Can you recommend a good movie? What’s your favorite song? What’s your favorite color? How do you prepare for a test? How do you relax? Do you have a favorite English word?
Can you turn a bureaucratic requirement into a communication tool to express personal ideas and build classroom community? Absolutely.
Taking attendance remains a vital part of our teaching duties. Some schools even require student signatures to prevent fraud and inflated student numbers or covering for weak students. When faced with this situation years ago, I started adding simple questions to the attendance sheets. What’s your favorite month? What’s your favorite sports team? What are you grateful for? How will you revise your last paper to make it better?
Students appreciate the opportunity to express their ideas and perceptions, and learn more about their classmates. The questions also help build a better classroom atmosphere and provide ice-breakers for students to talk with each other during break. Finally, this extra line turns a boring procedure into an educational tool that works for administrators, teachers, and students. What’s not to like?
As an old American TV commercial used to say, “try it – you’ll like it.”
Visit my website www.compellingconversations.com for free conversation materials, teaching tips for ESL/EFL classrooms, and links to excellent websites to learn English.
Paraphrasing remains a critical skill in academic classrooms and in the larger world.
The ability to re-phrase and re-state, usually called paraphrasing, allows students to confirm information, accurately convey information, and avoid plagiarism problems in writing papers. Paraphrasing, usually quite emphasized in ESL and EFL writing classes, deserves some attention in conversation class too.
Students should learn to confirm information by asking clarification questions. Some useful phrases for a listener to ask include:
Are you saying…?
Do you mean?
What are you getting at?
If I understand you correctly, you are saying …
Did I get that right?
Speakers can also check to see if their group members understand their directions.
Can you understand me?
Do you follow?
Is that clear?
Should I repeat the directions?
Do you want me to repeat that?
Asking advanced students to repeat directions, in different words, can be an effective group activity. Student A tells a story, and Student B retells it to Student C. It also helps build vocabulary.
Another technique that I’ve found useful is asking students to paraphrase proverbs and quotations. This exercise, done in groups of two, is often followed by asking if students agree or disagree with the proverb or quotation. Of course, students have to give a reason and/or an example. ESL tutors and lucky teachers with small classes can further elaborate this technique to match student interests.
If students can accurately paraphrase a reading, a radio segment, or a verbal statement, they can actively participate in common conversations and classroom discussions. Many English teachers underestimate the importance of this skill, ansd assume students understand more than they might. Verbal paraphrasing activities allow both students and teachers to assess a listening comprehension in a natural, authentic manner.
Verbal paraphrasing, therefore, deserves more attention in speaking activities – especially in high intermediate and advanced levels!
Conversation remains a vital social skill for our English students. Naturally, immigrants and international students want to fully participate in their schools, their jobs, and their communities. Speaking clearly in English allows individuals to express their life experiences, insights, and perceptions in fluent conversations – both inside and outside classrooms. Limited English fluency, in contrast, often causes additional stress. “Speech is civilization itself,” wrote Thomas Mann, the great 20th century German novelist.”It is silence which isolates.”
Therefore, conversation skills deserve far greater attention in English language classrooms for academic, social, and cultural reasons. Conversation skills also require practice, practice, and more practice. So let’s give our students more chances to express themselves, share their experiences, and develop their discussion skills in our English language classrooms – especially our high intermediate and advanced students. Teachers need to create encouraging, yet rigorous, classroom atmospheres where students can learn by doing.
Speaking skills, I’d suggest, deserve at least as much attention as grammar in our classrooms. Do students who know grammar, but can’t hold a conversation really speak English?
Conversation skills often matter more at work, at school, at parties, and at home. Whether ESL students seek better work opportunities, higher grades, or closer relations with native English speakers, our students also want to become fluent in English. So let’s meet both our students needs and wishes, and add more conversation activities and allocate more time to speaking skills in our ESL classes.
“English saved my life.”
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), English novelist born in Poland
Does teaching articles (a, an, the) make sense in a conversation class?
Perhaps. Context matters.
Conversation class should encourage English students to express their ideas, practice familiar words and syntax, and develop greater confidence in effectively communicating in English. Content remains king. Given how little most of our ESL students speak English outside of classes, we need to provide many speaking opportunities for them to develop greater fluency.
Starting from these assumptions, I generally prefer indirect correction of student errors during conversation class. I often circle around a class, listen in, join small discussion groups, and make a few notes. If I hear some grammatical error, I usually demonstrate correct language – but without explicitly or publicly correcting the student.
This indirect correction – modeling the correct syntax – seems especially important with adult students with limited academic backgrounds. I prefer encouraging these sometimes reluctant, shy and often insecure students to insisting on perfect grammar.
Yet article errors matter in English, and provide what native speakers consider significant information. Just as some languages divide nouns or adjectives into masculine and feminine, English highlights the difference between a definite (or known) member of a group and an indefinite (or unknown) member of a group. Article errors are also very common among English language learners– both international graduate students and wealthy immigrants who have lived in the United States for 20 years.
After collecting overheard student errors during conversation lessons, I tend to pick one “good mistake” and give several examples when the class comes back for a general discussion. It is here, more for college students and future college students, that I remind students of the differences between articles “a”, “an” and “the”. Because I teach in the United States, I often pick examples from current events to make the general grammar point before focusing on the precise errors made in class.
One example that I often use comes from the Iraq war. Some Iraqi citizens believe Islam be a source – one of many sources – for Iraq’s laws and constitution. Other Iraqi citizens believe Islam should it be the one and only source for Iraq’s laws and constitution. Another group of Iraqi citizens, and apparently a small minority, believe Islam should play no official role in Iraq’s laws and constitution. This explanation helps students understand the importance of and distinctions between “a” and “the”, connect a grammar point to current events, and provides memorable examples.
Finally, I’m also far more likely to spend precious class time on this advanced grammar point with current college students or academic ESL classes than with typical adult education classes. Students planning to take standardized exams like the TOEFL or TOEIC have far more need for this type of focused attention on grammar. I tend to tailor my approach to error correction, in both conversation and writing classes, to student needs. Minimum wage workers, street vendors, and elderly immigrants learning English in their spare time have less immediate need for extended grammar points in a conversation class. Or so it seems to me.
Context, as so often in teaching English, matters.
Books and literature still matter in our 21st century global culture of blogs, especially for starting conversations. In the past few days, I have had three engaging, satisfying conversations with strangers about books. How?
Is that a good book?
What is on your summer reading list?
Can you recommend a good book?
What’s the best book you’ve read this year?
Once I broke the ice standing in line, the conversation just flowed. I asked a few questions, shared a few reading suggestions, and enjoyed what had been “dead” time waiting to mail books to customers.
English language learners can develop and deepen their conversation skills with classroom practice. As English students practice more, they also develop the confidence to start conversations with co-workers, fellow English students, fellow bus passengers, or strangers in line. Conversation skills can be practiced almost anywhere, but our English classrooms provide a safe, tolerant, and natural environment to develop and deepen speaking skills.
Here is a link to a conversation lesson called “Reading Pleasures and Tastes” that ESL teachers, English teachers, literature lovers and casual readers might enjoy.It’s chapter #16 from Compelling Conversations: Questions and Quotations on Timeless Topics.
Our students have chosen to speak English because it opens more doors. We should help them realize their ambitions, support their dreams, and avoid judging their motives.
For better or for worse, knowing English makes life easier and better. For instance, the ability to speak English allows individuals to communicate with millions of other people from around the world. Some globalization critics and ethnic nationalists, especially in smaller countries, have attacked English as subverting national and group identities. English speakers tend to be the more educated, more affluent, and more successful individuals in several developing countries. This fact apparently offends many people, including a surprisingly number of ESL teachers, who feel seeking worldly success, money, status, or an international spouse is elitist.
You will also find a rich literature on the use of English in advertisements in non-English speaking countries for the same reasons. Modern technological products and companies, such as LG, advertise in Europe in English their message that “Life is Good”. The clear implication is that buying their LG product makes “Life Good” and as does speaking English since only English speakers can understand their ads. Hence, English has also become a symbol of modernism and stylish consumerism. LG is a Korean company!
Attacking the prevalence of English remains popular, and questioning the “morality” of choosing to speak English in some academic circles. This obsession seems misguided and ironic. As English teachers and tutors, we need to carefully assess the full range of aspirations and skills that our students as we choose and develop materials. But assessing does not mean judging them! A teacher should support the legal goals of their students.
If our students need a certain score on a standardized exam (TOEFL, TOEIC, citizenship), we need to choose appropriate materials to meet their immediate goals – including active skills like speaking and writing. The new TOEFL, by the way, is a huge improvement over the old, grammar-focused one used for decades. Speaking has been recognized as a vital life skill.
Yet we also need to help students develop authentic language skills that transcend immediate test scores. Many administrators, for understandable reasons, attempt to force all instruction toward standardized tests. Many English instructors feel that standardized test scores have displaced traditional educational goals. Professor Charles Talcott, for instance, has passionately argued against “The Tyranny of Standardized Testing in English Language Classrooms.”
How many times have you encountered ESL students who have collected impressive test scores yet struggled to express themselves in a simple conversation in English? Students need the chance to develop their conversation skills – in and out of the classroom. Listening and speaking remain essential skills so students can express themselves – even be themselves – in English.
