The Key to Teaching ESL Conversation Classes

Conversation classes can be tough, on one hand they can turn out to be a great deal of fun, a success, and a wonderful learning and teaching experience. After all, you don’t have to worry about loads of tedious grammar exercises or correcting endless piles of homework! However, conversation classes can also seem like an eternity of the silent treatment or completely forced, unnatural, and boring conversation. The latter scenario is most likely to happen to someone who either isn’t familiar or comfortable with the creativity level or organizational freedom of a conversation class; or simply hasn’t prepared on the right level for the class.

To be sure, a conversational class is the least demanding as far as preparations go. However, the popular misconception among new teachers, or veterans of very structured grammar based classes, is that there is absolutely no preparation needed for a conversation class. This simply isn’t true, even the most seasoned of conversational teachers need to prepare a little. With that said, it’s time to begin discussing exactly what kind of preparation is needed.

First off, try to decide what the student should learn or practice in each lesson, in short set a focus. This is usually a grammar point such as past tense, future tense, the conditional, etc…, or the introduction or practice of vocabulary. After choosing a focus you can begin deciding on what kinds of supporting activities will best provide learning and entertainment on the topic at hand. Depending on the amount of class time you have available, a great idea is to incorporate both a “talking time” and an “activity time.” In this way it is easy to acquire an adequate level of learning (a time to take in and use) the grammar/vocabulary, and ample time to apply it. The talking time is obviously a more controlled environment and thus encourages students to try out what they have learned and make the mistakes they need to in order to improve. At this time the teacher is free to make corrections both privately and as a class and this works well to smooth out any rough edges.