How Was Your Weekend? 1001 Discussion Questions To Use With Your EFL/ESL Students

By James M. Taylor

Have you ever noticed that you usually ask your students the same questions over and over again? Usually about their weekends? I did, so I decided to write this book so it never happened again. With "How Was Your Weekend? 1001 Discussion Questions To Use With Your EFL/ESL Students" you too can avoid boring yourself and your students with a huge variety of questions on a multitude of topics, from the personal to the general, from the serious to the silly. The only guarantee is that the quality of conversation in your classroom will improve!

Organised into different thematic sections, the book is easy to navigate and designed to be used quickly and easily during lessons. There is also an introduction, in which I describe how the book can be used and some things to take into consideration.

With "How Was Your Weekend?" at your side, boring classroom conversations are now a thing of the past!

• Language: English
• Publisher: James M. Taylor
• Release date: Aug 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463815946

James M. Taylor

I am an English as a foreign language teacher and teacher trainer currently based in Brazil. I have taught English to adults and teenagers in Brazil, South Korea, Belgium and Costa Rica since 2007. I am currently specialising in bespoke one-to-one lessons online for business and exam students. I am also a podcast producer, including the ELTON nominated TEFL Commute podcast. I am a former President and a co-founder of BELTA, the Belgian English Language Teachers Association, and current Second-Vice President of BRAZ-TESOL Brasília and BRAZ-TESOL BESIG. In 2010, I started my blog, www.theteacherjames.com, on which I have continued to share lesson materials and opinion pieces. I am a very active member of the ELT community and regular present at conferences, both online and offline.

Book preview

James M. Taylor is an English as a foreign language teacher and teacher trainer currently based in Brazil. He has taught English to adults and teenagers in Brazil, South Korea, Belgium and Costa Rica since 2007. He is currently specialising in bespoke one-to-one lessons online for business and exam students.

He is also a podcast producer, including the ELTON nominated TEFL Commute podcast. He is a former President and a co-founder of BELTA, the Belgian English Language Teachers Association, and current Second-Vice President of BRAZ-TESOL Brasília and BRAZ-TESOL BESIG. In 2010, James started his blog, theteacherjames.com, on which he has continued to share lesson materials and opinion pieces.

He is a very active member of the ELT community and regular presents at conferences, both online and offline.

This is his first book, but not his last.

theteacherjames.com

taylormadeenglish.com

Inspirations

I’d like to give some credit to some of the people that inspired this book. The first is the British comedian Richard Herring who wrote the book Emergency Questions. His questions are a lot more surreal and ‘adult’ than mine, but they are hilarious and you should buy the book to use with your friends. Definitely not with your students though.

Secondly, I have been inspired by the British radio and TV presenter Danny Baker, who I’ve been a fan of since I was a teenager. He has an amazing ability to find topics of conversation on his radio shows that have some combination of the surreal, the obscure and the mundane and turn them into some of the funniest radio I have ever heard.

If you’re not an EFL/ESL teacher…

...and you’ve bought this book, thanks! You’ll probably want to skip the introduction and go straight to the questions. Have fun!

How to use this book

I decided to write How Was Your Weekend? because of boredom. Not with life, or with teaching, but with asking my students that same question over and over again. It became so routine that I even started to ask it at the end of the week when I’d already had one class with the students! So, in an effort to shake things up and try something different, I decided to compile this huge list of questions so the next time I felt that tedious question approaching, I had a more interesting alternative.

And thus, after a lot of research and exploring different fusty corners of my brain, this book was born. But how is it used? Well, simply put, it’s up to you, but it is designed to be used by teachers at the beginning of class as a warmer before the main procedures of the lesson. I ask a student for a random number and in a one-to-one class, then use that question as the beginning of a discussion between us. In a larger group, I will give the question to the students and let them discuss them in pairs or small groups depending on the size