I haven’t tried this yet, but I really think it could solve some problems I’m having with recycling, students who miss lessons and need to catch up, and balancing seeing a large amount of language that they might come across in their work with knowing a few things really well.
After needs analysis, choose just one main aim. In a perfect world that would be a clear priority for most of the class, but as you will see below that isn’t vital and it could even be something randomly chosen from the list of things that they say they might need.
You then plan the whole course (or a large chunk at the beginning of it) around that one priority, and tie the other things that the students also want/ need to do in with that as you go along.
For example, if emailing is the main focus, and other things they mention needing are meetings, negotiations and telephoning, this is how you could do it:
All lessons are related to emailing and the first few lessons are exclusively on that
Some other topics are mentioned by tying them in by function, e.g. when doing asking for information by email, get them to pretend to telephone and use similar language
Others are tied in by language point. For example, you could do part of a lesson on dependent prepositions in emailing phrases and then do dependent prepositions in phrases for other skills that they might need. Ditto with articles/ determiners, collocations or a tense review.
Yet others are tied in to help mix up the skills and energy levels, e.g. roleplaying a meeting on email policy in your company
And finally you can introduce another skill to contrast with the main one, e.g. showing how some opening and closing telephone calls language is similar to emailing (e.g. “I have to keep this short because a client is arriving in a minute”), and how some is different.
Doubt it actually is an original idea, but as I hadn’t come across it before thought I might as well share so others can add, criticise and tell me how everyone else has known about it since the seventies…
Some worksheets on the topics mentioned here (some with links to articles on the topic):
Emailing games and worksheets (including meeting on company email policy)
Meetings and negotiations communication games etc and prepositions pairwork
TEFLtastic 