Which grammar item should I teach next?

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MrWunderbar

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Hello,

Some of you might not know me yet, I'm a student who is currently fulfilling an internship at a vocational high school in China.
My task is to improve the students oral English, which means pronunciation of course, but also to teach them useful things for a basic conversation in English.
I teach nine different classes and each one a single lesson per week. That is not much time.
The past weeks I focused to teach my students the use of the simple tenses (besides pronunciation exercises). But my intention is not fill them up with any possible way to use a tense, it is much more to make them aware, that there are different tenses in English and that it is important to know that they can crucially change the meaning of a sentence. And also because their English book requires them to have that knowledge. (it starts with past perfect and ends with reported speech)
I have one particular class that has a lot of very good students. To say it more colloquial: "they eat grammar and spit out English"
I have taught them following so far:
present simple, present progressive, past simple and "will-future"
I also always showed them the differences between the tenses, by establishing a connection between them. (present simple vs. present progressive, present simple vs. past simple, etc.)

Now I'm not sure what I should teach them next. Currently I can't decide between present perfect and to-be-going-to. I'm not sure which one is more useful (and I know that this is not a good measurement, but I have to think about what uses them the most.)

Or do you have a completely different idea?
I'm open to any suggestions.
 

Soup

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Or do you have a completely different idea?
I'm open to any suggestions.
Ask your students what they want to work on. Their replies will surprise you as they have the answer you're looking for. :-D
 

MrWunderbar

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Ask your students what they want to work on. Their replies will surprise you as they have the answer you're looking for. :-D

I do that with my older students (18), who have a more concrete idea what they want to learn and what not (Currently I'm teaching them the IPA). But these are my youngest ones (16) and they would not even understand what I ask them.

And by the way, this would work in the Western World, but in China the teachers even say to me: "You can teach whatever you want." They are too polite to give me orders what to do or what I should not do.
This is a cultural difference, that makes my job very difficult, because I have to decide everything on my own.
 

MrWunderbar

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Problem solved, I taught them the difference between "WILL" and "GOING-TO".
Worked out quite well.
Thread closed.
 
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