Make Your Free-Talk Lessons More Fun With Social Media

Did you know that World Social Media Day is coming up?  

World Social Media Day was launched by Mashable on June 30, 2010. It was born as a way to recognize social media’s impact on global communication and to bring the world together to celebrate it.

– National Today

Thanks to social media, we now have greater access to languages as they are spoken in real life! To celebrate, we’ll discuss some tips for teaching authentic English using sites like Facebook and Instagram. Feel free to suggest these activities during your next free conversation lesson!

Share Pages You Follow

The first thing we can do is to share our favorite pages with our students.

In particular, we can introduce them to pages focusing on topics they’re interested in. The more fascinated they are, the more likely they’ll be willing to read the posts and interact with them in English.

If we don’t know any pages that the student might find interesting, we can look them up together by Googling “top Facebook/Instagram pages” followed by the student’s topic of interest.

For lower-level students, it’s best to look for pages that use short and simple language in their posts. After all, students will quickly lose motivation to read if posts are too long or difficult, and that would defeat the purpose of learning with social media.

Remind students that they can use the translation function to figure out the meaning of a post they’re not 100% sure about. And of course, they can always bookmark the more difficult posts and ask us about them during their next lesson with us!

Students who want to maximize exposure to English can use Facebook’s “see first” feature. This allows users to choose what they see at the top of their news feed. Setting English pages to show up at the top will force students to see English as soon as they open Facebook.

Just keep in mind that Engoo, like many other schools and learning platforms, strictly forbids students and tutors from connecting with each other over social media. This is for everyone’s safety and security.

Do Picture Description Exercises

With the pages we found above, we can now try to do picture description exercises. 

Describing real pictures can be fun, because two people will often react to the same photo in dramatically different ways, which always leads to a great discussion.

We can also encourage students to bookmark content they’d like to describe with us next time. Here are instructions for doing this on Instagram and Facebook.

Write on Social Media

After describing a post, we can also encourage our student to comment on it in English. They can start out with simple comments like “Nice photo!” or “What a beautiful sunset!”.

Once they get used to responding in English, they can try writing longer comments like, “I enjoy reading your posts very much. I feel like I’m learning a lot.” With longer comments, they might even be able to apply the vocabulary you taught them during the picture description exercise.

We can encourage students who already enjoy posting on their own social media accounts to try posting in English. If the student doesn’t feel ready to write entire posts, they can start with some hashtags in English and gradually add more and more English to their posts.

In Japan, some of our students actually have “study accounts” on Instagram, where they reflect on each lesson and say a few words about their tutor. One student even shared that her study account keeps her motivated: “If I don’t take a lesson, I can’t post on my account, so this motivates me to keep taking lessons!” So this is another option we can recommend to students.

Finally, remind them that they can use the hashtags #engoo (or #DMM英会話 in Japan) when they post, so they can connect with other users who are learning English through our platform. They can reply to each other’s posts, exchange study tips, and keep each other motivated.

Discuss Social Media

Some of your students may just want to talk and that’s OK too! Social media has become widely-discussed in recent years, so there’s plenty of topics to talk about. 

Here are some intermediate-level Daily News articles to get you started:

• “How to Get More Followers on Social Media”
• ”Algeria Blocks Social Media During National Exams”
• “How Social Media Can Help or Hurt Your Job Search”
• “Best Daily Snapchat Posts to Share $1 Million”

And here are some advanced ones:

• ”Data from 500 Million Facebook Accounts Found Online”
• ”Social Media Goes Dark for Black Out Tuesday”
• ”Study: Increasing Social Media Use Raises Depression Risk”

Happy tutoring!