Problems, solutions and giving advice

I taught my first English lesson to real students last week and it went pretty well, if I do say so myself. They were all very kind to me, which helped because I was a little bit nervous! I started out by asking the students if they were ok and whether they had any worries, attempting to elicit some problems from them that I could use to present the language. Of course, none of them had any problems (well, none that they wanted to share, anyway) so I introduced one of my own. I told them about my struggle to lose weight and got some excellent advice from one student in particular! I weaved the context of agony aunts into the conversation by asking if there was anywhere I could write to for advice (since I was so embarrassed about my problem) and the students managed to get what I was driving at and said that I could write to a magazine. Bingo! At those magic words, I was able to properly introduce the lesson context, explaining what agony means and checking that the students knew what 'anonymous' meant. I projected the mock-up of an agony aunt page on the wall and asked the students to have a look at it.

I then brought in my first activity. I had spent the previous night writing a few problems on one set of cards and the solutions for the problems on another set and finding some pictures to illustrate them. I used a laminator for only the second time in my life to produce a rather spiffing set of cards. The idea was that the students were given one problem and one solution each, but the problems and solutions didn't match. To get a matching pair, they would have to confide their problems in each other. When they had found the person with the matching advice card, the other person would read them the advice, then give them the card. They could only sit down when they had got their matching advice card and given the other advice card away to someone else. I modelled the activity with Marco to make sure that they understood what they had to do but they stood about waiting for one person to read their problem out loud to the group, rather than mingling and talking amongst themselves, so I had to prompt them to interact. Afterwards, in my feedback session, Artemis said that although my instruction had been clear and my modelling good, sometimes students just need to be re-instructed, so that is something I will work on for next time.

Having got the students to match the problems and solutions, I then asked them to read what they had and projected the sentences onto the wall. I got them to analyse the grammar of the language used and also the difference in tone between them, 'should' being used for strong advice, whereas 'you could try' used for suggestions. I then quickly introduced the creative part of the lesson. I gave the students a sheet, the top half of which was labelled 'letter to an agony aunt,' and asked the students to think of a problem and write to an agony aunt about it for advice. They then swapped with someone else in the class who pretended that they were the agony aunt and replied, using the structures that we had looked at earlier. I then asked them to read out the problems and the advice given to the rest of the class. 

Well, some of them were just hilarious. Bad breath featured heavily in a couple of cases. There was one husband who begged the agony aunt to save his marriage as his wife had such bad breath that he couldn't kiss her any more. The advice given was to scare the poor woman with tales of all the things that could be wrong with her until she went to the dentist. Another person's boss had bad breath and in the current economic climate, he didn't want to leave the job as he was afraid he wouldn't get a new one. The advice was to make a gift of some mouthwash and breath freshener as the boss couldn't turn down a present. Another person kept sleepwalking and one night woke up to find herself in the middle of the street wearing a Santa outfit! The agony aunt said that they really wanted to help, but first of all, the writer should stop drinking so much! Yet another one was simply unprintable, but very funny. I felt so lucky to have such talented students who really threw themselves into the activity.

I'm teaching them again this week so I hope this coming lesson is as entertaining as the last one. We've got past modals of ability tomorrow so I'm designing a lesson around their greatest achievements. Hopefully, they'll enjoy this one too.