Speaking Activities That Don’t Suck: Foolproof Ways to Force Your EFL Students to Produce Enormous Amounts of English PDF
Preview Speaking Activities That Don’t Suck: Foolproof Ways to Force Your EFL Students to Produce Enormous Amounts of English
ENGLISH TEACHER X SPEAKING ACTIVITIES THAT DON’T SUCK By English Teacher X Copyright © 2011 by English Teacher X All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below. For further information please contact the author at [email protected] Visit the author at www.englishteacherx.com: Twitter: @englishteacherx Facebook: www.facebook.com/englishteacherx Also by English Teacher X, now available on Amazon and other retailers: Memoirs To Travel Hopelessly: A TEFL Memoir Vodkaberg: Nine Years in Russia Requiem for a Vagabond Guides Guide to Teaching English Abroad Speaking Activities That Don’t Suck How to Survive Living Abroad Grammar Slammer Comic Collections Christmas in Bangkok Doofus and Valiant We’re Pretty Pathetic, Aren’t We? Disgusting Bar Conversations and More Complete Collected Comics Contents INTRODUCTION: ANSWER ME WHEN I TELL YOU TO SHUT UP! PART ONE: THE ANATOMY OF AN ENGLISH LESSON MORE QUESTIONS FOR PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT AND STUFF WHY YOU SUCK AS A TEFL TEACHER DECONSTRUCTING A TEFL LESSON SOME COMMON RESPONSES TO FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS PART TWO: SHORT AND EASY SPEAKING ACTIVITIES STILL MORE PERSONAL GROWTH AND PROFESSIONAL SELF-IMPROVEMENT QUESTIONS SHORT SPEAKING ACTIVITIES: YOUR MOST EFFECTIVE WEAPON AGANST RECALCITRANCE MORE THAN 50 ACTIVITIES FOR FORCING ENGLISH OUT OF YOUR STUDENTS WITH LITTLE OR NO PREPARATION THE PAIN OF PRIVATES PAINKILLERS FOR PRIVATE LESSONS FIRST GENERIC INTRODUCTORY LESSON FOR INDIVIDUALS WORKSHEET ABOUT JOB RESPONSIBILITIES AND WORK GENERIC SECOND LESSON PLAN FOR INDIVIDUAL STUDENTS WORKSHEET: HOLIDAY VOCABULARY COLLOCATIONS THIRD GENERIC LESSON PLAN FOR INDIVIDUALS ROCK STAR SCHEDULE A ROCK STAR SCHEDULE B FINAL COMMENTS ABOUT PRIVATE LESSONS PART FOUR: TOPIC-BASED SPEAKING QUESTIONS SPEAKING AT THE HIGHER LEVELS EVEN MORE CHALLENGES FOR PERSONAL GROWTH AND SELF-DEVELOPMENT EXTENSIVE EXAMPLE OF SPEAKING QUESTIONS PERSONAL GROWTH AND BETTERMENT CHALLENGE THREE SEVERAL PAGES OF EXAMPLES OF QUESTIONS ABOUT COMPUTERS A FINAL BATCH OF PERSONAL GROWTH AND PROFESSIONAL REFLECTION AND SELF DEVELOPMENT QUESTIONS FINAL WORDS APPENDIX: ACTIVITIES FOR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND SELF-ABUSE QUESTIONS FOR PERSONAL GROWTH AND SELF-DEVELOPMENT #1 Consider your personal answers to the following questions. Do you agree or disagree with these statements? 1) My students, like dead hookers, should be seen and not heard. 2) I believe that my students need to spend the whole class reading, listening, and writing, because I am usually too hungover to want to speak. 3) My students are too fucking stupid to talk. 4) The class is most interesting when I’m telling them funny stories about all the cool stuff that happened to me back when I was a backpacker. 5) My students don’t want to speak. They thrive on silence. 6) I consistently come up with brilliant speaking activities and fascinating topics, and yet still my students sit there like little mushrooms. 7) Sometimes I wish I was back working at the Cheesecake Factory, where I didn’t have people staring at me like mental patients all the time. 8) Like testicle cancer, there is simply no way to make English class enjoyable. 9) I need to correct every single fucking mistake that the little bastards make. It’s my only reason to exist. 10) If a student hasn’t started crying by the end of the class, I feel empty inside. Okay…have you considered your answers? Is your moment of reflection complete? Then let’s begin. INTRODUCTION: ANSWER ME WHEN I TELL YOU TO SHUT UP! MORE ASS SHOWING I often envy baboons. They communicate by screeching, hitting each other, and showing each other their asses. Humans don’t have it so easy. We have an extremely complicated system of social interaction and communication based on spoken word, social mores and customs, body language, and intonation. Little wonder humans have so much trouble getting along. The world needs more ass-showing and screeching! Alas, you, the Teacher of English as a Foreign Language, henceforth referred to as the teacher, You, or the dumbfuck, have the unenviable job of teaching your students to communicate. The one thing that history has shown us that all humans are pretty much uniformly terrible at. OH SHIT Calm down. A few things to remember first. Let’s narrow your job down a little. First of all, your job isn’t to teach the students to communicate. Not really. It’s just to teach them to SPEAK. There will be some presentation and exchange of ideas here, of course, but we’re mostly concerned with the act of speaking itself, not some kind of meaningful dialogue. ANY MORON CAN SPEAK Most human beings can speak, except of course for Harpo Marx, Snake Eyes on GI Joe, and Helen Keller and her noble brothers and sisters. Unfortunately, pretty much none of them have anything interesting, relevant, or meaningful to say. Now I come from a different generation – I started teaching in 1995 – when the ability to speak English was widely considered to be the only qualification necessary to be able to teach English. Most native speakers got through their lessons in one of two ways: 1) They read to the students from the book. 2) They told the students stories about their lives and daily activities. Or some combination of the two. In Asia, especially, this was generally accepted just fine. But alas, about 2000 or so, the world started to seriously Globalize. Fast internet came along. People from developing countries started traveling more. They began to realize they hadn’t learned a fucking thing from listening to that florid-faced Australian guy stand in front of the class reading and telling funny stories. And anyway – you aren’t being paid enough to be a standup comedian. If you like telling funny stories, you’re wasting it on foreign students, who can’t understand you anyway. If you like reading aloud, consider becoming a television news presenter. Or a politician.
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