Last week I tried something that had worked well with my sophomore students. In my experience, the students generally like anything that is different from what they could find in an English textbook like idioms, slang, dialectal differences etc. For my last English Corner I talked about chatting or texting in English. I don't think it is a very practical or academic topic but the students at Web really liked it especially since they use a lot of abbreviated language in Chinese when they text on phones or chat online.
First I went over what basic "SMS language" is (thank you Wikipedia) and covered some basic rules. For example when chatting and texting many people don't capitalize, don't use punctuation, eliminate vowels and use a lot of abbreviations. I gave them some basic clues like r=are, 2=too/to, y=why, 4=four, c=see, u=you etc. and then I let them try some on their own. Here is the list I gave them: btw, tgif, asap, fyi, l8r, bff, lol, xoxo, omg, jk and idk. They absolutely loved it! I gave them a few messages to decode and then had them try and write their own.
Afterward we talked about the advantages and disadvantages of texting language and it turned out to be a really good discussion. I even learned that many Chinese are worried about losing their memory and ability to write the more difficult characters as most people only use computers and phones to write these days - kind of feels like us and spell check! In the future I'll be looking for more interesting topics like these; even if the topics seem a little silly, the fact that students get excited and involved means that there will be more English speaking going on.
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