Background Information:
Teacher: Tarasine Buck
Date: 28 October 1998
Class Description: teenagers or adults, high intermediate to advanced proficiency; best for students who might be looking for a job in the U.S.
Time: four class periods, 65 min. each.
Unit Goal: for students to prepare for and develop skills necessary to be successful in a job interview.
Enabling Objectives:
(5 min.) Ask if any of the students have ever held a job, either in their home country or in the U.S. As a class, discuss what are considered "good jobs" in students' home countries and what kinds of jobs students have had and/or want to have in the future. Tell the students that, during this unit, you will talk about and learn skills for being successful in a job interview in the U.S.
Pre-Listening:
(2-3 min.) Explain that you will be listening to a brief audio (or video) segment of someone talking about what U.S. employers look for in job interviews. Discuss as a class what the students think the person will say.
Focused Listening:
(10 min.) Pass out the list of questions corresponding to the segment and ask students to answer the questions as they listen. Play the segment.
Post-listening:
(10 min.) As a class, discuss what you learned as you listened. Write unfamiliar vocabulary items and phrases on the board as they come up and talk about what they mean.
Manipulative Practice:
(5 min.) Use the new words and phrases in several example sentences, writing them on the board as you go. Ask students questions using the new vocabulary. For example, if "first impression" is a new vocabulary item, you could ask "Do you worry about making a good first impression on someone you meet?" "What do you think makes a bad first impression on someone?" Have them turn to another student and practice using the vocabulary by asking questions of each other.
Meaningful Practice:
(15 min.) Have students work in pairs to review orally the answers they wrote to the questions in the listening activity, focusing on the similarities and differences between their home culture and U.S. culture job interview expectations. Encourage them to use the new vocabulary. Circulate and note some of the responses. Call the whole class together and discuss some of the similarities and differences that they discovered, perhaps calling on the students whose responses you noted.
(15 min.) Pass out the article entitled "For first impression, dress your best" (or other appropriate article) together with the corresponding question sheets. Have the students read the article in groups of 3 or 4 and answer the questions orally. Circulate to check comprehension, answer questions, etc.
Closure:
(2-4 min.) Assign extra-class work: finish any article questions they might not have completed; write down three possible questions an interviewer might ask an interviewee (you can encourage them to ask friends, roommates, etc. for ideas).
Introduction/Pre-Listening:
(3-4 min.) Explain that today you will be discussing the types of questions an employer might ask in an interview. Have the students compare with a neighbor the questions they wrote down as extra-class work. Have students decide whether or not they think their questions will show up in the video or simulation.
Focused Listening:
(7-8 min.) Introduce a short video segment or simulation of a typical job interview. Ask students to take out the questions they prepared for extra-class work. Play the segment or act out the simulation; have them notice if the questions they wrote are actually asked in the interview and write down any others the interviewer asks.
Post-Listening/Manipulative Practice:
(15 min.) First, write the questions the interviewer asked on the board, adding any others that students have come up with. Discuss whether any of the questions were unexpected and whether any of the questions are different from job interview questions in their home cultures. Then ask the students how the interviewee responded or how they would respond to the questions, focusing on the grammatical tenses of the responses (i.e. simple present: like to work with people, present perfect: I have worked in this field for three years, simple past: I stopped working for that company because I moved and so on). Model other plausible responses to the questions. Then, have pairs of students practice asking and answering the questions with a focus on the grammatical structures, taking turns as interviewer and interviewee. Circulate to check comprehension and answer questions.
Meaningful Practice:
(15 min.) As a whole class, discuss whether interview questions might differ depending on the job. Ask for some different jobs students have or would be interested in having. Write them on the board and discuss differences in questions an/or preparation needed, requirements, and so on. Show some sample help wanted ads on an overhead projector to show real life job requirements. (Briefly explain common abbreviations and terms.)
(15 min.) Have students choose a job they would be interested in having either now or in the future. In pairs, have them discuss and write down job requirements and possible interview questions in order to prepare. Pass out sample classified ad sections to help. Circulate to answer questions.
Closure:
(2-4 min.) Explain that tomorrow, students will be practicing mock interviews with each other. Assign extra-class work: prepare appropriate questions and answers.
Note: In addition to the focus on oral communication skills, this unit plan attempts to integrate the skills of listening, reading, writing, and grammar in varying degrees. In a truly integrated skills curriculum, the unit could be expanded to include more practice with reading want ads, job notices and additional literature on the subject as well as a resume writing component.
Article: "For First Impression, Dress Your Best"
Questions