ESL Advanced Lessons

Advanced students participate in a conversation: At lower levels, students react to the conversation rather than fully join it. In other words, the conversation has a very interview-like feel. Then there's fillers, redundancies, and body language to consider, all of which enhances the participation factor for advanced students.

Advanced students use speaking strategies: Students adjust their speaking with intonation, rates of speech, nuance, and vocabulary. This colors a conversation and adds a level of richness. With some advanced students, though, fluency may suffer as they search for the right word or expression.

Advanced students talk at length: Advanced students can describe events and ideas at length, and explain around unknown words and phrases, for several minutes or more. They can speak smoothly, too, and link ideas together. These abilities are better with familiar topics, and even advanced students may struggle on unfamiliar topics, or topics that don't hold much personal interest.

Advanced students can comfortably use English for work or for school: The previous points primarily focus on speaking ability. But we need to consider reading skills, too. Advanced students should be able to skim for main ideas, or scan for specific information, both of which would be a daily necessity in work or school situations. On familiar topics or topics of personal interest, there should be a higher level of understanding than just a general comprehension.

Vocabulary: Whenever possible, try to pre-teach vocabulary rather than address target words in the middle of a lesson or an activity. This allows students the opportunity to guess the vocabulary via context, grammatical function, or by the prefixes, suffixes, or roots of the words. They next can check the vocabulary in a dictionary to confirm their guess. However, if key vocabulary is introduced in the middle of an activity, retention drops because students focus more on the task at hand. The goal is to work towards a more than superficial understanding of the key language

idea: Take a list of synonyms for the key words of the lesson. Students work in pairs to first brainstorm additional words around the synonyms. When it comes time to connect the synonyms with the target vocabulary, students will have several words to make the link.

Reading: Assign questions with any reading activity. This allows students to practice skimming for gist or scanning for specific information - both are real life tasks for meetings, school work, and so on. In addition, the students can identify the writer's intent, search for supporting evidence, or use the information to agree, disagree, and support opinions.

idea: Cut an article or passage into several strips. Students read the information, and then must get into groups to summarize what was read. They must also be prepared to answer questions asked from their peers for full comprehension.

Listening: Listening activities may focus on specific vocabulary or grammar. Whenever using a listening activity, the material should be read just slightly above the ability of the students. Read the piece several times, and in bite size chunks. Students must process the information heard and connect it to pre-existing knowledge or information.

idea: Assign a series of questions beforehand. You don't have to limit the questions to gauge comprehension, but other questions may be asked, too. For example: How many phrasal verbs can you hear? What is the tone of the reader? In what situations might the information be used?

for more info: Heads Up English: Listening

Speaking: Speaking activities perhaps offer the best practice for students to master English. It's important for students to use the information from the lesson as much as possible, whether the focus is vocabulary, grammar, or information on a topic. Speaking provides the chance to do more than demonstrate what has been learned. Students make a vital connection with other language points and to their particular interests, thereby raising retention rates.

idea: Assign a discussion question for pairs to talk about for three to five minutes. Students switch partners, and discuss the same question again. Look at the first conversation as a trial run, because the second conversation will see improved fluency and accuracy with the language. Students may also use some of the information from their initial partner, which results in richer conversations.

for more info: Heads Up English: Speaking