Nowadays, more and more people (including your students!) have to interview for a new job in English. In this article, we want to encourage you to help your students ace those questions and get their dream job!
Of course, you’re most probably not an HR expert, and neither are we! But you can help your students be more confident with their English, that’s for sure.
Read on to find out how you can do it.
Practise vocabulary
Prepare a list of useful words and phrases for a job interview (you can find them in Twofold Magazine in the Vocabulary Bank). You can do it together with the students during the lesson or have a list ready before the class.
Make sure the students know how to use them correctly so that they feel confident.
How can you do it? Practice, practice, practice.
- go over the phrases, explain the meaning and practise the pronunciation,
- ask the students to put these phrases into sentences that are true for them,
- role-play a job interview using these words and phrases.
Practise grammar
Together with the students, review the various tenses and other grammatical structures that might be useful in a job interview.
Make sure to remind the students in what contexts this grammar can be used:
- Present Simple to talk about the duties in their current jobs.
- Present Perfect (Continuous) to talk about their work experience up to the present moment.
- Past Simple to discuss their responsibilities in previous jobs.
- Future tenses to talk about their career goals.
- Conditionals to talk about hypothetical situations at work.
- Question forms to be able to ask questions about the job.
Practise communication
Think of questions that are commonly asked in an interview:
What are your strengths and weaknesses?
Why do you want to work here?
What can you bring to this company? etc.
You’ll find more questions in this issue of Twofold Magazine in the Convo Cards section. And if you need more, just brainstorm them with your students.
Get the students to practise answering these questions.
How can you do it?
- Give them some time to think about the answers which are true for them.
- Give them some time to practise saying these answers. Focus especially on pronunciation and sounding natural! Don’t encourage them to memorise them.
- Role-play a job interview: put students into pairs, have one person be an interviewer, and the other one an interviewee (you can find role-plays for a job interview in this material).
Extra activities
If you have more time to practise this topic, you can do some extra activities.
#1 Talk about education and experience
Go over students’ education and past experience and help them to talk about it. Very often the names of particular courses or even job posts can be difficult to translate into English.
#2 Write a dialogue
Get the students to come up with a template for a job interview dialogue. You can bring some photos for inspiration. You can find the photos and a job interview dialogue in this material.
#3 Write a CV and cover letter
If you have more time to spend on this topic, you can help the students with their CVs and cover letters.
Bring a template of a CV to class and ask the students to complete it with their information.
#4 Play a video of an interview
You can play a short video of a job interview (you can find a lot of them on YouTube), break it apart and analyse it with the students. It will give them a good idea of what to expect.
Happy teaching!
