Compelling American Conversations ― Commentary, Supplemental Exercises, and Reproducible Speaking Activities, Teacher Edition

This English Teacher’s Guide to Compelling American Conversations provides teaching tips, feedback suggestions, extension suggestions, and supplemental exercises so you can help teach speaking skills in a relaxed, confident manner. How do you we get our intermediate English language learners to speak more in our classes? How can we help prepare American residents by choice develop the conversational skills to become future American citizens? These questions inspired Compelling American Conversations: Questions and Quotations for Intermediate American English Language Learners. Since 2012, the versatile speaking skills textbook has found its way into several English as a Second Language and English language development classrooms. Words can often have multiple meanings, and the term “intermediate English language learner” is no exception. Compelling American Conversations was written with this recognition to offer various ways of helping English students develop and deepen their conversation skills. Compelling American Conversations (CAC), an exceptionally flexible ESL textbook, makes adding speaking skills relatively easy in a wide range of classroom environments. This Teacher’s Guide will help English teachers – and tutors – working in adult education programs, community colleges, Intensive English Programs, literacy centers, and international student offices. Compelling American Conversations helps English language learners feel more comfortable in English. It will also help your students become more fluent in English. This teacher’s guide provides detailed suggestions on how to effectively teach each lesson, anticipate “good mistakes” from students, and provide feedback. It also includes several new activities for each chapters so you can extend the lessons, adapt to both stronger and weaker students, and add explicit pronunciation and vocabulary training. We have also deployed the Common European Framework of References (CEFR) for each lesson to clearly identify specific teaching objectives in each lesson. In addition to an activity by activity teaching tip for the entire 15 chapters, this teacher’s guide includes many supplemental activities such as: Sound Practice - Accent reduction activities and minimal pair practice Grammar Connection – Activity that focuses on how words and sentences work in a conversation context of each thematic chapter. Steps to Success – A supplemental activity focused on English for Specific Purposes Phrasal Verbs – Another supplemental activity that develops student fluency. The Brave and the Bold – More sensitive questions that might spark lively, yet controversial, discussions. This section is more appropriate for college than high school classrooms. Fun with Famous Folks – Ways to do more with selected quotations for student presentations. Like many other experienced English teachers, we often browse through teaching guides for ESL & ELT textbooks. Therefore, this particular Teacher’s Guide has been written so the materials can be read – and perhaps enjoyed - both individually or consumed in a scaffold manner. We have shared our perspectives in a more candid, less diplomatic manner than many more traditional textbook authors and publishers. The result is an informative, street smart guide to teaching English and deploying Compelling American Conversations in your ESL classroom.