Tuesday, April 24

In this class we will go over Unit 6, Lesson 5, on interviewing for a job.

Tuesday, April 17

This week we are going to finish Unit 6, Lesson 1, and move on to Lesson 2. We will review skills and characteristics, and will move on to analyzing companies where one might apply for work. We will hand back resumes for students who were in class last Tuesday.

Tuesday, April 10

This Tuesday we will work on Unit 6, Lesson 1, pages 102 and 103. We will go over descriptions of skills and characteristics that different jobs require. Students will describe jobs they have held, and what those jobs required. We will also use some advertisements from the Sunday classified ads.

Tuesday, March 27

Tonight we will review the material in Unit 5, covering

1. Which type of doctor you'd go to for different ailments or types of care: foot, back, pregnancy, diabetes, heart trouble, children's care, your teeth, mental disorders, care of the elderly.
2. Exercises 6 through 10 on page 85.
3. Exercise F on page 86.
4. NutritionaI labels on packages of food.
5. Indirect speech (p. 87).
6. Exercise E on page 88.
7. Exercise G on page 89.
8. Fill out the application on pages 95 and 96.

Items 2 and 6 we will work on as a group.

Tuesday, March 6

This week we will work on Lessons 1, Locating Community Resources, and 2, Using the Telephone. For both lessons, we will emphasize student practice.

In Lesson 1, we will have students ask and give directions to locate

• the local library
• schools, public and parochial
• the zoo
• an art museum
• a grocery store
• the swimming pool
• the DC employment office

In Lesson 2, we will practice asking questions over the telephone. I will try to make up a couple of sets of index cards, questions and answers, with each student drawing one from each deck, and so getting to practice once as customer and once as store or office employee.

February 28 Overview

We are going to hurry through the grammatical parts of Lesson 4, Unit 2, namely the passive voice.We will then move on to Lesson 5, on business letters.

The "passive voice" tells what happened, but not who did it:

• passive: The car was scratched. active: I scratched the car.
• passive: The homework is posted on line. active: Samantha posted the homework on line.

English forms the passive voice with a form of the word "be" and a past form of the main verb. So

•  Lessons are taught Tuesday through Thursday night.
• Groceries are sold on Mount Pleasant Avenue.
• The chalk was broken.

If you wish to name the person or thing that acted, you can use a clause with by:

• A falling branch scratched my car's paint.
•  My car's paint was scratched by a falling branch.

You can practice forming the passive version of some sentences:

• David assigned some homework.
• Samantha suggested a game.
• That dog growled at me.

Lesson 5 of Unit 2 discusses business letters. We will devote most of the class to this lesson. The letter on page 34 can serve as our model for organization, having from top to bottom the components

• return address
• date
• address (of the recipient)
• salutation
• body
• closing
• signature
• name

You must include in your letter

• who you are
• why you are writing
• an explanation of the problem
• a suggested resolution

The book does not say, but you should know

• do not sound angry
• do not suggest that the recipient has tried to cheat you
• imply that the difficulty can easily be resolved.

We will practice writing letters based on the scenarios on page 35, breaking up into small groups to do so.

Tuesday, February 21

As Samantha's email noted, we reviewed conditions "If I had", "Unless you", "If he weren't", and so on, with a game that had teams try to construct a suitable second clause. This might have worked better with some previous drill, or with other preparation up front. The second half reviewing words related to crime and the courts, went somewhat more smoothly.

I'm inviting all of the Spring ESL 4 teachers to try posting to this blog. What I have in mind is less to let the teachers know what happened in the previous class, for which email will serve well enough, but for us to let the students know, as far in advance as possible, what will be covered in each next class, including

• vocabulary
• grammar
• sample calculations, if the lesson includes them (as some of the Unit 2 lessons do)
• any other suggestions for preparation that might be helpful

This certainly may work better for the Tuesday class, where teachers and students have more time to prepare; yet if we are predictable enough it might work for the other classes also.