View Single Post
  #2 (permalink)  
Unread Sep 23rd, 2009, 11:17 pm
Lynxy2 Lynxy2 is offline
eslHQ Member
 
Join Date: Jun 20th, 2008
Posts: 2
Lynxy2 is on a distinguished road
Smile Re: Testing communicative ability

Hey there,

Start off with some simple introductions, as it`s your first lesson. You should be able to learn a little about the student`s ability from the response time, response length and control of grammatical structures.

You should probably choose a topic that anyone can talk about in simple terms for the first lesson, for example food. This means you can ask questions ranging from "What`s your favourite food?" to "If a visitor was coming to your country, what kind of restaurants would you recommend?Why?". If you do this you can expand the lesson to suit a high-level student, or you can keep it simple by introducing a list of adjectives to describe food and having the student match the adjective with one kind of food (for example sweet, salty, bitter, creamy, spicy etc.) It`s good if you can use some kind of visual aid, for example pictures of food from a magazine to use as an initial talking point.

Depending on the student`s level you could also introduce a role play, for example ordering in a restaurant or complaining if they already have a good standard of communicative ability.

Hope this helps!Good luck!
Reply With Quote