Ashley Koens

I’m already building something and want to take it further

I’ve been teaching English as a second language (ESL) for about a year now, and a few months in, I noticed a problem. Because my students range from young children to adults in different professions, it was taking a long time to prepare each class. I needed a faster way to create tailored, high-quality lessons without spending so much time on prep, so I built a system to do it in under five minutes. At the beginning of each week, I use Canva to create a themed PDF, one for kids and one for adults. It includes a welcome, review of the last lesson, a warmup, and a section for questions. Then I pull premade lessons from sites like ESL Pals or SuperEnglish to teach general or business English. For adults, the premade lessons are okay, but I’ve noticed most curriculums don’t include natural dialogue. When they do, it’s usually short, rough, and not how an American actually speaks. There are also no personalized dialogues. For example, one of my students moved from China to Seattle and runs her own preschool. She struggled with real conversations, like talking to parents or her assistant teacher. She needed practice with things like parent/teacher conferences or discussing a child’s behavior with a parent while offering solutions. Curriculums don’t cover those kinds of real-life situations, so I use AI to quickly generate four vocabulary words and a realistic dialogue tailored to the student. I skim it, adjust the tone if needed, and the whole process takes less than a minute. Many ESL students learn how to read and write English as children, but don’t get much conversational practice. As adults, speaking is usually what they struggle with the most. These personalized dialogues help fill that gap by giving them realistic, real-life conversation practice. It brings the quality of their lessons to a completely different level. Overall, this approach has been effective at saving time and giving students real, practical speaking results they can actually use.