Second language learning: Fluency in complex sentences?

Post date: 2021-03-06 08:10:05
Views: 82
I volunteer as a tutor of conversational English (I'm not a trained ESL teacher). The learner I work with has very good English skills and she has a job requiring her to use English. She's expressed that her chief challenge is constructing complex sentences on the fly. What activities are good for building fluency in complex sentences (e.g. conditional, indirect speech)

I totally get the problem, since I'm an advanced intermediate learner of another language and past conditionals, etc. are a time that I totally have to stop and work out the verb tenses. ("I wish that I... had known or I have, no, would have... told you.") It's a real barrier to fluency.

She says that she has studied a lot of grammar but needs help applying it. I think her theoretical grammar's a bit weaker than she thinks and I've found modeling sentences useful, but the goal of the lessons isn't to do grammar worksheets.

I've done a lot of asking questions about hypotheticals, both past and present. I find that the asking questions and answering them thing tends to lead to her saying one sentence in the conditional, and then a longer chat in the present. I want to think of activities that motivate her to use the complex sentence structures she needs to at work, e.g. reporting on what people tell her to a third party, bouncing back and forth in time.

Role play? I hate it with a fiery passion myself, because it changes the dynamic from wanting to communicate to having to find something to say, but I can imagine it being useful for someone who doesn't have the same terror of performing that I do.

Other ideas? I'd also appreciate any professional terminology I can use to find ideas online. When I search by grammatical concept, I get... grammar worksheets.
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