I've been teaching a group of teachers since last year, and they are my only group at the moment (mostly of what I do is either teacher training or exam preparation).
The good thing is I really enjoy working with them, which means I pick the topics of the lessons carefully and try hard to make them interesting. I think this particular lesson hit the mark.
If you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen the photo below. It shows the board work of a lesson I taught yesterday, based on an article from the Guardian describing the WhatsApp scandal in the Brazilian presidential elections.
It's unlikely this lesson is for you if you don't live in Brazil, but enough of my friends showed interest in it that I decided to make a quick post for it.
One of my favourite things about being a CELTA tutor is working with people who are talented and highly motivated. Ana Paula is one such teacher. When I read her skills assignment, I told her the text would lend itself really well to a conversation lesson.
Today's lesson, then, is now my own, but Ana's. It is aimed at upper-intermediate adult students and will certainly generate some interesting discussion.
Ana Paula is a freelance teacher who has been in ELT for over for 4 years, working in Guarujá and São Paulo. She has also lived in New York – United States and holds the CELTA and ESL from Borough Of Manhattan Community College (BMCC). She will have graduated in Pedagogy by the end of this year.
Finally, I highly recommend checking her YouTube channel and Facebook page.
A while ago Carina Alves asked on Facebook which exam materials teachers used in their preparation classes. I said I usually use past papers, either available on Cambridge's website or as a booklet. This may give you the idea that my lessons are a diet of endless exam practice (a phrase borrowed from Fiona Jospeh), which couldn't be further from the truth.
For today's blog post I'm going to use a Proficiency lesson to illustrate how I teach exam preparation. Although the lesson itself is aimed at C1-C2 students, the ideas and rationale behind it can be used for exams at any level.
I started the blog almost two years ago (June 2015). During that first month I had 300 visitors and 700 page views. Last month there were more than 3 thousand visitors and 7 thousand page views. In between I published 99 posts including conversation and grammar lessons, posts about the CELTA and the DELTA as well as topics such as error correction, feedback, teacher development and pronunciation.
Post number one hundred will be a sad one, however. My first son will be born next month and tgetting ready for fatherhood is taking up all of my free time. So this will be my last post for a little while. I'm planning on writing again in August, but that will depend entirely on how busy I'm then, which I can't be sure at this moment.
In order to get you through this period I have selected some older posts that may be worth exploring. I've put them together in a series of top 5 lists for a total of 20 posts you can read if you miss my writing.
If you live in Brazil you have certainly had a conversation about the meat scandal that made the news last Friday. It stands to reason that students will have conversations about the same topic if they work for multinational companies or if they have foreign friends.
With that in mind, I choose this topic to provide students with vocabulary to talk about this topic in English. This is aimed at adult students who are B2 or C1. You may need to adapt the text further or pre-teach more vocabulary if you want to use it with B1 students.