Over the last three weeks, I have been observing a speaking class with a a focus on Canadian culture. Each class it two hours long and consists of eighteen students from five different countries, each with a different language base. The students are at an intermediate level of English and are concurrently taking reading and writing courses. Most of the students are eager to participate and are able to interact well with each other.
The general topic of this lesson is dating. The students were previously introduced to the topic by the regular classroom teacher at the end of the previous day's lesson. In that lesson, students completed a customs quiz in their textbook (Genzel and Cummings) that checked their previous knowledge of North American dating customs. They also briefly reviewed four common methods of meeting people to date, and compared them to what occurs in their own cultures.
My lesson focused more closely on some of the aspects of current dating trends: first dates, online dating, blind dates and speed dating. For each of these subtopics, I used a short Youtube video as an introduction, and then had the students work in pairs to discuss the ideas from each subtopic and to use the vocabulary. I arranged the students in male-female pairs where possible, but some of the pairs were female-female. The students seemed comfortable with this arrangement. I also arranged the pairs to mix the first languages, in order to encourage students to communicate in English.
My lesson plan is linked below, with any identifying information redacted.