esl conversation activities

Teacher Training Class: Week 3

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SUMMARY MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED

It is possible to improve the quality of teachers, and therefore student performance, by changing traditional academic requirements, lowering entry level standards with an apprenticeship system and rewarding teachers who deliver extra value.

Traditional academic requirements, like a teacher’s certificate, do not ensure that people have the social or classroom management skills required to foster student success.

An apprenticeship system, with low admission standards and a rigorous evaluation system, would increase the pool of potential teachers and therefore increase the number of people who have the needed skills.

Teachers who have right skills should be rewarded with higher pay in order to encourage them to stay. A system of equal pay based on seniority does not encourage people to become better.

In the end, a new system is needed to find teachers who a certain withitness, a teaching skill that people don’t know they have until they get into the classroom.

Comprehension Questions

  1.  What is value added analysis in the story?
  2. How does the author compare the effect of class size and teacher quality?
  3. What is a back of the envelope calculation?
  4. Why do good teachers have a holding space for students?
  5. What’s the difference between good and bad feedback?
  6. Describe the features that made the math teacher a good instructor?
  7. Why are test scores, graduate degrees and certifications poor indicators of a teacher’s success?
  8. How do great teachers effectively handle desist events?
  9. What is withitness?
  10. What is a percentile?

FINAL THOUGHTS ON MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED

SAMPLE SUMMARY PARAGRAPH

To help students succeed we have to know why people fail by understanding panic, choke and stereotype threats. Panic is failure caused by a lack of thinking. Panic occurs when inexperienced people are in stressful situations and lose short term memory.

Choking is failure caused by too much thinking. In stressful situations that require mental or physical smoothness. By thinking too much, we perform below our abilities.

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Week 3: ESL Conversation

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This week, our class will study many different things. I hope you will learn and practice speaking about:

  1. feng shui
  2. furniture
  3. Korean words related to housing
  4. prepositions of location

Here are the worksheets for my ESL students for week 3 of the university semester.

ESL Vocabulary

This ESL vocabulary worksheet helps ESL students expand and review their English vocabulary. This worksheet is about compound words.

A compound word is two words put together to make a new word. For example, look at these three
words: hand, pipes, air

To each word, we can add BAG to make three new words, like these: handbag, bagpipes, airbag.

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Week 2: ESL Conversation

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Here are some files which my ESL students need to download and print for the English class. 

ESL THINKING PUZZLE

This ESL conversation worksheet has a puzzle. My students have to solve the puzzle and then practice speaking an writing the answer.

This ESL speaking activity has several parts.

  1. Put the pictures in order (i.e. what is first, second and so on).
  2. With your partner, make a speaking story and tell the story. use the present simple tense. And, be sure to use the articles A and THE properly.
  3. Finally, write the story in your notebook.

DESCRIBE DIFFERENCES

This conversation worksheet has two pictures. You and a partner have to describe the different things in each Picture A and Picture B.

Here is an example.

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