Help wanted re. ESOL job interview

I have received a request from a site user who has an upcoming job interview. I am not sure how many basic skills / ESOL teachers will be reading this in the middle of August but have offered to share the question on this blog in the hope of receiving a range of teaching ideas / responses.

My gut feeling would be to use a Language Experience approach and, I guess, explain how this strategy could be used in the presentation – giving examples of teaching resources, activities, etc. However, I am not a qualified ESOL teacher and have only used this approach with Entry Level 1-2 literacy students.

The writer thinks they are expecting a PowerPoint presentation which will be followed by a panel interview.

If you have any ideas please share them by leaving a comment - or, if you prefer, email maggie@skillsworkshop.org and I will forward any messages to the site user.

Thank you.

Dear Maggie

I hope you don’t mind me e-mailing you but I hope you can give me some help or point me in the right direction. I’ve tried emailing some teaching forums and have had no replies or anything.

Basically, I’ve got an interview for an ESOL Lecturer position at a local FE college but they want me to do a presentation and this is something I’ve no experience of. Also, I don’t know how long or what format the presentation is supposed to take. Surely they aren’t expecting an all singing all dancing one?

The presentation question is "If you had one or more Level 2 students whose speaking skills were very good but whose reading and writing skills were a lot weaker, what strategies would you use to assist the students in bringing up those skills to Level 2?"

To me, this sounds like a question that could be asked during an interview so I’m not sure how I would go about doing a presentation on it. I’ve been teaching ESOL for 3 years in Liverpool and I have the experience for the job but the idea of a presentation has knocked me for six!

Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot.