About to start teaching an EFL/ESL class and you don’t know what to do with your students?
Without a set plan or guidance from your school, it’s a daunting prospect to come up with ideas for every lesson. But it’s also an opportunity. Break free of railroaded lesson plans and create amazing sessions which spur your students on to success.
EFL/ESL teachers should adapt lessons to suit their learners’ needs. Classes should provide relevant and practical English. Generally, a mixture of the four key skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking) should be practiced. Vocabulary is crucial for all learners.
Every class is different. The unique makeup of the group size, ability and maturity means there’s no one- size-fits-all approach. Fortunately, however, there are some overarching principles.
Find out your students’ needs
Before you do any teaching, get to know your students. That doesn’t mean asking them everything about their personal lives, but it involves knowing their strengths and weaknesses.
For private students and those in language academies, it also means figuring out what they want from the class. Some will want grammar support. Some will have specific needs for their job. Others will just want conversation to develop speaking fluency.
If you’re in a standard primary or secondary school, you’ll probably have standards or objectives to meet by the end of the year. Design your classes to reach or even surpass them.
Once you’ve figured out what your students require, focus on designing lesson plans which target those specific needs.
For each of the four key skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking), as well as vocabulary, I’ve provided some ideas for a range of different classes.
What writing activities should you teach?
Writing activities look very different for kids and adults.
With adults, you can get them to write longer passages, often multiple pages.
If it’s a business oriented class, set up an email exchange where they write to you and you respond, adding your corrections, and introducing new vocab and structures.
Otherwise, you can have them write journals, review films they watched, or compose letters to a friend.
For children, don’t make them write too much in one go. Use the rule of “a little, often”.
Set up pen pals with classes in your home country, get them to write three fun things they did at the weekend, or write folding stories.
I prefer to give longer-form writing activities as homework. This means they can take their time and you can spend the lesson focusing on other skills.
What reading activities should you teach?
In a perfect world, you could plonk an English fiction book in front of your students and have them read it, then chat about it later. Unfortunately, this rarely works. Unless your students have a high level, they won’t understand enough to stay interested beyond a few pages.
Instead, use shorter extracts. For adults, news articles and short stories are great. For kids, short stories and cartoons work well.
But don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Standard reading comprehensions get old pretty quickly, so mix things up with a mystery puzzle in which students have to read and understand the information to find out who did the crime.
Or, have your students plan an imaginary holiday together. They’ll have to search on the internet and read information about hotels, flights, things to do, etc. For business students, have them prepare a business trip. Talk about relevant and practical!
In short, find a variety of sources of written text which are relevant to your students. Test their understanding not just with comprehension questions, but with engaging and exciting activities.
What listening activities should you teach?
Is it just me, or are most textbook listening exercises rubbish? The people speak about the most boring things and in the most unnatural way and I know they’re designed to be clear and simple, but we can do better, right?
Absolutely. YouTube, radio, podcasts, music – there’s a world of listening material out there.
For kids and low-level learners, search the internet for EFL/ESL songs and fun videos. There’s plenty of wonderful content on many topics.
And with intermediate to advanced learners, you can really tailor the content. There’s a podcast for everyone, music for all tastes, and countless YouTube videos which are free and easy to find.
Expose your students to different voices, accents, and dialects.
I encourage my students to listen to English at home. Finding something they enjoy makes it easy practice for them.
For more homework ideas, read my article: 9 Engaging Homework Ideas for EFL/ESL: No worksheets!
And don’t forget your own voice. Every time you speak to your students, they’re listening (hopefully!), so, often, even just a conversation is enough.
What speaking activities should you teach?
If you’re teaching in a language academy or private tutoring, students may just want to practice speaking. Many public schools focus too much on grammar and reading. Your students might not get the chance to speak much English, so provide them with as many opportunities as possible.
This is also true if you’re teaching a full sized classroom. Although it may seem risky to let everyone talk at the same time, speaking practice is vital for long-term success.
Simple conversation is enough for some. Just chat about whatever they have on their mind, and share your interests.
For a more formal approach, have students do mini-presentations.
Introduce speaking games. I have a list of 9 EFL/ESL Speaking Games & Activities Perfect for Beginners which you can build a class around, or throw in at the end of the lesson.
My favourite speaking activities are role plays. You can adapt them to any type of class and let students express themselves with confidence.
For more on why role plays are so great, read Why All EFL/ESL Teachers Should Use Role Play Activities.
Don’t forget about vocabulary
For me, vocabulary is just as important, if not more so, than the four key skills. Without knowing words, you can’t read, write, listen, or speak.
Regardless of the level of your class, there’s always new vocabulary to learn; even native English speakers learn new words all the time.
You can base entire classes around vocabulary, or keep a steady practice at the start and end of every lesson.
My guide, Best Method to Improve EFL/ESL Students’ Vocabulary: 9 Steps, explains how to teach vocab in the most effective manner. And check out my 9 High Energy EFL/ESL Games for Boosting Vocabulary.
Conclusion
By now, I hope it’s clear that you have to adapt and design each of your classes to suit the requirements of your students.
This may appear like a lot of work. In reality, it’s not so bad. You don’t have to design bespoke activities for every single class, just work out what to target and use the internet to find specific activities.
It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle. There are pieces missing in your students’ English and you have to identify what the missing pieces look like, then search for the right match.
