Talking in front of people

[the button]

There's stuff like: -

* talk to one person at a time rather than the group as a whole.
* don't worry if you lose your thread a bit. What feels like 5 minutes of uneasy silence to you is often barely noticeable to an audience.
* speak more slowly than usual. Especially since they're learning English.
* get them talking to each other. "What does everybody else think?" is such a fucking teacher's cop-out, but it still works. Especially cos they're paying for it, and are presumably keen to learn stuff.
* if they have to write stuff down, keep an eye out for when a lot of people have stopped writing. This can mean you've lost them.
* keep recapping and summarising what you've said. This sounds repetitive to you, but not necessarily to them, because they haven't heard it before. Also, recapping and summarising what other people have said is a valuable skill learning a new language, so get them to recap what you/another one of them have said before they start on their own bit.

And if all else fails, "Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooh me lads, you should have seen us gannin."

 

[extra dry]

how are lectures going, are students interested...have them bring stuff in to talk about, in small groups...not sure what else you could do, good advice from what I have read..

 

[gaijingirl]

I do quite a bit of this in my Japanese classes and also occasionally for training other teachers (usually about how our school supports EAL students).

I always start with a hook - something to pull them in. I'm lucky in that I have an interactive white board, so I can show a short youtube or something similar.

However, there's plenty of other ways to do it..

For example i recently had to talk about our EAL (English as an additional language) students and I started by giving them a ranking activity that basically involved me making a set of cards with "Polish, Tamil, Somalian" etc etc on and they had to rank them in order of most students to least students in our school. As such they had a really good conversation around the topic which allowed them to access what I had to say afterwards. It also gave me a real springboard to talk from as of course they got it quite wrong. Of course this would work with any subject.

An alternative is a quiz ie "what is marmite - a) a cake b) a drink c) a yeast spread".. etc..

I'm sure you already use plenty of stuff like the above anyway - and also "find the odd one out", "find the mistake" etc etc.. these can all easily be adapted to cultural hours.

Using visuals is really important I think (for any student of any language) and generally trying to involve the students as much as possible in the discussion.

I love teaching the cultural part and unfortunately my students know it - if they're particularly bored with a piece of grammar or something, they've cottoned on that all they have to do is say something like..."Miss why do the Japanese eat so much rice..." or similar and I can't stop myself going off on one..

 

[dessiato]

anything. it's just so they get practice listening and asking questions

it just has to be interesting (they are proffesionals and university students)

Quite a large number of my classes are exactly this I find subjects of general interest on BBC websites, knowing what they are studying and interested in helps enormously.

Onestop English has some useful downloadable stuff as does the BBC learning English website.

I have to say that after three years I have still not managed to exhaust areas of discussion.

 

[isitme]

my last one i did mysteries like ghosts and nessie and there was one geeky kid who loved it and everyone else hated it

 

[isitme]

ok, i appear to have acquired the skill of talking rubbish for an hour quite easily

i do feel like they get bored cos i just go off on tangents a lot and don't actually make any points

i don't think that this is neccesarily a bad thing, but is there any way i can make the students more engaged? maybe some ideas for group excercises instead of lectures?

 

[redsnapper]

Mrs Magpie has already made some good suggestions for group work if you look back on the thread.