It used to feel like a serious chore coming up with interesting topics to talk about week after week in conversation classes with my advanced ESL adult students. Can you relate? I think I felt like, if someone is paying me for classes, I need to bring my A-game: create activities and content from scratch, build a whole personalized lesson, etc. Then, I realized I was seriously overcomplicating lesson planning. I don't need to re-invent the wheel, I just need to find a current topic and ask some thought-provoking questions. Now, classes take waaaay less time to plan and my students are always commenting that they love our conversation and the articles I send them. Honestly, they end up being some of the best conversations I have all week, too! So, I'm here to share my tried-and-true formula for planning a successful conversation class with my B2/C1 students who have expressed a desire to focus on vocabulary, particularly idiomatic expressions and phrasal verbs (I avoid gramma...
