient in a mainstream language such as Chinese, Spanish, and French or a less common language such as Farsi, Urdu and Amharic, teachers who are bilingual have a competitive edge when it comes to finding work online.
So use this marketable skill to translate both oral and written materials for numerous industries.
You could also work as an intermediary to facilitate communication between two people who speak different languages.
Translation jobs are excellent for gaining experience working remotely, as well as improving your own language skills and technique.
From software and engineering to finance and medicine, you can offer a wide range of translation services which makes this job not only versatile but always in high demand.
To start locating companies that need to hire a translator, join websites like Verbalize It, Gengo or Translators Café that resource you with training tools and help match you with clients who require the particular language you’re fluent in.
Customer Service or Sales Representative
Average Pay
Salaries usually start between $12 to $15 per hour.
As long as you’re willing to learn about a company’s products and services, finding an entry-level job in customer service should be a relatively easy task.
These types of companies are usually only looking for people who are friendly to talk to, and patient enough to deal with any troublesome or irate customers.
Customer service jobs will require that you answer calls, emails or instant chat messages from customers to help solve their problems.
This often includes troubleshooting products or services, upselling and making inside sales, surveying customers, and even dealing with payment and billing issues.
Data Entry Clerk
Average Pay
Salaries usually start between $12 to $15 per hour.
Data entry can easily be done remotely and doesn’t require any previous experience in your employer’s industry.
You will need to be a detail-oriented person and should have a basic understanding of how to create documents and spreadsheets. Most data entry positions require nothing more than fast typing skills and a keen eye for detail.
Your daily job duties will include creating documents and filling in information as per your client’s requirements.
You may also be required to perform thorough research to collect data in order to transfer this information into a computer system or database to maintain accurate records for your employer.
Social Media Manager
Average Pay
Social media manager positions usually start out at about $15 per hour.
With social media being more popular than ever, more and more companies are looking for people to take care of their social media accounts in order to help maintain a positive image in the eyes of their customers.
As a social media manager, your job duties will include tasks such as replying to customer comments and messages on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, performing online research, as well as scheduling interesting content posts to keep customers engaged with the company.
You’ll typically be required to complete tasks that are relatively simple, but usually somewhat tedious and time-consuming to perform.
Photographer
The competition is fierce as more people capitalize on the photography trend, but if you invest in a camera and hone the craft, this hobby could pay-off.
To become a serious photographer, take and edit as many pictures as you can, assemble a portfolio, then submit your work travel magazines, websites and tourism boards.
Some publications host photo contests with monetary prizes and other publications will compensate directly for each of your photos they’re interested in printing.
The more creative, original, distinctive and polished your photographs, the better chance you’ll have of standing out from the crowd and drawing the attention of editors.
So when you’re not in the classroom, grab that camera, roam the streets, and be on the lookout for eye-catching sights to capture on film.
Not to mention, the more pictures you take, the more visual reminders you’ll have of this experience abroad.
How to Find a Side Job for Teachers
Once you’ve decided to make extra income, the next step is to get out there and find yourself a side job. Besides the specialized online platforms mentioned in the sections above, in general, there are a few places to start your job search.
Online Job Boards
There are literally hundreds of remote job boards on the internet. Most platforms, such as Freelancer.com and Upwork.com, have job listings in a variety of different niches and industries.
In most cases, you’ll have to set up an account, create a profile, and then you’ll be free to apply to any of the jobs posted on their websites.
Personal Networking
Networking is always a great way to meet new people, and build connections that can help launch your career as a remote worker.
It’s also never a bad idea to contact your former employers and co-workers to ask if they’re able to help you out in any way.
Another good idea is to create an account on LinkedIn, which can be used as your own personal portfolio by displaying your past and current work, as well as allowing you to connect with all sorts of professionals in your industry.
Social Media Platforms
Facebook and Twitter are excellent places to search for potential jobs.
You can try joining groups where people talk about remote work to find out who is hiring. You can even try sending out tweets with hashtags related to the type of job you’re looking for.
Cold Calling or Emailing
This method requires a bit more effort on your part, but it can often be the best way to landing your dream job.
If you already know which company you want to work for, you can try picking up the phone and making an unsolicited call to their office.
Once you get them on the line, introduce yourself and ask a few simple questions such as whether or not they hire remote employees, or if they are currently looking for any.
Also, if you’re too shy to pick up the phone, you can also try getting in contact with a company by sending them an unsolicited e-mail. Just make sure to address your recipient personally and try to keep things short and professional.
Last Thoughts
The above mentioned are a few ways of getting a steady flow of side income to support your living abroad.
If you have a hard time deciding what to go for, try asking the fellow teachers from your community. They will point you to the most promising activity in your particular location and position.
Teaching abroad (and in your home country, too) is an amazing opportunity to embrace the global mindset and boost your life skills. Make sure to use your flexible hours to the most.
Not only these side jobs for teachers bring you money for the mundane expenses, but they also become a noteworthy line in your resume or a superb story to tell.
How can you build effective lessons and feel in control of the class?
Lesson plans are essential to planning and ultimately giving great ESL lessons.
But isn’t making lesson plans long and arduous? Well… not if you do things the right way!
In this article, you will learn to make a lesson plan for teaching English from scratch that is both effective and won’t eat up all of your time and energy!
Can You Teach Without a Lesson Plan?
The short answer is yes, you can teach a lesson without a plan. However…
You shouldn’t!
With one-to-one students, you usually have more freedom. If things don’t go quite right you can usually just keep talking and keep the flow going while working out what to do next.
In fact, I have a few students who just want to practise their free conversation and I just turn up and talk for an hour without anything planned.
However, for the majority of students (especially groups), not planning a lesson is not an option.
You need a clear idea of what you want your students to learn and how you are going to help them achieve that goal. The only way to do this is with a lesson plan.
Remember that you may think you’re saving time by not planning anything (or planning minimally) but you’ll regret it when you are in the middle of a stressful, unplanned lesson.
As Benjamin Franklin once said,
“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
How to Create a Lesson Plan From Scratch
Does it matter which tool you use to create your lesson plan?
Not really, no.
The important thing is that you can easily and quickly create your plan, make adjustments (if necessary) and bring it to class with you.
You could…
Use Pen & Paper
This is the low-tech option but still popular, especially if you can’t get access to a computer.
You also have the advantage that you don’t have to worry about making a printout or bringing a laptop with you to class etc.
Use Word Processing Software
You can use Microsoft Word or any other popular application you would use for writing anything else.
Simply type it up and then either print a copy at the end or find some way of bringing it to class (laptop, mobile phone, classroom computer, etc.)
Use an Online Storage System
I started using Google Drive for my lesson plans a few years ago and haven’t gone back since!
The documents app has everything I need to type up my lessons and I know that everything is stored online which makes it easy to access.
Think About Presentation
Bear in mind that you should think about who will be looking at your plan. If you are working in a school or with an assistant then it is likely that others will see it.
Make sure it is neat enough that others can understand it and maybe spend some time on the presentation and making it look pretty.
However, if you are a freelance teacher then presentation doesn’t matter so much. As long you can make out what’s written and can follow it easily, you can have it look however you want!
Once you have decided on your tool to make your lesson plan, you then need to focus on what you actually will include in your plan.
Essential Parts to Include in an ESL Lesson Plan
Once you have the right tool for the job it’s important to focus on what you will include in your lesson plan. Some of these can be optional but pay attention to the essentials that will be marked.
In theory, you can do these in any order you want. However, going through in the order provided here will make your life a lot easier.
Parts of a Lesson Plan
Date and time
Class and Student Name, Number of Students
Lesson Aims
Lesson Duration
Lesson Activities
Bonus Activities
Resources Needed
Here’s how a simple lesson plan template could look like:
Date and Time
It may seem trivial but you want to make sure you have the right lesson plan for the right lesson.
Get into the habit of including date and time to avoid confusion and turning up to class with the wrong plan!
This is also useful when the lesson plan needs to be filed after class (e.g. in a school).
Class and Student Name
Again, it comes down to making sure you are matching the right plan to the right class. This also helps you visualise your learners as you are making your lesson plan.
Number of Students
This one isn’t important if you just teach one-to-one lessons (obviously). However, if you are teaching group classes then the number of students in your class will need to be taken into consideration when planning activities.
Lesson Aims (Essential)
Ask yourself:
“What do I want my students to do at the end of this class that they couldn’t do before?”
This is your lesson aim and is one of the most important considerations when designing a lesson plan.
This can be seen as “What is the point of this class?”.
For vocabulary lessons, the lesson aim may be a list of words or maybe a certain concept if teaching a grammar lesson.
Whatever the reason is, make a note of it and always keep it in mind when you make any other decisions about the lesson plan.
Lesson Duration (Essential)
How long do you have to do the lesson?
In order to effectively plan your activities in class, you need to know how much time you have to work with.
Lesson Activities (Essential)
Create a list of every activity you plan to do in class. This needs to be precise and include things such as warm up, free conversation, explaining homework at the end, etc.
State how long each activity will take in minutes.
Obviously it is unlikely you will be able to stick to this exactly, things change and you need to go with the flow. However, try to stick as closely as you can to it and you will find your life will be much easier.
It doesn’t need to be said but, this needs to be done after your lesson aims, as they will dictate what activities will be appropriate for that class.
Bonus Activities
As well as planning your lesson activities, it’s a good idea to include some bonus activities that can be done in case you finish the class early.
You don’t want to run out of planned activities halfway through a class and have to improvise a class to a room of 30 students!
Get a couple of backup activities planned and take them to each class. A small amount of planning now will give you peace of mind in the long run.
Resources Needed (Essential)
Make a list of everything you need and pay attention to the details.
As well as noting down that you need printouts for that crossword, did you think about whether the students have pens or will you need to bring them? Do you have backups of lesson materials? A backup USB drive of the presentation etc?
Be prepared with all of this because there’s nothing worse than having to run out of class 5 minutes in because you forgot something small!
How to Structure an ESL Lesson
Ok so we know all of the details needed for the lesson plan but… how do we actually structure the activities in the class?
This is very much dependent on the type of class you are teaching and your style. As I’m teaching mostly one-to-one advanced students and my students require different things, my lesson plans vary quite a bit.
However, for “traditional” classes (groups from beginner to intermediate level) you will likely want to follow the classic PPP model which is mentioned extensively in TEFL courses.
What is PPP?
PPP is an acronym for presentation, practice, and production.
It is a popular model for teaching foreign languages and is one of the most popular teaching models used in TEFL courses.
Let’s look at each section in more detail with 5 great ideas for each!
Presentation
In our first section, presentation, we show the students something. It could be:
Ideas for Presentation
A short, fictional story
A video
An object (a piece of fruit, a toy, etc.)
A roleplayed conversation between the teacher and the assistant
A news story
It could be anything, as long as it can stimulate a discussion about what you want to teach in the class.
For example, if I want to teach the past simple tense vs the past continuous, then I could find a story that uses both of these and highlight them.
Practice
In the next section practice, we give students a chance to use the new concept in a controlled environment. We could use:
Ideas for Practice
Gap-fill exercises (a sentence with a word missing that a student has to fill)
Sentence correction (students find the mistakes in an incorrect sentence)
Sentence rearrange (students have to put the jumbled words of a sentence in the right order)
Synonym matching (students have to match a word with its synonym)
Word select (again, there’s a gap in a sentence but there are a selection of words to choose from)
The idea is that students can play with the new concept but they still have the “training wheels” on.
Production
The final stage, production, is much freer and allows the student to use the new concept with less help. Think of exercises like:
Ideas for Production
Writing an essay (set an essay question; can be very good for homework assignments, too)
Free conversation (split students into pairs and have them talk freely while incorporating the new concept)
Asking questions (either ask the students yourself or split them into groups)
Roleplays (split students into pairs and give them roles to act out)
Information exchange (split students into pairs and have them find out certain information from the other)
This section is usually the most challenging as the students have much less support compared to the practice stage. However, it is essential for preparing students to use these new concepts in the real world.
Useful Tips for Lesson Planning
It’s Better to Overplan
When you are first starting out it is much better to over-plan everything.
Where will the students be sat? How long will it take to hand out the exercise sheets? Will you allow time for questions?
Start by overplanning and as you get more comfortable teaching, you can start taking out things that you don’t feel you need.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
There are plenty of pre-existing lesson plans out there just begging for you to use.
If your school or establishment has its own then you can use those and adapt them.
Have a look online for any free or paid downloadable lesson plans and even share them with other teachers.
You can keep these lesson plans as but you will likely want to tweak them to fit your class.
The point is, why struggle when the work is already done for you?
Make sure to include plenty of activities that get the students involved.
It’s difficult to write a lesson where you are talking for an hour straight and still managing to keep your students hooked and learning well.
When you include more student activities you find it’s easier to write the lesson, reduces teacher talk time and your students are more likely to learn effectively.
Make a Template
Once you have a lesson plan design that works, you can then use that as a template for the next lesson plan.
This can be a big timesaver as you don’t have to make everything from scratch each time.
Make Backups
Make sure you have a backup in case you lose your main plan. I used to keep digital copies of my lesson plans on my mobile phone so that I could check that in case anything happened.
Also, make sure your assistants have their own copy of the plan so they know what should be happening at each step in the class.
Practise the Activities
It’s especially important to practise the activities if it’s the first time doing them. As well as being able to perform the task properly in class, it allows you to see how long it will take.
This timing is important when planning your lessons as it allows you to be more precise with organising the timing of the activities and have a smoother flowing lesson.
Don’t Skip the Warmup
Whether you are teaching one-to-one or a room full of students, you shouldn’t skip the warmup. This is a chance to prepare the students for the lesson and flow naturally into the topic of the day.
Make sure to factor this into your plan. For larger classes, you may way to keep things a little more controlled and spend one or two minutes on the warmup.
For one-to-one classes, I usually aim for around 5-10 minutes as it allows me to personalise things a little more and build rapport.
The important thing though is this needs to be built into the timing of the lesson plan!
I have found it to be vital to include review sections in class.
A lot of language learning is a memory game, this means that not only does a student have to learn a definition of a word or grammar concept but they have to remember it too.
If your student doesn’t revise then these things will escape the memory frighteningly quickly.
For this reason, I always build in a review section nearer the start of the lesson to check their knowledge of what we did in the previous lesson.
You can check pronunciation and definition of words or even a “Can you remember what we did in the last lesson?”.
As long as you are getting the students’ brains to reactivate some memories from what has been done before then they are more likely to remember these things in the long run.
Example Lesson Plan
Now we’ve covered everything that you need to create effective lesson plans.
Let’s look at an example lesson plan about IELTS Speaking Practise to give you an impression of how (simple) a lesson plan can look like!
Conclusion
There we have it, everything you need to start building your very own lesson plans from scratch.
Remember to experiment with the different parts you need for a lesson plan.
Once you have something that works, use that as a template for future lesson plans to make your life even easier!
A good teacher should try to say as much as possible in a lesson to give as much information as possible… right?
WRONG!
In this article we will look at why limiting teacher talk time in a class is a good thing.
You will also find 15 essential tips on how to start limiting your own teacher talk time and create better ESL speaking lessons for your students.
So… let’s dive in!
Why Should You Limit Teacher Talk Time?
Just because you are the teacher it doesn’t mean you need to be in front of a blackboard talking at your students for an entire lesson.
This can maybe work well with certain concepts like grammar or when training listening ability but for building speaking skills we need more input from the students.
Naturally, in a conversation, there can only be one person speaking at a time. If you are speaking then the student is not and if they aren’t talking then how can they build their speaking ability?
Limiting teacher talk time will create the void needed for students to speak. Allow yourself to step back and listen to your students. Make notes on how they can improve and then guide them the right way.
This may be a different mindset than what you’re used to but is essential for students who want to focus on building their speaking fluency.
And… if you are teaching online then newsflash, this will be a large proportion of your students! Get this right and they will keep coming back for more.
The Tips to Get Your ESL Students Talking as Much as Possible
Now you are in the right frame of mind to begin helping your students build those speaking skills.
Let’s look at some top tips to get us speaking less and get them speaking more!
1. Ask Open-ended Questions
This first one is simple. Instead of asking closed-ended questions that are going to elicit… well… short answers at best, we should ask open-ended questions.
Look at the difference between these:
“Do you prefer chocolate or vanilla ice-cream?”
“What would you do if you won the lottery?”
How many possible answers could a student give for the first one? Two at most with some variation on sentence structure, right?
The second question, however, has so many possibilities and the type of answer will usually be a lot longer.
Now, having open-ended questions is great and all but it doesn’t guarantee success.
In our last section, we looked at answering what a student would do if they won the lottery. They could still answer with a short “I would invest it.”
This is where our magic words because and but come in.
Whenever a student gives you an answer that is too short, you can get a little more out of them by adding one of these words on the end.
Again, back to our example:
Teacher: “What would you do if you won the lottery?”
Student: “I would invest it.”
Teacher: “Because…”
Student: “Because that way I would get even more money.”
It can also take a different direction when we use but:
Teacher: “What would you do if you won the lottery?”
Student “I would invest it.”
Teacher: “But…”
Student: “But maybe not all of it because I would want to buy some clothes first.”
3. Use the Words Tell Me and Describe
This is where things start to open up even more. When you tell a student to tell you about something or describe something then you are likely to get a fairly lengthy answer.
Coupled with the fact that the teacher really doesn’t need to say that much, this is a powerful tool for levelling the student / teacher talk time balance.
We can add on follow up “tell me / describe” questions like so:
Teacher “Tell me about where you live.”
Student “I live in a small house in the city.”
Teacher “Describe the layout of your house.”
Student “It has three bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen… etc.”
4. Have the Students Ask You Questions
It’s very easy for things to sound like an interview when students follow your lead and only answer your questions.
Try mixing things up by getting them to ask you questions and engage more of their speaking side than just answering things.
Make sure your answers aren’t too long though. Remember that the shorter your answer, the more questions your student will have to think up to keep a conversation going.
I like to use this at the beginning of a class when doing some warm-up chitchat. I spend 5 minutes or so asking about my student’s week and then tell them to ask about mine.
5. Step Into a Supervisory Role
Consider your role in the classroom. In order to get the teacher talk time down, you will need to switch into a supervisor role.
In this position, the students will have been set a task (roleplay, interview each other, free talk, etc.) and your job is to simply make sure they are doing the right thing and only step in when necessary to make occasional corrections.
Finding the right balance for how often you should intervene is a skill you will develop with time.
You want to give your students enough space to be able to work things out but at the same time, you need to correct any major errors.
You will also need to check that they aren’t doing things such as speaking in their mother language or simply staying silent and not trying!
6. Have the Students Read the Lesson Explanations
I like to do this in my grammar lessons. Instead of reading everything out to a student and having them nod along, I like to get them to read it.
Not only are they learning grammar but we are getting them to read these things themselves which allows us to check their pronunciation at the same time, very effective!
Bear in mind that reading aloud tends to lower comprehension ability. For this reason, you may want to take over explaining when you get to really tough parts.
Alternatively, you can tell your students that they can read it again in their head if they struggled to understand something when speaking out loud.
7. Be Encouraging!
Speaking English can be very intimidating for some students.
They might not be naturally confident speakers in their own language, let alone in a language they don’t feel confident in!
The biggest worry is likely to be making mistakes.
Some students want their work to be perfect and the thought of making a mistake means that they will think it’s better to say fewer things well than risk saying more and messing everything up.
You need to explain from the beginning that this is the best environment for them to make mistakes.
It’s better to make those mistakes now where an English Teacher can correct them than later down the line in a more critical situation.
8. Be Strict With Bullies
Coming back to groups, this can be worse as not only are students thinking about what their teacher thinks but also their peers.
Again, make it clear to your students that making mistakes is fine but making fun of others will not be tolerated.
This is vital as if your quiet students get picked on for their mistakes by others then they are going to be even less likely to want to speak up.
This is the ratio of student to teacher talk time that you can aim to keep to for a specific exercise.
Tell your students that for every sentence you speak, they must speak for three sentences when replying (3:1).
If your student replies with less than this ratio, simply wait…
It may feel awkward at first but your students will soon get the hang of it and realise that they have to fill that gap. Which leads on to another important tip…
10. Enjoy the Silence in Conversations
In order to get some students talking, you will need to create some gaps in the conversation and this can feel awkward at first, very, very awkward.
You may be used to having to fill this gap with more speaking but you will have to turn that mindset off.
For a conversation to work you will obviously need to say some things, ask questions, etc.
But if a student gives an answer that is too short, if they try to quickly pass the “talking baton” back almost immediately then you will need some pauses in there.
Nobody likes this awkward feeling of “somebody should be talking” and sooner or later your student will say at least a little something else to keep the conversation going.
In order to get to this point though you will need to desensitise yourself from that awkward feeling and try to become comfortable with it so that only the student feels slightly awkward.
We need to shift the thinking from “nobody is talking so the teacher is making things awkward” to “nobody is talking so the student is making things awkward”.
11. Split the Class Into Smaller Groups
Obviously, in order to practise speaking in a group class, you will need to split everyone into smaller groups.
Now, you could split people into groups of 4-5 students and have them speak that way. If you do this then you’ve reduced teacher talk time but we are still left with students waiting for their turn to speak.
However, if you split your class into pairs then this increases the student talk time even more.
Something to consider the next time you do group work in class!
12. Have the Students Teach the Teacher
This is something I’ve started doing recently and am enjoying good results with it.
When going through your lesson, check your student’s comprehension of a word, phrase or concept by getting them to explain it to you (as if you didn’t know).
This can be quite difficult for them as they may only have a rough grasp of what it is anyway.
That being said, if they can power through and find a way to explain it to you then not only will they have boosted their speaking ability (explaining difficult things) but you should also find that their concept of that thing will have deepened as a result.
As the Roman philosopher Seneca said: “While we teach, we learn”
13. Have the Students Teach the Class
Similarly, you can have students explain things to other students. I’ve been using this to wonderful effect in my group classes.
Conduct your class, as usual, let’s say you are doing some reading practise. Your student comes across an interesting word that you want to check their comprehension of.
Simply ask them if they know what that word means. If they know it, then great, they can explain it to you (as mentioned in the point above).
If they don’t know it then don’t just give them the answer, open it up to the rest of the class…
“Does anybody else know this word?”
Now you are not only enlightening student A on the definition of a word but student B is building their ability to explain things (and strengthening their understanding of the word in the process).
Is there such a thing as killing three birds with one stone?
14. Get Out the Timer
This is something that would work better in a one-to-one class but could see some benefit in a group class.
Bring out a timer so it is in sight of both you and the student.
You will then ask questions and the student will need to talk for a set amount of time. You will only begin speaking again once the time is up, which forces the student to keep going even if they get stuck.
This is great as it gives you a measurable target you can use to increase speaking stamina.
Start with a short time such as thirty seconds and over time bring the time up until it’s up to several minutes.
As well as being great for general speaking practice, this is a great tool for anyone studying the IELTS where examinees are expected to speak for up to several minutes without any aid from the other person.
15. Always Have Backup Conversation Activities Prepared
You will inevitably finish a lesson earlier than expected at some point and need to find some way to fill the time.
Again, one of the biggest things you can do is become comfortable with the idea of not having to speak all of the time.
Once you create that space then you will start to see it filled with your students’ words instead and that’s where their speaking ability really grows!
Experiment with these tips, don’t be afraid to mix and match or even try some of your own ideas out!
How often do your students say they struggle with pronunciation… It’s a lot, right?
English can be really tough in this area and mastering how to teach it will really step up your game as a teacher.
By the end of this article, you will know the pronunciation fundamentals that every teacher needs to know.
You will learn effective activities and be given the resources needed to get the most from your student’s pronunciation.
So, without further ado, let’s get started!
Objectives of Teaching Pronunciation
When focussing on pronunciation it’s important that we focus on that… pronunciation.
This is different from accent reduction where the aim is to sound “like a native”. This goal can take many many years as well as a very high level of immersion.
The point of pronunciation is that we understand which word the speaker is trying to say.
We do this by focusing on things such as word stress, vowel sounds and consonant sounds.
As mentioned, English is tough because although there are some rules, they tend to get broken so often. Added to that, there are plenty of words that sound different to how they are written and it’s a recipe for confusion!
Incorrect pronunciation can lead to mild discomfort at best, and at worse, we could have some incredibly dangerous mistakes.
E.g. A Dr that tells a Nurse to give a patient eighty milligrams of a drug instead of eighteen (because they missed out the n sound at the end!)
This is a method of spelling words based on how the word sounds as opposed to how it is represented in a language.
For example, cough is spelled /kɒf/. Here it is very easy to see that the final consonant sound is an /f/ and not some kind of g.
Let’s look at other ways gh is used:
Ghost = /ɡəʊst/
Through = /θruː/ (silent)
Laugh = /lɑːf/
Bighead = /ˈbɪɡ.hed/
Hiccough = /ˈhɪkʌp/
If you can introduce this to your students and show them how to find the phonetic spelling of words on a website like the Cambridge Dictionary then it’s similar to teaching them how to fish (rather than simply handing the fish over).
How to Teach Word and Sentence Stress
Teaching stress can be difficult depending on your student’s mother language.
For a student whose mother language is Russian, it can be fairly simple to explain which syllable the stress should fall on in a particular word. This is because Russian uses variable stress; this is similar to English where the stressed syllable can change in a non-predictable way.
For students from languages such as Polish or Finnish where the stress is on a fixed syllable each time, you will need to explain the difference first.
Then there are languages such as Mandarin or Thai where you will need to explain the concept of stress from the beginning as they more or less lack lexical stress altogether.
Word Stress (Lexical Stress)
For most intermediate and advanced students you will simply need to pronounce a chosen word with the correct stress and then have your students memorise it.
Make sure to test these on a regular basis or have your students use some form of memory aid such as ANKI.
ANKI
ANKI is a free piece of software that is incredibly efficient at helping someone memorise large amounts of information. Very useful in language learning!
It would be a good idea to look at some constants, such as how compound nouns will have the stress on the first syllable of the first word most of the time.
You can also use the IPA spelling which gives the stress of a word with an apostrophe, useful for your students to check while doing self-study.
For beginner students, you will need to explain things from the beginning.
Pick a couple of words that have the stress on different syllables, say them out loud and ask your student if they can hear the difference.
This works better if it’s a verb / noun pair.
Examples: Verb-Noun-Pairs to Practise Word Stress
to increase (verb) /ɪnˈkriːs/ — Increase (noun) /ˈɪn.kriːs/
to record (verb) = /rɪˈkɔːd/ — Record (noun) = /ˈrek.ɔːd/
to permit (verb) = /pəˈmɪt/ — Permit (noun) = /ˈpɜː.mɪt/
to accent (verb) = /əkˈsent/ — Accent (noun) = /ˈæk.sənt/
to digest (verb) = /daɪˈdʒest/ — Digest (noun) = /ˈdaɪ.dʒest/
to overlap (verb) = /ˌəʊ.vəˈlæp/ — Overlap (noun) = /ˈəʊ.və.læp/
They should be listening for a slight raise in pitch as well as raise in volume on the stressed syllables. Once they can hear it, get them to repeat what you are saying.
Sentence Stress (Prosodic Stress)
Although word stress is arguably the more important of these two to get right, eventually your more advanced students will benefit from learning about sentence stress.
A great way to do this is to take a sentence that has plenty of variations of meaning depending on where the stress falls.
Example: Sentence Stress Excercise
Jim stole the chocolate cookie. = It was Jim who stole the cookie (not someone else).
Jim stole the chocolate cookie. = It was theft that was done (not something else).
Jim stole the chocolate cookie. = It was a chocolate cookie that was stolen (not another flavour).
Jim stole the chocolate cookie. = It was a cookie that was stolen (not another chocolate flavoured thing).
After using some examples you can ask your students to give you a sentence that has a particular meaning.
E.g. Who was it that stole the cookie? Which cookie was stolen? etc.
How to Teach Vowels
When teaching vowels it’s important to consider your student’s mother language.
A lot of European languages have the same words with similar spelling. However, vowel sounds can shift in English.
A common example is the word chocolate. In many European countries, this word has a more pronounced ‘a’ vowel sound, this will often sound like the ‘a’ in late. However, in English, this is pronounced as a schwa: /ˈtʃɒk.lət/.
A schwa
…is the unstressed vowel sound found in words such as the, about and pencil.
This will not be the first time you will have to tell your students that a vowel is pronounced as a schwa instead of the vowel they are used to pronouncing in their own language.
We can split our vowels into two groups: monophthongs and diphthongs. Let’s take a look at the differences and how to teach them.
Monophthongs
Monophthongs are the simple vowel sounds that you might find in words such as cat, boom and tree.
You will know when you are producing a monophthong as the shape of the mouth will stay the same.
Have a look at your mouth as you produce the vowel sound in the words not (monophthong) and no (diphthong). In the vowel sound of not, your lips will stay in the same place. However, when you produce the vowel sound in no, you will find that the opening of the lips reduces.
Get your students to do the same so that they can see and hear the difference.
It would be handy to have a list of words that cover all of the monophthongs used in English. This way you can quickly test that your student can make all of the sounds.
After this, you will need to do reading practise so that your students can associate those sounds with words when they read by themselves.
Diphthongs
Diphthongs are often known as gliding vowels. To make these sounds we take two monophthongs and then move between them to get our final sound.
Examples are the vowels in words such as buy, lay, bow.
Although many languages utilize diphthongs, they are non-existent in languages such as Japanese.
For this reason, your students may struggle when introducing these sounds as they will naturally hear them as two different vowels and may give them too much separation.
To break this habit you can have the student pronounce each monophthong separately and then gradually reduce the gap between them until you have a fast, smooth glide.
How to Teach Consonants
When looking at consonants it is common practise to separate these into two groups: voiceless and voiced sounds. Let’s look at the difference.
Voiceless Sounds
Voiceless consonants are sounds that nearly exclusively use just the teeth, tongue and lips to make the sound.
These usually sound “harsher” and include:
Voiceless Consonants
/k/
/f/
/p/
/s/
/t/
/ʃ/(sh)
/tʃ/(ch)
/θ/ (th)
Most students shouldn’t have any problems reproducing these sounds. That being said, if the sounds they are producing seem too soft then you can ask them to really force the air out. Start by exaggerating and producing an overly forced sound and then soften it until it sounds natural.
Voiced Sounds
Voiced consonants are a lot softer in comparison. They still utilise the teeth, tongue and lips but the difference is that they bring the voicebox into play.
You can check if you are making a voiced sound by placing your fingers on your voice cords. If you feel them vibrate quite a bit then it is likely a voice sound.
Voiced consonants in English include:
Voiced Consonants
/b/
/d/
/g/
/dʒ/ (j)
/m/
/n/
/v/
/w/
/j/ (y)
/z/
Voiced and Voiceless Pairs
Once you have established the difference between voiced and voiceless sounds you can introduce voiced and voiceless pairs.
Some voiced and voiceless sounds go together. They have the same teeth, tongue and lip movements. The only difference is that one doesn’t use the voicebox and has a more forceful sound.
An example of this is /d/ and /t/. Get your students to say both of these sounds and notice the difference between them. When producing these it is important that there is enough of a difference so that the listener can differentiate them.
You can demonstrate this importance by using a phrase such as “He is Ted.” vs “He is dead.”
As you can see, this slight change in consonant sound produces a very drastic difference in sentence!
You can then give a list of other example pairs:
Examples: Voiced/Voiceless Pairs
“My car has a dent.” vs “My car has a tent.”
“I sent her a card.” vs “I sent her a guard.”
“I need a pill.” vs “I need a bill.”
“This is a gold chain.” vs “This is a gold Jane.”
“I will visit the zoo.” vs “I will visit the Sue.”
Activities
After teaching the basics of pronunciation you will need ways to drill this information to memory.
Remember that your students will often be unlearning habits from their native tongue which are ingrained in their minds as well as their muscles.
This can take time so always reassure them when they make mistakes that it doesn’t need to be rushed.
Advantage: Very targeted practice for specific sounds
Disadvantage: Sentences are less natural and not likely to be encountered in English
Tongue Twisters are one of my favourite ways to drill pronunciation.
You can take a very specific sound or pair of sounds (e.g R/L for Japanese students or V/W for students of Slavic languages). You then get your students to read through the sentences slowly and each time they read, try it a little faster.
Examples: Tongue Twisters
“She sells seashells by the seashore.”
“Red lorry, yellow lorry, loud lorry, run!”
“Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.”
“Veronica went away to view a vase”
“They thought the thistles touched their tongues though.”
These will be difficult at first because there are so many tricky sounds but the idea is doing focussed difficult practice like this will make everything else seem easier. Similar to how lifting heavy weights in a gym makes everything else feel lighter after.
Word Lists
Advantage: Can be used for very common words with a particular sound
Disadvantage: Can get boring quickly
Word lists are much simpler in nature. We now just have a list of words that have the target sound in them.
These are great for examples and are essential in associating certain sounds with certain spellings.
That being said, reading a list of words can get a little boring quickly. For that reason maybe pick 10 or so, spend a few minutes on practising the pronunciation and then move on.
Reading
Advantage: Can test a wide range of sounds
Disadvantage: The sounds are so varied so it’s not great for practicing a specific sound
Now, this is a much more natural activity. Find a piece of text from the news, a story or wherever you want.
Have your student read out loud and just make a note of any words that aren’t quite right. After a few paragraphs, check these words with your students.
Sometimes a student doesn’t know the correct pronunciation of a word and sometimes they just made a one-off mistake.
For this reason I like to ask them to read that word again without saying the pronunciation myself to see whether we need to spend time memorising it later.
Movie Mimicking
Advantage: Great for practising with a reference
Disadvantage: Less mentally engaging
Take a movie clip (youtube is a great source for this) and play a sentence and then have your student copy along.
This is called mimicking and is great at achieving correct pronunciation and can also be used for accent reduction.
This one can work well in class for short periods of time but I prefer to set this type of activity for homework when the student can do it in their own time.
Flashcards
Advantage: Incredibly efficient
Disadvantage: Takes a bit of time to set up
This is a very powerful way of memorising pronunciation (a must in English where the words can be spelt so differently from how they sound.)
We will use ANKI for this. First, help your student to set up ANKI and create their first cards.
On side A: Write the target word (e.g. challenge)
On side B: You can either spell the word phonetically, get a recording of the word and attach it to the card or both! (e.g. /ˈtʃæl.ɪndʒ/)
Now, your student will have a reminder to revise these words as well as the reference for each one. For each review, they will be shown either side A or B and will have to recall what the other side is.
I recommend helping them set up ANKI in class and then sending them the reference files etc as homework.
When teaching pronunciation you are going to need text… a lot of text!
This section will give you the places to find articles, stories etc to practise with your students.
I’ve also curated a list of the best books to help develop your pronunciation teaching skills and get the very best out of your students.
News Websites
BBC News
As mentioned already, BBC news is a great resource.
It is continually being updated with new stories, it is well written and uses a wide range of vocabulary that is ideal for testing all sounds that are pronounced in British English.
Wired Magazine
I like Wired magazine as it is more specific to technology.
This is great if you have a student that has a passion for this area or works in this industry. It allows you to test their pronunciation on niche words that they will often use, very useful!
News in Easy English
News in Easy English is my go-to website when I need to check the pronunciation of a beginner student.
Most of the language used is fairly simple and is a great way to get the foundations locked down.
Books
How to Teach Pronunciation
This is essential reading for teaching pronunciation. [amazon link=”0582429757″ title=”How to Teach Pronunciation”] covers the basics (such as vowels and consonants) all the way to more advanced topics such as intonation and connected speech.
It also includes sample lessons to give you immediate ideas on how to start applying these concepts in your lessons.
Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary
Exactly as it sounds, the [amazon link=”0521765757″ title=”Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary”] contains over 230,000 words and gives the IPA spelling for each. Extremely useful if you are learning how to read and write using the IPA and if you need to check the pronunciation of a word without access to the internet.
As well as the pronunciation list, it contains essays, notes and a glossary explaining various aspects of pronunciation.
Pronunciation Contrasts in English
[amazon link=”1577666410″ title=”Pronunciation Contrasts in English”] is a great book for highlighting the differences between certain sounds.
The authors have brought together the experience of 50 ESL teachers as well as their own experience in teaching and present clear concepts and patterns to help teach non-native students.
This is the ideal choice for teaching minimal pairs and other such similar sounds.
Summary
So you should now have a much clearer idea of how to teach English pronunciation to your students.
Remember that you will find a lot of students who choose to self-study and are happy building their grammar and reading skills alone.
However, pronunciation is one of the areas that has been the most in-demand with my students.
Being able to provide feedback and explain pronunciation concepts in a concise and easy to understand way has kept my students coming back for more.
Get this right and you will find the same happening for your lessons!
Do you struggle with finding interesting ways to teach ESL listening skills?
Maybe you have an activity or two already but you want to be able to mix it up and keep things interesting.
By the end of this article, you will have 12 interesting English listening activities that you can use with ESL students of various ages and skill levels.
We even selected some great resources for your next listening lesson!
Why are Listening Skills so Important?
Listening makes up one of the four core areas of language: reading, writing, speaking and listening.
If our students’ listening isn’t good enough then they are missing out on a quarter of their language ability!
Listening is needed in order to do things such as watching movies, listening to music and having conversations.
The problem is that this skill can easily become underdeveloped. Visual tasks such as reading and writing may seem more comfortable and so students may prefer to give these more time.
While this may be easier in the short run it means that those skills become a lot stronger but their listening gets left in the dirt.
We need to make a conscious effort to give listening skills the attention they deserve!
This article has a list of plenty of listening exercises that you can begin using today and let your student’s listening skills play catch up!
Here is the list of activities, exercises, and games that you can start using with your students to improve their listening skills.
Everything has been arranged into different groups to make finding the right activity for the right student even easier. Let’s begin!
Listening Exercises for Beginners
Gap Fill (Cloze Testing)
Start by writing out a sentence but omit some of the words. Each student needs a copy of this sentence.
Next, you simply read the sentence (including the missing word) and the students fill in the missing word.
Difficulty can be increased by omitting more words, speaking quicker or changing which words you leave out.
For example, if you have a sentence such as “I like to … cake” it is fairly easy to guess a word like “eat”, there are only so many words that would make sense here.
However, if we instead have a sentence like “I like to eat …” then all of a sudden there are so many more words that could fit there which makes it harder.
Always review the students’ results and use them as feedback for creating the next set of exercises.
Resource tip: Here is a selection of sample gap-fill texts.
Odd Word Out
With this activity, you need to first take a piece of a chosen text.
You then need to create another version of this text for the students and in this version, you will need to change some of the words.
You then read out loud the text from your copy and the students have to circle which words are different.
This is a great activity as it trains the students to really focus on the sounds and how they match the words.
You can increase the difficulty by either using more difficult text, using a longer piece of text or by increasing the number of incorrect words.
Bonus points if the students can tell you what the correct word should be that you said!
Resource tip: Here you can find some easy stories to use for this exercise.
Choose the Right Picture
This activity is great for building listening skills with simple vocabulary. It’s very easy to set up too!
You first need a selection of pictures, one for each piece of target vocabulary. Each picture needs a corresponding letter. For example, if we have 26 pictures then we can use ‘A’ for the first picture and ‘B’ for the next picture etc.
If this is done with more than one student then put all of these pictures on one or two sheets of paper and make copies for everyone.
You then simply need to say one of the words from your selection and your students need to write the letter for that picture down.
For complete beginners, it’s better to say the target words in isolation but you can increase the difficulty by giving them phrases or sentences with the target word “hidden in them”. After a while, you could even include more than one target word to really ramp up the challenge.
For this exercise, you will first need to have a piece of text with plenty of information. News articles are great for this.
You then either need a recording of the text being spoken or a script so that you can read it yourself.
Students will have to listen to what is being said, understand it and then write down a summary of the most important parts.
This can be quite a difficult task as there are a number of different skills students need to employ but it is extremely useful for comprehension.
In fact, this activity makes up part of the PTE exam so is especially great if you prepare any students for that.
Resource tip: My favourite site for news stories is BBC news.
Movie Star
First, you will need a movie clip with just two characters speaking (around 1-2 minutes).
Next pair two of your students and assign one of the characters to each student.
Your students will get a chance to watch the clip now and they will have to make notes on the dialogue.
Once they have made their notes they will then have to perform the scene themselves.
Now obviously it is unlikely they are going to get it word for word. Instead, you need to focus on them conveying the important parts of the scene. Make sure to tell them this in advance so that they don’t feel too stressed about trying to memorise every single word.
If you want to increase the difficulty then try this without any visual, just allow the students to listen to the scene. This makes it much harder as there is no visual context for what’s happening.
Also, you can choose a film that is less likely to be known by the students to make things even trickier.
Resource tip: You can either curate your movie collection to find some good scenes or even easier just search for them on youtube!
Take a Message
This is an activity which is extremely practical as it’s something that will need to be done in a workplace for example.
Your student will play the part of a secretary. The boss isn’t in right now and so they will need to take a message for later.
For the telephone message, you can ring the student from another room. If this isn’t possible then ring from at least the other side of the room and facing away from each other so that they don’t get any visual clues.
This is similar to the “Summarise” activity but this time the quality of the call will be degraded as it’s coming from a telephone. This is also a conversation so the student will also have a chance to ask you to repeat details or confirm certain things.
This activity is a great chance to teach your students some stock phrases such as “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” as well as teaching them how to spell things using the NATO phonetic alphabet (alfa, bravo, charlie).
Memory Race / Running Dictation
Start by printing out some short pieces of text. You need to stick these around the classroom.
Next, split your students into pairs. Student A is the “fetcher” and student B is the “writer”.
Student B has to stay at their desk with their pen and paper. They are in charge of writing down the information they hear from student A.
Student A has to walk (or run if it’ safe!) to where the paper is. They then have to read and remember as much of it as possible before telling student B the information to write down.
They will need repeated trips to get it all, so it is motivating for them to remember as much as possible.
The first team to get their paper written down (with relatively few mistakes) is the winner!
This game is great for waking your students up and getting them moving about.
Remember to switch over so that everyone gets a turn.
Resource tip: Try using some short stories for this exercise.
If you haven’t played Simon says before then let me break down the rules to this classic children’s game.
First, the teacher will say “Simon says” followed by a verb phrase, e.g. “Simon says jump”. The students then have to do the actions.
You can make this competitive by having a student lose a point if they do it wrong, or if they’re the last.
However, if you’d prefer to keep a more relaxed environment (possibly better with younger students) then even just having them copy you will be fun enough as it gets them moving around.
Resource tip: The wikipedia page has a list of the names of this game in other languages so that your students can recognize it immediately!
Treasure Hunt
Another active game to wake up your younger students.
The idea for this game is for the teacher to say a word, e.g. “clock”, the students then have to get to that item as quickly as possible.
In order to make this a little more difficult, you could just say a letter and the students have to run to something that has the same first letter. E.g. if you say “b” then the students could run to the board or to a ball.
Resource tip: If there aren’t enough things in the classroom then you can print out some vocabulary cards and hide them around the room.
Call & Response
This one is good for training listening memory and can be a lot of fun for kids to be loud!
Simply take a word or short phrase, say it out loud and get them to shout it back to you as loud as they can!
This is very high energy so is great if you catch them falling asleep.
This works even better if you use a song or a chant to bring the energy levels up and make it even more fun!
Again, the length of the phrase can influence the difficulty. You could warm up with single words before making longer phrases later on.
This is based on the classic drinking game where every time someone says a designated word you have to drink.
Now we can’t exactly do the same here (unless you have a very particular kind of student!) so we will have to replace the drinking alcohol with some other kind of activity.
You could take a sip of water or coffee instead or you could act out some kind of activity, e.g. every time somebody says the word “fall” you have to clap your hands.
Once you have the rules set out you then need the audio. For this, you can either find your own audio material on youtube etc or you can simply read it yourself.
Bear in mind that if you do read it yourself then your attention will be split between reading and focussing on the student’s ability.
Resource tip: Here is a list of useful podcasts you can use for this exercise.
Transcription
This one is a little less fun but ideal for more serious students.
Simply take a piece of text, and read parts at a time with the student writing or typing what you are saying.
For this, I start slow by saying one word at a time with a gap in between each. After a while move up to doing two words with a gap in between and keep increasing the number of words.
The idea is to eventually get to a point where the student can transcribe entire sentences.
Once you have finished with a sentence then go through and mark it.
This is a good time to talk about logic in sentences.
For example, if they wrote down “Yesterday, I went to the peck and had a picnic.” then we could talk about why “peck” is not such a good choice here. We are expecting a noun and specifically a place.
Once we have gone through the type of word that should go there then they are more likely to end up with the right word “park”.
Resource tip:The Guardian is constantly updated with relevant news articles.
Meeting Minutes
In this exercise, you are roleplaying a meeting.
The teacher’s role is to speak on a particular topic for 5 minutes or so and the students have to listen and create minutes of the “meeting”.
The purpose of this exercise is for students to scan for the most important information and make a note of it.
The minutes they create can be basic bullet points as long as they have correct and relevant information. You can also give them a few minutes to tidy up their notes at the end.
This exercise is great because it is very relevant to utilizing listening skills in a real-world environment so the students will benefit greatly from this.
To mix things up you could also get one of the other students to speak in the meeting and have everyone else create minutes from them.
Also, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with as many of these as possible so that you are able to mix things up and keep your classes interesting and fun for your students.
Do you want to teach English online to Japanese students from home?
Maybe you’re interested in the culture, the people or you’re learning the language and want the chance to use it in class.
But where do you find them online? And once you get a trial lesson, what do you teach them?
This article gives you all you need to know about finding your new Japanese students, considering their needs when planning lessons and some of the cultural differences you may need to deal with.
Let’s go!
The Best Online-Platforms to Teach English to Japanese Students
You will likely meet Japanese students on the same platforms you teach many of your other students.
These are online marketplaces, where you can create a teacher profile and students can book a lesson with you. Basically, you are free to set your own hours and rates.
For every book lesson, the platforms take a cut of your rates.
The three most popular online teaching platforms, and some of their pro and cons, are:
Verbling
On Verbling, teachers retain a higher percentage of lesson payment but there are fewer students available than other options.
They also include any required teaching tools such as video call, whiteboard etc on the website which makes things easy.
Platforms That Specialise in Teaching Japanese-only Students
As well as these, there are dedicated companies that specialise in teaching Japanese-only students.
Bear in mind that these websites are aimed at Japanese natives. As such, the websites will usually be in Japanese.
Some offer an English language option but for others, you will need to know the language to a certain degree (or be happy using a translator!)
How to Navigate a Site Without Knowing Japanese
If you don’t know Japanese then there are two ways to make a website decipherable.
Change the Website Language
Look for a box that says “日本語”. This means “Japanese” and is where we will change the language.
After clicking on this box, search for “英語”. This means “English” and after selecting this option you should get the website in English (if this is an option they offer).
Use Google Translate
Search for the website in Google
Look for the option next to the website that says translate.
After selecting this, google will take you to its own translation of the website. It won’t be perfect but it will be good enough to make your way around.
Ok, so now we know we know how to read the websites, let’s compare them:
I have experience teaching on Eigox and it has its ups and downs.
The positives are that the lessons are fairly relaxed, most of the time it is a free conversation and when it isn’t you are provided with a lesson plan and all of the materials.
The pay is fairly decent (around $13 an hour) and you are free to set your own hours.
The negatives are that there isn’t a massive amount of work, there is no way to synchronise the calendar with anything else so you have to update your hours each week if you take lessons elsewhere.
They also have a cancellation policy where if you have to cancel a lesson then you not only forfeit payment for the class and are put on the watch (fair) but you also have to pay the cost of the class!
I had this happen once after a double booking occurred (I hadn’t updated my schedule on Eigox). I had to cancel the class and when I found that I would have to pay out from my next paycheque I decided that it wasn’t for me.
Not the worst available but certainly not the best. The website also isn’t one of the most professional, there are more than a few spelling mistakes to be found.
That being said, the entry requirements are fairly low (preferring one year of teaching experience) and their emphasis seems to be on teaching children so another bonus if you are wanting to specialise in that area.
I would say that you don’t want to stay on this platform forever but it looks like an accessible job if you are just starting out.
Ecom looks to be one of the more higher-end companies.
Their focus is on quality over quantity and as such require more experience (2 years) but for higher pay ($16-20 an hour).
Their focus is on business English as well as exam preparation for IELTS, TOEFL etc. Most of their students are businessmen.
One of the disadvantages (at least for myself) is that they are looking for people who can commit to 20 hours a week.
This is great if you are looking for a sole “employer”. However, for those that have other students and are looking to supplement with a few extra hours, this may not be ideal.
Another drawback is that they seem to be a lot more popular amongst teachers than the others. A great sign that they are a quality platform but it means the likelihood of getting a spot is reduced.
Go after this one if you have a bit of experience but getting in may prove a challenge!
What Are the Logistics for Teaching English Online?
There are a few things that you will need to bear in mind when working with Japanese students (and companies).
Technology and Workplace
The first thing if you haven’t got set up already is the hardware. You will need a computer connected to a decent speed internet connection. The internet speed doesn’t need to be the fastest but it does need to be stable.
You will also need a headset and webcam (if one isn’t already built into the computer). These can be picked up fairly inexpensively.
Once you have these then download your chosen video call software (I recommend Skype). This will allow you to, first of all, attend the interviews for the companies you want to work for as well as to conduct the lessons themselves.
When you attend the interview make sure you are presentable. Have a plain or tidy background, with good lighting and make sure to smile!
Time Difference
Some of your students will be Japanese natives living and possibly working abroad. In these situations, you may work with a few that match your time zone but the vast majority of Japanese people live… well in Japan.
Depending on where you live, this could be a small time difference or like me (UK) there could be a large time difference.
It actually works as an advantage for me as I work mornings and afternoons which is ideal for Japanese students who want to do lessons in the evening (after work).
Wherever you are, you need to factor this in when choosing your work schedule.
Payment
If you work on a website that caters to students from all countries then you don’t need to worry too much as you’ll likely be paid in a familiar currency such as dollars via PayPal.
If you work for a Japanese company though you are likely to be paid in Japanese Yen.
This was the case when I worked for Eigox. It was still via PayPal which made things a little easier but be aware of current currency rates and if any charges apply when looking at the remuneration of a teaching position.
Communication
Skype is widely common in Japan and I have used this for contact with most of my Japanese students as well as companies.
Don’t worry if you can’t type Japanese as plenty of people use rōmaji (Latin script) to spell their name on skype.
Special Characteristics of Japanese Students
You will find some similarities in the manner of personality between your Japanese students. This is something that you will get a feel for as you gain more experience.
However, just like any other student, Japanese students come in all shapes and sizes so don’t go into a first lesson assuming you know exactly how they will be.
Adults
In my experience, adults are usually very polite, punctual and attentive. Most of my adult Japanese students are learning for business reasons and so being generally knowledgeable in this area will be greatly appreciated.
Teens
Teenagers will usually be quite polite and like teens from other countries you can still win them over by connecting with them on their interests. Also, remember not to patronise and you should have no problems.
Children
I have found that teaching Japanese children is a lot more similar to teaching any other child online. They may be a little more polite and respectful but you have to remember that they are still children and you will still need to “win” their attention.
What Japanese Students Are Expecting of You
Like with any other student, punctuality and professionalism are expected from you.
With some adults, you can spend more time building rapport and be a bit freer with the activities in the lesson whereas others prefer to “get down to business” and be doing exercises and drills rather than talk about what they had for dinner yesterday.
Like most other children, Japanese children don’t really have expectations of how you should be. If you manage to make the lesson fun and keep the momentum going (and the parents see they are making progress) then you’ll do just fine.
There is a cliche that teachers in Japan dictate the class without a great deal of opportunity for freethinking from the class.
While this can be true for some, Japanese students know that you are a foreigner and appreciate being able to learn in a more relaxed atmosphere with free conversation and learn about your culture.
That being said, I have found it takes a few lessons for them to warm up to you and open up so just try to relax and give it time.
Cultural Differences Between Japan and the West
Although there are big differences between Japan and the west, there aren’t too many cultural differences that you will need to worry about in class.
It’s quite hard to commit a faux pas in English but there are a few things we need to consider.
Hand Gestures
First of all, let’s talk about counting with fingers.
Usually, we start with fingers bent and then extend each one to count. In Japan, it’s the opposite. They start with all fingers extended and curl each one when they count.
Another thing to consider is when pointing to oneself. We are used to pointing to our chest usually to express “me”. In Japan, it is the norm to point to one’s nose in this situation instead.
Lastly, with regard to gestures, it is perfectly normal to use a thumbs up to indicate a good job.
However, avoid the thumbs down at all costs! In Japan, it is the equivalent of “go to hell” which obviously isn’t going to go over well if used!
Here’s a short and fun video about other hand gestures that have a different meaning in Japan:
Comprehension
This can be a similar experience with students from other countries. You ask if they understand something and you will get a “yes” a lot of the time. The problem is that this isn’t always a “real yes”.
Some students would rather say yes to avoid disrupting the flow of the class or avoid disappointing the teacher. Or maybe they just weren’t listening at that point and feel that to mention that would be rude.
It is important then, that instead of asking “do you understand”, you should ask questions that check for comprehension “could you tell me what this means?”, “could you give me an example sentence using this concept” etc.
Names and Titles
Lastly, we should look at naming conventions in Japan.
It’s common for Japanese to address one another with title suffixes, similar to the way we use Mr/Mrs, etc in English.
There are a number of these suffixes depending on position and status but the most common is “san”. If we wanted to use this title with our student Tanaka then we would call him Tanaka-San.
Japanese Title Suffix
Meaning
san
Mr/Mrs
sama
a more formal form of “san”
sensei
used for teachers and experts such as doctors
That being said, your students know that you are not Japanese and so don’t expect you to use this (I often don’t).
It’s useful, however, to be aware that they will likely use these suffixes when talking about yourself and other friends and colleagues.
To show respect it may be a good idea to ask from the start whether they would prefer you to use this suffix with them.
Which Topics Should You Teach?
Like any student, the topic you teach depends on what your student already knows and what they need to know.
It’s worth bearing in mind that English is taught as a compulsory subject from the age of around 10 in Japan. Therefore, you will find that anyone from that age upwards will have at least a basic grasp of the language.
If you are teaching a child from the very beginning then you will want to start with basic vocabulary, phonics and getting them used to the language.
With grammar, you will likely need to emphasise the importance of articles, plural forms and things like subject-verb agreement.
These are things that just don’t exist in the Japanese language and so even seasoned English learners can struggle with these areas.
I have found that although adults usually possess a somewhat wide vocabulary and are adept at using English grammar, they tend to struggle with pronunciation a little more than children.
For this reason, I spend a great deal of time with exercises that strengthen pronunciation.
Me, during an online English pronunciation lesson (Photo: Jonathan Race)
Pronunciation
Pronunciation needs its own section as it can be extremely difficult for a Japanese learner moving to English. First of all, they will have to learn to make new sounds which their mouths aren’t used to making.
On top of this, the pronunciation of English words can be drastically different from what is expected of the spelling.
L / R
This is one of the biggest challenges for a Japanese learner’s pronunciation, differentiating between “l” and “r”.
The reason why this is difficult is that the Japanese language doesn’t have these sounds. There is a sound that is somewhere between the two and this is usually what is used when a beginner Japanese tries to use these sounds.
It’s important when teaching this that you explain the position of the tongue, lips, and jaw at the beginning, middle and end of the sound. Use diagrams or show them your mouth to help.
Once they have the basics down you then need to drill this to make it become second nature. For that, tongue twisters can be a huge help and I usually set aside a few minutes at the start of every lesson to do that.
Diphthongs
This is another big change between the two languages. Diphthongs (gliding from one vowel sound to another e.g. the vowel sound in “my”) don’t exist in Japanese. Every vowel sound is a monophthong (e.g. the vowel sound in “egg”).
It can be easy to “cheat” these diphthongs if you are a Japanese learner by simply going from one monophthong to another. That is after all what diphthongs are.
However, in order to get these vowels to sound natural, we need to work at increasing the speed between the two.
If there is a particular diphthong that your learner is struggling with then start by getting them to make the initial vowel sound and then the final found sound separately.
You can then practise going between these two sounds slowly and gradually speed it up.
Consonants
Lastly, with regards to pronunciation, we need to look at consonants.
If you aren’t familiar with the Japanese language then you need to know that the consonant sounds come at the beginning of their syllables with a vowel after (e.g. “banana”).
Because of their familiarity with this, it makes it difficult when moving to a language which has consonants at the end of words.
You may find words like “lot” becoming “loto” or “bad” becoming “bado”.
These can be improved by first making the student aware of the sound they are making compared to how it should be.
After that, you can help them practice cutting the vowel sound at the end of the word shorter and shorter until it no longer exists.
Consonant clusters are especially difficult (e.g. “crisps”).
For these, you may want to have the student practise making the consonant sounds with just their mouth (no voice box) before getting them to piece them together.
Take each sound one at a time and again gradually speed it up until it sounds right.
Last Thoughts
As I’ve said in this article, you can learn about common grammar and pronunciation mistakes that Japanese learners tend to make.
However, remember that each student is unique and will have their own optimum way of learning.
Another thing you should consider if you haven’t already is learning the language. Now, learning Japanese is a huge undertaking but even just learning the basics will give you a massive understanding of the pronunciation and syllabary from where your learners come from.
My knowledge of the language has been indispensable when teaching Japanese learners and it has allowed me to find and fix issues quickly and effectively.
Even if you don’t choose to go down that route though you can learn these things over time with enough experience.
Best of luck in the classroom, またね！(see you later!)
Is it just reciting monotonously from a textbook and hoping that the students are on board?
Can we make it more interactive and dare I say, even fun?
Read on and find out yourself!
Whether you’re new to teaching English (ESL) or are just looking for new ways to keep things fresh in the classroom, there is something in this guide about teaching grammar for everyone.
After using some of these 33 strategies and activities, don’t be surprised if you’re soon being harassed by other teachers who want to know your secrets!
Why Inspiring Grammar Lessons Are So Important
Grammar in any language is important, that’s a fact and English grammar is no exception. Learning grammar can be no easy task and teaching it can be even harder!
There are a number of reasons that can make teaching grammar a difficult task, including fossilized errors, irregularity of verbs, plurals, etc and vast differences between English and the student’s mother tongue.
Another issue can come from the mindset of the students. If they have experienced dry, boring grammar lessons in the past then they will likely expect the same this time around.
7 Sure-Fire Strategies and Survival Tips for Your Grammar Lessons
Let’s have a look at some “survival tips” to help you and your students navigate the jungle that is English grammar.
1. Teaching Grammar in Context
One method of teaching which has had a lot of success is teaching grammar in context.
This makes sense as we created “grammar rules” as a way to make sense of the patterns that we use in the language. They are not arbitrary systems imagined out of thin air.
For this reason, it makes sense to see how these rules apply in the language.
Use different example sentences so that students can see how we can use these rules. It’s important to show why these are useful and why someone would want to use these.
It’s all well and good teaching a student the intricacies of the past perfect tense but if it hasn’t clicked in the student’s mind why they would want to use such a device then it most likely won’t get used in their active language skills.
2. Teaching Grammar Rules Inductively
Inductive teaching is a very useful tool when it comes to teaching grammar. Let’s have a look at how it works.
We start with specific examples, such as sentences that all use a particular grammar point. The students then use these examples to come to their own conclusions about what the rule is.
This is in contrast with deductive teaching, which starts by teaching the rule/s first and then looking at examples afterward.
This teaching style is great as it starts with a real-world example that already gives the grammar device relevance. It then forces students to engage cognitively instead of passively taking in a presentation which they may or may not be on board with.
The idea is that a student who engages in this way is more likely to understand and retain a particular point.
That being said, while this method can be very successful with some aspects of grammar which are generally straightforward (such as adjectives), there are some areas of grammar (such as articles) where it may not be as effective due to the large number of rules and irregularities that can occur.
3. Grammar Placement Testing
One thing that needs to be known before we start teaching grammar is what the students actually know.
For a class learning English as a foreign language from the very beginning, this is a lot simpler. We can somewhat assume the students are a blank slate and we just need to stick to the syllabus.
Maybe some have had some prior outside tuition and have covered certain areas, these students can be assigned harder tasks to avoid boredom but the vast majority will be at the same level.
If we are teaching one-to-one classes though, our job becomes a little more tricky. Not everyone learns grammar in a fixed order so the things a student knows can be a bit “random”.
Even if they showed you a syllabus of what they have covered, there may be some areas that require doubling back on if they have forgotten or didn’t understand properly in the first place.
How do we know which topics these are?
This is where placement testing becomes extremely useful. The student is given a test designed to test them on a variety of different grammar points. From this, the teacher is able to see where the student’s weaknesses are and use that to form a plan of what needs to be studied.
Writing is fundamental for teaching grammar. When explaining structure you and your students need to see what is happening in order to make sense of it.
The nice thing about practicing writing (compared to speaking) is that it gives the students time to think and work things out. You can plan worksheets beforehand to work through and these can also be used to set homework.
There is something to using grammar by using conversation too.
It may be worth doing this after the student has had a chance to practise with writing first to boost their confidence.
A good idea is to have a free conversation session at the end of the lesson where you can use the new grammar concept. This is more likely to have the concept “stick” when the student speaks in the language in the future.
Teaching children and teaching adults can be two very different things!
Let’s look at some of the differences.
When teaching children, a big challenge is engagement. Expecting a class of 6-year-olds to sit still for an hour and watch you explain grammar points on a board is not realistic.
Doing activities that get them physically involved (games), mixing up activities often and using examples with things like pictures will help draw them into the subject.
Also, it’s a good idea not to drop too much on them at once. Maybe introduce the present simple tense into a class on verbs, instead of bombarding them on all of the simple tenses and their rules for a whole class.
Teaching adults with regards to grammar can sometimes be easier. Adults tend to have a little more patience and are usually ok taking their time to focus on each point without needing a new activity every few minutes or a game to liven things up.
That being said, some variety is still needed to keep them interested but there is less pressure in this area than with children.
Adult beginners will usually go along with the tasks set and will only really ask things if they don’t understand something.
Be aware though that the more advanced students can ask you a lot of background questions about a particular topic especially if they are very interested — e.g “why would we use the past perfect continuous instead of the past simple?” — so it’s a good idea to make sure you are prepared!
7. Tackling Common Grammar Mistakes
It’s important to tackle common mistakes early before they become fossilized, otherwise, it can be an uphill battle!
Here are some of the common grammar mistakes you should watch out for with your students:
Adding “s” to noncount nouns
Missing articles
Improper placement of adverbs
Subject / verb agreement
If you are teaching a particular grammar point then it is important to stop a student and correct them immediately if they make a mistake related to that grammar point.
I’ve seen students self-correct after just a few of these interruptions so it doesn’t take long!
To reinforce these points you can set homework (such as essay questions) that are designed to get the student to use the taught grammar.
13 Great Games and Activities to Teach Grammar Rules
Having a list of fun games and activities for your class is a necessity.
Not only will you have great material for your lesson plans but you will also feel confident knowing you have something to fall back on if things don’t go according to plan or if you start losing the students’ attention.
1. (Reverse) Taboo
Subject: Adjectives
A student has to get either the teacher or other students to guess a particular word by only using adjectives to describe what it is.
Example:
A ball – “round, bouncy”
2. Sentence Expansion
Subject: Adverbs
Write a simple sentence. Then get the student to insert an adverb.
Take a section of a text and remove all of the articles from it. The students have to put the articles back in where they think they should go.
For a more competitive element, you could split the class into two teams who have to work together to complete the task first.
Example:
“[…] man went to […] shop and bought […] ice cream.”
4. I want…
Subject: Determiners
Split the students into groups and get them to ask the other group for things like “that pen” or “those sweets” etc.
Example:
“Have you seen that boy over there?”
“Do you like this pair of jeans?”
5. He/she said…
Subject: Direct and Indirect Speech
Pair students up. Have student 1 say a sentence. Get student 2 to tell us what student 1 said. Carry on from student to student.
If you are teaching one to one lessons then you could always use a scene from a movie and get the student to tell you what the actors said.
Example:
Student 1 “Yesterday I went to school.”
Student 2 “Student 1 said he went to school yesterday.” – “I want an apple.”
Student 3 “Student 2 said she wants an apple.” – “I like cats.”
6. Fact Finder
Subject: Gerunds or Present Participle
Pair students up and get them to find out five facts about the other. These facts must be made up of at least one gerund or present participle.
Example:
“Jane likes snowboarding”
“Ben is studying English”
7. I Spy With My Little Eye
Subject: Nouns
A classic for beginners. Use the phrase “I spy with my little eye, something beginning with…” followed by the first letter of a noun that is in the room. The other students have to guess what the word is.
Example:
Student 1 “I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘a’.”
Student 2 “Is it an axe?”
Student 1 “No.”
Student 3 “Is it an apple?”
Student 1 “Yes!”
8. Voice Switch
Subject: Active and Passive Voice
Ask the students to convert a sentence from an active voice to the passive voice and vice versa.
Example:
“The man ate the cookie.” -> “The cookie was eaten by the man.”
9. Whose Is It?
Subject: Possessives
Give an object (e.g. a ball) to a student and ask the others whose it is (“his”, “Jim’s”, etc).
Repeat this a few times and then move on to splitting the class into groups so that this time it is now “theirs” / “ours” etc.
Example:
“Whose is this?”
“It is Jane’s”
“Good, and whose is this?”
“It is mine.”
10. Guess Who
Subject: Relative Clauses
You can use the classic game “guess who”. The rules are the same as the original. Each person has a collection of faces in front of them, they also have a card with one particular face on. They then each take it in turns to ask questions and find out which card the other player has.
The difference with this game is that we have to use a relative clause in our questions.
Example:
The students have a selection of faces in front of them.
They have to find out the chosen face by asking questions:
“Do they wear glasses?” – “Is it someone who wears glasses?”
11. Interview
Subject: to-Infinitives
Pair the students up and one can be the interviewer while the other can be the interviewee. The aim is to find out what the person being interviewed “likes to do”.
After they have a few answers, students swap roles. This is designed to test “to-infinitives” so make sure the students use the “to verb” format in their answers.
Example:
“What do you like to do?”
“I like to ski.”
12. Delegation
Subject: Causative Verbs
Split the students into groups of three: the boss, the boss’s assistant, and the worker. The boss needs to get the assistant to ask the worker to do a task.
Example:
Boss: “Have Student C stack the documents.”
Assistant: “Stack the documents.”
Worker: “Ok.”
Rotate this so everybody gets a turn.
You can also have the students use “get” after a few repetitions. (Make sure to explain that “get” is more casual.)
13. Simon Says
Subject: Verbs and Verb Tenses
This is a great one for getting the attention of younger learners when teaching verbs. Say the sentences “Simon says…” and then add a phrase after it such as “jump up”. The students then have to do what you say.
Example:
“Simon says ‘stand up’”
*Class stands up
“Simon says ‘sit down’”
*Class sits down
How to Teach Specific Grammar Areas
Now that we have gone over an overview of grammar overall, it’s time to look at the methods of delivery for each specific area.
It goes without saying that you need to be comfortable with whatever topic you are delivering so that you are prepared in case you get any of those “curveball questions”. These sections will look at the teaching of each topic. For the background information, there is a more in-depth resource list at the end of the article.
1. Adjectives
What are adjectives?: Describing words for nouns.
“The tall building.” / “The ball is red.” / “That car is expensive.”
Adjectives are quite straightforward. Most languages will have an equivalent so it is quite an easy concept to grasp. Getting the student/s to use the adjectives will prove very useful and will help them “stick” a bit better when they can be visualized.
What are adverbs?: Describing words for verbs, adjectives and other adverbs.
“He suddenly woke up.” / “The car is very small.” / “She sings really well.”
Now adverbs get a little trickier. Students often struggle with getting the order of words right with adverbs. A good idea is to split the adverbs up into groups (degree, time, manner, etc) and teach each group individually before moving on to the next.
Seeing these adverbs used in context will be very useful and getting the students to identify which type of adverb is being used in a sentence will also help get them to think about their own word order.
What are articles?: They tell us if a noun is specific or general.
“I have a car.” / “Do you want an apple?” / “I will take the day off work.”
Articles are a simple concept to begin with. Most students who have spent any time with the language knows that we have to use them but they do get a fair amount of misuse. More exposure to the language and seeing lots of example sentences help to see how they are used.
“I want that one.” / “Do you want these?” / “No, I want those ones.”
These are some of the first things a student will learn on their English journey. As it is likely to be children you are teaching, it may help to be a little more interactive and use props to help engage them in the lesson.
What are gerunds and the present participle?: Making nouns from verbs
“He is running down the street.” / “I am working in a school.” / “I like playing football.”
These are good to teach at the same time. As they both have the same ending it is easy for students to get the two confused.
This is where inductive teaching can play a valuable part.
Put two sentences on the board, one of these sentences uses a gerund and the other has a sentence in the continuous tense.
First, ask students if they can spot the difference. If they can’t guess it then start asking questions such as “where is the verb in this sentence?” or “where is the noun?”.
Once you’ve drawn their attention to that and explained the difference then they should be able to guess any more examples you send their way.
“This is a ball.” / “Hello, my name is Tim.” / “There is a lot of information here.”
It’s very easy to explain these to beginners and nouns are some of the first words that students learn. In English there are certain rules that have to be obeyed though such as:
Capitalization
Singular / plural nouns
Count vs Non-count
We can also open things up by talking about topics such as compound nouns, collective nouns as well as abstract nouns.
What is the passive voice?: When something is done to the subject.
“The cookie was eaten.” / “The signature was forged.” / “The person was murdered.”
The passive voice is extremely useful when teaching students who are studying for things such as IELTS (that requires a high level of academic writing). It is worth setting these students essay questions for homework on a regularly basis and getting them to use the passive voice in their answers.
“That is my car.”/ “This is yours.” / “The summer of love.”
For beginners we can use flashcards or the students themselves to demonstrate the possessive form and it shouldn’t take too long to grasp. The difficulty usually comes in when trying to decide where the apostrophes go in things like singular and plural nouns. For this reason it’s a good idea to teach these around the same time as singular vs plural.
What are relative clauses?: A clause that adds additional information to a sentence.
“I went to the place where I was born.” / “I bought a dress that looks really nice.” / “This is that person who I told you about.”
Relative clauses can be a messy area. It’s a good idea to take things slowly and lay the groundwork. First look at sentence structure, look at the differences between phrases, clauses and sentences. Once you have this locked down then you can build that and introduce relative clauses.
As you get into more technical aspects of grammar like this it is a good idea to get the students to make their own sentences using the construct. With simpler aspects of grammar it’s very easy for them to see the value in a certain point and find the motivation to use it.
When things get more difficult though they will need an extra push in seeing why it has use and why they should use a more difficult sentence structure (compared to using two separate simple sentences.)
What are to-infinitives?: Verbs that can be used as nouns or paired with other verbs.
“I want to go.” / “He needs to do his homework.” / “She has to buy a ticket.”
When tackling the topic of to-infinitives it is most likely a good idea to bring gerunds into the mix as they can sometimes act in similar ways. Start by introducing two sentences, one using a to-infinitive and one using a gerund:
I like skiing.
I like to ski.
Once they have seen that you can use both in similar ways then the next obvious question is “why should we use one or the other?”. At this point you can introduce sentences where one is a preferable choice:
I want to play football.
I want playing football.
You can explain the situations where gerunds are prefered and situations where to-infinitives are preferred. After that you can get them to correct mistakes, choose between a gerund or to-infinitive and then finally give them scenarios where they get a chance to form their own sentences with either type of verb.
What are causative verbs?: Making somebody else do an action.
“I had my haircut.”/ “I got Jim to fix the car.” / “I got my house cleaned.”
Causatives are usually a little more advanced but you can still have a lot of fun with them especially as there’s a lot of opportunity to get movement involved and act things out.
What are verbs and verb tenses?: Actions and when they happen in time.
“I went to the shop.” / “I am going to the shop.” / “I will go to the shop.”
You’re going to have a much easier time explaining things like tenses with a diagram related to time. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a timeline on a board or a clock, as long as it’s something visual to point at it will make your life a lot easier.
The truth is, they’re more similar than you might think. In fact, all teachers are also managers.
To be an effective classroom manager, you need to develop a classroom management plan.
Do you need an MBA to make one?
Of course not! When you know what factors to consider, creating a classroom management plan is actually a pretty straightforward process.
Read on to find out how you can make a classroom management plan that really works in just 4 easy steps!
Why Teacher Have to Be Managers
A classroom, like an office, is a system of people trying to work together, and a teacher’s job is to organize and guide people in order to achieve goals — just like a manager does.
If your classroom isn’t well managed it breaks down, devolving into chaos with no clear plan or direction.
A well-managed class, however, runs like a tight ship. Everyone knows what’s going on, they work together well, and they help each other and cooperate because there’s already a clear plan in place.
Let’s dive into what makes up a good management plan that suits your management style and class — no matter who you are or what kind of students you’re teaching.
The Basic Components of an Effective Classroom Management Plan
A good classroom management plan covers every single aspect of your class’s flow and structure. The plan includes preparation, execution, and process.
While that might sound like a lot, it’s fairly simple to create an effective, comprehensive classroom management plan. In fact, you can do it in four steps:
Lay out clear classroom expectations
Introduce clear classroom procedures
Configure systems for rewards and punishments
Consistently enforce all aspects of your classroom management system
These steps can be used in any classroom, for any age of students. Let’s go into what each piece of our classroom management plan really entails:
1. Lay Out Clear Classroom Expectations
Laying out classroom expectations is important because it gives students a clear outline of what they should be doing and how they should be behaving throughout the day.
Classroom expectations (rather than rules) create guidelines your students can refer to and abide by — think of them as a kind of code for how to act in the classroom.
Classroom procedures are basically routines and systems for carrying out tasks throughout the day.
Procedures are an essential part of your classroom management plan because they help your class go smoothly and give students concrete steps for each part of your day, from arriving in your classroom in the morning to getting ready for lunch to leaving at the end of the day.
Classroom procedures are what makes — or breaks — the flow of each day in your class.
Rewards and punishments are, of course, a necessary part of maintaining your classroom management system, because they put grit and meaning behind your expectations and procedures.
Effective reward and punishment systems will incentivize and even excite students to behave in a way that benefits themselves and the class.
They also give students a good reason to refrain from disobeying the rules or causing trouble in your classroom.
Not all reward and punishment systems are created equal, however.
A good system is one that’s clear, simple, and meaningful — that means that students know how many points they have at any given time, that they know what does and doesn’t merit a reward or punishment, and that they know why they want points — what they’re all accumulating toward.
A good system is also one that emphasizes rewards rather than punishments and has rewards and punishments for the whole class — not just one student.
You can have more than one system in place to fulfill all these requirements.
For example, you can have a marble jar that you add one marble to when the class (or an individual student) is behaving well, and take a marble away from when students are misbehaving.
Set a prize for when students have accumulated a certain number of points.
Check out our guide to classroom rewards for some educational rewards for individual students and the whole class!
The important thing is that students aren’t just working for points — they’re working toward something, whether it be a field trip or the chance to be classroom monitor or 5 extra minutes at recess. And also, they’re working together!
4. Enforce All the Great Systems You Have in Place
Consistent enforcement is the most important part of your management system because, without it, your whole classroom management plan breaks down.
If you want students to take you at your word and trust in your management system, you need to abide by it as well.
This means that you make sure to follow the classroom expectations and procedures you’ve set in place and that you check whether your students are doing the same.
It also means making sure that any co-teachers and other classroom staff are clear about your classroom management plan so that they can enforce rules in the same way you do, creating a coherent system no matter who’s in charge at a given moment.
Enforcing your classroom management plan also means, of course, that you need to be consistent in doling out rewards and punishments, and that you need to follow up warnings and promises with concrete results.
That means that if you’ve warned a student that you’ll send a letter home if they keep misbehaving that you actually send a letter home, even if you really don’t want to.
It also means that if you’ve promised your class a pizza party, you need to deliver one — even if there’s no time for one and you’re feeling totally overwhelmed.
If you don’t follow through on your promises, then the students stop trusting in all the components of your classroom management plan and the whole thing falls apart.
Changes and Exceptions
Now, you’re probably thinking that this sounds like a lot. No changes or exceptions, ever? Well, not completely.
Here’s a secret:
Your classroom management plan is almost definitely going to have components you’ll want to change.
And there will be times when you just can’t deliver the students what you’ve promised them — because one of your higher-ups changes their mind about something because there simply isn’t enough time, or because of a parent or co-teacher steps in.
Your classroom is a busy place with lots of moving parts, and sometimes things just come up.
You should, of course, try to limit inconsistencies as much as possible, but when they do arise, or when you realize you need to change something in your classroom management plan, the key is to not panic.
Instead, sit down with students and co-teachers and be transparent about what’s going on.
Even if you have young students, you can explain that you’re making a change to the rules or that something is not going to pan out, and explain why.
If you are teaching students whose mother tongue is not English, have a local teacher help explain if necessary, so students truly understand what’s going on.
You can use changes as a teaching moment to model good communication skills!
Apologize, let students know what’s going on, and make room for questions and clarifications.
By letting students in on what’s going on when you need to make changes, you let them into your process and keep your classroom management plan intact.
Just make sure to be consistent about the changes you’ve made, to note them down on whatever charts and teaching tools you use to maintain your classroom management plan, and to try your hardest to be fair and kind to students at all times.
This how-to guide is a great reference for when you need to change something mid-year.
If you have a 4-part classroom management plan and enforce it consistently, you are sure to have a cohesive, calm, and orderly class — well, most of the time, anyway.
All of us were kindergarteners at some point, right? Hopefully?
Well, I remember the rewards that I got in kindergarten: bubblegum, a movie day, a pizza party at the end of the year.
Were these classroom rewards totally fun? YES! Did they help me learn? Well…..maybe not.
You, a shrewd and cunning teacher, can do better than the rewards that you got as a kindergartener, which is why we’re giving you the perfect guide to rewards that students will fall all over themselves for, without even realizing they’re learning!
Genius, right?
Read on for 13 mastermind classroom rewards that your kids will go bananas for, no matter how old they are.
Why the Rewards (and Punishments) We Give Matter
While there’s nothing wrong with having rewards that are just fun, it’s important for teachers to recognize the power of rewards and punishments and how they affect students.
Good rewards are educational, motivating, healthy, and promote learning and leadership.
Bad rewards promote screen time, junk food, and unhealthy behaviors, or don’t have anything to do with the class.
It’s perfectly fine to incentivize good behavior with the occasional pizza party, for example, but if you consistently use food as a reward you risk instilling an unhealthy relationship to food in your students.
In fact, studies show that using food as a reward in the classroom can not only contribute to poor nutrition and physical health, but it can also negatively impact behavior, and learning.
When we use junk food, screen time, or other indulgences as rewards, we teach students that they should be working toward those things, and we make them seem more desirable.
When we use physical activity, leadership opportunities, and learning activities as a reward, however, we instill a spirit of discovery and healthy living in students.
The rewards that follow are healthy and downright fun, contribute to classroom culture, — and best of all, your students will truly love them! And what’s better than that?
Classroom Rewards For Individual Students
For Students of any Age
While the exact way you implement some of these rewards will vary based on the age of your students, the basic idea will remain the same.
1. Class Monitor
This is the Cadillac of rewards because it benefits students and takes away from your workload.
Tell your class that the two students who accumulate the most points over the period of a day or week get to be class monitor the next day (or week), and make up badges, vests, or necklaces for your class monitors to wear.
You should devise specific roles for your class monitors and make sure students know what they are, so the monitors don’t over- (or under-) step. Class monitors can guide students to clean up, line up, do group activities, and play outside.
You’ll be shocked at how willing and excited your students are at the chance to be class monitor — and they’ll learn leadership skills in the process!
2. Teacher’s Helper
Like the class monitor, the teacher’s helper(s) may be one or a couple of students who got the most points over a specified period. Teacher’s helpers can do tasks like handing out worksheets, collecting homework, going to the office to collect items from the printer, and/or helping set up lunch or naptime things.
3. Star of the Class
Graphic: Sample “Star of the Class” setup: Includes student’s picture, name, birthday, place of birth, favorite color, fun fact
Each week, you can feature a student as “star of the class”, and put a picture of them on the wall along with some information about them.
At some point in the week, make time for the Star of the Class to make a short presentation about themselves to other students — in English, of course.
Your students will love getting to be the center of attention for a week — just make sure to do a little engineering to make sure everyone gets a chance to be the star. It’s no fun when there’s a teacher’s pet hogging the spotlight all the time!
For Younger Students
Younger students are fantastic because they get excited about everything, even high fives.
So don’t worry about giving them rewards that are really grandiose — just make sure that rewards are more frequent when you have younger students because they like classes with more excitement and more things happening!
Here are a few rewards you can give students who’ve reached certain benchmarks (perhaps choose a reward when they’ve accumulated 5 points, and another when they’ve accumulated 20 … etc.)
4. Pick the Story Time Book
Your students will be thrilled to get to pick out the storytime book, and it will get them excited about reading! What a dream!
5. Choose Their Activity Corner First
Let the students who’ve behaved best in the morning pick their activity corner first to motivate them to behave well and get them excited about independent play!
6. Sit Somewhere Special During Story Time
…or circle time, or class time, or whenever makes the most sense in your classroom. Have a special seat at the front of the class reserved for a student who’s been well-behaved and accumulated a lot of points.
Not only does the special seat motivate students, it also puts your most well-behaved student in a position where they can model good behaviors to the rest of your class!
7. Pick a Reward from the Treasure Box
You should save this reward as a super-special treat, say when a student’s racked up 100 points, maybe.
Here’s how to set up a treasure box: Find a box, any box. Decorate it with glitter and gemstones and gold paint (or however you want to! Just make it fun!)
Fill the box with treasures — educational treasures. They don’t need to be super fancy or expensive; your students will get excited no matter what’s inside.
At the beginning of the year, give students a sneak peek into your treasure box — don’t give away all your treasures, though. Then, leave the treasure box somewhere students can see it.
When a student has gotten enough points, let them come up to the front of the class and pick out a treasure. They’ll be so excited, and other students will want a treasure too!
Ideas for treasures
Easy reader or picture books
Toy animals
Rubik’s cubes
Tokens/gift certificates that can be redeemed for extra reading time, the chance to pick an activity, or another privilege
School supplies like pencils and notebooks
Art supplies like paintbrushes, stickers, and colored paper
For Older Students
While older students still love rewards (after all, who doesn’t?), they probably won’t get as excited about colorful erasers and sticker packs as younger students. They also don’t need to be rewarded as frequently.
Meaningful rewards that students work toward over a longer period are a great motivator in a more mature classroom. Here are a few rewards that older students will be happy to work toward:
8. The Chance to Retake a Test
This is big, right? The opportunity to retake a test is one that students will most definitely want to work toward, and it actually benefits them because retaking a test means more studying, which means more learning. Everybody wins!
9. Extra Reading Time
If you have silent sustained reading or something of the like in your class, you can give students who’ve behaved well extra time to read. They’ll be thrilled with the time to be independent, and they’ll be getting excited about books in the process!
Also, the other students will want to work hard so they can have more time to read, too.
Rewards for the Whole Class
Rewards for the whole class are really great because they encourage cooperation. They also incentivize students enforcing the classroom expectations among themselves, meaning you don’t need to be on constant alert.
Here are some whole-class rewards that are great for any age of student!
10. Field Trip
A field trip is educational, fun, and totally motivating. You can bet students will work hard if the chance to leave class during the day is on the line!
If you’re not actually allowed to take students on a field trip at your school, you can take them to a different classroom or part of the school — maybe to see the principal’s office or the inside of the cafeteria!
Or, you can organize an in-class field trip instead: pick a destination to transform your class into that place for a day!
For example, you could have a “staycation” to the zoo where you watch a Planet Earth documentary, eat animal crackers, dress up as animals, and do other zoo-themed activities.
Discovery Education is just one outlet for exciting and educational in-school field trips.
11. Extra Recess
The kids get to run around, get physical exercise, and play all the sillies out? Yes, please!
12. Special Class Visitor
Invite a scientist, a parent with an exciting job, or someone else fun to the class to give a presentation to the students.
You can even dress up as a subject that you’re studying and “visit” the class (perhaps put on a tall hat and be Abraham Lincoln, or dress up like a lion or a zebra if you’re learning about animals!)
13. Immersive Group Project
Your kids will seriously love the chance to work together on a fun group project. You can make the project totally holistic, including games, a class movie, a book on the subject, and crafts.
Your students will get more involved and learn more when they’re directing their learning process, and they’re all wrapped up in it! ESL Library has some great group projects you can do with your class.
Have Fun With Your Rewards!
At the end of the day, rewards are fun treats for students, and hopefully for yourself, too.
Don’t stress out if not every single reward is educational and fun and totally perfect. As long as the kids are motivated and you’re not spending more time thinking of and doling out rewards than you are teaching, you’re probably doing great.
So find some rewards that make you happy, and get ready to show them off to a class full of students who are excited and ready to learn!
Have you seen classes where everyone was running around and the teacher had no control over the students — or where the classroom was completely silent and the students were staring into space, either totally bored or too nervous to talk?
These classes contrast sharply with ones where everyone’s smiling and laughing and the classroom is full of energy and excitement.
Do teachers need secret superpowers to create interested, involved classes
Nope! All it takes to have a good class is a solid plan and some good old ‘sticktoitiveness’.
Creating a good classroom culture is imperative to fostering a class that’s bubbling, interested, and respectful.
Read on to find out what it takes to cultivate a curious and involved class and find out the three building blocks of positive classroom culture!
What Does Good Classroom Culture Look Like?
The thing about good classroom culture is that it’s not only good for your students — it also benefits you!
In a class with good classroom etiquette and culture, students are respectful, self-directed, and well-behaved.
They behave kindly and courteously to one another, they follow systems and routines in the classroom, and they feel empowered to learn and discover on their own.
When you foster positive classroom culture, you generate a system that allows students to feel safe, heard, and respected, and thus able to discover and grow without fear.
The Three Building Blocks of Good Classroom Culture
Set Up Clear Classroom Expectations and Rewards Systems
The first step to creating a good classroom culture is to set up clear classroom expectations and to enforce your expectations with consistent, frequent rewards, as well as sparing and consistent punishments.
Developing classroom expectations and a system of enforcing together with your students is essential to establishing behavior norms and to helping them understand what kind of student they should aspire to be in your class.
Read this guide to classroom expectations for more information on classroom expectations and how they help establish classroom etiquette and culture!
Create Classroom Systems and Routines
Good classroom culture is a byproduct of systems and routines that give students a sense of security and control. You can nurture your students’ control over the classroom by initiating clear routines in your classroom.
When students have a system or routine that they follow, they don’t need to wait for you to tell them every single thing they need to do:
They can move onto the next task when they’re ready, and feel like they’re not just bodies in chairs but rather free agents who can direct their own learning experience and make decisions on their own.
Having routines might seem boring, but in fact, it gives students the freedom to create their own unique experiences within routine — and it takes some of the teaching work off of you!
What Does a Solid Classroom Routine Look Like?
What your class routine looks like will vary based on the size and level of your class and the age of your students.
In general, though, you should have routines for the start and end of class, and routines that go with different units.
Perhaps students take the first 5 minutes of class to turn in homework, prepare their things at their desks, and watch a funny video or have a group discussion over a topic at hand.
After that, you might introduce the lesson using a PPT before breaking students into groups to do work on their own, receiving and replacing any materials they might need from designated spots independently.
End class by having students clean up, ask any remaining questions, tally up rewards and demerits, and note down homework.
You can have a number of routines that you use during the middle of your class based on what unit you’re on or what kind of activity you’re doing, as long as students have rubrics and solid expectations they can draw from so they’re self-motivated and know what’s going on.
If you teach younger students, it’s a great idea to have activity stations where students can learn through playing in small groups.
A classroom with good classroom culture is one where students are taking ownership of their learning experience, leading and asking questions on their own.
Foster these traits by creating room for lots of questions, presentations, projects, and discussions.
You can place a box for feedback in the back of your classroom to give shy students an outlet to make their voices heard.
You can even have an explicit conversation with students at the beginning of the semester where you emphasize that there are no wrong answers, that your classroom is a safe place for questioning and thinking, and that students may not mock or laugh at one another in your class.
Classroom Culture Starts With You! Model Good Classroom Etiquette and Behavior
As a teacher, you have enormous power to influence your students — for better or for worse. By being a good role model, you set an example for the kind of behavior you seek in your students.
Being a good role model means not being overly harsh or unfair (hey, if students can’t be mean to one another, then you can’t be mean to them!).
This doesn’t mean that you should be a pushover or totally buddy-buddy with your students, though.
You can also show how to ask big questions and find the answers to them, how to admit when you don’t know something, how to be a good listener.
Simply acting in a way that’s calm, respectful, and open to active discovery will give your students the tools to do the same. Don’t underestimate your power!
If you set up the three good building blocks for good classroom culture and act the way you want to see your students acting, you’re sure to find yourself with a class full of students that are kind, honest, interested, and more than ready to learn!
As an ESL teacher, you’re probably looking for ways to maintain an orderly classroom, not to mention create a positive, calm learning environment.
Even if you’re an experienced teacher, you may be struggling to make your class better behaved and more focused.
The truth is that maintaining a great ESL class is hard — and you can’t do it alone.
You need to work with your students continuously to create a classroom full of people discovering and helping each other question and learn.
Fear no more, because you’re about to learn how you can create a path to more rewarding and full ESL classes by establishing and maintaining classroom expectations.
Best of all, you’re getting the inside scoop on the three expectations that are key for creating a great classroom, along with tips for adapting them to suit your teaching style!
Why Classroom Expectations Matter
Too many teachers fall into one of these two traps:
Either they’re totally strict and spend more time disciplining than teaching, or they’re too wishy-washy and end up letting students watch movies and read during class because they’ve just given up on maintaining control.
The key to changing that is setting classroom expectations. Good classroom expectations — not classroom rules — involve students in setting up the structure of a class.
Classroom expectations set the tone for your class, creating a blueprint that guides the way both you and your students behave.
How To Set Up Classroom Expectations
Set up classroom expectations on the first day of class, and do it with your students. Creating classroom expectations as a class is important because it gives students ownership of their learning and makes them invested in the guidelines.
If you’re teaching very young students, you may have to lead the discussion about classroom expectations more, but you can still let students use TPR (Total Physical Response) and single words to give input!
If you have older students, you can have them split into groups to brainstorm rules or get together as a class to think of some.
Make sure to enforce that these are expectations and not rules, and so they should be simple and positive. They should be guidelines that encourage participation and discovery, not a laundry list of dos and don’ts.
As students brainstorm expectations, write them down and condense them. Lots of students will probably think of ideas that are variations of a theme, and you can facilitate their thinking process by condensing ideas or combining them into one guideline.
Have students write the final list you come up with on posters that they can decorate and hang around the classroom! That way they’ll have a reminder of the expectations all semester — in their handwriting.
The Only Three Classroom Expectations You Need
Note: Every ESL classroom is different, so these exact expectations may not be for everyone. You may want to expand on them or adapt them, but I encourage you to use them as a blueprint because I’ve found that they’re the bones of what makes a good ESL classroom.
Best of all, they can be adapted for any age of learner because they’re really simple and really universal.
Without further ado, here are the three magic classroom expectations:
Speak English
This one’s kind of a no-brainer, right? Anyone learning a language needs to speak the target language if they want to learn it, and they need to hear it, too.
A classroom full of people speaking English is a classroom full of people practicing using and listening to a new language; it’s a classroom full of people learning.
Notice that I didn’t say “No Chinese” (or “No Spanish” or whatever language), because the point of this expectation isn’t prohibition. We don’t want to bar students from speaking their native language or focus on negatives.
Instead, we want to emphasize that this space is for learning English. We all speak English in English class so that we can all learn English.
This expectation is probably the most broadly applicable one, but its generality doesn’t make it unuseful.
In fact, “Be Respectful” is the cornerstone of the classroom: it sets the entire note for what kind of class yours is and how students should behave in it.
You can adapt this classroom expectation for different ages. For very young students, for example, you can say “Be nice!”, and pair it with a movement like bowing or doing an exaggerated, fingers-on-your-cheeks smile.
For older students, you have the option of breaking this expectation into three pieces:
Respect other students
Respect the classroom
Respect the teacher
Respect myself
Talk to the students about what this expectation means: it means not defiling classroom property, not hitting or biting or saying mean words, not running around during class or making fun of people.
Being respectful means trying hard, helping others, and not laughing at them. Your students will be eager to give examples of respect, and maybe even illustrate them on their posters! This is especially helpful, if you have students with different backgrounds and want to teach culturally responsive.
Bonus idea: With your students, think of other things you want your class to respect!
Perhaps you can say “Respect the Earth” and encourage recycling and other acts of environmentalism? Make this your own, and give your students’ interests and concerns a platform.
Listen When Others Are Speaking
This last one seems repetitive. I mean, this is a form of respect, right? Yes, it is!
But here’s the thing: it’s so important, it’s worth writing separately. If students are talking over each other, talking over you, then no learning can get done and the class goes to chaos.
Establishing this expectation gives you the tools to establish others and conduct a calm, productive class.
Even though it’s redundant, put it down.
You’re going to be happy to be able to point to this classroom expectation clearly on the wall when students are yelling over one another and you think you’re about to lose your cool.
Tip: If you teach younger students, you can reduce this rule to “Listen!”, paired with a cupped hand behind the ear.
How Do I Make My Classroom Expectations Matter?
Great list, you’re thinking, but how do I put these into action? How do I use them to create real change in my classroom?
The trick to making your expectations matter is making them clear — over and over and over again.
If you have young students, you can chant the expectations call-and-response style with accompanying motions for the first month of the year or even longer!
If you have older students, have the expectations visible on the wall, and refer to them both when you’re disciplining and when you’re rewarding behavior. Speaking of which…
Give Lots Of Rewards
The best way to encourage behaviors is through positive reinforcements! Rather than focusing on bad behaviors, reward students for trying, for being respectful, for really showing up and learning. Before you know it, your students are going to be so eager to do well and act well in class that they’ll be doing your job for you!
So set out classroom expectations and positive rewards and let them work their magic.
Conversation lessons are a great way to practice and develop speaking skills for adults (and teenagers), but you may be a little lost on how to give your student the most out of the lesson.
You don’t want to just show up to the lesson and chat. You should want to give them the most value out of each conversation lesson you have.
The tips below on how to give a professional English conversation lesson for adults will steer you in the right direction.
Ready? Here come the tips!
1. Assess the Student’s Skill Level
If you teach English conversation lessons, you’ve probably already worked with or will work with students who have a range of skill levels, all the way from beginner to advanced.
When you teach beginner level students (A1), your job will probably consist of training the basics of: grammar tenses (present simple, present continuous, etc.), communication skills (“Hello, where is the train station?”), and vocabulary words (table, walk, arm, heavy, etc.) before they are able to start using the language in a natural conversational type of setting.
So in the case that you teach beginners, it means that your students aren’t quite at a conversational level yet and need more time to get there, which in turn means you obviously won’t be having conversation lessons.
If you do have beginner students, you will have to approach the lesson in a different way and use different techniques to get them to a conversational level. This should be your goal with a beginner student – prime them for becoming “conversational” English speakers.
But for pre-intermediate (A2) to advanced (C1) students, your students are probably already well-versed or at least have some degree of conversational communication skills, and therefore have different needs.
This is where the value of being able to teach a great English conversation lesson comes in, and teenage and adult language learners generally value the chance to practice their conversation skills during lessons because it trains them to be able to communicate effectively and easily with people in practical, everyday situations.
For levels above the beginner stage, which means A2 and above, the tips that follow below should serve as a good baseline on how to carry out your lessons and develop their conversational skills.
Bottom line: Getting a good sense of the student’s skill level will help you how to prepare for the lesson. If they’re beginners (A1), your goal should be to get your students to a conversational level. If they’re pre-intermediate (A2) or higher, your goal should be developing and improving the conversational skills they already have, which brings us to the next point…
2. Show Interest in your Students’ Interests and Focus on Their Personal, Work, or School Life
If you already know that your students are at least at a conversational level, in your first lesson with your new student(s), you should do some introductory tasks such as finding out about their school or work life, their responsibilities at their job, something about their family, home life, why they need English, their experience with and goals for English, as well as personal hobbies and interests.
When you get to know about their goals in English, their personal interests, their job or school life, you should try to hit on these two points moving forward in your next lessons.
Students will improve faster when they’re talking about things they care and know something about.
Showing genuine interest in your students’ own interests and their personal, work, or school life will go a long way. We all love to talk about ourselves, and the more the conversation hovers around the life and interests of the student, the more the student will speak.
The more a student speaks, the more comfortable they feel in the language. The more comfortable they feel in the language, the more they will improve.
This will also make your job easier because they are more likely to steal the conversation and all the talking time – which is exactly what you want!
It gives your student the time they want and need to practice developing their speaking skills, and it takes the pressure off you to be constantly active during the lesson. In a conversation lesson, I recommend an 80-20 or 75-25 relation for student-teacher talking time.
Bottom line: Learning about and striking on the topics that get your students excited or are important to them will naturally make them speak and improve because they’ll want to dominate the conversation with their knowledge and experience in these fields. The more your student talks, the more practice they get, and the more they improve. It’s a win-win for both you and the student because they get to speak and you get a lot of pressure taken off of you.
3. Prepare Videos, Articles, or Stories to Talk About
If one of my students works in IT or is interested in playing video games, or technology in general, I might search for a good video to watch, online articles, stories to read, interviews, or prepare discussion questions relevant to modern tech devices, computers, video games, mobile applications, artificial intelligence, robots, etc. and bring material on this topic to the lesson.
A lesson plan like this will give you engaging material to help your student develop the skills they need to talk about modern technology, its impacts on the world, robots, and artificial intelligence.
Since the student is emotionally invested in the topic of technology, they’ll be inspired to share their thoughts on this particular video (in reference to the above link). That lesson plan specifically will give you great material to work with.
You can then easily steer the conversation in the direction of the student’s own opinions about robots and technology, their experience and skills in IT, their favorite video games, tech devices etc. which they should have a lot to share and talk about.
Sit back and listen to what they have to say about the topic. Ask a lot of questions and show a lot of interest in what they’re talking about, even if you aren’t an IT or tech-person. Maybe your student will even teach you something interesting about it.
Bottom line: Getting prepared with some content related to the interest of the student will give you the grounds for developing good, meaningful, and productive conversations with them.
4. Tie in Local News Topics into Your Lessons
One thing that I almost always do before going to a lesson is checking out the local news topics going on in the city or country where I live (in my case – Prague, Czech Republic). This is because your students are likely to relate to the things going on where they live.
Think about elections or political stories, cultural or sports events going on, news about public figures, new movies, national holidays, extreme weather conditions, or new developments in the city life (like a new start-up company, a new law that was passed, or a new mobile app, for example).
Search online for news sources in English in the city or country where you live and pick out things that you think could fuel some good conversation. Keep an eye out for hot news topics that seem controversial, modern, or interesting.
Students often like discussing the things going on in the local world around them because it has an effect on them and they may have some fresh knowledge on that topic already from listening to the radio, watching TV, or checking in on social media.
You don’t even have to necessarily have them read the full article you found online. Turn it into a conversation activity. Introduce the topic and ask if they’ve heard something about it. If not, quickly scan and go through some of the highlights of the article with them and try to breed a conversation from the points that stick out.
You could also just ask your students a very general question – “Have you heard, read, or seen anything interesting in the news recently?” I’ve asked this question many times and sometimes they’ll tell me something I haven’t heard about – even after I’ve checked the news. Try to build a short conversation about that topic and dig to find out how much your student knows about the details of the story.
Another advantage is that you can use and recycle that topic with another student and see if your next student has heard something about it. Many times if one of your students has heard about a hot topic going in their country or city, the chances are that more of your students will have already also heard about it too, so bring that topic up in your next lessons with other students for that day or that week.
It’s also interesting to see how differently your students view a specific story or topic in the news, and you can work on training your student how to express their ideas and opinions clearly on a controversial or influential topic – which is a great skill to develop as a foreign language speaker.
Bottom Line: When you present your students with local news topics that they can relate to and are interested in, they tend to be more engaged. (And it makes your job easier!) When discussing a local topic, try to pick out everything they know about it and hear their opinion on it – which in turn gives you the grounds to train your students how to naturally express opinions on relevant topics.
5. Focus on the Student, but Don’t Forget to Share Your Opinions, Ideas, Thoughts, and Experiences
One of the most important things to remember when giving a language conversation lesson as a teacher is that this is the student’s time to talk.
Although there’s nothing wrong with talking about yourself, try to keep that to a limit. Your student is with you for one main reason – to practice their speaking skills with a native or proficient speaker and improving as much as they can.
Think of yourself as the leader of the conversation, but you also shouldn’t forget that a conversation goes two ways, and in order to keep a conversation going you’ll have to share your own feedback, opinions, ideas, thoughts, and experiences on the topic.
Don’t be afraid to steal a little bit of talking time because this is good for the student as well.
However, you should be conscious of the fact that the reason for doing this is to facilitate extra conversation for your student, give him/her a chance to react to your opinions or ask questions, and also to introduce new vocabulary terms or expressions that could be useful along the way (see tip #10 and #11 below).
Whenever you start talking, speak clearly and simply so that the student has a chance to practice their listening skills – but since it’s a conversation lesson, you will want to find a way to redirect what you say back to the student.
The way to focus on a student during a lesson is by paying attention, being engaged, being sensitive about their mistakes or mispronunciations, helping him/her say things correctly, and asking him/her a lot of follow-up type questions.
Below you can see an example of what it means to facilitate a conversation with a student, who is maybe a little shy or doesn’t like to talk much:
Example conversation:
Teacher: “How was your hockey practice this week?”
Student: “It was good.”
Teacher: “What kind of training exercises did you do?”
Student: “We had to skate between small, plastic orange…uh…um…”
Teacher: “Cones” (write down the word ‘cones’ on a piece of paper). “And are there any good exercises you can do at home to train for hockey?”
Student: “At home, you can do…’ (student mimics a push-up)
Teacher: “Push-ups” (write down the word ‘push-ups’ on a piece of paper). “Oh I hate push-ups! I injured my shoulder one time doing push-ups. And have you ever been injured while playing hockey?”
Student: “Yes, one time when I was…”
Bottom line: You are the one steering the conversation, focusing on getting the student to speak as much as possible, asking good questions, eliciting their ideas, stories, experiences, opinions, but share your side as well. If you have a talkative student, they can often make the lesson really easy for you. But other times you’ll have to work harder and be creative in eliciting ideas from your student, which brings us to our next point…
6. Practice and Learn the Art of Facilitation
As mentioned in the point above, you’re the leader or facilitator of the conversation.
However, “facilitating” a conversation can sometimes be harder than it sounds.
We’ve all been through those moments in our lives when we’re talking or having a conversation with someone and then there’s that awkward, silent moment where neither person in the conversation knows what to say or how to continue.
As an ESL conversation specialist, you should try to master the art of conversation direction so that there aren’t any awkward gaps or pauses in your conversation.
I recently got a great book as a gift from my father for Christmas, and it’s filled with great conversation questions that I’ve been using in my lessons – and the book wasn’t even designed for ESL lessons! When my father gave it to me, I flipped through it, and thought to myself – “Wow, this is going to be perfect content for my ESL students.”
Basically, that book contains one question per day (about your life) for 365 days, and you have space below the questions to write answers. But in my case, I decided to use it as content for my ESL conversation lessons.
Some of the questions might be a little bit too personal, so be careful and sensitive which ones you choose. Asking some of them will depend on the student – so use careful judgment. But for many of the questions this book has been magical so far because I’ve been able to build meaningful conversation for a while – sometimes 45 – 60 minutes out of just one question.
What I’ve done with my students is just simply have them choose a number between 1 and 365. (The book has 365 questions). One of the questions my student chose was something along the lines of – “Are you reader? If so, what’s your favorite book you’ve ever read and why?”
Luckily, the student I asked this question to is a big reader, so she couldn’t stop talking about all of her favorite books. But there were moments when she stopped talking, and I felt the need to keep it going because I could tell she was engaged in the topic of reading books.
For example, she got talking about how much she loved the Game of Thrones series. While she was talking her face off about the Game of Thrones, I immediately started planning a series or line of follow-up questioning in my head:
“Have you also watched the Game of Thrones TV show? If so, is it better than the book?”
“Have you ever seen a movie and read the same book, but the movie was better?”
“Do you also like the Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series?”
“Are you also a fan of other genres of books, or mostly just fantasy?”
“I read somewhere that it’s good to read a bit before going to bed. Do you do this too?”
“What do you think is the main message of the book?”
“Do you own an e-reader or do you prefer to read from an actual paperback book?”
From just these questions, I’m pretty sure we were getting close to about 45+ minutes. Of course, along the way, I was teaching her new vocabulary terms related to the topic of reading, and then introducing/writing down these phrases and terms down for her:
“I couldn’t put the book down.”
“It’s a page-turner.”
“I sometimes get hooked once I start reading.”
“The book sucked me in.”
(See tip #10 below for more information on this one).
Another great thing about that book of questions is that if one question doesn’t go well or was unsuccessful in producing some good, meaningful talk, just flip to another page – there’s plenty of others (365) to choose from!
Bottom line: One of the best skills in facilitating conversation is that when the student is talking, build an arsenal of follow-up questions in your head while they are still talking, and keep it stored in your mind until they are finished with what they have to say. When you feel that they are done talking, fire out the follow-up question(s). Make your questions flow in a logical order.
7. Correct Students Upon Hearing a Mistake (But Not Always!)
Your voice, pen, paper, face, and hands are your most valuable tools for error correction during a conversation lesson. Use your voice to demonstrate how to say something correctly, use your pen and paper to show them where they’ve made mistakes, and your face and hands to indicate that they’ve made an error.
There are different ways you can correct a student, and the most classic way is that when a student makes a mistake, you correct them verbally, on the spot after the mistake is made. Basically, you interrupt the student (politely!) and tell them the correct way to say it:
Student: “Yesterday, we must did a lot training exercises.”
Teacher: (Interrupt) “Yesterday, we had to do a lot of training exercises.”
Then, on a piece of paper, you can write down ‘must (present) – had to (past simple)’ and explain that we use the past simple form of ‘have to’ for ‘must’.
Alternatively, you could also write down that students’ mistake on paper while they continue to talk without interrupting them, and come back to it at the end of the lesson. Then, walk through the mistakes in the sentence with the student at the end of the lesson. Show and explain to them why ‘must did’ is incorrect, and why you need to add the preposition ‘of’.
Bottom line: Find a balance in the ways that you error correct your students. Mix it up a bit – correct them verbally, by making and using hand gestures, or also take advantage of your pen & paper or whiteboard.
8. Let Some Mistakes Go and Don’t Disrupt the Flow of Conversation
One important thing to remember is that you don’t want to disrupt the flow of the conversation, which is what can happen if you overcorrect them, so be careful with this technique. You can also damage their confidence and fluency.
If you interrupt a student to correct them, do it in moderation. Not every single mistake needs to be corrected.
The most important thing is that the student can communicate their ideas in a clear way, which is what you’re there to help them with. If you’re not quite sure what your student is trying to say, ask them to try explaining it in a different or more simple way.
After living in the Czech Republic for a long time, I decided to go through the rewarding, fun, and ‘oh-so-painful’ process of learning the Czech language. I had a great conversation recently in the Czech language with my Uber driver during a 20-minute ride to the airport in Prague.
I knew I was making mistakes during our conversation. I realized it right away when I made them. But the driver understood me anyway when I made my mistakes – and this, in general, is the most important in a conversation – that the person on the other side listening understands you and that the communication flows despite grammatical, pronunciation, word choice errors, etc.
Of course in many situations (interviews, presentations, formal speeches, etc) accuracy is important – but for informal conversation, it’s more important if the speaker expresses themselves in an understandable way. This is an important thing to keep in mind while giving a conversation lesson – not every mistake needs to be corrected!
Bottom line: You don’t have to correct 100% of the time, and actually – you shouldn’t! Just make sure that you understand your student and that it’s clear to you what they want or are trying to express. It’s ok to tell your student you don’t understand and to explain it in a different way.
9. Let the Student Correct Themself and Be Attentive to the Word Choice and Pronunciation
Try to mix up your techniques as well. For example, instead of interrupting the student verbally with the correct way to say it, you could do something like break a gentle smile and shake your head back and forth. This will indicate to the student that he/she has made a mistake, and they will have to think about how to correct it on their own. This is very effective because they must do the work in their own mind to reform their sentence. Or you could elicit the mistake by repeating the sentence and let the student try to finish it in the corrected form.
For the example above, start saying “Yesterday, we…not ‘must’ but…” and the student should try to finish it correctly: ‘Yesterday, we had to…’. Another technique is repeating exactly what the student said and shaking your head while putting stress in your voice at the part where the student’s mistake was.
Being polite is important as well, and correct your student in an empathetic way that doesn’t make them feel embarrassed.
You will also want to be attentive to the word choice and pronunciation when error-correcting students. For word position, you can stop the student and cross your two index fingers over each other, while for pronunciation you can simply say the right way to say it and then have the student repeat the corrected version back to you.
Also for a word position mistake, you can write it down on a piece of paper (like in tip #7 above) and show your student why it was wrong how they said it, and explain the fundamental rules of word position to them. Here’s an example:
Student’s mistake: “Said the president that important for him is the health of the economy.”
Write that down while they’re speaking. Then go through the mistake with them and explain how the subject “The president” must come before the verb “said” and then correct the second part too – “that the health of the economy is important for him.”
It may take a while to get the hang of effective error-correcting, but it’s an important skill to learn.
Bottom Line: Error correction is an essential component to any conversation lesson, but vary the ways you do it and do it in moderation.
10. Find Ways to Introduce New Vocabulary Terms Every Lesson
One of the most important things I do when teaching a conversation lesson is introducing and writing down new vocabulary terms that come up. If a student can’t think of a word, your job is to help them find the word they want to use in that specific context and then introduce them to it. You can also repeat or summarize the same idea of what the student just said in your own words, how you would say it yourself naturally.
Naturally, tie in new vocabulary terms. Many times the student may say something, you understand what they mean, but they just didn’t say it how a native speaker would. Let’s look at the examples below:
Example 1:
Student: “My job application was not accepted.”
Teacher: “So your application got turned down?”
And at this time, you can write down the new term for them: ‘turn down’
Go over the definition and how to use ‘turn down’, with another example in context. Then, you could introduce some other phrasal verbs that use the verb ‘turn’: (turn up, turn around, turn into, turn against, etc.). You could even introduce the grammar point using ‘get’ in the passive form ‘to get turned down’ / ‘to get hit’ / ‘to get arrested’, etc. (See tip #12 below for more on this.)
Example 2:
Student: “He is not so good to his dog.”
Teacher: “So he doesn’t treat his dog well?”
And at this time, you can write down the new term: ‘to treat’
What I would do in this situation is go over the different contexts, meanings, and parts of speech for the word ‘treat’.
Contexts:
treat (v.) to behave a specific way to somebody or something
(v.) to give medical care or try to heal
(n.) a type of reward, snack, toy, etc. for good behavior
Parts of speech:
treatment
Untreatable
This brings us to the next tip…
11. Demonstrate How Native Speakers Think and Speak
This is a developed skill for teaching and can take time to do it the right way, but it will help your students improve. The reason it takes time is that you have to train your brain how to think on its toes, and the reason it’s difficult is that you have to multi-task – engaging in a conversation while also thinking about how to express ideas in different ways.
But, basically what you should be doing is each time your students speak, tell a story, or explain something, is to think not about what your students say, but think about how they say it.
Don’t interrupt them while they’re still speaking, let them finish, but think about how a native speaker would say the same thing they just said and write it down. Let’s look at an example:
Student’s sentence: “It was good for him, but not for me.”
Native Speaker sentence: “It worked out in his favor, not mine.”
Student’s sentence: “It’s very hard to get my children out of bed.”
Native Speaker sentence: “Getting my children out of bed is like pulling teeth.”
Student’s sentence: “My boss gave me a lot of work today, so much that I’m very stressed.”
Native Speaker sentence: “My boss gave me a lot of work today, so I’m overwhelmed. OR: “My boss gave me so much work that I’m losing my mind.”
It’s important to point out here that for each of those situations, the students didn’t say anything wrong or incorrectly. You’re merely just helping them to expand their ability to express themself or teaching them how a native speaker might naturally express the same idea.
Bottom line: Try focusing not on what students say, but how they say it. This will expand your students’ ability to express themselves and help your students speak just as native or proficient speakers do.
12. Dive Deep Into the Nuances and Technicalities of the Language
The most valuable thing you can do to introduce the technicalities of English to your students is is to get as deep as you can with one vocabulary word. Think of all of the parts of speech in which it can be used. Think of any expression or phrasal verbs that include that specific vocabulary word.
A perfect example that happened during a lesson with my student recently was with the word ‘cheer.’ My student said that he went to a race and was there as a spectator to ‘cheer for’ his wife.
While it was clear what he meant, it wasn’t exactly correct. It took me a second to realize what was wrong with it (he should have said ‘cheer her on’). So, we got into what the difference is between ‘cheer someone on’ and ‘cheer for’ and I also introduced the term ‘cheer someone up’. Additionally, I taught him the phrasal verb ‘root for’ (a synonym for ‘cheer for’) which was new to him.
Another example – my student asked how the ‘participation’ was in the US midterm elections. While that was also clear what he meant, we usually use the word ‘turn-out’ when talking about voter participation.
Then, I clarified that it’s used as a noun here and showed him how to use it as a verb (College students turned out big-time to the midterm 2018 elections.) while also introducing a new term – ‘big-time.’ While the student understood what that meant, that was the first time he saw the term ‘big-time.’
Then, we went deeper into the word ‘turn’ – going through expressions, terminology, proverbs, idioms, and additional phrasal verbs with the word turn:
turn into – “The storm turned into a big hurricane.”
turn in – “The student turned in his homework assignment late and got penalized for it.”
turn off – “I went on a first date last night, but he only talked about himself the whole time. It really turned me off!”
turn up – “My girlfriend lost her phone, but it eventually turned up.”
turn down – “He turned down the job opportunity because it was too far of a trip from home.”
I then showed him how to use this one in a passive construction: “He asked a girl out on a date, but he got turned down.”
My student was confused about why we use ‘get’ + passive here instead of with the verb ‘be’ + passive. So, we used this as our next topic of study. I showed him why we use ‘He got arrested.” instead of “He was arrested.” and we did an activity on this which really helped the student understand and use it actively. This is a language nuance and technicality that is valuable for an intermediate to advanced level student to learn.
Bottom line: Getting deep into the technicalities and picking apart vocabulary terms will uncover a lot of new things that your student hadn’t been introduced to before, and therefore establish grounds for learning something new about the language. When one term, word, phrase, etc. comes up in the lesson, continue extending it.
13. Translate Terms to and from the Student’s Native Language
This one is debatable across the ELT industry. But in my own experience, it’s one thing that’s definitely helped me a lot – especially with clarity and accuracy.
You might run into a situation when a student is talking and they don’t know the word they want to say and you also don’t know what they want to say. In this case, you could have an online dictionary/translator accessible during the lesson so that you can just translate the word quickly.
Sometimes, of course, when you translate the word, there will be different words that are used in different contexts. Your role here is to find the right one they wanted to say in that specific context of what they’re talking about.
It’s often recommended to avoid translation during a language lesson, but I think that it can be useful from time to time. As I mentioned above, the reason I like it is that it provides clarification and accuracy.
If you have some proficiency in your students’ native language, it’s going to be a lot easier to teach them English because you’ll know how their brains work linguistically in their native language and understand why they make certain mistakes.
Bottom Line: Pay attention to the vocabulary words your students need and help them say things the right way while building upon those new words. Don’t be afraid to use a translator if you need it. If neither you nor your student can think of the word, it wouldn’t hurt to try translating it and finding the right word for the right context.
14. Keep and Maintain Good Lesson Notes & Records You Take During the Lesson
One of my students’ absolute favorite thing that I do – which is really effective in ingraining the new material into their ‘English language’ part of the brain – is to go back over the terms (which were discussed above in tips #5 and #6), grammar points or new expressions that you’ve talked about, written down, and have been introduced in previous lessons.
How do you do that? Simple – keep the records from your lessons.
When you’re doing private one-one lessons with teenagers or adults, you should always have a notebook or blank piece of paper with you. Write down new words and expressions that come up when they don’t know how to say something, as well as the mistakes they make while speaking.
Hold on to those papers – those are the blueprints to your students’ progress. It’s pretty easy to maintain the files – just keep those papers in a separate folder or plastic sleeve for each student. Go back over the terms each month – every 4 lessons you should refresh everything that’s been written on those sheets of paper.
Hold on to those papers yourself. How likely is it that your students will go back over those terms by themselves?
I do have students who do this, but I know for sure most of them don’t. They’re busy people and have busy lives. That’s why I always keep organized files and records of everything I’ve done with the student. Think of maintaining those lesson notes and records as a service – or better yet – a treasure in the chest.
In your next lesson, take that paper back out and spend 5-10 minutes reviewing all of the new terminologies.
If you want to go the extra mile, get them typed up onto a Google doc. Write the date at the top and the new vocabulary terms, expressions, and their speaking mistakes into the document. You’ll have to do some extra work typing the content from the white sheet onto the Google doc, but it’s super professional and your students will love you for it.
When I do it, it usually takes about 10 – 15 minutes per document, which is time-consuming, but as I said, your students are going to be impressed. I’ve had several students actually thank me for doing this and ask me to keep doing it. After that, you can get rid of the paper since you’ll have the documents stored online.
Bottom line: Maintaining your lesson notes and records are the blueprints to student development. Keep them safe, go the extra mile by getting it onto a Google document, and get a happy, improved student.
15. Repeat and Review Everything from the Lesson Notes in the Next Lessons
Use those pieces of paper that you wrote down all of your students’ mistakes, notes, new words, terms, expressions, etc from the lesson, as stated in the above point to drill in and refresh what the students learned during the last lesson.
You can do this by either reading the word out loud and having the student recall the context you had for it, or by having them try to tell you a definition or context examples for the word. You could also do it the other way around – you read out the definition and the student tells you the word.
Basically – repeat and repeat, and find ways to get students to use those words in conversations. Always do some CCQ (concept checking questions) because those often lead to more and deeper conversations.
Keep an eye out for their repeated mistakes – for example, if they make multiple mistakes in one lesson with present perfect, then you could focus on present perfect as a grammar point for the next lesson and bring some speaking or writing activities related to that. It also gives the lesson a nice flow if you transition from the student’s mistake to the grammar point that you have planned for that next lesson.
Bottom line: Reviewing the material from the last lesson will help drill in the new terms, information, and content that you’ve covered. One key to teaching a language is to keep repeating and repeating what you’ve already taught your students.
16. Dive into Niched Topics
Advanced students definitely need to polish and be exposed to what I like to call ‘corner English,’ which is basically niche topics that are tucked into the corners of the big realm of the English language and vocabulary.
When you get into these topics, it’s killing two birds with one stone because niched topics will give your students new things to learn in terms of language and they also generally can provide something new and educational for your student about something beyond just the language.
What are some examples of niched topics and how you can approach teaching them? A great place to find some niched vocabulary topics is Fluentize.com. Let’s take a look at some example lessons from the website:
Meet the Voice Actor For Super Mario
Breeding the World’s Hottest Pepper
Storm Surges Can Be the Deadliest Part of a Hurricane
Why Pizza Purists Love Neapolitan Style Pizza
How San Francisco is Becoming a Zero Waste City
These are all great examples of niched topics – which bring a lot of great, new vocabulary terms to the surface for your students. The lesson plans are also designed to generate really great, in-depth conversation, which will establish further grounds for introducing new things to your student and pave the way for learning new terms, expressions, and vocabulary – and very specific terms related to those topics.
Let’s take a look at an example. In the lesson plan for ‘How San Francisco Is Becoming a Zero Waste City’ (not available anymore), there are vocabulary terms featured such as:
Composting
Incineration
Landfills
Yard Trimmings
Food Scraps
Greenhouse gases
Soil
Crops
Grind up / Ground up
These are very niched vocabulary words related to the topic of the environment, specifically talking about waste. Will your students already know these words? Possibly! Which is fine, but it’s good to repeat them, and many of those words I bet they don’t know yet or it’s the first time they’re seeing them.
As explained in tip #12 above, get deeper into those words and build upon them:
Composting – Compostable / Incineration – Incinerator, etc.
For the term “yard trimmings”, teach them the term “to mow the lawn, lawn mower/weed wacker, leaf blower, etc.”
Don’t forget to do some CCQ (concept checking questions). Fluentize provides some CCQ questions in that lesson for you.
Once you get to know your students better, you’ll learn what topics they’re into, and Fluentize.com will provide you a great resource for ideas. For any student you have, there will most likely be topics they’d be interested in discussing on the website.
Bottom line: Getting into niched topics will establish grounds for expanding vocabulary because there are very specific vocabulary terms related to those topics, and will also give them a chance to learn about something relevant or interesting outside of just linguistics.
17. Find a Balance between Professionalism and Casualness
This one depends on a few different things – Does your student need English for business or personal reasons? How do they want the lessons to be? Are they practicing for some exam? Are they using it for traveling? What culture are they from? What are the requests and the needs of the student?
You should think about these questions for each student you have in order to determine how you prepare and set the tone for each lesson. Even ask the student. Don’t be afraid to downright ask them what they want to do or focus, or if there is anything specifically they would like to train.
Do they want conversation lessons? Practice writing emails? Listening? Communicating on the phone? Focus on building vocabulary? Grammar? Every student is different. However, a common theme I’ve noticed across my lessons is that they each have a healthy blend of professionalism and casualness.
I try to make the lessons both personal and educational. It’s possible that many students look at their private English lesson as a break from their busy days while keeping their English skills fresh, learning some new things along the way.
Many students just want to practice communication and conversational topics, instead of it being a really serious, intense kind of environment.
I’ve had students on both sides of the spectrum – the ‘I need to really work hard and do intensive exercises and get my grammar perfect and do homework regularly’ type of student and the ‘let’s just chill and talk, but please occasionally correct me’ type of student.
Get a feel for what your students’ wishes and needs are, and prepare accordingly. However, even if your student is on the ‘work really hard’ side, you can still make the lesson fun and personable.
As you give your English lessons – think about how you would want your private one-one language lesson to be and how you would want your teacher to be with you if you were on the other side.
The reason it’s important to find a balance is that you don’t want to just show up, chat, and that’s it, without teaching them anything, but you also don’t want to be super serious and just intensively drill grammar exercise after grammar exercise (unless your students request this).
Students generally want to feel comfortable, have meaningful discussions, express opinions on interesting topics, do fun activities, learn something new, joke around a little bit, and develop their skills.
Being casual and professional is a blend of using humor, listening to your student, teaching them useful vocabulary terms, correcting their mistakes, engaging in meaningful conversation, asking questions and their opinions, giving your opinions, and being genuinely interested in their lives, stories, and experiences.
If you can nail all of these things in your conversation lessons, I’d say your on track to giving them a positive, professional, and casual lesson experience that your student will appreciate, enjoy, and get value out of all at the same time.
Bottom line: Making your students feel comfortable and not taking the lesson too seriously are good, but also make sure you focus on education and developing their skills.
18. Implement and Work With Authentic Materials
You really shouldn’tunderestimate the power and value of implementing authentic resources in your ESL lessons. Authentic resources are packed with useful learning material, much of which your students will be new to.
Videos, TV series, music, news articles, books, social media – these types of resources will give you a lot to work with as a teacher and help prepare your students for communication and real-life interactions in practical contexts.
There’s a lot of slang, interesting terms, and different kinds of pronunciation you can train using these resources. In my own experience, I’ve found incredible value in using real-world videos as a resource in my ESL lessons for a variety of reasons.
Additionally, students tend to work well with authentic materials and enjoy working with topics that matter to them and that are relevant to their life. As mentioned in tips #2 and #3 above, an engaged student is usually more inclined to learn, and that’s the value of using authentic materials – there are all kinds of authentic materials out there that you can use to pique the interest of your student.
Check-in with your students from time to time about what kind of authentic materials they want to work within the lessons. Pick up on what they’re interested in and what they talk about a lot, and find authentic materials on these topics. This will give you good direction in terms of choosing and planning for the right topics for your lessons.
If your student talks about food a lot, then find some authentic materials based on food and cooking (cookbooks, online recipes, stories about successful chefs, information about cultural foods, etc.)
Bottom line: Authentic materials are valuable to use with students because they’re packed with new terms, are likely to pique interest and give your student a practical context to train for real-life engagement with the language.
For Business English students, it’s important that ESL lessons are based on the needs of their day-to-day work.
They want to practice situations taken from their professional environment, and discuss real-life Business English topics.
Some are: making phone calls, being able to hold and carry on conversations, speaking with colleagues, preparing and giving presentations, or negotiations.
The Business English activities in this post will save you time and effort in making quality content for your lessons.
About the Business English Topics And Activities
Lessons including well-designed activities will prepare your students for their professional lives and give them the necessary skills and vocabulary needed to communicate effectively in English.
The 20 activity suggestions you’ll find in this post relate to the topics of business travel, commuting to work, big business, artificial intelligence, technology, and music.
Below are some examples of activities from these lessons that can help your Business English students improve their communication skills.
Topic: AirBnB Business Travel
Airbnb has been expanding their services to open up the market for business travelers.
They are simplifying the process of booking and launched some tools which automatically organize your business trip expenses. This new business travel program is coming out strong.
Activities
Phone Calling
Writing Accommodation Descriptions
Leaving Reviews
Mobile App Concepts
Debate With Hotel Owner
Comparing and Contrasting
This topic works especially great with Business English lessons in the real estate, hospitality, or mobile app industries, but also in general for any businessmen or women who have to travel for their jobs.
This is an especially engaging Business English topic for a few reasons: it’s controversial (hotel owners aren’t happy about AirBnB) and it’s a hot topic (more and more people are choosing Airbnb over hotels).
Airbnb is a relatively new global powerhouse, revolutionizing the hospitality industry the same way that Uber revolutionized the taxi industry.
Activity: Phone Calling
Put students in pairs or a group. Assign each student a different role from the roles below, or they can choose one.
Students have to imagine that they are Airbnb hosts who just hosted:
A small group of middle-aged business travelers
A small group of young adult party travelers
A small family of 4 with young children
An individual traveler who came with his dog
Students then ‘call’ their ‘friends’ (another student in the class) to either leave a voicemail or talk about the experience (or complain about the experience!).
They should describe how the experience was as the host for these types of travelers:
What was different about hosting each of their stays?
Was it positive or negative and why?
Did anything good, bad, surprising, or unusual happen during their stay?
You could even have them imagine what could be a positive and negative experience for hosting these types of travelers.
You could even get a bit more creative with this one by assigning a pair of students a role from the list above, and they have to call the ‘host’ (their partner) and ask them questions or make special requests about their stay, e.g:
Am I allowed to bring my dog to your property?
Is there a nice cafe in the area where I can bring my laptop to do work?
We have a baby who cries a lot during the night. Will this bother you?
Even though with Airbnb, you would probably just message the host online, but in this case, you can make it a phone call to practice speaking.
Activity: Writing Accommodation or Property Descriptions & Reviews
Students work with a partner or group and imagine they are Airbnb hosts offering a special, exotic, or unique type of accommodation rental.
They should discuss and agree on the type of home rental they have to offer, where in the world it is, and create their own online listing for this rental on Airbnb.
In the listing, they should explain what type of rental it is, the location, the check-in and check-out procedure, a description and special features of the accommodation, and other housing details and rules.
Make students offer something different or special about their property – something they wouldn’t get somewhere else. Remember, they want to sell the experience!
Students then present their accommodation profile description to the other students in the class and then give their listing to another student or group.
The other student or group then makes a detailed review for that listing, imagining they actually stayed there.
Activity: Creating Mobile App Concepts in the Sharing Economy
Put students in pairs and give them a list of other mobile apps in the sharing economy.
Examples:
DogVacay
HomeDine
BlaBla Car
Neighborgoods
JustPark
Based on the name of the app, students have to discuss and explain what they imagine the concept of the app to be and how it works.
After students work together for a couple of minutes, go around the class and ask them to report their answers. If they’re not able to imagine what it might be, you can just tell them.
Ask them questions like:
Would this type of app be useful for you? Why or why not?
Which app from this list would help you the most?
Try to create an in-depth class discussion about all of these apps.
For the apps listed above specifically, you can discuss things like:
If parking is a problem for your students (JustPark)
What they do with their dog when they go on a trip (DogVacay)
If they would be interested to drive with a stranger for many hours (BlaBla Car)
If they’ve ever eaten at someone’s home, from another country or culture (HomeDine)
Then, students can either work with the same or different partners to create their own concept for a mobile app in the sharing economy.
They should focus on things like:
The special features of the app
What problem it solves / Why it’s a good idea
How it works
What problems could happen when people use your app
An alternative to this one is I’ve also had students imagine that they were the founders of Airbnb, and they have to come up with their own detailed story behind the establishment of the company, which turned out to be a fun activity.
Activity: Debate Between AirBnB Representative and Hotel Owner
Put students in pairs or two small groups and they prepare for a debate.
One student or group takes the position of an AirBnB company representative and the other takes the position of a Hotel Owner.
Each side must prepare, defend, and present their positions to the other groups, presenting information about…
Why they believe their accommodation service is better (at least 3 advantages of your service) Students must talk about the top reasons to stay in a hotel over Airbnb, or vice versa.
If you think Airbnb should be legal or illegal and why (obviously the AirBnB rep will say it should be legal and the hotel owner will say it should be illegal)
The positive impact your service has on society and the economy
What actual people and guests have said about your accommodation services
Your role as the teacher will be the moderator during the debate – generating follow-up questions for the students or groups when they present their sides. Keep the debate clean and flowing smoothly.
Activity: Comparing and Contrasting (Hotels vs. AirBnB or Uber vs. Taxi)
If for any reason you don’t want to make this an official ‘debate,’ another thing you could do is just make it a general, in-depth class discussion, conversation, or compare & contrast about the advantages and disadvantages of staying in Airbnb in comparison with hotels.
Make sure students talk about their own experiences.
Transition the discussion to the conflict between Uber and Taxi, because they are facing a similar conflict for similar reasons.
Many businessmen and women in the modern world have to commute for hours and hours per week to their jobs or for work purposes. Sitting in the car or public transit like this can really have a negative impact on one’s overall lifestyle.
Activities
Telling a Story
Commenting on YouTube
Expressing Frustrations or Complaining
Talking About Lifestyle & Daily Routines
The reason this topic works so well in Business ESL lessons is that it reaches such a wide spectrum of people.
Everyone who has a job as an employee in a company, a school, a factory, etc has a unique situation. All Business English students usually have a lot to say about their experience commuting (or home office if they have that privilege!).
Activity: Telling a Story
Students work in pairs.
Student A: This student imagines that he/she spends a lot of time commuting and is very pessimistic about the situation.
This student believes that they have the worst commute in the world. Describe the situation in detail. The student should complain about it as much as possible and why they hate it so much.
They should take notes on:
Where you live
Your daily routine
Where you go to work
What’s so bad about the commute / What are the conditions of the commute
How commuting makes you feel
The student then has to tell one negative story that they have had during their commute.
Student B: This student imagines that they spend a lot of time commuting but is very optimistic about the situation.
This student loves the situation that they have. They should discuss and explain in detail why they have the best commute in the world, talk about it as much as possible and why they enjoy it.
Also, they take notes on:
Where you live
Your daily routine
Where you go to work
What’s so bad about the commute / What are the conditions of the commute
How commuting makes you feel
They tell one positive story that they’ve had during your commute.
After the students write notes for their roles (give them a few minutes), have them describe their situations to their partner.
They should listen to their partner’s situation carefully because they should then report the details of their partner’s situation back to the class!
Activity: Commenting on YouTube
At the beginning of the video, the reporter complains about her long daily routine and commute, and then she says to the audience:
“Before you go and post that comment telling me to ‘move closer’, you need to see that I’m not the only person doing this.”
In pairs, students should come up with a response that the following type of people would write or say to the reporter in the YouTube comments section, e.g:
What could be a rude response to that statement in the comment section of the video?
What could be an empathetic response to that statement in the comment section of the video?
What could be a funny response to that statement in the comment section of the video?
Another activity you could do is give students some imaginary comments to that video, and then the students have to write responses to these imaginary comments. You can make it a speaking or writing activity.
For example, here are a few possible comments to that video:
Comment #1:
“Americans are completely crazy and lazy. You drive these huge cars to work and in reality, you don’t need to. Look at the Netherlands and Denmark – they have very efficient bicycle transport systems and bicycles are much more environmental. It’s stupid to drive everywhere.”
Comment #2:
“The best solution to this problem is self-driving cars. Our tax money should go more to support the production of self-driving cars. That way when people commute they can do productive things. The solution to public transit is getting better wifi connections on the subways and buses.”
You can instruct one student to write a response which agrees with each comment, and the other student to write a response which disagrees with each comment, something along those lines.
Activity: Expressing Frustrations & Complaining
Put students in pairs, or in two groups. You’ll distribute to each student pair or group two cards which read:
A: Riding on public transport
B: Driving in a car
Students must work together to come up with a list of all the things that frustrate them, annoy them, stress them out, or make them angry while (1) riding on public transport and (2) driving a car.
The group which comes up with the most things in the time limit (3 minutes should be good) wins.
This activity usually works really well because everyone gets angry, stressed, frustrated, etc. at some point while driving a car or riding public transportation.
A lot of good vocabulary can also come out of this one. You can even teach a couple of fun phrasal verbs related to driving when you talk about this topic:
Cut (someone) off – “I hate when I’m driving and someone cuts me off and then I have to slam on my brakes.”
Pull (someone) over – “I hate when I’m driving only a little bit above the speed limit and a police officer pulls me over.”
Freak out – “I hate driving with my father. He always drives aggressively and freaks out about small things.”
Run over – “I hate when I run over a nail or a sharp object and my tire goes flat.”
Hold (someone) up – “I hate when traffic holds me up and makes me late for work.”
You can use this activity for teaching students other terminology that is useful for expressing complaints or frustrations:
I get frustrated when…
I get all stressed out when…
It gets me so worked up when…
It pisses me off when…
I totally freak out when…
I lose my mind when…
It drives me nuts when…
Have students then use these expressions to talk about their frustrations commuting or about their job in general.
Activity: Talking About Lifestyle, Commuting, and Employment Situations
Spending hours commuting and then hours at the office has become so integrated into the modern working world that it can have quite a profound impact on our quality of life and lifestyle, which is why it’s good to talk about in a language lesson.
Here’s an activity you can do that will give your students a good opportunity to talk about their lifestyle, commute, and employment situation.
It’s also simple, easy to prepare, and generates quality conversation.
Print a number of statements on cards and give them to the students or write them on the whiteboard in class.
Put students in pairs or groups. Have them discuss if they think the following statements are generally true or false and why:
People are generally happier if they travel to work by car instead of public transportation.
In the USA, people generally commute to work or school by train or bus.
10 days of paid vacation per year is fair from an employer.
Regular exercise helps people deal with stress from work.
People are more productive if they have a 4-day working week instead of 5.
Put students in pairs or groups. Have them discuss if the following statements are true or false for them personally and have them explain why:
There is a positive working atmosphere at my job.
I am satisfied with my work-life balance.
Every day I eat a balanced and healthy breakfast before work.
When I commute to work I try to be productive on the way.
I prefer working from home rather than going to an office.
I spend too much time at work socializing with my colleagues.
Speaking about daily routines is also a great activity if you’d like to focus on the present simple as a grammar point for your lesson.
Topic: Big Business (Amazon, Coca-Cola, Netflix, etc.)
Using big companies and corporations as a topic in your Business English lessons is practical for obvious reasons and you can make it fun too for your students.
It’s especially great to use big business as a topic if you actually have adult students who work in big companies, but they’re also applicable topics for students who have their own business or who work in smaller companies.
Activities
History & Fun Facts
Developing a Product
Making Slogans
Analyzing the Impact of Technology on Jobs
Activity: History & Fun Facts About Big Companies
As a lead-in or warm-up exercise to a lesson about big business, you can search and find some fun or interesting facts or history about the companies.
One quick activity you could do to lead to a topic is a simple fill-in-the-blank that looks something like this:
Amazon
Below are 5 interesting facts about Amazon. Let the students fill in the blanks with words that they think fit.
The founder Jeff Bazos wanted to name the company Amazon which has products from ‘A to Z’ symbolizing a large size, just like the Amazon ________________________ .
Amazon.com started as a bookstore in Jeff Bazos’ ________________________ .
The combined ________________________ of Amazon’s warehouses is enough to hold more water than 10,000 Olympic pools.
Today Amazon has more than 350,000 ________________________ .
One of Amazon’s first offices had a ________________________ which employees would ring every time a sale was made.
Coca-Cola
Below are 5 interesting facts about Coca-Cola. Fill in the blanks with words that you think fit.
The Coca-Cola ________________________ is recognized by 94% of the world’s population.
The word “cola” is derived from the kola ________________________ , which contains caffeine and can have medicinal value.
Coca-Cola can be a good ________________________ for insect bites on your skin.
Coca-Cola spends more money on ________________________ than Microsoft and Apple combined.
A few people once tried to sell the Coca-Cola ________________________ to Pepsi, but they were reported to the FBI.
A fun activity you can follow up with this one is instruct students to research any big business they have in mind and search for some fun facts about that company or the story behind how it started.
Have them give a few-minute presentation in the following lesson about the start or history of the company and a few fun facts about it. This is also good for developing presentation skills for adults in English.
They can use the questions below to help them give their presentation:
Who started the company and when? How did the idea originate?
What were some important moments in the company’s history?
What are some of the company’s most successful products or services? Describe them in detail.
What’s special or different about this company compared to the competitors?
What are some fun facts about your company?
Activity: Developing a Product
Amazon launched a prototype store called ‘Amazon Go’ in December of 2017 – it’s a type of grocery store where you can go shopping and add things to your virtual cart so that you don’t have to wait in line or check out.
You add the products to your shopping cart and you can just leave the store, and Amazon will automatically charge your account.
They have developed other types of products and services over the years that have been successful, such as the Amazon Kindle (E-Reader) and Amazon Echo (voice-controlled smart speaker/personal assistant).
In this activity, what you do is have students work together on product development for Amazon or for another big company.
Students work with a partner or group. They imagine to be product developers for Amazon and create two of their own products, or services provided and sold by Amazon.
They should discuss and create names for the products or services, which industry the products or services are in, and then write a description for each explaining how it works, what problem it solves, what’s so special about it, as well as what problems they have experienced in the development.
It can be a special kind of mobile app, tech gadget, clothing item, or something else.
Of course, it doesn’t necessarily have to be from Amazon. You can have students choose another company.
One way you could get your students to come up with a good idea is instruct them to think of some brands that they generally buy, and then brainstorm what products they think would be cool to have from those brands.
Or you can have them think of some problems or frustrations they have in their daily life and what product or service would solve those problems for them. In the case of Amazon Go, the problem was that people hate waiting in lines at supermarkets.
Remind students that it doesn’t have to be realistic, it can be something imaginary.
Most of your students who will do this activity probably haven’t developed a product before. Keep it basic, simple, and fun, and it should go ok.
You just want students to be creative and work together to make something special.
One time I had a group who made a personal assistant who did all of his presentations for him because he hated public speaking, which I thought was pretty funny.
Students should then present their new product to the other students or groups.
Activity: Making Slogans
This is a straightforward activity and easy to assign and it works great with any student who is in marketing. Students also tend to have fun with it.
Basically, all you need to do is assign students to make a slogan for whatever company or brand you’re discussing.
One thing I’ve done to make it interesting and add a little twist to it is to have students make a list of good and bad slogans for one company.
That one has definitely brought a couple laughs to the lesson, especially for the bad slogans.
Here are a few examples I’ve gotten from students for bad company slogans for Coca-Cola:
“Feed your sugar addiction.”
“Put on the big pounds.”
“Teeth are overrated.”
Anyway, give them some examples of some real slogans that have already existed for the brand before they make their own.
A few actual ones for Coca-Cola are:
“Open Happiness”
“Life Tastes Good.”
“Taste the Feeling.”
The advantage of having students make their own slogan or quote is that it lets student use creativity. When students have to think creatively, they’re forced to use important vocabulary terms and language structures in a special kind of way.
In any case, have your students share and present their slogans and quotes to the other students in the class.
Activity: Analyzing the Impact of Technology on Jobs
Another great theme and activity that comes from a discussion about companies like Amazon, is analyzing the impact of technology on jobs.
That’s one big criticism of concepts like Amazon Go that I’ve discussed with my students. The more jobs that robots do for us, the more jobs they take away from humans (Amazon Go takes jobs away from cashiers).
One activity you could do on this is to have students brainstorm and come up with two more jobs, companies, or businesses that have been taken over or lost to technological advances.
Students should specify the name or type of the technology, which industry it is in, and three general impacts of this technology (can be positive or negative impacts).
Two examples I remember hearing from students was about VHS and video rental stores being lost to online streaming services like Netflix, and driving jobs being lost to self-driving cars.
Technology: Online streaming
Industry: Entertainment
Impacts:
It put VHS video rental stores out of business
It makes people lazier because they don’t go to the video store anymore
Illegal online pirating of films and TV becomes easier
Technology: Self-driving cars
Industry: Automotive
Impacts:
Less need for delivery drivers, truckers, and taxis
Fewer accidents on the road because machines are more precise than humans
People can focus on other things in the car if they don’t have to concentrate on driving
You can give these examples to your students if they don’t think of them.
You can also give students the task of coming up with two jobs where it could be very difficult for technology to take over. Which jobs do you think technology couldn’t do in the future? Students should specify why it would be difficult to take over these jobs using this technology.
Topic: Artificial Intelligence and Future Technology
Doing an ESL lesson activity about the impact of technology on jobs leads us to the next point: Artificial intelligence and future technology, which has its feet in many industries and certainly draws interest from Business English students.
Activities
Interview With a Humanoid Robot
Making a Sci-Fi Film Plot
Forming Opinions
This topic works especially great with Business English lessons in the IT or programming industry, but also in general for any businessmen or women who use technology regularly for their jobs.
This is an especially engaging Business English topic for a few reasons – it can get a little dark (a humanoid robot which can communicate freaks people out a bit!) and it’s also relevant – artificial intelligence and machine learning is making its way into a lot of industries, products, and software these days.
It’s interesting when the stuff that used to be sci-fi stuff turns into reality, and that’s what you want to focus on in your Business English lessons.
Activity: Interview With a Humanoid Robot
Watch the video about Sophia the robot with your students.
Basically, what students do is make an interview with her.
Sophia the robot makes for a great English lesson, period. Students are usually quite intrigued by “her” and there are so many different directions you can take this lesson.
After watching the video, instruct each student to create and write five extra questions that they would want to ask Sophia. (Questions which are not in the video interview).
After they are finished making their questions, they ask their partner the questions they made. Students then answer their partner’s questions from the perspective of Sophia the robot.
Here are some words or topics students could either use in their questions or use just as general topics to help them make their questions:
Humanity
Evolution
The Future
Technology
Ethics
After a student answers each question, their partner should try to ask a follow-up question or two – a question you ask on the spot based on the answer you get.
Explain the concept of a follow-up question to your students and show them examples:
Original question: “What emotions do you feel?”
Answer: “I feel curious.”
Follow-up question: “Why do you feel curious?”
Answer: “I feel curious because I want to know why I was created and why I’m different than normal humans.”
Follow up question: “Can you imagine why you were created?”
Having students ask follow-up questions is great practice for developing interview and conversational skills because they have to think on their feet without time to prepare.
Activity: Making a Sci-Fi Film Plot
Watch the sci-fi short film about ‘Sight Systems’ which forecasts the evolution of ‘Google Glasses’ and Virtual Reality (which are also great topics to discuss in your Business English lessons).
After you watch the video with your students, a fun activity you could have your students do is to imagine that they are directors creating the next scenes to the short film they just watched about Sight Systems.
They should work in pairs and discuss and write what the next five scenes will be. Have them describe the scenes in detail and explain what happens in each scene.
Students then share what they came up with the other students in the class.
After this, put the students back together and they should come up with a short plot for a similar type of short film that they saw.
The plot must focus on the dangers of future technology. Alternatively, you could give them the option of creating a movie plot focusing on the bright sides of technology.
Activity: Forming Opinions and Interview Quotes
This activity can actually be applied to a range of different topics.
Put the students in pairs and have them imagine to be speaking from the perspective of the following companies or people.
Students have to make an opinion from the standpoint of each company or person.
Companies
Gas Company
Electric Car Company
Solar Panel Company
People
Environmental Activist
Auto Technician
Politician
Economist
Car Consumer
For the people above, you could have students imagine they were interviewed about their thoughts on electric charging highways.
What do they think about electric highways? Do they support or oppose them? Let them explain their opinion.
Then they have to agree on what would be the most important quote or statement from that interview.
Give students some useful phrases for expressing opinions to help them make their opinions or quotes, which are at least three sentences long and they explain their opinion.
You could give students an ideal example quote from an interview with an Environmental Activist:
“In the long-term, electric charging highways will be a great solution for decreasing pollution because it promotes the consumption and usage of electric vehicles, which are much better for the environment than gas-powered vehicles. However, in the short-term, electric charging highways could produce a negative impact on the environment because of the intense construction work that will be needed to create these highways all across the country. Therefore, I see a positive long-term effect and a negative short-term effect.”
You want your students to form something similar for each of the roles, then students should present the opinions or quotes they made together to the rest of the class.
Topic: Music
Doing ESL lesson activities about music is fun and there’s a lot of different directions you can take this topic in a lesson.
Music is also a big business with all of the jobs in music production, sound technology, festivals, online streaming services like Spotify, and these days even vinyl is making a comeback.
Activities
Organizing an Event
Making a Business Plan
Giving a Presentation
This topic works especially great with Business English lessons in the music industry, but also in general for any businessmen or women who use are interested in music.
This is an especially engaging Business English topic for a few reasons – people love music and it’s a big part of life for many people.
Activity: Organizing an Event
Have students work with a partner. They should imagine they are event organizers and are planning a festival concept for next summer.
They want to make it even better than the Belgian festival “Tomorrowland” and the most luxurious festival in the world.
What luxuries will there be? What special things can be added, implemented, planned, organized, or done in order to create a better festival experience for the guests?
Students should discuss these points together. They can use the discussion questions below to help them:
What special luxuries, things, offers, products, facilities, and features you will provide?
What will be different about the campsite? How will you make it better than Dreamville?
Describe the atmosphere. What’s unique about the stages and performances?
Describe the security concept. How will you make the event safe and what are the policies?
Students should then give a presentation about their festival concept to the other groups and describe in as much detail as possible what the festival will be like.
After hearing from the other groups, students can discuss which festival concept was the best and why and give advice about what might help their festival to be better.
Activity: Making a Business Plan
Students work together with a partner or group. They imagine that they are opening a vinyl store in their town. They must make a business plan and a to-do list.
They can answer these questions in their business plan:
What is the name of your vinyl shop?
Other than vinyls, what will you need to get started?
How will your vinyl shop stand out from the competition?
Describe what kind of theme or atmosphere the shop would have. How would you decorate the shop/front window?
Describe your ideal kind of customer or target market.
Describe your ideal kind of employee or shop assistant.
What could be some clever ways to advertise your shop?
What will be the biggest challenges of opening the shop?
Students can then present their business plan to the other students in the class.
Activity: Giving a Presentation
Students work with a partner or group. They imagine they are giving a presentation to a group of vinyl fanatics.
They should choose from one of the topics below they’d like to do a presentation about, or they can also make their own topic.
They should prepare and give a one-minute presentation to the other groups on their chosen topic.
Even if they don’t know much about the topic, you can just instruct them to be as creative as possible and come up with some interesting things to talk about.
Here are the topics they can choose from:
How to create a sustainable future for vinyl
The guide to shopping for and listening to vinyl like a pro
The future of music
Why the age of vinyl in the 70s beats today’s digital age
The steps to starting up a successful vinyl shop
You can have students do research on the internet if they have access.
You can also give students the choice to also come up with their own idea for a presentation, anything in the music sector. It doesn’t have to be specifically related to vinyls.
The most important thing is that students have a structure for their presentation, have researched important information about it, and teach the class something interesting.
You can also have students include one of each of the following things in their presentation:
A problem (Music has become too digital in modern ages.)
A statistic or fact (Over 7.6 million vinyls were sold in the US in 2018.)
An opinion (We believe that vinyls will continue to be popular for years.)
A quote (Zdenek Pelc said, “If people like something, they need something touchable.”)
Bonus Activity
This one last bonus activity you could do will help your students develop the skills they need for business and professional reasons.
Have them give a “show and tell” presentation or just simply talk about three gadgets, tools, products, services, etc they’ve bought in the recent past related to one of their personal interests.
Have the students teach the class either how to use this product or service, how it works, why they bought it, what the features are, what problem it solves for them, etc.
Here are some actual examples from my students, which you can show your students to give them an idea of what you’re looking for:
A new running watch
A subscription to Netflix
A Nintendo NES Classic Edition
A new bicycle helmet
A portable speaker
Conclusion
All of these activities referenced are meant to be engaging for your adult students in Business English lessons, but the most effective way to do them is with the full lesson plans via the links above.
Watching the videos with your students should generate extra discussion and give you extra content to work with.
Maybe you’ve already been teaching for a few years and want to make a transition from teaching children to adults. Perhaps you’re a newbie with specific teaching preferences. You may be a seasoned professional who knows exactly what they want, or a starry-eyed hopeful fresh to the shores of a foreign country you never thought you’d explore before.
Whatever the case may be, you clicked on this article because you’re interested in teaching English to adults. It’s a little harder, but not impossible, to sift through job opportunities looking for adult teachers, but is teaching adult learners right for you?
Teaching Adults: What it Takes
You will likely enjoy working with adults if you:
You value independent learning.
You value life experiences.
You prefer teaching via lecture.
You prefer teaching via discussion/debate.
You prefer structured teaching.
You prefer one-to-one classes.
The purpose of this article is to evaluate the different pros and cons of teaching adult learners so that you can make the best decision for yourself. Let’s start with the pros.
Pros of Teaching English to Adults
Less Focus on Discipline
Most of the adults who take English classes do so because they want to. Often, whatever they are learning has a direct impact on their pocket-book or an impact on their overall feelings of contentment. Adult learners don’t have to be told to sit nicely or asked why they didn’t get certain assignments done.
You Get to Work With Other Professionals
You never know who you might meet. You could very well meet someone who helps change your life for the better and vice versa. There are more opportunities to network when you are working with adults. Also, if the adults you’re teaching enjoy your classes, they could bring you more business.
Normally, adult learners who want to take English lessons have had some level of prior training, even if that training was largely remedial. However, there is also a good chance several of the adult students you may encounter have high language abilities. Students who have a good grasp of English will be able to engage in more debates, philosophical discussions, critical thinking activities, and ask more questions. All of those things help to build and maintain a great classroom environment.
They Want to Learn
Plenty of children remain in school because they are told they ought to or because it is required by law. Adult learners tend to go back to school or remain in school because they find value in learning. They are drawn to the classroom environment because it is what they consider valuable to them.
Smaller class sizes
Adult classes tend to be smaller in size than children’s classes. It is not unusual to have an adult class consisting of one-to-one lessons or group lessons of 4 to 6 students. You can give more personalized attention to the student when class sizes are smaller and go into more detail about subjects of interest to them.
Cons of Teaching English to Adults
Now that we’ve gone through the list of pros there are, unfortunately, some drawbacks to teaching English to adults. It may not be obvious until you’re in the situation or it may take you by surprise if you experience it organically (I sure was), but the list below will tell you what things to watch out for if you do decide on that adult teaching job.
They Have Higher Expectations
Many adult learners know exactly what they want to learn and expect the teacher to deliver. Sometimes, their expectations can be unrealistic- like expecting additional one-on-one tutoring from a teacher at inconvenient hours for no additional pay or expecting to be fluent after a few weeks of lessons.
While there’s nothing wrong with wanting to get one’s money worth, it’s important to tell adult learners what to expect and give them an accurate timeline of how long acquiring the knowledge they want to have might take.
Similarly, adult learners can be more critical of a lesson or delivery. In some Asian cultures, adult students may not complain about an aspect of a lesson or teacher to their face but may tell another employee or the teacher’s superior about the critique. That news usually makes its way back to the teacher in question and can be unpleasant to deal with.
Language is Harder to Learn the Older You Are
As people age, they develop more strengths and, at other times, new weaknesses. It is generally thought that the younger a person is, the more they are able to properly assimilate to a new language. The ability to pick up a new language with ease tends to wane around the age of ten.
Adult learners may have unique struggles and needs from the teacher regarding word pronunciations, accents, word choices, and sentence composition that may differ from young learners. It is important to be aware of that, to know how to navigate those situations.
They Are More Anxious
Adult learners tend to be practical in their pursuit of language knowledge. They want to get the information that they need and eliminate any additional “fluff,” so to speak. They usually know what they want out of the classroom, and for that reason, they tend to take their educational pursuits very seriously.
Sometimes, adults can be more self-conscious about making a mistake and may need to be coaxed into giving their thoughts or opinions about subjects. They are not only more self-aware but also more aware of the people around them and concerned about how others perceive them, whereas young children are free-spirited and uncaring about how others view them.
Students May Be Tired
Adult students are often married or dating seriously, in university, juggling a full-time or part-time job, or otherwise dealing with some variation of those things in their daily lives. While children seem to have abundant energy on a daily basis, adults tend to be more reserved and can even seem a little bit tired in the classroom.
It is important to understand that they may have other obligations and that while they enjoy learning, they may still be recovering from a hard day or week, and therefore, there may be inconsistency among adult learners regarding their participation levels in discussions and assignments.
So…. Should I Teach English to Adults?
Now that you know just what teaching English to adults involves, you have a major question to ask yourself: Should I go for it? No matter what you decide, going in with a clear head, having an idea of what makes a good ESL teacher, good teaching methods, and the pros and cons can only help you.
Universities, private businesses, online course providers, and individuals are willing to shell out top dollars for teachers with valid credentials, so be sure to look for those institutions when you’re sending out your CV. Whatever your choice, or if you change your mind, the perfect job is out there just waiting for you to snag it. Happy job hunting!
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