Dave's ESL Cafe

For at least two of my oral English classes, I am dealing with students whose English is actually worse than my Chinese in some cases. So we are really dealing with basic instruction in the classroom, nothing fancy or ideological. You do what you can to get them to speak. Probably the best web site for getting ideas for this sort of activity is known as Dave's esl (english as a second language) cafe. People teaching English as a second language submit all sorts of ideas for activities. It is Sunday afternoon and I am trying to figure out what to do with my oral english classes this week and so turn to the web site. Here is an example from the web stie:

"Here's a Speaking Activity that worked for me. I teach a Beginning Adult Hogwon class 4 days a week at a University in Korea. I taught them about immigrants in the US and Canada and "the Salad Bowl" analogy. They learned that everyone has their differences as well as similarities and how to communicate that. You may want to practice this skill first (Kris is younger than Kristine...Mary's hair is more blonde than Lin's...They are the same age...They are both doctors...Ben is as tall as Tom...) Cut out pictures of people from magazines, glue them on a sheet of white paper. Save room at the bottom where you can write information such as their name, age, job, place of residence, and any other information you want to add. Give each student one of those sheets and have them talk about the differences and the similarities between them."

It doesn't get much more basic. There is also a whole section on discipline, and its good to know that this seems to be a universal problems. Some of the solutions offered seem a bit drastic. In one case, you are to have yellow and red cards, and like in soccer, if someone misbehaves you give them a yellow card as a warning and if they do it again they get a red card--and they are out of the class. The person who put this idea up said that if there are two red cards in a class, she ends class for the day. It may sound a bit drastic, but at least fro the welcome back kotter, kids, it may get pulled out.