When faced with a difficult question, especially in a stressful situation like a job interview or a product presentation, some learners of English tend to fall silent and fail to let the other person know that they’re thinking.This might be especially problematic if the conversation takes place over the phone or Skype, i.e. when the person they’re talking to can’t see them and doesn’t know how to interpret their silence. Here’s a short lesson that I designed to help my learners deal with this problem.
Lesson Overview Level: B1 – B2 Learner type: Business English or General English/Teens. Time: 30-45 minutes Target expressions: Materials: a Microsoft Word worksheet (you can download a .pdf file from Slideshare below):
Very happy to win this month’s onestopenglish Lesson Share competition! I wanted to take part in this competition for ages, but only got the guts to send in a worksheet when I was doing the iTDi course on Creating ELT Materials (I wrote about the course back in June). The lesson is on work-related emailing, so if you teach this topic, you can check it out on their website.
Ever since I read the great Listening in the Language Classroomby John Field, the book on developing listening skills, I became quite passionate about the need to consistently help learners cope with high frequency grammar structures in authentic speech, incorporating authentic listening work into grammar work. In the previous lesson on this blog the focus was on the way modals are pronounced.
In this new video-based lesson based on an interview with Leonardo DiCaprio, the learners practice their speaking, grammar for story-telling and again practice listening decoding, focusing on target grammar.
More specifically, the learners
[listening: gist] listen to scary stories that happened to Leonardo Dicaprio;
[grammar] explore the ways Present Perfect, Past Simple and Continuous are used in stories (Present Perfect typically comes at the beginning of the story to describe or ask about general life experience; Past Simple is used to describe a sequence of events; Past Continuous, for background information);
[listening: decoding skills] notice the way these tenses sound in authentic speech (some sounds get dropped from the verbs and linkers, which might make this grammar problematic for listeners);
[speaking] tell each other stories about the scariest/funniest/saddest things that have happened to them;
[spoken grammar, optional] explore using Present Simple/Continuous in stories to achieve a dramatic effect and using ‘He goes’ to report what someone said.
Videos used in the lesson:
Story 1 (Tasks 1 – 8)
Story 2 (Optional task 10)
Level: Intermediate/Upper-Intermediate (B1/B2)
Time: 90-120 minutes
Materials:
an editable Microsoft Word worksheet (docx). If you don’t have Microsoft Word, you can download the .pdf file from Slideshare:
[for listening decoding work] A power point presentation (zip) where the words problematic for listeners are isolated, so that the learners can really hear what sounds are dropped. To play the audios, unpack the archive.
One of the questions that my learners (who are IT people) are very likely to be asked during interviews and promotion reviews is ‘Tell us about your favourite technology’. But, whatever their profession, Business English learners need to learn to speak fluently and persuasively when presenting the advantages of products, tools and options.
Here’s a ‘geeky’ lesson plan in which the learners
watch a video of a developer talking about the features of his favourite browser (activities: gist listening, listening decoding skills)
analyze linkers used for listing ideas
briefly revise modal verbs (could, (don’t) have to)
talk about their favourite tools, apps and technologies
It worked very well with my learners, who spent more than fifteen minutes discussing the relative merits of file managers and development environments. For learners who are less geeky, I included a range of other websites and apps to talk about, e.g. social networks, messengers and and to-do list apps.
Level: Intermediate (B1)
Time: 90 minutes
Materials: an editable Microsoft Word worksheet. If you don’t have Microsoft Word, you could download the .pdf file from Slideshare:
Today I’m sharing a lesson based on four video snippets with Google employees describing their career paths and how they got to Google. Although this topic is covered extensively in every Business English course, I wanted to give my group (which is a very strong Pre-Intermediate group about to finish the course) exposure to authentic speech, and this material seemed both interesting linguistically and not too challenging. The learners revise past simple and present perfect (time adverbials used with those tenses), practice listening decoding skills (listening to verbs in past simple and present perfect), focus on vocabulary to talk about educational background and career paths, and finish the lesson by speaking about their own career paths.
I must admit I was very unsure that the learners would cope well with the listening tasks, because my previous attempts to introduce (tiny bits of) authentic listening in that group had caused a lot of frustration. But this time they did all right. Apart from Task 2, all they needed to do was to discriminate between Past Simple and Present Perfect – the ‘secret reason’ for the task was to get them to notice how Past Simple is pronounced (very often it sounds very close to Present Simple, as the ending /t/ is barely pronounced, which might be confusing for the learners). NB For the tasks in which the students listen to sentences one by one to check their answers, it’s better to open the videos on youtube and use the interactive transcript feature to replay sentences.
One thing that I noticed while working on this worksheet that I had never noticed before was that speakers tend to use vague language with periods of time (‘a little over a year ago’, ‘for about four and a half years’, ‘for a bit’ – other examples that didn’t make it into the worksheet were ‘for quite a number of years’, ‘for close to six years’). This definitely sounds a lot more natural, but I’d never thought to teach this little trick to my students who were preparing for exams.
Anyway, here’s the worksheet – let me know if you use it or if you see how it could be improved.
Level: Intermediate (B1) Time: 90 minutes Materials:a worksheet (feel free to edit and adapt).
If you don’t have Microsoft Word, you can download a .pdf file from Slideshare:
In this post I’m sharing a video-based lesson on Performance reviews that I taught today. It’s based on a fragment from a QA session by career analyst Dan Pink, who you might have heard of, as his TED talk on The puzzle of motivation features among top 10 most watched TED talks.
Levels: B1+ up to B2
Length: 90 minutes
Activities: the s/s watch an authentic video on alternatives to traditional performance reviews, develop their listening skills by focusing on features of connected speech, learn vocabulary from the video and finish the lesson with a discussion
Materials: an editable worksheet. If you don’t have Microsoft Word, you can download a .pdf from Slideshare:
Features of connected speech
In one of the listening activities in this lesson the learners transcribe several sentences from the video. Here are some common English words and expressions that my students found problematic, due to the fact that they sound quite different from their dictionary form.
Overview:
Elision of /ʊ/ from the diphthong /aʊ/ (e.g. ‘out’ and ‘how’ sound more like ‘ut’ and ‘har’)
Weak form of ‘are you’ and ‘you are’ (you are /ju ɑː/ -> /jə /)
Elision of ‘t’ and ‘d’ the end of words (either disappear e.g. don’t_ask, or get replaced with a glottal stop, as the air isn’t released, e.g. it)
Frequent chunks: at_the/at the end of the month; and_then
r_vowel linking (e.g. more_among)
1. Elision of /ʊ/ from /aʊ/
set out /ˈaʊt/ your goals
set out /ˈaʊt/
set them out /ˈaʊt/
of how /ˈhaʊ/ you’re doing
how /ˈhaʊ/ you’re
maybe think about /ə.baʊt/ this
2. Weak form of ‘are you’ and ‘you are’
you are /ju ɑː/ >> /jə /
of how you’re /jə / doing
are you /ə ju/ > /(ə)jə/
where are you /weər(ə)jə/ making progress
are you making
where are you /weər(ə)jə/ falling behind
3. Elision of /d/ /t/ (or replacement with glottal stop)
and_meet monthly
and say
Elision of /t/ in negative forms: question that we don’t ask
don’t ask
that
Elision of /t/ in negative forms: I didn’t quite make those
This post is different from what I normally do, because it’s a variation of a lesson that has already been posted to this blog.
A couple of months ago I posted a lesson on Keeping a conversation going. The lesson waspart of a short course for IT professionals on entertaining a customer and it worked really well helping the learners to come up with ideas while making small talk and raised their awareness of strategies for active listening (body language, backchanneling, reformulation and so on). One problem was that the video used in the lesson was very technical, so it wasn’t really suitable for learners outside the world of IT. It was also very short and featured only a very limited range of examples. As a result, my students were still struggling with the pronunciation of backchannels by the end of the lesson, ‘overpronouncing’ them. This week I needed to teach that topic again, so I adapted the worksheet, using a video that can be interesting for non-IT people, and is packed to the brim with examples for the learners to analyze.
I’m very sorry for the overlap, but it seems like I still find spoken language, and ‘active listenership’ in particular, too much of a teaching challenge to let it go. This feature of language has always been challenging for my students, and at the moment I don’t have on my shelf any resource books on speaking based on authentic listening extracts, or at least recordings that don’t scream ‘recording studio’. For instance, there’s the fantastic Handbook of Spoken Grammar, but the audios there don’t sound that natural. (I’m sure there must be some great resource packs, and I know there have been some great coursebooks like Touchstone, but I’m limited to BE coursebooks, so I would be very grateful for pointers to resource books or materials that can be used stand-alone).
Just two years ago, when I was doing my Delta Module 2, I was craving to at least get some transcripts of authentic, unscripted interaction, and so I was buying up books that contained transcripts of authentic interviews (Exploring Spoken English, one amazing book where those transcripts are also painstakingly analyzed, can be bought second hand for a penny – and amazon also allows one to flip through its pages). Now, just two years later, there’s no need to buy up books to get transcripts: hundreds of hours of transcribed interviews are available on Youtube, mostly on Google channels. So for now I’m creating my own materials, for what they’re worth.
a deck of cards (if you don’t have cards, print them out and cut them up from the last page of the worksheet)
If you don’t have Microsoft Word, download the .pdf from Slideshare:
The video:
The extracts for the speech analysis task (Task 6):
Extract 1 (11:23-11:46). Small ‘I’m listening’ words:
BRIAN GRADY: And you know, we don’t try to be pushy, but, you know, we want to expose and make things easier for people to do. [Sure,sure]Made With Android is about finding people outside of Google, doing things that nobody expected them to do with a phone. [Right] And.. so we found out that there’s a lot of people– there’s a community out there. People that, because of the extensibility of the Android operating system, [Sure. Sure.]are able to make incredible…
Extract 2 (11:46 – 11:50). Echoing.
applications that do crazy things, like—
LAURENCE MORONEY: Likeflying a weather balloon.
BRIAN GRADY: Flying a weather balloon, or opening
Extract 3 (11:48 – 12:01). Small ‘I’m listening’ words, echoing, reformulating and building on what the speaker said
BRIAN GRADY: Flying a weather balloon, or opening your apartment door when you’re at the top of the stairs and your bags are full of groceries. [Yeah!] I don’t know how you do that. Your hands are full of– but anyway. There’s things like that.
LAURENCE MORONEY: The things that people will think of that we can’t think of, right?
Extract 4 (12:38 – 13:07) Small ‘I’m listening’ words, reformulating and building on what the speaker said
BRIAN GRADY: Yes. We want non-commercial applications that are about fun, [OK] or hobby lifestyle kind of stuff, [Right] new connecting new things that people hadn’t connected. We want it to be an open source project. [Right] And we want to be able to, not only entertain people and inspire people with the video, but also provide them with the code, [OK] the applications, and maybe they’ll go out and do something else with it.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So somebody can pick this and run with it for themselves. [Yeah] Like I could actually go and get a weather balloon myself, now, and start doing what these folks do.
Extract 5 (13:07 – 13:17). Small ‘I’m listening’ words, echoing key words, short emotional comment (It’s cool), laughter.
BRIAN GRADY: You go to casadeballoon dot club, [OK] which is this group’s website.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I love the ‘dot club.’
BRIAN GRADY: Dot club. [It’s cool] I like the‘casadeballon’. [laughter] But anyway,
Extract 6 (13:46 – 13:50) Emphatic agreement.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I guess, the more exotic the locale, the better?
A couple of weeks ago I was doing a diagnostic test with one of my Business English groups to establish how well they answered interview questions. One of the questions was Have you ever worked with someone who it was difficult to work with? The students came up with lots of stories of difficult colleagues, but two things became evident from their replies. First, they didn’t really understand what to include in the answer, so they mostly focused on the description of the situation, and at least half of them didn’t even mention how the situation was resolved. And second, their replies were so long-winded that it was difficult to see structure in them even when they were structured.
So here is a video-based lesson plan that we did with that group today. The main aim of this lesson was to help the students structure their speech when talking about past experiences and decisions using the STAR framework for impromptu speaking. They listen to an extract from a workshop in Stanford Graduate School of Business in which the framework is presented, focus on vocabulary (talking about deadlines) and grammar (cleft sentences) in the video and then practice using the framework in their own speech.
In the second lesson (or for homework), the students analyze an example of a business person using a variation of the technique in her presentation:
Language level: B2 (Upper-Intermediate) Learner type: adults (Business English) Activity: listening (gist and decoding work), vocabulary, speaking strategies (STAR framework), cleft sentences (optional) Length: ideally, two lessons (either 60 or 90 minutes, as communicative activities are flexible in length)
To do the lesson in 90 minutes, skip the task focusing on cleft sentences (see the procedure in the Teacher’s notes at the end of the worksheet). Materials: editable .docx worksheet (tasks, transcripts, teacher’s notes). If you don’t have Microsoft Word, download a .pdf file from Slideshare:
Some of my students are great conversationalists who thrive talking to new interesting people, but for others having to maintain a conversation with someone they don’t know that well is a truly daunting task. I personally am more of a quiet type, and I deeply sympathize with people who have this problem. I remember, when I first started out teaching, being positively terrified by meeting some of my students on the underground: inexplicably, having chatted with them effortlessly in class, I completely froze and didn’t know what to say the moment we stepped out of the classroom.
When it comes to intercultural communication, the issues of shyness and not knowing how to break the ice or fill the awkward pauses may be additionally complicated by the fact that different cultures might expect different behaviour during the conversation. For example, in her IATEFL presentation on The Pragmatics of successful business communication, Chia Suan Chong gave a very interesting example of how politeness and the wish not to interrupt may be interpreted as lack of interest:
Allyson: You won’t believe what happened to me today! Jun Sook stares at her and doesn’t say a word. Allyson: Right, if you’re not interested, then I’m not going to tell you! Jun Sook: Huh?
Russians make another good example: we use back-channeling (i.e. small noises and comments that show you’re listening and interested, like ‘Mmm?’ and ‘Interesting’) a lot less than English or American people, and a typical reaction when some of my students notices the question ‘Really?’ in a transcript is to giggle and ask, ‘How come she doesn’t believe him?’ We also have quite different body language, so a lot of my students avoid making eye contact, and hardly use any gestures when they speak.
A few weeks ago a team of engineers at my company needed to entertain a customer (something that they normally don’t do) and I needed to teach a short course designed to help them brush up their English and conversation skills. Here’s one of the lesson plans that was part of the course. It is designed to help learners maintain conversations more easily by
asking a range of follow-up questions more skillfully and
using some ‘active listening’ techniques, namely, showing interest verbally (through short interjections and comments) and non-verbally, through eye contact and body language.
a deck of cards (you’ll need around 8 cards for each student – printed out cards will do)
If you don’t have Microsoft Word, download the .pdf from Slideshare:
Teacher’s notes
Warmer: Task 1. S/s discuss in pairs for 3-5 minutes. Brief feedback. Task 2. The purpose of tasks 2 and 3 is for the students to notice the differences between the way they show interest / encourage the other speaker to continue and the way Americans do that.
For task 2, split s/s into groups of three or four. Two people in each group are talking (Task 2), the remaining students are analyzing their conversation (Secret task on last page). Allow 2 minutes for Student As to read the task, then let Students B and C talk for 3-4 minutes. Task 3. Elicit from Student As what they were looking out for and board the questions. Conduct brief feedback, then focus the class on the first three questions: (1) How do they use their hands? (2) Do they make any eye contact? (3) How do they show that they’re listening? Explain that you’re going to watch a short video of two IT professionals discussing their work. Explain that the topic is quite technical and that the students’ task is to ignore what the speakers are saying and concentrate on questions (1), (2) and (3). Play the video.
Suggested answers:
(1) How do they use their hands?
They use hands a lot to illustrate what they’re saying
(2) Do they make any eye contact? They make eye contact occasionally, but they don’t look each other in the eye for more than a few seconds.
(3) How do they show that they’re listening?
Non-verbally (they’re sitting half-facing each other and they nod a lot)
Verbally (they use ‘small noises’ (Huh-huh), make short comments (Right), and at one point ‘echo’ by reformulating a key word (3:28: ‘They’re still on the same visit’/’The same session’).
Play the video again, this time stopping after each example of back-channeling and asking the students to repeat it.
Task 2′. Get the students to repeat the same task in new pairs – this time nobody is doing the secret task and the objective is to (1) use more interesting gestures while you’re speaking and (2) show interest by body language, small noises and short comments.
Task 4. The aim of tasks 4 and 5 is to extend the students’ repertoire of short comments used to show interest and to give them controlled practice coming up with follow-up questions. Refer the class to Task 4 and ask them to sort the reactions. Conduct brief feedback.
Follow-up: Elicit answers to the following questions:
1. What word makes follow-up sound more friendly/conversational? (So).
2. What words make comments work more natural/conversational? (So, then).
3. What is the structure of the comments? (Short reaction, e.g. ‘Really?’/’Yeah’/’Exactly’ + a longer comment).
Key:
One- or two-word comments / echoing key words.
Follow-up questions
Comments that work as follow-up questions
Comments about yourself
5 years?Interesting.
Right.Was it?
Yeah.
Really? What was that like?Why did you decide to leave your start-up? So, were you working on the same project back then?So when exactly did you start with this?
So you know the company pretty well then.
So you have been working here for quite a long time now.
Really? That’s interesting because…
Yeah, I had a similar experience. I ….
Exactly. I think…
Refer the class to Task 5 and ask to come up with more short comments / follow-up questions and comments (do the first line together, then allow the students to work in pairs).
Task 6. Distribute cards to students and put them in new pairs. Explain that in this task they’ll chat about the questions and they’ll need to use the cards to know how to react: by showing interest using body language, by asking follow-up questions, by making comments that serve as questions or by making comments to share something about themselves.
Task 7. Either as a follow-up or for homework, get the students categorize the questions in Task 6 and come up with more questions. Use those questions for another revision/communication activity next time.
Ask the students to read them, choose their favourite tips and share them, either in the next lesson or on your facebook group/blog, if the group has one.
Update. I was very happy to hear that this post got shortlisted for Teaching English – British Council blog award. If you decide to vote for it (in which case, THANK YOU! :)), let them know by ‘liking’ the post on their facebook page: ow.ly/MrfLk.
Levels: B1+/B2 Length: 90 minutes Course type: Business English
Materials: Worksheet (also see the Update with a more elaborate version two lines below)
If you don’t have Microsoft word, download the worksheet from Slideshare:
Update: My colleague Anastasiya Chernetskaya and I have created a longer worksheet which would probably take 120 minutes to cover, or would need a 30-45 minute revision slot during the following lesson. Apart from expressions for saying ‘no’, this worksheet also contains a useful framework for structuring a refusal so that it doesn’t cause offence, and written practice.
Warmer (page 1-2) 10 mins
Lead in by asking the students: have you heard of Quora? Tell them that that’s a question-and-answer service where you can ask any question and get replies from people ‘in the know’ (interesting replies get upvoted). For example, if you ask a question about the International Space Station, chances are you’ll get a reply from an engineer who designed it. Questions are grouped by areas of interest (e.g. jobs, professional areas, learning languages, etc).Pairs s/s up, hand out page 1 to Student As and page 2 to Student Bs (folded so that they can’t see the text). S/s read the Quora question in the speech bubble and then discuss questions 1-2. Then they read their texts, retell them to each other and discuss.Follow-up question: do you generally find it easy to say ‘no’?
Task 1. 3-5 mins
Get the students to brainstorm requests and board them. S/s discuss in pairs how they’d feel about the requests on the board and how they’d reply.
Task 2. 10 mins
My students came up with:
Business Analyst: [I’m on holiday for the next two weeks. If something comes up, could you contact the customer directly?]
The customer: [That’s not exactly what we want. Could you change this functionality? No, we can’t pay for that.]
The TL: We need someone to work on site. Could you go?
The PM: Your project is over budget. You’ll have to take an unpaid vacation.
Other team members. Could you help me RIGHT NOW?
The receptionist: Could you help me to carry some boxes from the ground floor to the HR’s office?
Task 3. 10 mins
Ask the s/s to cover the expressions. S/s fill the gaps with their best guesses for 1 minute and then uncover the expressions / fill the gaps. During class feedback, discuss both suggested answers and the students’ initial ideas.
Task 4. 10 mins
Use the second table to work on pronunciation (mark linking, chunks, etc).
Get students to compare in pairs orally (pronouncing linked sentences and listening to each other).
Suggested answers (linking):
1
Sorry, I’ll be away_on [business/holiday] [then/when you need me].
I’d love to help, but I’m really snowed_under_at_the moment. Can this wait?
4
It may be a bit problematic. The thing_is, I’m_up to my neck_in these reports. Have you tried Peter?
5
Try me again when_[I’ve finished the report / I’m back from holiday].
6
I suppose I could look_intowit.
Tip. For better connected speech and natural stress patterns, work on chunking (there’s a great blog post about this on Olga Samsonova’s blog: https://olgateacher.wordpress.com/2015/01/02/40/)
Task 5. 20 mins
If you don’t have dice, get s/s to roll dice on their mobile phones using https://www.random.org/dice/ Variation. For more controlled practice, start this out as a written activity: the s/s bombard each other very short (one-line) emails with requests from various roles and reply explaining why they can’t do what they’ve been asked to do right now. Here’s a great worksheet that my colleague Anastasiya Chernetskaya created: written practice. Here’s a great three-line template for saying ‘no’ that would be ideal for this activity.
Follow-up [an activity by Mario Rinvolucri] 10 mins
While the students are playing, listen in and write (on slips of paper) 5-10 examples of good sentences that you hear from them and 5-10 examples of sentences with mistakes (preferably, focusing on language associated with saying ‘no’ to requests). After the activity, distribute the slips. Allocate two areas on a table: ‘Perfect English’ and ‘Could-be-better English’. Get the s/s to put their cards on the table. Then comment on each card (where ‘Perfect English’ cards were put on the wrong side, use this as an opportunity to encourage students that their English is better than they might think; when there’s a mistake, either comment yourself or invite the group to correct.)
I’ve tried this activity a lot of times, and it normally produces a lot of happy chuckles (and often there’s someone who wants to take the cards home). Students really like to see that some of what they’ve said is Perfect English! Tip: take a picture before and after feedback and share the pics with the s/s so that they can revise.
[If time] After mistake correction, s/s could repeat the activity in new pairs.
Follow-up / homework (for IT English / Business English) How to say ‘no’ to feature requests for software products, and to customer requests in general? Check out this excellent reply on Quora which comes with an email template: http://www.quora.com/What-are-good-ways-to-say-no-to-a-feature-request/answer/Gergana-Dimowa (also, the free e-book of Business email templates linked to at the end of the post is one not to miss). Looks useful even for learners not involved in IT: with other lines of business, elicit customer requests that might have to be refused, and then get the students to look through the article and discuss which tips are applicable to their setting and how the remaining tips could be adapted.
When faced with a difficult question, especially in a stressful situation like a job interview or a product presentation, some learners of English tend to fall silent and fail to let the other person know that they’re thinking.This might be especially problematic if the conversation takes place over the phone or Skype, i.e. when the person they’re talking to can’t see them and doesn’t know how to interpret their silence. Here’s a short lesson that I designed to help my learners deal with this problem.
Materials: a Microsoft Word worksheet (you can download a .pdf file from Slideshare below):
Olya Sergeeva's ELT blog 
