Main Idea:  Give students homework to listen to a story. When they come back to class, they have to share and discuss.

Some Benefits:

• works on ground and remotely

• authentic and engaging

• wide variety of language exposure & includes questions about language comprehension

• students choose and share

• you only need half your students to do the homework to get a conversation going - if someone didn't do the listening homework, they are in charge of getting enough details of the story to retell it. Then students that did do it can give recommendations to students that didn't do it yet.

Possible Conversation Questions:

Retell:

• Share the stories you listened to with your group. 

• Use the pictures as visual aids

• Retell their stories.

• Ask questions!

Share:

• Which story did you like best? Why 

• Which story resonated with you most? Why?

• What do the stories make you wonder about?

• What do you think the future holds for the people in the interviews you heard?

Language:

• Was there something you didn't understand? What?

• Were there new expressions or vocabulary you heard? What?

• Did the speakers have speaking style that was new for you? Explain.

• What about their speaking style made it easy or difficult for you to understand?

• Did you look at the script?

Connect:

• If you could interview anyone from your family for StoryCorps, who would it be and what kinds of questions would you ask?

• If you could interview a friend StoryCorps, who would it be and what kinds of questions would you ask?

• If you were going to be interviewed for StoryCorps, what would you like to talk about?

Here are some other sites I use for same type of activity where students choose something to read or listen to and then come back to share and then do a project or activity that mirrors what they saw. These are all aimed at intermediate to advanced learners of English, and my students are adults. If you are teaching a thematic unit, you can also find some very good source material for discussions about immigrant identity, the importance of education, parenting, and much more. 

Warning: I definitely curate these for my students. Some have language or topics that may not be suitable for class - especially if you want to promote discussion.

The Moth - True stories told live, longer format audio and video format, mostly for adult learners.

Humans of New York - photographs with written text of  back story of people in photos.

Middle Ground - YouTube channel from Jubilee where people with opposite ideas come together for a conversation.

Spectrum - also from Jubilee, a  collection of videos where people have to respond on a spectrum of agreement to statements (I have done this remote with Google slides - each student moves a shape - very engaging. Here is a link to a slide you can use.)

This I believe - an extensive site of essays with audio of the writers reading them. It includes essays from famous figures and not famous. You can search thematically or search a name. My advanced students choose one and do a summary/response activity where they have to connect a personal experience to the same theme.