Excerpt from the article
(This posting includes handouts which you are welcome to use with your students.)
• 8th Free Reading Unit. Scarcity: Not Having Enough of Something (can effect mental capacity)
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Tag Archives: handouts
• Starting and Ending a Conversation (Includes a Group Mixer Activity)
(This posting includes a POWERPOINT presentation and HANDOUTS which you are welcome to use with your students.)*
For the readers of my article in The Word, here is the link to the activity: NEW Start & End Conv Activity Also, to see the new, 2026 edition of Conversation Strategies where this activity came from, see Conversation Strategies 2026 Edition
“I wish I had more chances to practice my English outside of class.”
“How can I meet some native-English speakers?”
“I went to a party last weekend. There were about 20 people there, but nobody seemed to want to talk to me. I just kind of stood in the corner looking at my cell phone. Why didn’t anyone talk to me?”
“I sat next to someone, and I wanted to talk to him, but I was afraid that I would be bothering him, or he wouldn’t say anything. What do you think?”
I’ve been asked these types of questions frequently by my students. Naturally, some of them were low-level students with little confidence in their skills, but surprisingly, often more fluent ones also asked me for advice.
For students from some cultures, starting a conversation with someone they don’t know might be a new concept to them. (See Best Subject for an ESL Integrated-Skills Class (Part 2 of 4: Reading aspect)
Exercises for starting-a-conversation skills Continue reading
• A More Sophisticated Technique Than Just Saying, “What did you say?” and “I don’t understand.”
(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)
Spoiler alert: You will hear quite a bit of laughing when students are doing the activity in pairs. 😁
Here is how I introduce this technique to intermediate-level ESL students:
If I say to you, “My cousin gave me a jigsaw puzzle,” and you say, “Pardon?” I’ll know you didn’t understand. But I won’t know which word you didn’t understand. It will help me if you let me know specifically which word you didn’t understand, so you might ask, “Your cousin gave you a what?” Then I know you didn’t understand “jigsaw puzzle.” Or you might ask, “Who gave you a puzzle?” Then I know you didn’t understand that I had said “my cousin.” This unit will give you practice in asking questions about specific information which you did not understand.
The practice for this technique involves a brief introductory exercise and a 3-step pair work activity. (You can find the complete set of exercise to download and use with your students in the link below.)
• ESL Students Won’t Progress In Conversation Skills Without This Technique.
This posting is discussed on my YouTube video YouTube ESL Students Won’t Progress In Conversation Skills Without This Technique
(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)
In her book, What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage: Lessons for People from Animals and Their Trainers, Amy Sutherland describes how “progressive” animal trainers help animals who may feel nervous about anything new or that they are not accustomed to. One way is called desensitizing. She explains, “When you counter-condition, you take a negative experience and make it a positive one by pairing it with something good.”
She gives the example of a cavy, which is a South American rodent, who was terrified of the humans at the animal training school. Anytime that it needed vet care, it had to be caught, which meant chasing it around its cage, and this made it even more terrified of humans. The animal trainer set up a counter-conditioning. Each day she would enter the cavy’s cage and move just an inch closer. If the cagy didn’t hide behind a bush, the trainer would reward it with an alfalfa pellet. Overtime, the cavy allowed the trainer to come closer and closer, until one day the animal ate some pellets right out of the trainer’s hand.
I realized that desensitizing our ESL students to a “negative experience” could help them become more open to using an important technique, just as it helped the cavy.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t understand that.”
For many language learners, it seems so hard to say this or a similar phrase. For some, it can be embarrassing to appear less proficient than others (e.g. classmates) seem to be. Some don’t have confidence that they’ll understand even if their interlocutor repeats slower or rephrases what was said. Others don’t want to take up the other person’s time having to explain or simplify what they had just said.
I, myself even as an adult, was like this when I was trying to navigate my way around France or Japan. If the situation wasn’t dire, I usually just nodded like I understood and thanked them. But at times, when I really needed the information, I put aside my ego when I couldn’t understand and said in French or Japanese, “Excuse me. Could you repeat that?” To my amazement, nine out of ten times, the people adjusted their speech by speaking more slowly, and/or used easier vocabulary, pantomimed, and sometimes even used some English. Over time, I became desensitized to those negative emotions I had felt about saying, “I didn’t understand.”
Common Sense Teaching ESL 