An ESL listening and reading activity: Agony Aunt | English Activity for Giving Advice

An ESL Activity for when your students are learning about giving advice: Check out Agony Aunt. Agony Aunt is a fun speaking and listening ESL activity related to advice. Keep on watching for all the details you need to know about this popular English activity for children, teenagers or adults. ------- • Check out this blog post for more details on this advice-giving activity https://eslspeaking.org/esl-speaking-listening-agony-aunt/ • If you liked this video, find my teaching playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL0Q8kr18oQKFDBcKGvNh_av3em-Byajj ------ 101 ESL Activities for Teenagers and adults: https://amzn.to/3PaD7q2 https://www.facebook.com/eslspeaking https://www.pinterest.ca/eslspeaking/ https://www.instagram.com/jackie.bolen/ https://www.tiktok.com/@englishwithjackie?lang=en #esl #teachingenglishwithjackie #eslactivities ------------------------------------------------------- Even more Ideas for the TEFL Classroom: https://eslspeaking.org/ -------------------------------------------------------- Timestamp for this listening and reading activity: 0:00 Intro 0:16 What is Agony Aunt? 0:45 My go-to problem for university students in Korea 1:30 What students have to do 2:27 Conclusion Transcript for Agony Aunt: So you know something that everyone likes doing is giving advice. Everyone knows how to solve other people's problems, right? So that's why I love to do this activity with my ESL or EFL students. it's called agony aunt and it's just an advice column that was in newspapers, I guess in Canada or the USA. And people write in with their problems and then the agony aunt gives advice to these people and tries to solve their problems for them. This is ideal for the unit in the textbooks that you can find should and shouldn't for giving advice. The way it works is that I come up with a problem, something that's common kind of in the country that you're teaching and age-appropriate as well. I taught university students in Korea mostly so my problem was there were these high school students or high school student that was studying for the, it's called the seuneung exam. I guess it's kind of like the SAT that students would take in their grade 12 year and it basically determines their entire future. So anyway, it was a student in grade 12 preparing for this exam and they were exhausted. They weren't sleeping. They weren't eating. They were losing a bunch of weight and basically, they were just in really rough shape and they were so worried about their score on the test. Their parents were hassling them to study more and it was just a big mess. I'd put students into groups and then I'd give them something like 10 to 15 minutes and I'd give them some time to write advice to this student, what they would say to this person. And it was such a great one to do because all my students had been through that same process at some point in their lives even as recently as the previous year. So they all had good things to say to that student. And then once that was done, they would read out their advice to the class and then I would generally choose which advice I thought was best. And I mean, it was very subjective so just kind of whatever advice was kind of some solid advice and they did a good job using should and shouldn't and yeah, they did quite a good job presenting it. That kind of thing. I would just say like, I really liked team A over here. Their advice was really great and they did a good job presenting. Good work! But I would also say, oh but from team B, I liked this idea that you said. Something like that. Just try out this activity, agony aunt for when you're teaching about advice. Tags: ESL listening and reading activity, listening activity, advice game, advice activity, listening game, reading activity, reading game, agony aunt examples, problem pages agony aunt, agony aunt, agony aunt game, agony aunt activity, classroom reading game, classroom listening game, teaching listening, teaching reading,