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Quote Frauke I can not do pair work or group work and it looks like that everything out of the books don't seem appropriate for them. I am so NOT creative here....
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Hi Frauke,
I teach adults one to one all the time, at all levels from beginners to advanced. just a comment on your two points above :
You can do pairwork! It's just that you have to be the other member of the pair! This obviously means that you can't monitor at the same time, but try taping the activity. You can then play back the conversation, the student can try to correct his/her own mistakes or reformulate the things s/he had difficulty with.
Some pairwork activities can be adapted to become individual activities for one to one. For example a spot the difference activity with pictures, intended to be done with one student having each picture and describing it to his/her partner can be done by letting the student see the first picture for ten seconds, then turning it over andshowing him/her the second. They then have to list, from memory, the differences.
At lower levels I think students need a coursebook in order to provide a coherent course. They also need to do all the things that they would do if they were working in a group. Teachers are often frightened, for example, of asking students to read or do written exercises in class. Don't be - especially if they're not doing homework. They need to. The advantage of 1-to-1 at lower levels is that you can also add in things which are particularly relevant to the student. For example, with one beginner, I taught the past form of verbs (affirmative only) very early on. We then started each lesson with her telling me the things she had done in the preceding days. because she was saying things like I
went to a meeting about ... I had a problem with... the specific vocab she needed for her work came up - which it wouldn't have done if we'd just ploughed through the course.
At higher levels it's more interesting to work on authentic materials based on the student's own interests - which may be for work or personal - but also much more time consuming in terms of preparation. At the moment, for example I have one person responsible for energy issues - we're working on EU and other documents concerning initiatives on pollution (provided by the student or from the Net) and another who's taking a high level sailing licence - we're working on a diary of a round-the-world race, again from the net. In each case I divide the text into sections, and then turn it into a "unit" with pre-text discussion activities, general and detailed comprehension tasks, vocabulary study etc. I also use short clips of video from BBC World which I work on in much the same way.
Hope that helps.