Top-notch Conversation Classes in 10 Steps

How to Plan Top-notch Conversation Classes in 10 Steps

                                                                                                                                                                                                       By Maria Soledad Bancoff                                            Translator & Lecturer

So, it’s true. When we attend Teachers’ training college and other preparation courses to become teachers, we spend many hours learning about methodology, didactic and pedagogy, where we learn that planning our classes is always must. Generally, our sessions target at grammar goals ideally driven by communicative situations, although, in the end, “grammarly” thought. Thinking back, I can’t remember the last class I didn’t plan my classes, but I definitely remember the many times I questioned myself about my planning practice when it comes to conversational classes.

Nowadays, the “main course” of language classes is conversation, and the demand for practice to trigger the attendants' speaking skills is overwhelming. These are great opportunities to ask ourselves questions when preparing our classes, personally, I asked myself about two essential matters: first, should I increase/reduce the time of my class to deliver this content? Second, beyond conversation: what’s the target of this class? (i.e.: that during my classes my student can acquire more fluency, work on accent reduction, speak about specific topics,etc). These two questions will help us reshape our classes to provide our students with better and more entertaining classes, thus releasing pressure of filling unnecessary time gaps and defining the path of our teaching.

Personally, I try to suggest my private students to book a 45-minute class for conversation instead of an hour. Usually, that time is enough to round-up a nice and neat one-on-one conversation class that makes the student feel comfortable and wanting to book more sessions.

If you feel a little bit lost when planning your conversation classes, I’d like to invite you to try these 10 steps to plan a top-notch class:

1.       💭 1. Ask your students about their needs and likes to tailor your classes to their expectations.

2.       💭 2. Rrank a list of topics you’d like to deal with in your classes. If possible, order them in a way you can go back to a topic you worked with some classes before to recycle, reuse and test how much vocabulary your student can remember.

3.      💭 3 Surf the net to find interesting, short (max. 3:50 min) videos or texts to work with.

4.      💭 4   Find images connected to your topics and material to trigger ideas on the activation or closure stages of your class.

5.      💭 5 Choose the most useful words according to your target in these materials (around 8 - 10 terms).

6.      💭 6 Prepare flashcards with these words to use when presenting your topic.

7.      💭 7 After your warm-up, prepare some general questions connected to the topic, i.e.: if your class will deal with strange jobs, you can activate the topic by asking your student to elaborate and rank three unusual works (s)he can imagine.

8.     💭 8   Present the flashcards with the terms you’ve chosen, play the video or give them some time to read the text, and prepare some more questions connected to the video/text to invite your student use these words.

9.    💭 9 Prepare some more ideas to end your class aiming to recap an idea retrieving those words if possible. Think about this stage as an opportunity to let your student see how much (s)he learnt and test yourself as a teacher.  Also, you can include a quotation to ask opinions that trigger more conversation.

1    💭 10  Before ending your class ask your student how (s)he felt about your class! This is a great tool to assess your work as a teacher.

I hope you found this article inspiring to plan more appealing and interesting conversation classes for your language (English, Spanish, or any other) students, and to share ideas about the best way to deliver classes to trigger conversational skills. Also, I invite you to follow my blog and tag teachers to reach more educators.

See you soon!

Credits for the picture: Imagen de <a href="https://www.freepik.es/foto-gratis/colegas-oficina-sentado-mesa-intercambio-ideas_4975556.htm#query=conversation&position=48&from_view=search">Freepik</a>