This week, my ESL students will improve English fluency and develops job skills by learning how to describe patterns, trends and differences.
ESL Conversation Activities
The first ESL conversation activity is a pair work exercise where students have to find the differences in two pictures. This is a warm up for the next activity.
The second activity is more complex. Students will look at several sheets numerical data. Then the students will complete two tasks.
- describe the differences in consumption
- identify patterns
- develop ideas to explain why these patterns occurred.
The worksheets for this exercise are here: ESL food analysis data.
Speaking Activities
The first step is to understand the data you are looking at by answering three questions:
- what is it?
- what is being counted?
- what is the unit of measurement?
The second step is to summarize the most important ideas in the data. For our class, you should be able to make answers that:
- describe Korea’s past and present;
- compare current data for Korea and other countries;
- compare changes in Korea with changes in other countries;
- compare changes between different kinds of food;
- suggest possible reasons to explain the trends, changes and differences.
Extra Reading
Some of students asked if I could recommend some extra reading material. I would like to suggest the highest level students try reading articles by Malcolm Gladwell. He’s a better selling writer and many great books and articles.
Here are some links to his online articles.