ESL Teacher

I’ve had great success of late by inviting guest speakers to visit my ESL class. Students love the chance to speak to a “real” native speaker – apparently teachers don’t quite fall into this category! – and if you set it up well with an interesting activity to match it can be something they talk about for weeks.

If you’re living in an English-speaking country like I am, it’s absolutely easy to find a guest speaker – I’ve used several of my friends who happen to have interesting careers that are relevant to parts of my current Business English textbook. And the speakers themselves get a lot out of it by having a class full of students so genuinely interested in them – plus I always get them to each write a short thank you note to the speaker and handing over a collection of these is always fun.

So I think the key points when you’re preparing for a guest speaker are:

• Incorporate an informal small talk and introduction session at the start to make both your speaker feel relaxed and at least some of the students to have the chance to talk one-on-one with them (they’ll ask more questions later then). I usually put on some cookies and drinks and monitor it to make sure at least four or five students have the chance to talk to the guest speaker.
• Give your students an activity to do connected to the guest speaker’s presentation. For example, I had a guest speaker who had worked in many different countries and the students needed to try to note down an outline of her CV – where she had worked and when.
• Get them to brainstorm possible questions before the guest speaker even arrives. I like to collate the questions and then write them out on a page to give to all the students, and then if they get shy there’s a question in front of them to fall back on.

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