Browse And Download
There are seventy-five lessons on the site - browse until you find something that you think is appropriate. At the bottom of each page, you will find a link marked 'Student Handout' that takes you to Google documents where you can download the material and send it to your students.
Text Choice - Lesson Length
My choice of text was based on having a topic that would generate discussion - either being for or against something, trying to persuade someone of something, or explaining something that the student had experience of themselves. The texts and the questions were chosen so that the student could come to the online lesson with background knowledge of the topic and a point of view they could express. Using the student's output during the lesson, we would work on any emergent language that was interesting (often pronunciation and usage based) and write it in the application's (Skype, in my case) chatbox. With a short revision of the chatbox's contents, the lessons would last approximately sixty minutes.
Lesson Format
The lessons follow the same format, passing from general questions to more specific questions, and include a 'Situation' (a role play between the student and the teacher). They end on a more general note, with quotations. This could be the format that you use in a classroom, but as I teach with flipped lessons, the student will already have prior knowledge of the contents - this is OK as all I care about is that the student has a reasonable knowledge of the topic, and that we can concentrate on their output during the online lesson.
Beginning Of The Course - After The Lesson - Online Tools
At the beginning of each course, I would create a class for each student on Quizlet. After each lesson, I would take the chatbox's contents and put them on Quizlet, using their translator to create phrases containing the language to revise. I would then message the student to tell them that there was new material for them to look at. When processing language during the lesson, I found Collins English dictionary to be very useful, as well as the corpus search engine Skell for finding examples of real world usage. For pronunciation symbols, I used the IPA Typewriter which allows you to copy and paste phoneme symbols.
Spelling - Personalisation
As a Brit, I have made use of British English spellings in the lessons, so be prepared to see word endings with -ise instead of -ice, -our instead of -or, or indeed, omelette instead of omelet, if you use American English. My students all came from one country, so in order to open up the materials to students from everywhere, I've replaced the nouns and adjectives referring to nationality with the phrase 'from your country'. This is somewhat cumbersome and repetitive, so I recommend that you edit the handouts to include the appropriate nouns/adjectives for your students.
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