Telephone calls, Questions about English

This is from: http://japanese.about.com/library/weekly/aa040801a.htm

Even though you start understanding a language better, it is always difficult to talk on the phone in that language. You can't use gestures, which help a lot most of the time. Also, you can't see the other person's facial expressions or reactions. You have to listen very carefully to what the other person says. Talking on the phone in Japanese might be especially harder, since there are some formal phrases customarily used in phone conversations. (The Japanese normally talk very politely on the phone unless talking with a friend.) Let's learn common expressions used on the phone. Don't be intimidated by phone calls. Practice makes perfect!

English ability (some questions)

I know that the students are getting frustrated about their English. It's difficult to know if you are improving in English because unlike the TOEIC test, which gives you a grade, conversational English is difficult to assess for the students. I think that videoing and showing the students what they are like goes some way towards giving them their first assessment. Talking about English, such as the questions below also gives the students to chance to air their frustrations and talk about them IN ENGLISH. Feedback about how well they are doing also helps a great deal. Since the students are soon going to be going on a break I would like them to go away feeling as though they are improving and can improve further by taking responsibility themselves.

Today, I also want to ask you some questions about your English.

1. Do you think that you are getting better at English.

2. What do you think you are getting better at in English, for example, pronunciation, grammar, vocabularly, etc?

3. What are you going to try to improve in for the next week?

4. What frustrates you with learning English?

5. What do you think is the hardest thing about learning English? For example, not understanding fast talk, not having topics to talk about, etc.

Now you think of some questions............let's write them on the board.