An adult student will be taking intensive English classes with me next week since he wants to move to Canada with his  family as soon as he finds a job in that country. His main aim is to improve his speaking and communicative skills. I hope you can guide me in terms of materials to teach him. Do students actually use coursebooks to learn english for specific purposes or communicative english ?

 

 

 

kindest regards!!  

 

In my experience, course books only slow-down the learning process when the goal is to quickly become fluent. Lessons tend to get lost in the specific grammar rules, and not on communication.  They need to become comfortable with speaking without worrying about tenses, etc.. In this case the student needs to improve their speaking abilities, so they need to speak. It is NOT critical that the grammar is always correct, it is not about passing a test. They need to realize it is okay to make mistakes, etc.--the important part is understanding and being understood (despite accents and poor grammar). So they need to grow vocabulary and reach the "break-through point" where they become comfortable speaking even if they are making mistakes. The best way to do this is full-immersion converstation (topic isn�t important) and getting them to start watching lots of TV/movies/series (I suggest turning on English subtitles along with English audio when they do).

 

Fine tuning can come later.

 

Thanks a lot for your functional feedback!!  

 

I also recommend getting your student to listen to a chapter a day from an audio book in English. When I read a book in Spanish, I keep stopping and looking up words and phrases I do not know. With an audiobook, that is not possible,but I get the gist and end up learning more as well as improving my listening skills. I also benefit in that I can go out and exercise when listening to audiobooks.

 

One other thing, when I have done intensives in the past, my boss would send me to eat with the students while keeping the meal-time conversation in English.  

 

One other thing, try and use games and short videos with questions to get away from the textbooks. It is a more natural process. 

Thanks Spinney for your interesting suggestions!!

 

 I loved your boss^s advice!!