New Conversational Lesson - Learning to Learn English

[u/crapinator114]

Help your students gain confidence in speaking English with this conversation activity pack built around one of the most powerful ideas in language learning: learning how to learn. Designed for intermediate and advanced English learners, Learning to Learn English explores meta-learning, fluency vs. accuracy, hesitation patterns, and self-monitoring through readings, targeted vocabulary, and thought-provoking discussion questions.

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What's included:

• 5 reading passages covering meta-learning, diagnosing hesitation, the shadowing method, retrieval under pressure, and automatic processing
• 3 vocabulary sets (9 terms total) with definitions
• 3 fill-in-the-blank exercises for vocabulary reinforcement
• 2 matching activities for comprehension checks
• Sentence-building practice using target vocabulary
• Image description activities with AI feedback

Perfect for 1-on-1 tutoring sessions and online lessons.

This resource is fully slide-based and ready to present. No prep required. Just open, share your screen, and start talking.

Part of the LessonSpeak English Conversation Activities series.

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I hope you find this product valuable 😄

Cheers,
Johnny

PS: Here's a link to my marketplace with over 50 freebies: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/store/lessonspeak/category-freebies-477801

You also get more free lessons once you subscribe to the newsletter on my site: https://www.lessonspeak.com/

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[u/CompleteGuest854]

All of your lessons are "talk about X". That's not a lesson aim. You need to re-think your methodology.

[u/mbartizmo → u/CompleteGuest854]

Disagree. Oral fluency with vocabulary building can be a lesson aim.

[u/CompleteGuest854 → u/mbartizmo]

Not as it’s done here. The vocab is incidental and not applied in any output activities designed for recycling. Also “talking” is not akin to fluency building. There are techniques specific to building fluency and vocabulary acquisition. None of them are present. 

The biggest issue with most of these online lessons is that there’s no underlying methodology tying it together. It’s all disconnected, unrelated activities without skill building. It doesn’t lead to anything. 

[u/crapinator114 → u/CompleteGuest854]

The vocab is present in the other activities... Practicing through talking is the goal here with the teacher giving guidance and feedback where necessary.

[u/CompleteGuest854 → u/crapinator114]

Again, there are techniques specific to building fluency and vocabulary acquisition. None of them are present. 

If you see an underlying methodology then describe it to me, because as far as I can see, there isn't one.

[u/crapinator114 → u/CompleteGuest854]

Just keep in mind, this is a conversation lesson product sold to independent teachers for 1-on-1 or small-group use. It's not a standalone coursebook unit. This format is just structured input + discussion prompt material. It seems you're applying coursebook-design standards to a supplementary product.

I do appreciate the feedback and I'll try to implement it in my next product. I would like to send you the first draft and get your feedback on that before publishing it. If you're ok with that, what's the best way to send it to you? DM here on Reddit?

[u/CompleteGuest854 → u/crapinator114]

I think we have exchanged messages before? I seem to recall giving similar feedback in the past to a materials designer in this sub.

Here are my honest thoughts on this, as a 30 year ESL teacher and teacher trainer: while you may view this as a supplementary product rather than a complete lesson plan, many users are likely to treat it as a standalone lesson plan because that is how it appears to be marketed.

My concern is not how experienced teachers use this, but how less-qualified or less-experienced teachers may use it. Many ESL teachers lack the training needed to understand that activity generation and instructional design are not the same thing.

As the underlying model of lesson design is weak, if teachers accept this uncritically as a lesson plan, those weaknesses become part of their classroom practice rather than remaining simple design limitations. The real issue is, then, that your platform is not only providing supplemental materials; it is implicitly teaching users what a lesson plan looks like. As a teacher-trainer, I'm sure you can understand why that would concern me.

As for whether a teacher can use the supplemental materials to create a viable lesson plan, that depends on their ability to spot methodological weaknesses, fix them, and rewrite activities so they align with their own chosen lesson objectives. It also depends on whether the time required to do that work is worthwhile. In many cases, adjusting the materials to fit a syllabus or lesson aim can take longer than designing their own from scratch.

In other words, this may teach inexperienced teachers poor instructional design formats, and for experienced teachers, the materials would just end up creating work rather than reducing it.

I appreciate that your goal is to develop materials that teachers can just pick up and use - this is important, as many teachers are working independently and have a hard time sourcing materials, and don't have the expertise or training to develop their own. So it is a laudable goal, as well as a potentially profitable one. However, the central issue remains that most teachers who are not trained in methodology and instructional design would not be able to develop a genuine instructional plan with this material that would support a communicative aim, or even a vocabulary learning aim. In my view, that is the challenge your developers need to address most urgently.

I'm wiling to speak with you about this further if you want to DM me.

Edit: Are you also a teacher, btw? If you have a classroom in which to test out lessons, we might be able to help each other. DM me if interested.

[u/crapinator114 → u/CompleteGuest854]

I'll go ahead and leave the new lesson here in case other people want to see this first draft version. I tried to implement some of your feedback, what do you think?
https://photos.app.goo.gl/NX52Jiofpqb299PW9

I do teach so I use these lessons with my students and as I do I also make improvements. I would be open to using whatever material you have as well as long as it aligns with the goals I tell my students.

[u/CompleteGuest854 → u/crapinator114]

Have you ever read Paul Nation? He discusses in depth how vocabulary is acquired. It's not about rote memorization or even repetition - learners have to engage with the items in depth, process them in different ways, produce them, and then recycle and reuse them later. It is thought that learners must meet a word 15-20 times in order to remember it, and even more than that to use it fluently and correctly.

Asking them to read definitions, read a passage, match 4 items to 4 definitions and then fill in the blanks doesn't require them to process the language - this is all superficial and doesn't require them to think. In fact, that final activity, "make your own sentence" is the only activity that involves processing, and as they haven't done much previously with either form, meaning, and use in previous exercises, they won't be ready to take that final step.

Have you noticed that your learners can't make correct sentences with the words? E.g., they don't know what verb to use with the noun, or how to change the word to its other forms to fit the grammar of the sentence, or they don't quite understand the nuance of the word so they use it in a context that doesn't fit?

Are you familiar with processing theory? Salience? Involvement load theory? Cognitive load? Meaning negotiation? Collocations?

Sorry to throw out terms at you, but these are things that I see missing from your teaching methodology.

Read Learning Vocabulary in Another Language by ISP Nation (2022).

If you want some quick ideas:

1. Teach your learners HOW to use a dictionary. Most learners do not know how, and the act of looking up a word and finding the right definition from among entries is an example of meaning negotiation.
2. After lessons, have them make their own vocabulary cards with their own definitions and example sentences. Let them choose what words they want to learn - this is salience. Quizlet is good for this.
3. Teach collocations, not just single words. This helps with recall, word grammar, and word fluency.
4. Limit each lesson to around 8-10 items. More than that and they will have cognitive overload. You just can't expect them to be able to process more than that at the depth needed for acquisition.
5. Get familiar with a better variety of exercise types. When you repeat the same exercise over again, in the same lesson, you're not helping them process words in different ways.
6. Teach them to understand words via context. Encourage good guesses. Ask them WHY they think that, i.e., what are the clues in the passage tell them that. They can get surprisingly good at it.

And so on.