Giving Advice - Lessons
Students have a lot of life experience to share. Why not try some lessons where students give others advice?
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One of the best approaches to language teaching is to focus on your students own interests, talents, knowledge and use that as the basis for learning the language. Teaching from the ground up. Personalization. Differentiation. Call it what you want, it has many names. A good example is the work of Sylvia Ashton-Warner.
One topic that works with this approach is that of getting students to give each other advice, using their own interests and knowledge as the source of communicative practice.
The first place to start is to teach the language, the “chunks” and expressions we use in English to give advice. Also, sequential conjunctions (First, After that, Next, Then … Finally). A teacher can present the expressions and ask students to use them to give some life advice or advice about a situation at the school, about the conditions the students are living. See the fantastic book, presenting many more language functions - Get Talking.
There are a myriad of topics you can use to get students giving advice. Even just using a template and having students share some general “life” advice, can be use.
Here are some other ideas for advice type lessons in class!
Advice Columns. Students read advice columns and debate, respond to the advice given by the columnist. See our Dear Abby lesson materials.
Writing. Give students a prompt, scenario. They discuss and then write out a piece of advice. Share and discuss with the class. See Ask Alex for an example.
Listening. Listen or watch a person giving some advice. There are a lot of these types of videos online. Get students to note what the speaker advises. After, discuss - do your students agree? See Quinn’s Love Line.
Studying, learning advice. Students have a lot of study tips, language learning skills and advice to share. The best apps, routines, how to learn vocabulary best, etc … See this activity as an example.
Cautionary advice. Teach students to give advice using imperatives and using “Don’t”. It’s a useful skill.
I hope this ideas have been useful and you’ll try some in your classroom. Let us know with a comment, if you do! What worked, didn’t, how students responded.
Thank you for the advice! :) Actually I wanted to become a teacher in order to help children see the world with positive mindset, to create their own beautiful experiences and to help them as much as I can to face difficulties. "Giving an advice" was one of the methods I planned to use. Thank you for confirming that my intuition was right.