Thursday Night Smith’s School of English Lessons
By Timothy Oliver (I am a part time teacher at Smith’s. I don’t ask Smith’s to sponsor my visa)
ET:
I started the lesson with one orange level student. I asked him where he just came from, and he told me that he is a dentist and just came from his office. Seeing that he came along with a friend, I tried a hunch and asked him if he enjoys playing social golf. He told me that he does enjoy playing golf with his friends and that he last played it in late April. From this, I started the lesson by re-enforcing his last One Point, B.13 “I haven’t (A) in ages because (B)” around his golf habits.
Item:
Smith’s School of English Item Series
Judging from the records in his file, I thought this student was at an incredibly advanced level for an Orange level student, having now been doing items at the build-up level. To build on this, I chose to introduce the “Adverbs of Manner” item to him. The Start-up was to match a set of picture cards with their English phrase equivalents. With minimal help, he easily completed this in a very quick amount of time, which implied to me that he already had a really good grasp on the vocabulary and basic grammar listed on the cards. I responded to this by speeding up the speed I at which i spoke as well as embellishing on the questions listed in the Presentation and Practice sections. Although he initially needed a little more encouragement and re-enforcement on some particular phrases, he easily formulated answers and was then able to extend upon them.
Routine:
As it had been over a month since he had last done it, I decided to review Pre-Intermediate Routine 8: Shopping for the routine section of this lesson. I wrote all of the content up on the board, and then formulated the sentences a piece at a time. He was easily able to repeat after me, and by the end, he was able to easily recite the entire set of sentences in record time. Because of this, I decided to start asking the questions in context to make sure he understood all of the content. It was obvious he did as he was able to create answers to the questions based off of the hints straight away.
One Point:
My decided One Point was “So far, so good”, which I attempted to demonstrate through using his interest in golf. I used the hypothetical situation of him winning against his friends, in that state (so far), he was doing well (so good). I checked his comprehension and he demonstrated that he understood, saying afterwards that he would try and use it.
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