Focus of Lesson: To enable adult learners to explore career options through oral interaction with peers after a visit to a work place.

Objectives: Students will listen to and respond to classmates.

Students will create an oral transcript of a class discussion using a tape recorder.

Students will formulate questions to e-mail to employees at a workplace.

Level of students: Intermediate

Applicable Learning Standards: Career Development & Occupational Studies 1:

Be knowledgeable about the world of work, explore career options, and relate personal skills, aptitudes, and abilities to future career decisions.

Preparation Time: 30 minutes

Implementation Time: A 3-hour class with a 15-minute break

Materials and Supplies: One tape recorder, access to E-mail

Room arrangement: A group of students sit in a semi-circle. The other students will sit in front of them. If the class is large, students some students can sit in a circle and the other students can sit around the core group.

Introduction for Teachers

Let’s Talk about Work was designed for an intermediate ESOL class that had just visited AT&T at 32 Avenue of the Americas in New York City. Students had asked four employees at the site questions related to their jobs. The lesson was conceived as a way to help students share information gathered during their visit.

The approaches used in this lesson were conceived after attending four different workshops to introduce ESOL practitioners to Methods in ESOL at the Literacy Assistance Center in Manhattan. This lesson uses techniques from Counseling Learning and the Silent Way.

Procedure:

Warm-Up

(20-30 minutes) During the visit to AT&T, record some of the answers given by the employees. Take excerpts and type them. Have students tell you who said what.

Students will need help on this part. This is meant as a way to help them recall the visit.

For very low intermediate students, a multiple-choice format might be more effective.

Whole-Class Activity:

(2 hours, 15 minutes)

1. Tell the class that they will have a taped discussion about their visit to a work place. Tell them some of the students will participate in the discussion and some will listen. Then ask volunteers for the activity to get in a circle. Have other students sit in front of them or around them.
2. Show students in the volunteer group how to turn on and stop the tape recorder. Explain to students that they will only speak into the tape recorder after they have practiced what they want to say with the teacher.
3. Explain to the observing students that their job is to listen. What is missing? What information do the students need? What questions do the students need to ask the employees at the work place they visited?
4. When everyone understands the task at hand can begin. Don’t be impatient. Most likely there will be a very, very long silence. Students are not used to having control of an activity. Eventually someone will break the silence (or you can ask someone in the audience to ask a question about the trip.)
5. When someone volunteers to speak, give him/her the tape recorder. Elicit from the student what s/he wants to say. Model the sentences in grammatically correct English. It helps if you model the phrase in chunks of three or four words.
6. When you feel the student is able to pronounce the phrase well, allow the student to speak into the tape recorder. The tape recorder is then passes to the next student who wants to respond to the comment or ask a question. Continue this process until you have a good discussion. Remember the goal is to find out what the students want to learn that they didn’t have a chance to ask about during their visit. The process can take over an hour.
7. At the end of the discussion, allow students to listen to the audiotape several times. Ask students in the outer circle to discuss their impressions.
8. The audiotape can be transcribed to work on grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary.
9. Students write questions to e-mail the employees they met.

Assessment:

Students will write questions based on the recorded conversation. These questions will be checked and corrected by the teacher.

Reflection on Lesson:

Students were eager to talk once we got going. Nobody felt pressured to talk. Observers were extremely interested during the process. They said that they felt the exercise helped them be aware of pronunciation. Participants were pleased to hear themselves on the tape. The goal of the lesson was achieved. Students had very different ideas about the role of English in getting a job generating many questions for AT&T personnel.

Pitfalls included students arguing. Next time I will insist that students not respond to each other until a student has recorded his/her remarks. Also, many students had long monologues, which were hard to control. Next time I will record segments one at a time.