Language Learning Centre – Conversation Club 11/15

This week our conversation club’s topic was Parties and Festivals. We had only four students join us once again as the students that join us most of the time had presentations this week and were busy.  They were a mix of beginner and intermediate students.

We had a variety of related topics to talk about as well as used several online functions to keep things interesting. In the intro Matthew talked about upcoming holidays and showed a video clip of an office party. Students discussed if they thought it was a fun party or not and then used the interactive whiteboard to talk about what parties they have been to or thrown before. Building on last week’s topic about home countries, we talked about festivals from different cultures briefly and then led to class discussion with several questions about their experience with going to parties and festivals. This was designed to be a breakout room activity but as we had fewer participants than expected, we made it a whole group discussion instead.

For my portion I got students to take turns coming up with things to think about when planning a party such as decorations, music, people to invite…and so on. I did a poll to see who has hosted a party and asked them if they thought it was hard work or not. For the ones that have not thrown a party before we talked about whether they thought it would be fun and whether they would like to have a party in the future. Next, I got the students to tell everyone one thing they liked or didn’t like about a party they went to and activities they did at the party. Some shared that they love arranging surprise parties or having gift exchanges and one girl talked about the barbeque parties she has been to. This was my favourite part of the lesson because they got to have the most uninterrupted talk time.

I concluded the lesson by playing Two Truths and a Lie. As there wasn’t too much time left, we didn’t get to finish but I thought it was great to have a different activity and told them we would play it again another time if we have time for it. The game could have gone better in the beginning if I had modelled my own answers, as one of the students was confused about the game and took up more time (she went twice giving her sentences too, so I quickly told her to guess someone’s answer instead), and I had students type their answers in shared notes and called on them for the guessing part but forgot that I had meant to ask them to use the ‘raise your hand’ function as well when guessing. I liked that the students had a chance to learn some new terms such as hosted / threw a party and to practice having conversations on several topics relating to parties. I think my talking speed and choice of language were good and had natural responses to keep their conversations going. Overall I’m happy with how I did and what went well was that with the small group it was easy to make sure to call on different people and get everyone to participate as much as possible. Through the conversations we got to know these students even better.