NOT A BIG DEAL: IT'S ONLY A CONVERSATION CLASS

Why State the Obvious?

In 2006, I decided to go to a language school and study Italian. I already had a good intermediate level in Italian at that time, but I understood that I needed some guidance. While I could read, watch TV (ergo listen), and study grammar or vocabulary at home, I still needed somebody to converse with. So I started to explore what language schools had to offer. In Florence, it was no problem to find Italian courses for foreigners. However, this experience turned out to be shocking.

At one school, I asked the ‘consulente’ to show me their long-term plan for my level, but they didn’t have one. I was even asked to write one myself, which they would then have followed in my individual course, at €35 per hour (twenty years ago!).

At another school, I joined a class where everybody was at a different level. So I took one part of the group (those less prepared than me) and, while the teacher was dealing with the stronger students, I improvised an Italian lesson for the others. I really enjoyed it, but I was a paying client.

At a third school, I found a conversation class for B1–B2 students and couldn’t wait to start the course. The lesson was scheduled at lunchtime (we all worked, so this time was most convenient), so our teacher arrived straight from the dining table… and was nearly asleep. He asked some questions, like what we had been doing or what we thought of Florence. We answered, then he asked more questions, and then our hour ended. Well, this was a lovely chat, the kind I usually have with Italian friends in a coffee bar, except there I only pay for the coffee. This was NOT a conversation lesson. It missed three important things:

• target language provided

• structured social forms

• feedback (i.e. error correction).

Conversation Lessons Must Be Prepared (Too)

This all happened many years ago, and I’m sure that language schools in Florence have improved a lot since. Still, I’ve come across many situations where qualified and experienced English teachers walk into the classroom to do “just conversation” without any preparation.

While an improvised lesson might be justified in an emergency (a cover class, for instance), in the long run this approach fails to give students the language they need to move from a lower level to a higher one. Even when such lessons do throw up useful language points, these aren’t structured enough to be retained. And without proper feedback, students lose the chance to notice, recognise, understand and later avoid their mistakes.

Teachers often don’t like preparing for conversation lessons; they assume it’s an easy class that can be improvised, and that students will be happy regardless, simply for having had the chance to talk to a native English speaker. In fact, good conversation lessons don’t necessarily need a long preparation time (or only need it the first time), and they offer far more than a small-talk session with the teacher.

Guidelines

Here are some guidelines a teacher needs to follow in a conversation lesson:

1. Choose the topic you want to talk about. You might ask a hundred questions, but your aim should be to lead your students towards one lexical field, situation or grammar point. This helps clarify the language needed and avoids pointless chatting.
2. Decide what language you are going to teach. If the topic requires specific vocabulary, choose the seven to twelve most important lexical items at your students’ level. These need to be pre-taught, elicited or clarified, and then practised. For example, if you want to talk about transport at pre-intermediate level (A2), you’ll want your students to know: get on the bus, get off the train, get in the car, get out of the taxi, take a bus, call a taxi, at the station/bus stop, etc. The same topic at intermediate level (B1) requires different items to be pre-taught: traffic jam, parking fine, cycle lane, taxi rank, motorway, coach, zebra crossing, etc. At upper-intermediate level (B2), you’ll want to clarify an even wider range of expressions: smog, air pollution, road rage, gridlock, yield, speeding, road accidents, etc. Based on these lexical items, you can devise an exercise suited to the students’ level: at pre-intermediate level, a simple “How do I get to the railway station?” task with a map; at intermediate level, a discussion of traffic conditions and problems in the students’ country or city; and at upper-intermediate level, a discussion of environmental problems and possible solutions for the future (this topic can even be linked to the future continuous and future perfect, if students have already been introduced to these). If you’ve chosen a situation rather than a topic, you might teach functional language instead — for example, how to make suggestions (“How/What about going to the cinema tonight?”, “Shall we go to the cinema tonight?”, “Why don’t we go to the cinema tonight?”) or how to express agreement/disagreement (“I couldn’t agree more.”, “I totally disagree.”, “I see your point, but…”). The elicited or pre-taught expressions could be put onto cards (one set per pair), and students should use them while discussing questions set by the teacher or chosen with the class. Grammar can and should be taught in conversation lessons, too. In a doctor role play, the “doctor” gives advice using “should/ought to”; in a school-themed discussion, students can debate what a good teacher or student can(‘t), must(n’t) or should(n’t) do; in a job interview, the present perfect simple and present perfect continuous can be practised easily (“How long have you been working as a teacher?”, “How many levels have you taught so far?”), and so on. This target language needs to be presented to students visually — written on the whiteboard, which requires very little preparation, or on a handout, which needs to be prepared once but can be reused many times.
3. Provide language input. People don’t just talk; they want to express or communicate something. So give your students a task: a role play, questions to discuss, a problem to solve, a decision to make, a text to read and comment on, or a track to listen to and interpret. This makes the whole conversation realistic, since these are mostly situations drawn from real life. You can also involve other skills (reading, listening, writing for homework) in your conversation class. They should support the lesson, but never dominate it, or it stops being a conversation lesson.
4. Use different social forms. To give every student the chance to speak, avoid frontal teacher–student interaction during the practice phase. Put students into pairs or small groups and have them speak simultaneously. Use some music if they seem shy at first, and also to get them used to speaking up over background noise, as often happens in real life.
5. Monitor your students. Monitoring serves two purposes: first, to make sure they’re doing what they were asked to do (in English); second, to make sure they’re using the target language accurately, and to collect good examples and typical mistakes from their utterances. If students aren’t using the target language correctly, stop them and remind them of the structures to use, or re-teach the point if they haven’t grasped it the first time. Then give them the same task again and restart the practice activity.
6. Provide feedback at the end of the task. This can be done in open class straight away, or first in pairs or groups and then in open class. There are traditionally two types of feedback:
7. - content feedback: emphasises good ideas, solutions to the problem, or surprising statements, and shows students that they were listened to during the task.
8. - language feedback: points out (correct or incorrect) grammar and lexical structures used by the students, aiming either to motivate them or to help them notice their mistakes.
9. 
   
10. Classic ways of giving language feedback include:
11. - the teacher writes up three sentences heard from students — two incorrect, one correct — and students identify and correct the incorrect ones (in groups, pairs or open class);
12. - the teacher elicits how to express an idea, collecting good examples from students (e.g. “How can you refuse an invitation politely?”);
13. - the teacher notes typical mistakes and clarifies them later, perhaps in the next lesson (since this needs preparation), through an auction game or an error-correction game.
14. Repeat the task. Giving students the same task a second time helps them shed the initial pressure of thinking about content, finding the right form, or pronouncing their ideas, and gives them the chance to do the activity better than the first time, since they now know what mistakes to avoid and which lexical items to use. In task-based teaching, the teacher sets the task at the start of the lesson (as a fluency exercise) to check what students already know about the target language; after teaching the language, students repeat the task while the teacher monitors for accurate use of that language. In a more classic conversation lesson, students can be given the same task again (ideally with new partners) after the feedback session, if time allows, with the teacher monitoring for the language points just covered. A good way to close a conversation lesson is with a quick game (a board or card game) that recycles the same language points in a fun way.
15. Recycle your materials. Everything you prepare today can and will be useful in a future lesson. Over time, every teacher builds up a set of ready-to-use ideas for each level, along with go-to topics for cover lessons. So from the start:
16. Prepare your materials on the computer where possible, and save files with clear names that help you identify them later. Names like “conv.q.elem” or “traffic_int” aren’t very useful, since you won’t remember what topic the first file covers or what type of activity the second one is. Names like “int_traffic_vocab” or “int_traffic_conv_q” make it clear that the first deals with traffic-related vocabulary and the second with discussion questions about traffic, both at intermediate level. This way, you can always find and reuse your materials.
17. Laminate your best exercises: If an exercise has worked well three or four times, it’s worth making the prompts (pictures, maps, cards, question slides, etc.) more durable by laminating them. That way, even after being handled by many students across many lessons, they’ll last — and you’ll save all the time it would otherwise take to cut out new cards each time.
18. File your materials: keep boxes for each level to store your resources, and folders for your best exercises, so everything is ready for emergencies or routine lesson preparation. This, too, saves a great deal of time.
19. Evaluate your lesson. Ask your students, and yourself, at the end of the lesson what they’ve learnt. Every conversation lesson, like every lesson, needs a clear aim — a reason for teaching what you teach. Students should be able to express something extra, orally, before they leave the classroom. If that’s the case, you’ve taught a conversation lesson. If the answer is simply that they talked a lot, you’ve only had a lovely chat with them — next time, offer them a coffee too.

The good news is that there’s plenty of material available to print, even for free, online. Just type the topic, level and some keywords describing the type of activity you want into a search engine, and you’ll find something: Macmillan English and www.busyteacher.org are just two of the many websites that offer help to teachers. Save them among your favourites and start building your own materials. And above all, have fun with your conversation classes.