3710. What Can You Do when Your Students Know Nothing or Nearly So? Some Try

 You know what? Like one month ago I finished to teach English to a nice class of adults, 0 beginners, or better said, false beginners, for they had some knowledge of English. 

And over all the school year I have been struggling to actually teach them, and striving also for them to learn something, you know, like the basics. I don’t usually encounter such a group, beginners I mean. It was a nice fight to really make good use of time – tell me, what can you do when the students know close to nothing, and they’ve got few communicative competences? 

As I said, it was a nice group, and the ones who persevered along the school year, well, you know, they did have a real interest to learn – so nice people they were. 

I’ve been screwing my brain to learn what to do with such people; even I consulted the Internet to learn about such a group. Plus the group was not very much settled, and only a small group stayed with us until the end of the year – I mean us because we were two teachers in class, a native teacher from San Diego, California, plus me, a non-native English teacher. 

Well, almost at the end of the school year I reached the conclusion we did need a textbook or coursebook – I have seen how much a textbook may do with other groups of adult students. 

So next school year we will have one from the very beginning, namely, an A1/A2 level coursebook, and I believe that fact will help a lot to settle the group. Those Oxford UP guys do know how to make nice books which you can learn a lot of English with! 

And those books include the basic vocab and basic grammar the students ought to learn. We’ve been utilizing such books with other groups, and the thing has turned out fine – they were A2/B1 and B1 level learners. 

Also such books make you practice the speaking skill for a great deal: the students have the need to speak in class, with the book contents and activities! 

With those my 0 beginners we used a graded reader plus a few worksheets, but the thing did not turn out fine – also they as homework had to find semantic fields on the Internet, and then say some lists of words in class, and … definitely I guess the thing will work better with such a coursebook. 

By the way, my collegue teacher next year will have to teach speaking and listening on his own, and I also guess he’s doing fine – also last school year he helped me a lot: the students had to face a native speaker and talk to him! 

The summer break may be good to rest and to also think of what you can improve. Have a nice day.