I am living in Japan and I currently teach children. I am TEFL qualified but I want to move onto adult English conversation classes.

I know there is a lot of websites out there but they don't actually tell you how to go about it. I like about.com but it still doesn't actually tell you the way to organize a lesson. I thought I would ask all you helpful people before I hit the book shops.

Try to think of a topic based lesson that can be split into several (varied) short activities. You can structure it much as you would a normal lesson in that you begin with a greater level of input from the teacher, maybe in the form of vocabulary, structure or pronunciation, and lead through the practice stages until you reach a free practice stage.

Group work and pair work is vital to give the students the maximum amount of speaking practice. The teacher can monitor and correct as and when necessary.

All sorts of material can be adapted for conversation classes - pictures, videos, poetry, newspapers etc.

A lot of games can be utilised too.