I'm a newly qualified teacher with little experience and am teaching 8 adults for a 2 hour evening class for 10 weeks in Dublin. The course is run by a local authority and is called "Learn to Speak English". The students vary in ability and experience enormously and include: 2 recently arrived Polish au pairs who have just left school, a 50 year old unemployed man from Poland who has lived in Ireland for 7 years, a Nigerian woman with 2 small children whose vocabulary is good but has a very strong accent which makes it difficult to understand her. The others are all East European. None of them has ever been taught English in school and so they have no knowledge of formal rules but all have learned vocabulary since moving to Ireland.

I have devised a topic based course (about me, food, health, clothes etc) for 10 weeks but am already, after 2 weeks, getting bogged down with grammar. I really would welcome suggestions for simple games where the students can actually practise speaking rather than me just instructing them.

I've mainly been using bits from Inside Out (Beginner/ elementary levels) plus Murphy for hard and fast rules/ exercises to look at at home

All/ any suggestions welcome!

Thanks

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