ESL Speaking Textbook Reviews

ESL Speaking Textbook Reviews

If you're looking for some advice about which ESL textbook to choose for your next class, check out:

ESL textbooks for children--I talk about my 2 favorites, mostly because they are an actual, well-though out series, unlike most of the other fluffy stuff filled with pictures and other crap that is kind of useless if you want to actually teach something.

ESL textbooks for adults--I preview my 3 favorite 4-skills textbooks that place a heavy emphasis on communicative speaking activities, which is just my style. These ones are also solid, minus all the fluffy stuff.

4 Hot Discussion Topics for Korean University Students

Discussion Topics for Korean Uni Students

This past week in my advanced conversation class, we've been talking about rules and regulations using the passive form and Touchstone 4, Unit 5. For homework, I had my students make a short video (3+ minutes) answering the questions, "What 2 things should people be encouraged to do to make it a better place. And, what should they be encouraged not to do?"

I just finished watching all the videos and the four topics that the students mentioned almost without fail were:

1. Smoking in public places.

2. The lax sex crime laws, especially if drinking is involved.

3. Trash on the streets and lack of trash cans.

4. Cutting in line at the bus station, bank, etc.

So, if you're looking for hot topics for your uni classes in Korea, these are some that your students would probably enjoy and be willing to talk about.

ESL Speaking Games and Activities

ESL Speaking Games and Activities

Inspired by the success of my first two books, How to Get a University Job in South Korea: The English Teaching Job of Your Dreamsand The Wealthy English Teacher: Teach, Travel, and Secure Your Financial Future, I've started work on a third one about ESL Speaking Games and Activities.

It'll contain around 50 of my go-to games and activities that I use in my own classes and I've tried to include lots of good stuff for teachers who teach young kids as well (I got my start way back in the day teaching kindy, so I know how it is!). I also have a few sample lesson plans for intermediate-advanced level adult conversation classes and some general teaching tips to keep in mind when you're teaching ESL Speaking.

If you want to get 40 ESL games and activities for all skills, delivered straight to your inbox, as well as be the first to know when I finish my latest book, sign up here:

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ESL Speaking: Activities, Games and Resources

2 pieces of  news for you, my readers. The first is: ESL Speaking. If you teach a conversation, discussion or 4-skills English class, this is the site for you. It has games, activities and resources all designed to help you plan your speaking classes. Plus, I think the design is wicked cool, if I do say so myself (it's my site! Ha!).

The second thing is that if you want to get 40 of my favorite ESL games and activities, you should sign up and get it delivered straight to your inbox. I promise only goodness for you and none of the badness that is spam.

40 ESL Games and Activities-Classroom Tested and Approved

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Four Skills Books for General English Classes

It's all about my favorite ESL Textbooks for general, 4-skills English classes. I'm only reviewing books that I've used in my own classes (of course!). For even more of my ESL textbook reviews, check out another site of mine, ESL Textbook Reviews.

The Four Corners Series

If I had only one choice for a 4-skills EFL textbook, this would be it. There are no "throw-away" chapters like in so many of the other books and the activities are interesting and engaging. It's so well designed actually that it's almost impossible for students not to participate. It's communication centered and focuses heavily on speaking, although it does hit the other three skills. Trust me, you won't be disappointed if you choose this book.

The Touchstone Series



I used the Touchstone series a number of years ago and remember hating it: text-heavy pages that were just overwhelming for me, and even more so for the students. However, I'm using it for my conversation classes these days (I had no choice!), but I have to say that they've made the second edition significantly better. There are some solid listening and reading activities, as well as some communicative "free-talking" activities at the back. By book 4, it's serious English so if you have quite high level students, check it out.

The World Link Series

I used this book for about 3 years at my old university and while I was a bit burnt out on it near the end, it really is a solid book. The units are interesting and engaging and are on the simpler side if you have lower-level, or multi-level classes. There just isn't that much text on the page, which is something I appreciate in an ESL textbook. The supplementary teacher's activity book was excellent and I used almost every single activity in it, so make sure you get that as well.
World Link: Teacher's Resource Text Bk. 1

The Smart Choice Series

I used the Smart Choice series a few years ago at my old university for a supplementary program and really enjoyed teaching it. It's grammar, but in a very simple, easy to understand way. It made teaching easy and very minimal prep was required because the book was good enough to just teach straight from it. The students usually seemed to enjoy the topics and it was easy enough to build natural conversations from it.

The Interchange Series



Interchange is one of the most popular 4-skills English as a second language textbooks and for good reason: it's solid. Jack Richards is one of the best ESL textbook writers out there and anything with his name on it is sure to be a good choice. If I was an admin of a program of some kind, I'd look closely at this book.

Professional Development-Start your Own Teaching Website

An excellent way to challenge yourself professionally is to start a teaching website of some sort, kind of like this one. Not only have I learned lots of helpful teaching things, but I've met plenty of fabulous people through it as well plus I have a few website development skills which might come in handy in the future. Here is some advice I have on various options for websites:

1. Blogger (like this blog) is a decent choice if you want really, really simple and easy. You can probably get up to speed in under an hour with this choice. 

2. Wordpress.com is similar to Blogger but it requires a wee bit more technical skill. It's probably better to start with this rather than Blogger because learning how to develop websites through this platform is a much more valuable skill for your future. Here's one site I developed using Wordpress.com:

Freedom Through Passive Income

3. Wordpress.org. Wordpress.org shares the same platform as Wordpress.com with the difference being that you need to have your own domain (instead of XYZ.wordpress.com) and that you need another site to host your page (although you can pay wordpress to do it for you too).  You can use something like Go Daddy for domains and hosting, and then Wordpress for the platform, which is how many of the websites you see do it (basically!). It is quite complicated, as I am discovering now that I've started working on my new website.

Jackie Bolen Please don't look too closely! I just bought it last night and haven't had much time to add cool stuff.

4. Hubpages. If you want to talk about a specific topic related to teaching, Hubpages is an excellent choice. Here are a few examples of my pages related to teaching:

ESL Icebreaker Activities

ESL Writing textbooks

Speaking activities for ESL students

ESL Textbook Reviews

One question that I often see tossed around on the Facebook groups related to language teaching is what textbook other teachers like.  I have a site called ESL Textbook Reviews that talks about my specific choices and I'll also list a few of them here. 

General 4 Skills Textbooks:



Academic Writing



Public Speaking and Presentations

Classes are done for the semester

Classes are Done!

Happy, happy times here in Busan as I've just finished teaching my last class of the semester, which is actually my last class until March since I've decided to have a mental health break this vacation and spend some time in Canada visiting the family and then to Vietnam for some beach therapy with friends.

Next week is speaking tests/presentations which are pretty low stress for me this time around because I'm not actually interacting with students and instead just observing.  (Check out this blog post for my run down of various kinds of speaking tests and the pros and cons of each).

Then the Monday after that is the final written exam for all my classes, which is even lower stress and pretty easy marking (1-2 minutes/student).  No 1/2 points here!  It's all or nothing.

Some final grade calculating which will be reasonably easy due to my diligent upkeep of that throughout the semester.

Anyway, long story short is that I've done all the hard work of the semester and only the easy stuff remains!  Yeah.

Like the sounds of working at a Uni in Korea and not having any classes until March?  Want to know how to get this job?  Check out this most fabulously helpful book (written by me!)

What Working at a University in Korea is Really Like. Part 4: Classes (or, what I do for 4 hours)

What Working at a Korean Uni is Really Like

If you missed the first 3 parts of this series, check out:

Korean Universities: Schedules

Korean Universities: Classes

Korean Universities: Office Politics

One of the common questions that I get from Hagwon and public school teachers is what I actually do in my classes.  In hagwons, it's extremely rare to have the same students for more than an hour at a time and 40-45 minutes is more common.  In public schools, the class lengths are about the same and the Korean co-teacher usually does the bulk of the heavy lifting.

My classes range from 1.5 hours-4 hours with the same group of students.  4 hour classes can be quite hard to teach so I'll use that as my example.  Here's how I would I use the time (if I was given no materials that I had to teach):

I'd pick a topic such as "Youth unemployment in Korea," "Microfinance" or "Renewable Energy."  I choose stuff that I'm actually interested in and you'd be surprised-even seemingly difficult topics such as these can be adapted and made easier for as low level as high-beginners.  Things like movies, hobbies, food and pets are TOTALLY overdone and I refuse to use topics like these unless forced to (if I'm given a textbook with them in it, or have extremely low-level students-but I generally try to avoid total beginners!).

Hour 1: an introduction to the topic.  This usually involves some very general warm-up questions, key vocabulary, a sample conversation, or something like "describe the picture" for lower levels.

Hour 2: we get into the reading or listening (quite often both).  If you find articles from Breaking News English, you can do the listening first with some sort of "big-picture" questions.  I'd usually listen twice, with the first time just being simple true/false or matching or something and then the second time, I'd increase the level of difficulty and use some short answer or fill in the blank stuff.

Then, I'd get the students to read the same thing that they just listened to but they'd have to answer some serious "critical thinking" or advanced level "reading comprehension" questions where the answers require processing the information in a deep way, or the answers are very subtle and require some "reading between the lines."

Hour 3: Discussion questions based on what they just listened to and read.  The students would have to discuss in small groups of 3-4 people and then we'd talk together as a class.

Hour 4: Some sort of activity.  For example, when I talked about microfinance, I showed a couple videos from Kiva and showed the students my own portfolio of who I lent money to.

Or, it might involve a debate of some kind.  For example, on the topic of Youth Unemployment, it might be something like, "Who has the final responsibility for solving this problem: youth, the government, parents, industry or universities?"

Or, it could be a survey activity.  For advanced levels, they'd have to make their own survey question or two, ask their classmates, process the information and then report back to the class their results.  For lower levels, I'd probably give them the questions already prepared.

Or, I might do some writing activity of some kind where the students have to share their opinion on the topic.  But, I will quite rarely do this and my activities are generally slanted towards speaking.

Speaking of Speech Videos

Whenever I teach presentations and public speaking, I use the most fabulous Speaking of Speech: Basic Presentation Skills for Beginners.  Today, I had a moment of panic because I somehow lost my USB stick with all the videos on it.  But, never fear!  Youtube saved the day as someone helpfully uploaded them all.  Thank you Mr. Kim, whoever you are.

Speaking of Speech Videos on Youtube.

How to Make Writing More Interactive

In one of my lower-intermediate conversation classes, we were studying about "evening routines" using Touchstone 2, Unit 8. 

I did the evening routine listening on page 83, and then followed it up with the writing exercise at the bottom of the page.  In order to make it more interactive, I did the following:

The students had to make 3 or 4 "test" questions based on what they wrote.  Then, they read what they wrote to their partner who had to listen carefully.  Finally, the student asked their partner the test questions.

It was quite useful in making "writing" more interesting than usual and also provided some additional listening, writing (questions) and speaking practice.  The test questions provided a reason to listen.  There were lots of laughs and smiles and good-natured joking when a student couldn't answer their partners questions, or got them wrong.

The Small Stuff that Matters: Ditch the Microphone

A small Sunday morning mini-rant.  When I go into classrooms that only have 30 or 40 desks filling up the entire space, there is always a microphone that has been put to obvious use.  Like it's actually sitting on the podium or something like that.  It always makes me wonder why.  Who actually has such a small voice that they can't project it enough for a class of 30 people?  Does anyone actually just stand at the podium and lecture the entire time?  Does anyone actually like holding a microphone for 75 minutes?  Most importantly, do students actually LIKE listening to a voice that is microphone projected, with a low-quality sound system and crappy microphone? 

It's all just so strange to me.  I've never used a microphone, even with classes of 40 or 50.  But, maybe my style is just kind of different.  I INSIST on absolute silence if I'm talking because I refuse to yell over the students.  I quite rarely write down things like answers to questions in the book so students ACTUALLY have to listen to what I'm saying in order to get the information that they need.  I also INSIST that students sit in the first few rows if it is a really large classroom, without a bunch of empty space because I refuse to yell over them.  I also tell them that I will never use a microphone so if their hearing is poor, they really should sit at the front of the classroom.

Anyway, isn't part of the job of "professor" at a university to be at least decent at public speaking?  The microphone/podium warrior just doesn't seem to cut it, in my world.

Games and Activities for your ESL Classroom

If you're stuck in a rut and looking for some new ideas for your English learning classrooms, check out some of my other sites.  Lots of interesting and fun ideas for both adults and children.

Fun ESL Activities for the Classroom

ESL Warm-up games and Activities

Speaking Activities for ESL Classrooms

Or, check out Speaking Activities That Don't Suck: Foolproof Ways to Force Your EFL Students to Produce Enormous Amounts of English

Free: 40 Tried and Tested ESL Games and Activities

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Speaking Tests: what went down

The other day, I talked about the various kinds of speaking tests for English language learners, but I didn't specifically talk about what I did this semester.  Here's what happened in my course for first year students in the English major at my uni:

I gave the students 6 possible topics, which were very general in nature and included things like, "Home and Family" or "Health and Exercise" and they were essentially what we had covered in class during the previous weeks.

The students came to my office in groups of 4, and then I randomly assigned them a partner and a topic.  The first 2 students had to talk about their first topic for a total of 2-3 minutes, and then the other topic for another 2-3 minutes.  Each person in the group had to start off one of the mini-conversations.  I only listened and quite rarely had to intervene (only in the case of someone giving 1-2 word answers and not asking any questions in return). Then the next set of partners had their conversation about their 2 topics.

I graded them on a 5 point scale on 3 things:

1. Grammar/Vocab use (only what we had studied in class).

2. Interesting, detailed answers (sentences +an extra detail or two)

3. Appropriate questions/ability to keep the conversation going.

Overall, this round of tests went very well. I was able to evaluate about 25 students in just under 2 hours. I finished not feeling totally exhausted, like I would have if I had had individual conversations will all those students. 

I think it was a good balance between random and predictable.  It was predictable in that the students had the 6 possible topics before the test, and they knew their 3 potential partners beforehand.  But, it was random in that the topics were randomly assigned, as well as the partner, so although students could prepare to some degree, they couldn't just memorize a dialogue.

One thing I didn't like was that the weaker students who gave one or two word answers and didn't ask a lot of questions made the test quite difficult for their partner, although I definitely took this into account during the grading. But, the students are all English majors so there are actually no truly terrible students in the class and most of them have at least a basic proficiency in English, as is not always the case in classes like mandatory Freshman English.

It's that time of year...Speaking Tests!

There are various ways for language teachers to do speaking tests, all of which have their positives and negatives.  Here's my brief summary:

1-1 interviews with the teacher.  This method is generally thought to have the highest validity, since no weaker student affect the stronger student in a negative way.  However, I think there are more negatives than positives:

1. The power dynamic which can come into play

2. The necessity to have students, alone in an office or classroom.  This is something that I'll always try to avoid if possible.

3. Exhaustion on the part of a teacher.  It just simply takes a lot of time and mental energy.

4. The teacher needs to serve as examiner and conversation partner, which can get tricky at times, especially at the end of a long day of tests.

Conversations/role-plays among students, usually 1-1 while the teacher just listens/observes.  The big negative of this one is that a weaker student can affect a stronger student, and although the teacher accounts for this in grading, it can often be seen as "not fair" in the student's eyes.  However, there are lost of positives:

1. No power dynamics

2. It can at least partly replicate "real" conversation, where the people are at a similar level of English ability. 

3. The teacher can just focus on listening and not have to act as a conversation partner.

4. Students often feel less nervous with at least one other person in the room besides the teacher.

Presentations, alone or in a group.  These are perhaps the easiest on the part of the teacher to administer, especially in groups.  You can "test" a group of 30 students in as little as a single 1.5 hour class.  The negatives are that it doesn't replicate "conversation" at all and this is most often what courses consist of at Korean universities.  But, if the teacher actually spends time teaching students how to do presentations, it can be a valuable life-skill that students can take with them throughout their lives.


So what am I doing?  3 of my classes with have presentations and the other one will have a conversation with another student, who will be selected randomly.  It's my first time in a long time teaching "conversation" to really high-level students, so it's an experiment of sorts.  I'll let you know how it goes.  Here's the book I used to help prepare my students for the presentation exam:

Lesson Plan: More Technology, Less Sleep

I based this lesson plan loosely on an article from Breaking News English, which is an extremely helpful site for any EFL/ESL teacher.  I used it for a 1.5 hour "News Club," which is a discussion group about current events.

More Technology, Less Sleep Lesson Plan.

A Survey Activity to practice Present Perfect and Simple Past

Present Perfect and Simple Past Survey Activity.

It basically works by students having to ask their classmates the "Have you ever" questions, changing the verb in brackets into PP form.  If the answer is yes,  they then switch to simple past (like normal conversational style) and ask 2 more additional questions, with the partner making sure to answer using the correct verb form for the simple past.  

It corresponds to unit 2 in Touchstone Level 3.

Cigarette Prices in Korea to Double: Lesson Plan

This lesson plan is for a 1.5 hour "News Club" discussion class.  I'm actually excited to talk about it; the topic should be pretty interesting to everyone.

Cigarette Prices Lesson Plan

Public Speaking for ESL Students

Presentations for ESL Students

It's seems like at my uni I've become somewhat of a presentation guru.  I keep getting classes that require me to teach them, which actually makes me very happy, especially because I've been using the most fabulous Speaking of Speech: Basic Presentation Skills for Beginners.

Even in classes that are not really dedicated to speeches, but which fall under the general umbrellas of "conversation" or "whatever the hell you want to teach," I'll try to slip in a little public speaking and presentations.  Here's why:

1. It's a concrete set of skills which students can hold onto and use at a later date.

2. It helps increase confidence when speaking English.  Things like eye contact and speaking loud enough are important, even in general conversation.

3. Presentations at job interviews are big these days in Korea.

4. I'd far rather listen to some (well done!) presentations for the speaking portion of a midterm or final exam than actually engage in 1-1 conversations with over a hundred students, which leaves me exhausted for weeks.




If you're mostly teaching ESL conversation classes, you'll probably find this website really helpful: ESL Speaking: Games, Activities and Resources,

Student Ridiculousness: a Small Rant

Yesterday, I taught an advanced level class where the students are preparing for internships in various locations around the world.  I'm covering the "general English" portion by doing discussion/listening/reading about various topics (that are interesting to me!) like Korea's aging society or workplace discrimination.

There were only 4 students in class yesterday and three of them were excellent, participating in class and trying to figure out new vocab and phrases and actually thinking about the issue and coming up with some constructive responses.

But, one of the students kept looking at her desk and not really participating, at all.  Her answers consisted almost exclusively of "yes," "no" and "I don't know."  When pressed for more details, she would just giggle.  I casually walked over to check out what she was reading and it was some kind of English grammar book, that was almost all in Korean.  And I thought to myself, how bizarre because it seems to me that her time, in a class of only 4 students, with a native English speaker would be far, far better spent actually interacting with that native speaker and the other students.  Like she's going to America in about 3 months, where she will have to actually interact with real, live English speakers on a daily basis.  I just don't get it.  Like really don't get it.

Check out this book about how to get a University Job in South Korea