Hey future Peace Corps Volunteerss! If you’ve somehow stumbled upon this post thanks to the miracle of Google and SEO, this post is for you!
Today we’re talking about adult English clubs – including some Peace Corps English club ideas.
Even if you’re not an English teacher, odds are that — at some point — you will be roped into hosting and organizing various English conversation clubs for the members of your community.
Shortly after I got to my site, the other new PCVs and I were immediately tasked with taking over a weekly English language club at my city’s Window on America center, which is basically an embassy-run cultural hub and information center located in our public library. WOA hosts a ton of public events — like screenings, speaking clubs, photo exhibits, etc. — managed by various PCVs, embassy employees, Fulbright scholars and enthusiastic Ukrainians. There are also a ton of English language resources at the WOA center.
It’s a really cool chance to not only work with adults, but also to make some English-speaking Ukrainian friends.
Sometimes, it’s kind of tricky to plan an English club. Where to start?! You have to pick a topic, put together an agenda, come up with some fun activities, create materials like slideshows and handouts…
…it can be overwhelming! Especially when you’re hosting multiple clubs per week and you feel your creativity draining. It’s even harder with adult students, too, because you have to balance your ESL-learners language levels with more mature topics than you can typically get away with teaching to secondary school students.
I make it a point to make my clubs as fun and interactive as possible by giving participants the opportunity to play games, give presentations and do activities that make language learning interesting and exciting.
I have three big tips for planning and executing English clubs.
My first tip: Work with other PCVs as much as you can. By rotating weeks with the other PCVs at my site/ in my oblast AND sharing club plans and materials with off-site PCVs, I’ve been able to reduce my club-related workload by 80 percent.
I host one club every three weeks, give or take, and because several of my other close off-site PCV friends do the same, we all exchange club ideas. We actually have a master Google Doc that lists ALL of our club themes — sorted by English proficiency level — and the accompanying agendas with hyperlinked presentations and printable materials.
If you somehow don’t seem to have any close PCV friends hosting English clubs (how?!), odds are still pretty high that someone in your cohort has access to a Google Drive folder somewhere that’s FULL of club plans, materials and ideas!
My second tip: survey your club participants. I sent out a Google Survey that was shared on the WOA Facebook page. There’s no point in spending time and energy creating a lesson plan and materials for a topic that nobody is interested in! You might be surprised what you find out when you simply ask clubgoers what topics they want to cover. For example: I had a survey respondent indicate they were interested in a club about cannabis legislation and culture in the U.S.!
My third tip: Google! I mean, it brought you here, right?
(For any PCVs reading this, please take as much of this content as you want or need. If you reach out and contact me, I might still even have some of these lesson plans and presentations saved somewhere in my Google Drive, and I’d be happy to share them with you!)
Really though, there are SO many internet resources that can help you put together English clubs.
If you opt to make your own materials from scratch, Google Slides, SlidesGo and Canva are great resources for fun slideshow templates. Pinterest also has SO many amazing handouts, activity templates and other ideas you can use.
There are also, I’m sure, a TON of Peace Corps blogs juuuuust like mine that are full of club ideas.
With all that having been said… onto the Peace Corps English club ideas: some theme and activity suggestions!
Club themes/ topics:
- Current events and social issues.
- Any American holiday. If you have an American holiday coming up, great! Make a presentation and plan some activities. I had my students play “United States Holidays: Family Feud,” in December, design and color Mardi Gras masks in February and watch Martin Luther King videos in January.
- Myers-Briggs and personality types. This one is simple: Print out several Myers-Briggs tests. Spend the first half of the club letting students individually take tests, then give a presentation about MBTI and famous people with each personality type.
- …Similarly, horoscopes and zodiac signs.
- Goal setting, planning and time-management.
- …Similarly, pretty much any self-help book. How to Win Friends and Influence People? The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People? The Five Love Languages? DONE.
- American vs. British English.
- “You be the teacher” – more on this one below.
- Road trip the U.S.! The previous volunteer at our site, Carl, had his club themes set for a full year by using this one. Each week’s presentation and activities were centered around a specific U.S. state.
- American culture vs. your host country’s culture.
- …Similarly, breaking American stereotypes and accentuating American diversity.
- Childhood paper games. I had an entire English club that centered around cootie catchers and MASH handouts. It was a blast.
- Health and nutrition.
- Portmanteaus.
- Media literacy. How can you tell what news sources are reputable? What is satire? What’s the difference between a news article, commentary, opinion piece or editorial? Where do your preferred news sources fall on the Media Bias Chart?
- …Similarly, anything you consider yourself somewhat of an expert on. For example: I focused some of my clubs on journalism and yoga because I worked as a journalist for 10 years prior to Peace Corps, and am a Registered Yoga Instructor. As a bonus: What topics can your PCV friends teach?
- …Similarly, guest hosts! Is there a member of your community who is passionate about a topic? Great! Offer to let them host! Offer to proofread their presentation and help with technical language. One of my site’s PCVs did this by letting her host organization (the City of Khmelnytskyi’s environmental division) come in, play a film in English and talk more about what their office did.
- Zero-waste and sustainability.
- Potlucks. This one requires a BIT of pre-planning (which may be tricky in some cultures) but if you can pull it off, potlucks are a great way to share recipes and learn some food-related vocabulary.
- Financial management and investment strategies. This depends on your host country’s financial systems, of course, but if it’s feasible, this one’s great for CED volunteers!
- Game night. I think every PCV packs Bananagrams in their luggage! If you’re lucky enough to have access to a community center with board games like Scrabble and Apples to Apples in place, great! If not, all you need is some paper and packing tape to make your own version of simple games like Taboo or Scattergories.
- Dance, music and songwriting. Split your students into groups, give each group a genre, find them a beat and let them write (and present) a song. Give each group a style of dance (or a very specific dance like the hokey pokey or Soulja Boy), give them 20 minutes to learn that dance via YouTube, and then let them teach everybody else in the class using both physical motion and verbal cues to work that English in there.
- Professional sports. Give your students a presentation on Olympic sports, and play a few games. Charades anyone? You can end this one by separating students into groups and having them make up a new sport, develop rules and demonstrate how their new sport is played.
- Bracket wars! This one times really well with March Madness, but you can do it anytime. All you need is several pre-printed brackets and a list of topic ideas. (Tip: Make them fun! My personal favorite is “cheeses,” but anything from host country cuisine to musicians to authors is do-able. The more specific your category, the more chances your learners have to practice technical language and learn new words like “manchego.”) Make sure you split your students into odd-numbered groups, and then let them debate and vote until there’s a bracket winner.
- Memes and internet culture. Show dumb silly internet videos, like Charlie the Unicorn, and have students analyze and create their own memes.
- Technology, social media and smartphone addictions.
- Social issues and public awareness campaigns. What are some social issues in your host country? Split the club into groups and have each create a public awareness campaign to address that issue.
Club activities:
- “You be the teacher.” If I’m at an absolute loss for fun ideas, I’ll simply give a brief presentation about LITERALLY ANY subject (examples: famous photographers, historical events, the Seven Wonders of the World, music genres, authors, whatever you’re personally interested in!) and then split students into groups. I’ll give each group a sub-topic (a specific photographer, a specific author) and have them do research to give the rest of the club a mini-presentation on their sub-topic. Just no direct quoting from Wikipedia, please.
- Relays. You can make these fun and creative. For my Mardi Gras-themed club, I wrapped trivia questions around beads and had students transfer the beads from one person to another, without using hands, then unwrap and answer a trivia question. For my holidays club, I put trivia questions inside red and green balloons, then split students up into “team red” and “team green,” and had them pop the balloons in teams and answer the questions.
- Game shows. Family Feud, Bingo, Jeopardy, Who Wants to be a Millionaire… if there is a game show format you can think of, it can be manipulated to work as the basis of an English club.
- Debates! These are minimal effort and very engaging.
- Handouts. Like my Myers-Briggs and bracket wars clubs, think about ways you can incorporate pre-printed handouts into your clubs. Some students aren’t as social, so handouts are a great way to encourage individual engagement without focusing every club on big social interactions. Tip: If I know I’m going to be splitting students up into groups later in the club, I’ll write a number somewhere on their handout (or on the back of their Mardi Gras mask!) so all they have to do is refer to the number to find their groupmates.
- Movies, films and screenings. This is last on my list because it’s not very engaging at all, but sometimes a film screening and discussion is a really easy last-minute way to knock out an English club. Just make sure you do the work to prepare your club with additional materials, like a short presentation about what the film will focus on, things to keep in mind during the film, a list of questions the film should answer, etc. Basically the same thing your middle school teachers did during movie days.
OK, anyway! Hopefully you took away one or two club theme or activity ideas from this monster post.
And, seriously — if any future PCVs happen to end up here, please reach out and let me know if you want some of my old materials! I’m happy to share if I still have them.
This post was originally published Feb. 3, 2022. Its timestamp has been updated to better reflect the timeline of my Peace Corps service.
