Still teaching !

It's been a while ! I am still teaching - now at Mayflower college in Plymouth, doing between 3 and 4 days a week. It is a private language school, so more EFL than ESOL , no asylum seekers or refugees any more ( sadly ), but lots of students who want to take the IELTS test and go on to do Masters Degrees here in the UK or just improve their general English, sometimes teenagers in the Summer School too. The college also trains air traffic controllers and pilots for their TEA tests .

I had two lessons today - the first , a 3 hour lesson, with an upper intermediate class of 7 students, which involved reviewing relative clauses. I wanted to brighten the grammar lesson up a bit , so did a boxes spelling team game at the beginning, reviewing vocabulary that they had covered in Monday's lesson , including extreme adjectives. They enjoyed this and it set a nice tone for the rest of the lesson. The text book we are using is New Cutting Edge and the topic for this Module is events and celebrations, so I then got them to think of festivals/ special days that take place in the UK, as many as they could, through the calendar year. This brought out some discussion about similarities in their own countries and cultures. ( They had talked about and described festivals in their own countries the day before ).

Once we got onto relative clauses, they had lots of questions regarding when to use the relative pronoun "that" and when to omit it, and where to put prepositions in relative clauses. I had printed off some helpful explanations and practice exercises for these from other sources, which were very useful. I think I would try to spread this over more lessons in the future though, as it may have been a bit too much to take in for the weaker students. I used a different coloured pen to highlight the relative clauses on the white board , and especially in non-defining relative clauses, to show that the sentence still made sense if the relative clause was removed. Most of the students seemed to have grasped the difference between non-defining and defining relative clauses by the end, but I have also asked the teacher who will take the class tomorrow to check that with them.

Break and lunch time were spent in the staff room helping to eat the copious amount of chocolate on offer today as one teacher, Jan celebrated a big birthday, and another, Katy, is leaving.

After lunch I had an intermediate class of 7 students ( from Saudi Arabia, Colombia, France, Turkey, and Kuwait ) and the topic was writing emails or letters to book hotel rooms. I began the lesson by sharing a funny experience I once had at a guest house in Norfolk - where the guest house turned out to be the house of an old couple, with no facilities and a huge St Bernard dog ! They then shared good or bad hotel experiences, which got them speaking a bit. I then used the set text book pages ( from Real Writing 2 ) which focussed on the order of an email and the formal structures and phrases/vocab needed for booking a room. Once these things were looked at, I gave them a couple of authentic adverts for guest houses in Plymouth and got them to write an email asking re availability of rooms and for other information. This gave me an opportunity to go round and check specific problems of grammar and spelling. I was also able to work individually for a few moments with the weakest student.

I then got them to practise a hotel dialogue in pairs ( written by me ) and then checked pronunciation and word stress as a whole class of the various vocab (eg: available, en suite, facilities etc ) They then wrote their own dialogue in pairs and then acted it out . In the future I would get them to do this in front of the class, so that the others can hear better, and also I would set the others a listening task whilst watching/listening - ie how many rooms, which dates , price etc. I worked with the weakest student , as there was an odd number, though I don't usually like to do this during pairwork, as I want to be able to listen to the others, but it was ok for a few moments, especially as they were presenting it to the class later , when I could make notes and comment on any problems then.

The lesson ended with a student from Kuwait giving me a jar of curry sauce. He had told me the day before that he wanted to show me a special Indian sauce, as he knows I like Indian food, I thought he was going to bring in a recipe ! I may try it for tea though ......