oral english

In addition to the culture class I am teaching four sections of oral English. In two of the classes, the students’ English ability is fairly low and in the other two classes it is pretty decent. This dictates the content of the class. In essence, they are two different classes. The basic oral English class is fairly highly structured with pattern drills and some pair work. For example, we spent the second 45 minutes of last week’s basic oral English class working on the following dialogue:
A: Hey. How you doin?
B: I’m alright. How you doin?
A: Pretty good.
Now, there might not seem like much here, but there is a whole lot for the basic English learner to assimilate. There is the fact that people, at least of the younger generation, rarely if ever say "Hello" when greeting each other. Yet this is what you often hear come out of people’s mouth out here when they want to talk to you. Second, there is the informality of greeting. Again, no one says, "how are you doing?" It’s "how ya doin." I wish I had a copy of the Miller commercial where all the guys in the bar say this to each other. This leads to the third point, which is that we just naturally inflect the first "How you doin" differently from the second "How you doin" In the first, the emphasis is on "doin," while in the second the emphasis is on "you" (or "ya"). If you say it in exactly the same way both times, the dialogue would sound very strange. Now we don’t think about these things, but these are things someone learning the language needs to be taught. So this is the sort of stuff we cover in the very basic English class. It may sound like there is not a lot to do, but in fact structuring the basic low level English class probably takes more time than anything because everything has to be laid out and explained in great detail, and you must put together drills and exercises that will stress these things.
The upper level oral English class is a lot more fun because you can give the students topics to work on in group. But more on that next time.