Adult ESL

Teaching Adults

12/17/2017 by admin

Though Kinney Brothers Publishing is best known for its Phonics & Spelling and Stories For Young Readers series, we also have teaching material for adults! Like all of our textbooks, the Trends: Business and Culture Reports series was created out of a need for classroom resources that, in this case, would spark the varied interests of adult language learners.

Robert Kinney, of Kinney Brothers Publishing, worked with students at Saidai University and government employees at the National Diet in Japan. For these classes, topical lessons that promoted critical thinking and a more nuanced response in conversation were the lessons du jour. In response, Robert created a collection of topical business reports and exercises to lead his intermediate and advanced students toward classroom discussions. Trends: Business and Culture Reports is the result of Robert’s years teaching those classes.

Below are a few examples from the Trends series. Two are free. You can download individual lessons packs or the full textbooks by clicking on the images below. This series is also available as black and white printed textbooks on the Kinney Brothers Publishing website.

I’d love to hear how your students respond to these lessons. Please let me know in the comment section below!

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney
Kinney Brothers Publishing

The Oasis of The Seas

05/13/2017 by admin

One of the schools I taught at in Japan was an intensive academic prep program for students getting ready to study in universities abroad.

This is a lesson guide for The Oasis of The Seas from the textbook, Trends, Business & Culture Reports, Book 2. You can download this lesson to try out in class.

In the speaking and listening courses, my job was to get the students talking as much as possible, to work on group tasks, and give presentations. One of the best tools I had for this was our textbook, Trends, Business and Culture Reports, as it allowed me to have the students run their own lessons. Here is an example of how I would do it (or rather, how the students would do it) using the reading and exercise pages The Oasis of the Seas.

The day before class I would choose one student to be the “Teacher,” and give him or her the first page of The Oasis of the Seas. The student was to read the story and prepare to lead the class through the reading and exercises on the page.

Before class the next day, the “Teacher” was to write the questions from the Discussion Questions section on the whiteboard.

He or she would then greet the students and make small chit-chat with them for a minute or two, asking them how their evening was the night before, etc. The teacher would then introduce the topic for the day – Traveling – and explain that they were to start by discussing the questions on the board. He or she would then read each question in turn, and ask the students if they have any questions about them. If yes, the teacher would answer the questions, and then say, “Okay, let’s go, up, up, up!”, to which the students would stand up, get into pairs, and discuss the questions, the teacher changing the pairs every 10 minutes for a total of 30 minutes discussion time.

The teacher would then have the students sit down and take out a notebook and pen for dictation. He or she would then ask the students to write the questions as he or she spoke them from the Comprehension Questions section. The students could ask the teacher to repeat the questions as necessary until they had all of the questions written in their notebooks.

Then, the teacher would explain that he or she was going to read twice the story called The Oasis of the Seas, and that they should listen and take notes on a new page in their notebooks. The teacher would then read the story twice while the students listened and took notes. When finished, the teacher would ask the students to get into pairs and work to answer the questions from their notes, stressing that the answers must be complete sentences.

When the students were finished, the teacher would ask the pairs in turn to read and answer the questions. The teacher would not let on whether the answers were correct or not, but respond with, “I see,” or “Really?” or “Okay, interesting.” Then, the teacher would hand out the two pages of The Oasis of the Seas, and ask the students to check their own answers with the reading. Once this was finished and the questions gone over again to make sure of the answers, the teacher would then ask the students to practice the reading aloud in pairs, working on fluency and pronunciation.

By this time, at least half of the 90-minute class period would be finished, and I would then take over, thanking the “Teacher” for his or her work.

I would then move the students through the rest of the exercises in The Oasis of the Seas and end with setting up the Presentation Task section, giving them one week to research one of the famous buildings listed in the section, or one of their own liking (no two students could do the same building), and prepare to give a presentation to the class, covering the information asked for, and other information they think is interesting.

If you try this in class, let us know how your students responded. We’d love to hear from you!

Michael Kinney
Kinney Brothers Publishing

Selling Wellness

05/13/2017 by admin

Health and medicine are major topics in our social and media discussions. How well your students understand the news articles and conversations happening around them determines the extent to which they can make informed decisions about their well-being.

Of course most beginner-intermediate ESL students have learned about the body, and how to talk about simple ailments, but Selling Wellness, from Trends, Book 2, challenges students to take their skills in reading, listening, and discussion around health and medicine to the next level. Starting off with a short paragraph on prescription drug sales in the United States, Selling Wellness engages solid intermediate-level students with reading and discussion exercises that center on health and exercise, taking medicine, pharmaceutical advertising, and the growing epidemic of pharmaceutical drug abuse and unintentional deaths by overdose.

Selling Wellness also includes a simple review of body part vocabulary, commonly-used idioms dealing with illness, and a survey exercise that can be used either in-class, or as a homework project.

The way I run this lesson…

I start off with writing the questions from the Discussion Questions section on the board. Students stand and discuss the questions in pairs, changing partners every five or ten minutes.

Next, I tell students to take out a notebook and prepare to write the questions from the Comprehension Questions section. I then dictate the questions, which the students write in their notebooks.

After this, the students turn to a new page in their notebooks. I then read the report twice, and the students take notes. Then, students pair up and work out the answers to the Comprehension Questions.

Finally, I hand out the two pages of Selling Wellness to the students, and the students work to check the answers to their questions, and practice reading the paragraph for themselves out loud.

From here I have the students drill each other using the Selling Wellness Drill section. With this, students change pairs, with one student turning his or her paper over, and the other student asking the questions. The partner listens closely to each question and gives a full answer. For example, if the question is, “Are Americans taking less medicine?”, the student should answer, “No, Americans are not taking less medicine. They are taking more medicine.” This is a great listening-and-response drill, and it further reviews the information given in the reading.

Next I have the students work out the Identification: Body Parts section, and then move on to the Discussion Exercise 1 section. For this discussion section, I give the students five or ten minutes to write out their ideas on their own, and then I put them in small groups for discussion.

Finally, depending on the amount of time left in class, I either set the students off to survey each other using the Survey Exercise section, or I assign the Survey Exercise as homework, giving them parameters on how many people they must ask, etc.

Another option for teaching this lesson would be to make it even more student-centered by having the students themselves run the class! See my blog entry titled, The Oasis of The Seas.

Please share your ideas…

Or maybe you have your own ideas on how to run this lesson. Please share! I would love to learn about any other ways you get your students talking and learning about health and fitness.

Michael Kinney
Kinney Brothers Publishing