English Pro

If you teach groups, the following situation might well hit close to home:
you send students to a breakout room asking them to discuss some questions (post-listening or post-reading, for example) and then - after bringing them back - you ask them about the things they discussed together and hear this:

👩🏼‍💼: We discussed that it makes no sense to …
👩🏼‍💼: We discussed that the government must take action to …

❌We discussed + that-clause❌

I hear something like this almost every lesson🙂

✅ we discuss something with someone
✅ we discuss something
✅ we discuss WHEN we should do sth / WHERE to do sth / WHO needs to do sth / HOW to do sth

So, suggest that your students use some of the following ways:
💁🏻‍♀️ One of the things we mentioned was …
💁🏻‍♀️ [Maria] said that … and I completely agree.
💁🏻‍♀️ [Maria] and I both agree that …
💁🏻‍♀️ I really liked [Maria’s] point about … because I couldn’t agree more.
💁🏻‍♀️ [Maria] and I believe/think that …

Do you know what is better than “We discussed + that-clause”?🙂 - Only “We discussed with [partner’s name] + that-clause” when there were two people involved in the conversation 🙃

One thing you can do after reading / listening to some text is retell its gist.

1️⃣ Ask your SS to take turns reading 2-3 sentences or a paragraph (provided that the paragraphs are more or less of the same size and pretty short) at a time. Tell them they can read out loud or to themselves.
(I personally like reading out loud at a slow pace, hearing the words and processing information that way).

2️⃣ Ask them to explain the main idea of each piece in their own words. They can use the phrases from the original text, of course, but they don’t have to - encourage them to improvise and produce their own version of the content.

How is this activity beneficial for SS?
Swipe to see🙌🏻

…………

Are you going to try it with your students?