Friday, June 30, 2017

Do your ESL/EFL students need to learn how to apply for jobs? Let's have a Mock Job Fair!

You need to prepare your ESL/EFL students to seek employment and you would like to offer more real-life opportunities for your students to practice. Let me share an amazing project you can do in your language school, college or university to achieve this goal.

My coordinator Jennifer Loewen created an amazing project in which beginning and intermediate students can play the role of either employees or employers. It is a "Mock Job Fair" where all the groups meet and interact. All the steps are carefully presented and practiced with the students in class and all the participants (teachers and students) can assess all the phases of the project.

If you have beginning students - they will be the employees. They learn how to read and understand job advertisements, where to look for jobs, how to apply for positions and how to answer interview questions.

If you have intermediate and advanced students - they will be the employers. They decide what kind of business the class wants to open (hair salon, bar, restaurant, daycare, coffee shop, etc.) and they learn how to create job advertisements, application forms, job interview questions and posters for the job fair. All the intermediate and advanced classes open a different company and "hire" for various positions.

I had the opportunity to prepare my students for both roles and they got very excited to learn about all the steps of the project. I am also very happy because some students became more confident and applied for real jobs after our project and guess what?.... They got the jobs!

Some students' impressions about the project: it improved their confidence, they learned a lot of contextualized vocabulary, and learned about how to apply for positions in Canada. Even though it was a mock job fair, almost everybody felt it was like a real one. Some even got a bit nervous during their job interviews!

You can see some pictures of my students' participation in two fairs below:

Beauty Centre - Winbeauty








Coffee Shop - Golden Cup










If you teach in Canada, you can find all the details for this project in Tutela  . If not, I can send you all the files, just let me know your email in the comments.

Do you have job fairs like these too? Please share your ideas in the comments. Thanks a million!


No comments: