ELT in Brazil

This lesson comes after TBL Lesson #10! If you haven’t read that one I suggest you do so you understand where we’re coming from.

This is a TBL lesson I taught as part of a General English course to a pair of students whom I meet twice a week. In the previous lesson, the students role-played an interaction between a shop owner and a customer.

We began the lesson by revisiting some of the words, expressions, and structures they used in the lesson before. Then, I told students we were going to do the same task again but switching roles. Students interacted and completed the task. I took notes, we worked on some emergent language and I gave them some feedback. As expected, students produced better this time than they did the first time.

I told students that my wife (also an English teacher) and I had done that task too and recorded it. I told them to listen to the interaction and take notes of what they find interesting and things they would like to try in their task. You’ll find the audio I sent them below.

Students took around five or six minutes to return from this activity which means they listened to the whole thing maybe twice or three times – perhaps even once but taking their time to write down some notes. When they returned I elicited from them what they would like to try and wrote these on the board. You can find their notes below.

We talked about these structures for a while to make sure they understood them and I asked them to repeat the task and try to include the structures they liked. They repeated the task and managed to include most of the language they collected. I took some notes, we worked on some emergent language and I gave them feedback. This was the end of the lesson.

For future reference, I believe I’ll be asking my wife for further assistance to record more audio like that. I think the students profited from listening to and studying how proficient speakers would perform the task. Expect to see more amateur audio in the coming posts!

See you next class!