Useful chunks to teach beginners: What’re you doing later?

Lots of useful chunks that we could teach beginners, don’t get taught early on because they’re seen as examples of ‘advanced’ grammar. For instance,  the common question What are you doing later? will be absent from most beginner courses and rarely feature even at Elementary or Pre-Intermediate because it’s ‘the present continuous with future reference’. Instead we focus on the nonsense of describing what people are doing in pictures and the like.. To me, this seems crazy as What are you doing . . . ? can be taught to almost absolute beginners as a useful chunk for asking about plans. Look at these common variations.

What are you doing later?

What are you doing tomorrow?

What are you doing after the class?

You might initially introduce this as a genuine question to beginner students, or when students try to ask you something similar. You can also elicit other endings – translating into English from the students’ first language if necessary:

What are you doing at the weekend?

What are you doing tonight?

What are you doing in the holidays?

Obviously, this will create a need for some answers. The key thing with teaching useful communicative chunks at very low levels is to not expect fully grammatical replies. Single words – or short strings – like cinema, go see family, nothing, football, etc. are all acceptable responses, though we might for example ask play football or watch football? At a later Elementary level and above, we might encourage or simply give grammaticalized replies such as I’m going (to go) to the cinema and I’m going to go and see my family – while still not expecting that students will use this grammar accurately.

The important thing is to make the real conversation available to students. As it was described to me by teachers from a school that piloted our beginner coursebook Outcomes, Beginner learners in the UK can feel socially isolated and they are not helped if they are not taught this stuff. That’s why we teach the question in unit 6 along with two other useful chunks: Do you want … (a coffee / go to the park), and I‘ll meet you …. (outside / at 6). Actually, the students have studied Do you want several times before this lesson, so it’s not really new. And frankly, neither is most of the vocab that complete these chunks.

In my experience, some students do successfully make use of the whole of these chunks and some start to benefit later as the syllabus spirals forward, However, as I say, what’s most important is that by teaching beginners useful chunks like this, we give space for the genuine communication, whether the students are accurate or not.

Want to know more about teaching beginners? Why not do our online teacher development course Teaching Languages at Low Levels. Or you could experience low-level learning and teaching again by doing one of our Basic Spanish courses where we teach useful chunks to beginners such as Que tal? so you can talk with others about your life.