Teaching Advanced English to Beginners?
If you have been teaching ESL in China for a while then at some point I’m willing to guess that you’ve been asked, or even required to teach material to students that was way over their heads. If you’re in this kind of position I have a useful tip for you.
Maybe you’re preparing students to take the TOEFL test way before they’re ready or maybe your teaching at a training center that has made some outrageous guarantees about students’ English proficiency at the end of their program. In either case, my suggestion is to concentrate on teaching the students vocabulary. Besides being a key factor in getting a higher score on the TOEFL, I believe vocabulary is one of the most important aspects of learning to speak a language.
Choose a number of readings that are on level with where your students need to be. Go through the reading and pull out key vocabulary words. If students are really low then pull out words that are necessary to understand the main purpose of the reading, not the details. Then give students the vocabulary set with Chinese translations. Go through these words, give students examples, and even give them a test on the words. In the next class give students the reading with a question set. Then give students another set of questions about the reading that are similar but not identical. Have them put away the text and you read it aloud. They will answer the questions based on what they hear and what they can remember from the text. The answers on the listening should be more free response questions that have directly to do with the meaning of the vocabulary given.
Do this over and over with different readings. It’s a good way to teach vocabulary, it will make parents happy to see how many new words their children are learning, and it will help their scores on the TOEFL (if that’s the goal).