Conversation Class Resources - July 2020
Searching for some ideas for your next English Conversation Class lesson and not sure where to start? Look no further. Here are some of our favorite Conversation Class resources for July 2020.
This is an incredible website which contains a huge list of conversation topics to choose from along with questions for each topic. There are also lesson plans which you can take and customize to fit your class structure and students.
A few of our favorite topics include: Favorites, Dreams, and Stress.
As for the lesson plans, we’ve had a lot of success in the past with The Love Clinic.
Especially as we’ve been teaching conversation classes online for the past several months due to the COVID-19 quarantine, we’ve been incorporating more videos into lessons to introduce topics. Ted-Ed is a great resource for finding videos to introduce topics to intermediate to advanced students. We play the videos with English subtitles and find they are a great way to get students thinking about the class topic.
Helpful tip: If the speaker in the video speaks too quickly for your students to understand well, you can adjust the video settings to have a slower playback speed.
This is a website that we ran into when we were searching for some more interestingly framed questions that allow students to get to know one another. They have a lot of different lists of questions on the site and many of the questions offer great practice not just in the opportunity to answer them but also in the fact that they often contain slang words, offering students a chance to hear everyday questions in everyday, less formal lingo.
Check out their list of 144 Great Conversation Starters.
We’ve been using this as an icebreaker for the past couple of months of conversation classes. They have several different free categories you can choose from with creative questions to ask the class. This is also a great activity to do if you end class early or if you want to start class with some fun questions before diving into the topic of the day.
If you’re teaching virtually and want to host a game night, or just want to include a game during class, Drawsaurus is a great option. It’s a Pictionary game where you can create a public or private room online. Once all players have joined and confirmed, it gives whoever’s turn it is an option of three different words they can draw and the rest of the class can guess by typing in the side chat box.
We haven’t tried it this way before, but another option would be to play the game more like Taboo, where a student chooses a word and then has to describe, rather than draw it, while the rest of the class types to guess.
What are your favorite conversation class resources? Let us know in the comments below!