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CONVERSATION
TEACHER and STUDENT
A conversation between a teacher and an individual student is not much different from a conversation in a group. See Conversation Practice 1 (Groups) and Conversation Practice 2 (Groups) The primary difference is that the two people have more responsibility to speak; there is no one else present to help them.
Preparation is essential in organizing group practice and it is also necessary at the individual level. The teacher must take the initial responsibility for preparing the talks. I believe the student also has a duty to prepare and this comes naturally in project based conversation, which I discuss later in this article.
I think most language teachers would agree that for the purposes of conversation practice, there are three distinct kinds of student who have different characteristics and needs:
If the adult student is interested in speaking English the conversation should be easy; everyone likes to talk about their work and in many cases the teacher can set up the conversation with a few suggestions and questions then let the student speak.
As most adult students are studying or practicing English specifically to help them in their work, these conversations are especially valuable in discovering and using the relevant vocabulary in English.
Children and young people don’t go to work, so they can’t talk about their boss, their colleagues or career issues, but when they get a bit older they have plenty to say and have sufficient experience to draw on. The challenge is to find a topic that interests them. If they are at college or University their life and experiences there can be a fruitful subject.
The story of how they got to University can be a great source of conversation, although the teacher might have to overcome the student’s modesty and lead the conversation with questions. After all, this subject deals with some of the young person’s first successes in life and it’s good to talk about those.
On the other hand, children go to school and in my experience they would rather not talk about it. It seems to me that children are only irritated by questions like ‘What did you do in school today?’ I don’t think these questions produce much. There has to be some variety, something different.
Another good way to annoy children is to ask them what they want to be when they grow up. You may remember adults asking you that question when you were young: how long did that conversation last?
There are exceptions, of course, like the 14 – year-old novillero (apprentice bullfighter) who came to me for lessons a few years ago. He was happy to talk about bullfighting but, as you can imagine, there isn’t much English vocabulary for this subject.
Nevertheless, for the typical teacher of English and the sort of young student that I meet, work is an important topic and provides a strong incentive. Harsh as it may seem, older children know that their world of work may be divided into those who speak English and those who don’t.
Even if the youngsters don’t want to talk about their own plans they can still be guided into talking about work in general, or other people’s work. I mention this in dealing with ‘project based’ conversation below.
At this point I must confess that I have not been successful with all of the strategies that I’ll discuss in this article. Some really good students, of various ages, simply don’t want to talk much and, no matter how old they are, the teacher can’t force them to speak.
Another question is: how long should a one on one conversation last? In my experience this is directly related to the age of the student. It will be difficult to maintain a conversation with an eight year old child for more than ten minutes, whereas an advanced adult can converse for the entire session.
When students are ready for conversation practice they usually indicate how much time we should spend on it. As a start, I usually try to use the last twenty minutes of the session, when we are more relaxed (especially important in early morning classes), and expand from there as necessary. Of course many students are at an advanced level when they come to me and they ask me to speak only in English all the time.
PROJECT BASED CONVERSATION
This is a fancy name for people having a chat. It is a true description of what we do in GROUPS: in my opinion conversation groups can’t function very well without a project. But it also works for teacher – student one on one talks. You can see examples of group projects at Conversation Practice (Groups) 1 and Conversation Practice (Groups) 2.
Remember also the points made about conversation in The Oral Interview.
Part of the teacher’s responsibility is to make sure that they have something to talk about. Any student who doesn’t want to talk about their work or doesn’t go to work needs something else to engage their attention and extend their vocabulary and idiomatic use of English.
My understanding of project based conversation for the individual student is that it should follow on from the exercises done in recent classes. If the student has been reading comprehension articles then the process should be:
reading – comprehension questions – translation – homework.
The homework can be agreed between the teacher and student. For example, using www.ingles-gratis123.com, we might start the project with
Lyndon B Johnson or
Patagonia.
The project might then be to research on the Internet about other U.S. presidents or, if you are outside the USA, a president of your own country, or simply someone famous. Patagonia would obviously lead to research about your own National Parks, famous places or the environment.
The Internet makes it easy to do this sort of research at a superficial level and, for the purposes of conversation that is exactly what we need - some superficial knowledge.
We are not conducting an exam on the subject and most normal conversations are to some extent ‘hot air’ – not exactly full of expert knowledge.
What about the teacher’s own knowledge or enthusiasm? This can be awkward because the student is also the customer and any conversation needs to concentrate on them and not what the teacher wants to talk about.
This is a risk for my students because I tend to talk too much. But my students are usually interested in subjects like Europe, Princess Diana and studying English abroad, topics on which I have a lot of superficial knowledge.
When the conversation turns to things that I’m enthusiastic about, like the role of social class in English, US presidents, Las Vegas, Hollywood or Disney World the ‘conversation’ can turn into a monologue, which is not what we want.
I wrote the article The United Kingdom to explain that my country is not all ‘England’ or even ‘London’, as many people in my part of South America seem to think.
If the intelligent student wants to know more about the British Royal Family or why Ireland is so strangely divided or why they’ve never heard of Wales, I have to give some explanation. But I need to restrict it to about ten minutes, if I can….
I had one good idea that turned out to be not so good in practice: I thought a joint consideration of a map or maps might produce good conversation. Unfortunately my students usually choose Europe or the United States, subjects which also might lead to a monologue.
The students can ask intelligent questions based on the map, but the answers are always longer than the questions. I haven’t done a project based on a map, as I hoped to do, such as:
Let’s talk about a journey by car, or (perhaps more interesting) by any available public transport by land or sea:
- from Spain to Vladivostok
What preparations would the journey need, how could we plan it? How to film it, photograph it, and so on. I’m sure it would work, but maybe it’s more suitable for a group project.
A conversation is not an interview, but if the conversation can be arranged so that the student asks the questions, a good result can come out of it. And, of course, practice in asking questions in English is always valuable. Following on what I’ve said above, we need a subject which must produce short answers.
Still in the ‘project’ mode, with adequate time for planning:
Describe a bicycle to someone who can’t see.
What changes would you make in your college, your country?
What do you think about dreams?
Do you believe in the survival of the fittest?
If you could choose a ‘money no object’ vacation, where would you go?
etcetera.
On the subject of work, a project could be based on research about what skills, education and training, talents etcetera would be required to become:
An airline pilot or flight attendant
A musician
A hotel manager
A journalist
A film editor
A hospital administrator
An actor and so on.
The most common topics don’t need much imagination but they are valuable: the student’s interests, hobbies, opinions, friends etc.
The teacher can do a little preparation about a particular interest or hobby, so as to be able to ask sensible questions and keep the conversation going, but nothing beats ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’
NOTE: You may have noticed that in this article I use some of the plural pronouns ‘they’, ‘their’, ‘theirs’ and ‘them’ when referring to an individual, the student, who is singular.
In modern use we do this to avoid repeating ‘he or she’, ‘him or her’ and ‘his or her’, which can be very boring. This use of the plural pronoun is not strictly grammatical, of course, but the experts now accept that it is correct.
Please tell all your friends about PAGES IN ENGLISH at
ingles-gratis123.com
For some thoughts on translation skills please see The Translator
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