What should I do during my teachers workshop?

[lubrid]

This website has a few chapters of their book free to download. I use it a lot for my teacher classes. I'd recommend getting the whole pdf with all the chapters. The questions are really easy to answer and sometimes kind of fun. The teachers easily get caught up in the questions and forget that speaking english is intimidating.
http://www.compellingconversations.com/sample-chapters.php

[ddanwen]

I've been experimenting a little bit with my teacher's class. They're very mixed so I've tried watching youtube videos and doing "fun" little exercises like the "21 reasons why English is hard" which has gotten mixed reactions. There's a post on here that has jazz chants and that has received very good reviews from the teacher's. It seems like they like to do listening and speaking (repetition) exercises from my experience.

[austinstanlee]

Thanks to everyone for such valuable insight! I've gotten alot of great advice which I will apply to my lesson planning.

[hildydoo]

I just started my teacher class this week, and I was a bit confused as to what I was supposed to teach them. At first, I was told it would be a conversation class, then I was told it would be a topic-based discussion class. So what I did was a little of both. I came up with a sheet of different ways of greeting each other ("How's it going/What's up?" etc.) and then I went to breakingnewsenglish.com (which was mentioned before) and picked an article from there. The teachers were higher level than I thought (especially one teacher, who acted like she couldn't speak a word but in fact she's rather high level!), which helped me a bit. The teachers said they really liked the class, and I'm encouraging them to pick the article we talk about next week themselves (which I think they also like).

Are there any topics any of you think would be good to cover for my conversation portion of the class?? I would love some ideas!

[OneVurfedGwrx]

I'm having similar difficulties in coming up with suitable material for a mixed ability teacher's class.  First week was easy with an introduction power-point about myself which went fine, but then the principal "suggested" I try to improve their classroom English and focus on that.  I've tried to split the class into halves, with the first part focusing on the classroom English and the second half on some activity. 

First I tried a topic discussion which didn't work too well, and then I tried a video clip with discussion, questions and gap-filling which worked reasonably well but showed some of the language challenges I had to work with (even with the stronger teachers who I thought would have little problem.)  (note: I did use a British show (as opposed to choosing something American they'd likely find easier), although I hand-picked something with easier accents, as I wish to broaden their scope regarding English and feel this would be helpful in demonstrating that their are a huge range of accents/dialects to deal with.)

At the moment I'm torn on whether to continue with the video style for a while as the feedback seemed reasonably positive compared to the group discussion.

However, thinking of what to teach in the "classroom English" segment is quite challenging, I've covered a lot of basic phrases but deciding which phrases/vocabulary to look at next is quite difficult.
 

[Alxolira]

http://waygook.org/index.php/topic,7278.msg54392.html#msg54392

[wendarzhang]

I was pretty lucky that my teacher's class got cancelled :D

[rammyd]

I just posted a topic about idioms with a link to a *.pdf.  The pdf file is ready to use but a little boring all on it's own.  In addition to the suggestions I mention in the thread try to come up with some scenarios the teachers could act out/talk about where they can use the idioms after practicing and understanding them well.

[Lever]

I used to teach adults in Japan.  Now, I know this is a completely different atmosphere, but what worked best for me was getting them to talk to one another.  I don't know how many times a week you have your class, and what the other teacher's free time situations are like though.  In my classes I started out with the 4 w's...who, what, when, where. 
eg. 
Student A: I went to the park last week. 
Student B, C, etc.: When did you go?  Who did you go with?  How was the weather? etc. 

I also found that they liked to talk about culture.  I know it's a bit of extra work for you, but I used to get an English newspaper.  And any article I didn't understand or maybe a news report that I saw that day I would bring up in class.  Tv worked best for me, because I had enough Japanese to know the basics of the report, but could feign ignorance about the rest of it. 
eg.
Me: I saw lots of people walking around a park on the news this morning.
Student: Oh, that was a cherry blossom festival.
Me: Cherry blossom festival...what's that?

I don't know if that would apply in your situation, but my students wanted an opportunity to talk and it seemed easier for them to talk about things that had happened.  The best part was they were talking to each other, and using English in a more casual/natural way.

Sorry if that wasn't helpful.   

[piyopayo]

Have you covered the topic on Konglish? When someone has lived in Korea for an extended period of time, I found that even foreigners get confused with English and Konglish. Hope this helps!

[DH]

I teach an intermediate English Class for the teachers at my school since last October. We first started with a textbook that led to conversations. "Express Yourself 1" written by LIS KOREA . The book includes short 3-4 paragraph articles about different things. ( gender roles, vacation, working for a female boss, etc.)  We would read one article per class and discuss the article. There are discussion questions in the book you can follow to aid the flow of discussion.

Recently, I have been introduced to Ted.com. Short 20 min video of lectures and speeches. You can pull from so many different categories.  Each video comes with subtitles in several languages. You can also pull out a transcript of the video. These are great because the teachers says that they end up watching the video several times because it is so fast and the speeches can be difficult to follow compared to reading textbook english. But they enjoy the challenge. 

to keep it enjoyable, i ask one teacher each week to choose their video of choice. I follow up each video by answering questions the teachers may have about the video and then follow up with discussion questions. now to keep up the challenge i've implemented the teacher that has chosen the video to memorize 4 mins of the video and they are to present to the rest of class. They say it helps with learning to speak english more naturally.

[afitz]

I have a friend that makes it easy on himself and just teaches them songs in English. He tells me that they all love it.

[Shan]

I have exactly the same problem! Except their level isn't as good! I started off with 'Introductions', and was told it's too difficult! Although, the first lesson is always terrible, but then it does get better! The multi-level english issue is also a problem!

[girodimo]

I recommend a conversation book for advanced level learners. It will give some structure to your class as well as allow your learners and yourself to see what's coming up in the next lesson. I used Talk Talk Talk by Duane Vorhees. My advanced learners found it challenging enough and every time the conversations were interesting.Often we would start with pair conversations then do a larger group conversation. I listened, stoked the conversation when possible, watched for errors or great examples. Then I made comments after. We had a great time.

http://book.interpark.com/product/BookDisplay.do?_method=detail&sc.shopNo=0000400000&sc.shopNo=0000400000&sc.dispNo=101714&sc.prdNo=204044974

[lovesenglish7]

There is a book called English Connections: Developing English Fluency that you might find useful. There is a teachers guide and students book. You can buy them on yes.24.com. Great ideas for topics and lessons for adults whose english is already at a high level!

[fenbot]

A great site I use is:

www.breakingnewsenglish.com

It has thousands of current affairs articles that have been simplified and made into lesson plans with warm up activities, discussion questions, synonym match etc....

Have a look and hope it helps

Cheers

[Sheba11]

I taught adults for a year and found that every one of them had a different purpose and expectation for the class, so definately ask them what they want to learn.  www.breakingnewsenglish.com and the book Express Yourself (as mentioned by other posters) went down pretty well.  I adjusted the lessons to suit the class.  Most of my adult students enjoyed playing games just as much as kids!  Just make sure theyre suitable for their age.  At the start of each class I taught them one expression what usually had slang, or an idiom or something, and gave them a riddle to figure out, which they seemed to like.  I also straight up told them I wasnt good at grammar but I would find the answer to any question they might have by the next class.  They were fine with that seeing as they mostly wanted to learn conversational english anyway.

That being said, I also taught a few teachers at my school last year and they were nothing like my previous adult classes.  They didnt want games or activites etc, just study.  It was a small class so they chose a text book and I worked through it with them..

[v_kcin]

I have to start giving English lessons to parents and teachers starting next week.

I teach in an elementary school in an extremely rural village in Gangwon-do. I have no idea what the skill level of parents is. The teachers' skill levels vary from very low to pretty good.

Any ideas of how I should take this task on? Lesson ideas, assessment, activites, etc...? All contributions will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Nicolas

[tbhscot]

when i've been in these situations in the past i usually just ask the parents/teachers to set the agenda or topic. let them decide what areas they want to study and you can find a few articles or materials on that subject.
i also find that teaching a few idioms each class is interesting for the group and useful for kick-starting some conversation.

[Hello]

Yeah I do almost the same thing. I ask a lot of questions to get to know them better and I`ll give them time to ask anyone any questions (even myself). That why everyone gets to relax. The adult students will usually tell you what they want to learn and they love idioms.Most of my adult students just want to learn how to express themselves in English. One of the great things about adult class is that they are always willing to help each other. Here is a link with some conversation topics http://iteslj.org/questions/