Teaching communication strategies

Podcasts – ESL Teacher Talk – ESL Podcasts for Teachers

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Happy fall everybody!

We’ll get back to fall and Halloween for the games of the week, but Matt has some great news for you. He’s finished and launched Dream English volume 3. There is a download pack on his website and it contains all of the songs from the 3 CDs plus a few bonus songs (over 45 songs.) You can also just get the new CD from there as well.
This show deals with teaching communication strategies. We discuss ideas and tips to teach to students, especially teens, about how to be a better conversationalist. So while it’s not really teaching them English, you will be teaching them how to involve themselves better in conversation and keep conversations going. The main points Mark covers in the podcast are:

• using questions
• follow up questions
• feeding the conversation content
• not killing, but keeping the conversation
• keeping everyone involved
• how to move forward from negative responses
• attacking the conversation and not being passive

There are bits and pieces in there about how to adapt these ideas to children’s lessons. We also discuss some ideas and advice for helping quiet students.

There are 4 activities mentioned toward the end of the show to help apply some of these concepts in your lessons.
If you have any questions of comments about the show, please post them here or over on the ESL Teacher Talk Forums at MES-English. We’d love to hear from you.

Games of the week:Â It’s a mummy. You’re it!

I just made that name up, but this week Matt has a Halloween theme game that uses some flashcards and game cards from MES-English’s Halloween set. Using a few cards and playing some Halloween music, you can have a lot of fun selecting students for different language tasks or it can be a knock out game you use at a Halloween party.

There are two more games mentioned that are just party games and might be fun for you to use with your students.

Thanks for listening!