The Pros and Cons: 25 Engaging Topics for Adult ESL Students

The Pros and Cons is an English fluency building workbook for adults designed to help ESL teachers create engaging and fun classes, covering a wide range of topics, and to help those students build fluency by providing ample activities that guide them to be creative and speak out. It's designed to be straight-forward and easy to use, so the teacher can pick it up and go into class with it with minimal preparation.

This workbook focuses on getting ESL students of intermediate and advanced English levels to engage with each other, and the teacher, in the case of one-to-one classes, through activities and questions that promote discussion and decision-making. They will be challenged to think critically, and solve problems, all while using English as the mode of communication to deal with a variety of different tasks.

What topics are included in this workbook?

1. Arranged Marriages
2. Helping the Poor
3. Telling White Lies
4. War
5. Adoption
6. Colonizing Mars
7. An International One-Child Policy
8. Living Together Before Marriage
9. Dating a Colleague
10. Moving Abroad
11. Being Child-free
12. Cloning
13. Dating During High School
14. Making Kids Earn Their Allowance
15. Banning Smoking
16. Going Completely Green in 5 Years
17. Nuclear Weapons and Energy
18. Open International Immigration
19. Marrying Outside of Your Culture
20. Harsher Punishments
21. Dating Students
22. Being Your Own Boss
23. Divorce
24. Dating Apps
25. Using Tablets Instead of Textbooks

Each topic, or unit, includes new vocabulary, discussion questions, activities for group- and pair-work, as well as statistics and a closing activity, or closing discussion questions.This workbook shines the most when used with groups of students, but can also be adapted to work well in one-to-one situations with VIP students (in the case of some language training schools) or private students.

Author's Note: As a teacher myself, I can say that the Pros and Cons has been my longest running series, and it has proven to be popular at every language training school I've used it at, and the content has continuously evolved over the past five years. The students are actively engaged, and even the quietest students find that they have something that they want to contribute to the discussion and the activities. My classes tend to be made up of students from lower-intermediate to advanced, and from age 14 to 60, and all have been able to participate and contribute to the conversations, as well as have many opportunities to speak out and engage with others.