Publisher's Synopsis
Before the course begins perform an initial assessment with each student to check that they are at a suitable level for the course, and then enrol them onto the course. This course is aimed at students who are at a good elementary level or pre-intermediate level. For this course we recommend that there are no more than ten students per class.
Before we start, the Talk a Lot course materials are designed to be flexible, and can be used in any way that you find suitable for your group or your needs. The course outline below is just an example, so please don't feel that you have to follow it to the letter!
The course is divided into twelve three-hour lessons. The first ten lessons each have a different topic; while lesson 11 is intended for the revision of material studied over the ten weeks, and lesson 12 is reserved for the students' examinations and an end of course review. We recommend that you hold one lesson per week, making this a twelve week course comprising 30 guided learning hours, plus 6 hours of guided revision and examination. It's up to you what order you do the lessons in; you don't have to follow our order of topics!
If your students need more than three hours of study per week, why not offer them two 3-hour lessons per week: one Talk a Lot lesson, as described below, and one lesson using traditional teaching methods, which include conventional reading, writing and grammar-based activities that could complement the intensive speaking and listening work of the Talk a Lot lessons.
You could follow a standard EFL or ESL course book such as New English File or New Headway, using material that complements the Talk a Lot lesson, so, for example, if your Talk a Lot lesson was on the topic of Sport, you could use material from a traditional course book on the same topic for the second lesson. This would then give you a course with 60 guided learning hours
This book provides information sheets and practice worksheets to help students learn skills that will accelerate their improvement in spoken English:
- how to identify and use the techniques of connected speech
- how to identify and use sentence stress
- how to identify word stress
- how to identify prefixes
- how to identify suffixes
- how to identify compound nouns
- how to identify weak forms
- learn the sounds of English with the International Phonetic Alphabet
- how to identify vowel sounds
