Workplace curriculum for ELL

Submitted by Stacy Early on Fri, 07/26/2024 - 14:36
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  • 4 Comments

Hi all! I am looking for a curriculum for beginning to intermediate ELL classes focusing on workplace topics. 

Safety, common phrases for HR including questions about their checks, generally asking questions of supervisors at work (industrial mostly), being able to report a maintenance issue, etc. 

We use English Forward, but those lessons aren't really what we need. So we can do our own from their lesson flow, but I'd rather have some things ready to go and structured. 

    Comments

    Hi Stacy, 

    I can recommend Ronna Magy's wonderful book,  Working it Out -- certainly for low-intermediate learners. You could do scaffolding for beginners. And Donna Price also has a great book for intermediate learners that came out in 1998 Skills for Success. The lessons are applicable across workplace contexts, and you can easily provide more recent realia to go along with the content.  Again, you could scaffold the material for beginners. 

    I also found the following on LINCS: https://www.literacyvolunteersandro.org/LVAWorkplaceCurriculum11116.pdf and these materials  on the Web. 

    https://www.literacyvolunteersandro.org/LVAWorkplaceCurriculum11116.pdf

    https://atlasabe.org/news/work-readiness-curriculum-for-low-level-esl/

    Another resource you might consider would be working with AI - ChatGPT, Claude or CoPilot_ to create structured instructional materials that would match the level(s) you need and provide the up-to-date workplace content  you need. For example, I asked Chat GPT for a beginning ESL task-based lesson on HR terms and this is what it gave me. (Of course, you would want to refine the lesson , but this was done in about 3 minutes without any refinements 😉) 

    Hope this is helpful! 

    Warmly, 

    Jayme 
     

    Thanks for sharing these great suggestions, Jayme, including the AI-generated ideas! It is my understanding that Working it Out is out of print, but there are many other popular published curricula that include a focus on workplace readiness, including Road to Work, Step Forward, Future, Ventures and more.

    Good luck, Amy, in locating materials that best suit your class.

    If members have other resources to recommend, please do!

    Cheers, Susan