It is great fun and is very effective. It could also make you money! We are charging just ?5 per English learner for the download of the lesson plan and attendance but you can charge what you like when you set yours up (fluent and native English speakers come for free). Native and fluent speakers go free!
Re-create our Out There learning and conversation sessions by using our self-study lesson plans as preparation for participants before they come to the group meetings and schedule the meetings through Meetup.com. Using Meetup you can upload the lesson plans for members to download once they have paid using PayPal. You can set your attendance fee to whatever you like.
The lesson plans should provide participants with a little bit of structure for their English learning and conversation experience. Here is how it can work (alter the format if you think it needs to be amended), just copy and paste into your Meetup schedule.
Instructions for learners:
1) Pay and download one of the sample self-study lesson plans and the MP3 files for the listening if there are any. There will be three plans, each at a different level.
2) Print the lesson plan you think is at your level and study it with a dictionary next to you.
3) Come along to this first EOT meetup with your pre-prepared questions and use them to start conversations with people, including fluent and native speakers who will be there to meet you and make friends. Once you have had a conversation with someone and used the language from the lesson plan move on or stay there and continue talking about something else.
Instructions for native English speakers:
1) Come along to the EOT meetup and chat with some lovely people who wish to practise their English and get to know the locals at the same time.
2) Once you have helped someone to practise the English from their lesson plan, talk to someone else or just have a longer chat in English with them on any subject.
More and more people are signing up in London now, the next one is on the 3rd of March,we will let you know how it goes. We are sure this will continue to be a success and that we will have created a new more focused form of language exchange that is based upon constructivist and psycholinguistic research and we will be able to help you to become an Out There organiser on Meetup and make some money using our materials.
