Teaching English to ELLs

I am going to start breaking away from my math education blog posts. I am working on a masters degree from the University of North Dakota on teaching English Language Learners. I hope that this program will help me to be a better math teacher, but I am also learning about how to teach English.

I live in Japan and my church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) offers free English Conversation Classes (Eikaiwa). I have taught these classes off and on since 2004. I have decided to return for me to practice teaching English and to serve the amazing people in my community.

I am teaching the beginning class and my first week I prepared a very pair conversation oriented lesson. The topic was families. For my records here is the flow of the lesson:

1) I asked the question: "Why do you want to learn English?"
This is the first question I always ask a new (to me) student. It is important that I know why my students are studying English. The common responses are:

• To watch American movies without subtitles.
• To talk to foreigners at work or family
• To use in international travel

2) I presented a family tree that I created with family relationship vocabulary. My students were all familiar with this vocabulary.

3) They were sitting in pairs, so I had them talk with their partner about their mothers. I then ask each partner to tell me about their partner's mother. I also asked about their oldest child.

4) We concluded with having partners discuss why families are important.

The lesson went very well! I walked away feeling like I wasn't teaching a beginning class, I was teaching an intermediate class. Which was my downfall for my second lesson.