Transform Self-Study Workplace Courses into Engaging Group-Learning Experiences

Ellii's new career-specific courses were initially designed to be used as self-study solutions for English learners looking to explore a variety of career pathways. While some students are waiting patiently to get into English language classes, others are looking for specialized content that meets their specific needs outside of a General English class. 

Teachers or administers can assign a course, and ELs can work their way independently through the digital-only units on their laptops or mobile devices. All tasks and assessments are autoscored; however, we hope that teachers are monitoring students' results and progress and helping as much as they can along the way. 

But what if you want to teach Ellii's workplace courses in a group setting? We know now that many teachers are previewing these ready-made courses with this question in mind.

Here are some ideas for adding speaking, writing, and other group activities into a classroom setting. Please share your own activity suggestions and feedback in the comments below! 

Exploit the dialogues in pairs 

Each unit in a career-specific course at Ellii centers around one dialogue with two or three speakers. As a self-study task, students can read and listen to the dialogues and review vocabulary in context. As a class, you can play the audio and students can follow along. Students can also take turns reading the dialogue out loud. But what else can you do in class with ready-made dialogues? Here are some ideas:

• Read the dialogues out loud as a pair and then swap roles
• Peform the dialogues for the teacher and work on pronunciation and intonation
• Swap out a set number of words or expressions and perform a new dialogue 
• Write an entirely new dialogue using the key vocabulary and expressions 
• Role-play what happened before
• Role-play what happens next

Have a class discussion after each scenario

• What was the dialogue mainly about? 
• What went wrong? 
• What went right? 
• Do you think this scenario would happen on a daily basis? If not, how often?
• Is this a scenario that you could see yourself excelling in? Why or why not?
• Are you still interested in this career after studying this scenario? Why or why not? 
• What else do you want to know about this type of scenario?

Help the new vocabulary become more sticky

Here are a bunch of activity ideas we have shared in the past about reviewing vocabulary with ELLs. We also recommend using these blank Vocabulary Cards.

• How to Remember Vocabulary (Share the URGE method with your learners)
• 4 Activities for Reviewing Vocabulary (Hot Seat, Matchup, Concentration A & B)
• One-to-One Vocabulary Review Ideas (Wh-questions; Reduce, Reuse, Recyle; Speed Sort; Word Soup; and more!)

In addition, we hope you have already discovered the places to find related flashcards and silent clips (and how to use them) in this post: Career Pathways for Newcomers.

Have students quiz each other before assigning the assessments

Each workplace course has two assessments—a mid-course and a final assessment. Your students can work in pairs to quiz each other on the vocabulary and scenarios using the Review task from each unit. Alternatively, ask each student to come up with five questions and then pull them out of a box and quiz the class as a group. Students can raise their hands or approach the board to answer. Examples of question types include drawing, spelling, or defining words. Encourage students to also ask main idea or detail questions about the scenarios. 

• Draw a call button for me.
• When would a nursing assistant use an ear thermometer?
• How does a pharmacist technician verify a person's ID?
• How do you spell autoclave?
• What kind of questions does an EMT ask when arriving at the scene of an accident?

Create your own additional units together

• Put students in pairs or groups of three. 
• Have groups come up with a new scenario involving the worker (e.g., nursing assistant) and a colleague or patient/customer from the course.
• Encourage students to research their new scenarios. (They may want to try to use AI for this task, but make sure that they fact-check the results!)
• After writing a new short dialogue, encourage students to choose about 6–10 keywords that they want to teach from it. (Alternatively, encourage them to recycle vocabulary they learned in the course.)
• After writing their new dialogues, have students work together to peer-edit each other's work (try our Writing Correction Key). Where would the new scenario fit best into the course?
• Students can then try to create other tasks to build out their lesson (matching, dialogue, vocabulary review, comprension, review), using the template that Ellii has used in the course.

Interview a professional

To build these courses, Ellii collaborated with people in the field, including nursing assistants, phlebotmists, and others. Your students could do this as well!

Do you or any of your friends, colleagues, or even students know someone who works in this field? Would they be willing to come into your class to talk to the students or even call in via speaker phone?

Have your students prepare some questions for a professional whether you find someone to ask or not. If you can't find someone to answer the questions live for you, consider putting students to work researching the answers to their own questions.

Reflect on the course

We hope you and your learners always take the time to reflect on the content you use at Ellii. We have plenty of reflection tools that you can use in our Assesment Tools area. Some of these tools may be useful for you to use alongside these courses. You could even have students share comments on this blog post!

• 3-2-1 Reflection
• Exit Slips
• Wrap-Up

Help Ellii design a printable workplace course template

If you are hoping to use paper-based versions of Ellii's workplace courses, we would love to hear from you!

• Which tasks and activites would you like to see in a paper-based version of Ellii's courses? Would you use an abridged printout that has the dialogue and comprehension questions, or are you looking for a full printable lesson with all of the tasks from the digital version (i.e., similar to an Everyday Dialogues PDF)?
• Would you be using the printable version in a group or one-to-one setting?
• Is there a reason the digital version is not currently meeting your classroom needs?

Any suggestions or feedback you have will help as we explore how to reverse-engineer our courses for your printable needs in 2025. Thank you for your requests!

What ideas do you have for adding engaging classroom activities to self-study materials.