I’m working on another pre-sessional course this summer for a British university. I love pre-sessionals, for me it’s the only time of year I work with other teachers. The students are great too, usually very focused and excited at the prospect of studying abroad.

This year we need to focus on fluency in speaking. We seem to hope fluency will improve with time, exposure and growing confidence. It appears to me the activities I usually do are inadequate, they tend to be designed to improve fluency over the longer term by building vocabulary (paraphrasing, using vague language, or functional phrases to buy time, to generalize etc.) or they focus on improving accuracy, or both. I want activities that activate language the students already know. Read more