ESL Conversation Starters

One thing that has been really helpful for me as a teacher in China has been sharing ideas and lesson plans with other teachers. I don't know if I will continue to be a teacher for the long term, but I figured that whatever experience I did gain in this one year could still be helpful for others! I've decided that whenever I come across an idea that really works well with my students, I'll share it on here!

For starters, our school's English corner last Monday went really well. Every week Betsy meets with the student leaders to help them come up with discussion questions. This week the students wanted the topic to be "Your Life Story." Of course, many students who come to English corner are from other departments at the university, and their English is usually not so great, so we needed something to help them get started talking.

I suggested doing a happiness line graph. This idea was actually based on a reflective activity that we did at a couple ICF leadership meetings (many of my ideas actually are derived from InterVarsity leadership experience... go figure). The x-axis of the graph is time in years starting from when you were born until the present. The y-axis is a scale of how happy you were. So if you were really happy at a certain point in your life, you should draw your line going higher at that point on the graph. It makes more sense if you look at the picture.

The x-axis units say "born, elementary school, middle school, high school, university, now."
I guess I've been steadily getting happier!

This worked surprisingly well! I thought maybe the idea would confuse students, but in the end, having a visual really helped them to talk about their experiences growing up, both the good and the bad. It was a great time of conversation!

This idea can also be used for any conversation group; not just English learners!

Hope this is helpful! Have fun conversing! :)