City Tours

Shane Uesugi and Marco Escalera, ESL instructors for ELS Language Centers

Level: Beginning

Before you begin:

Objective: Students learn to obtain, organize, plan and present info. from various sites for presentations.Used to develop oral (speaking) skills, listening acquisition (i.e. audience takes notes and asks questions), and working together as a team.

Introduction

1) students are divided into pairs.

2) each pair finds information from a site as directed by instructor

Sample activity: "Tour Guide" Description: students use MAPBLAST(http://www.mapblast.com) or Yahoo (http://maps.yahoo.com)to find information on points of interest, weekend activities, restaurants, historical sites,places for entertainment, etc. Students gather info from different locales and work together (in pairs) to present to the class.

Presentation

During presentations, students will act as "tour guides" to give: directions to the places, and present the special activities and information for each point of interest (i.e. cost, times of availability, specials, attractions, etc.). After all presentations are completed or during presentations, students exchange information and have options to plan a weekend activity based on information exchanged. If possible, students can submit a "critic's review" of the place they visited and present this to the class.

Practice

Results: students can practice conversational skills to share information taken from internet. Some cultural information (depending on the location i.e point of interest)about the community can be discussed and compared.