Overcoming teenagers’ self-consciousness, shyness and defensiveness is not an easy task. We have had three lessons so far but I suppose I have already broken the ice with most of them. I do like them – to start with – they are nice kids, some a bit lost, some fed up with our marvellous summer weather and they host families 
but I can see they respect me and, even with a bit of French blasé attitude, they haven’t failed to do everything I have been resquesting from them.
As a mini-project and follow-up of a vocabulary and speaking activity on tourist brochures, I asked them to prepare a tourist poster about a place they knew well and liked. I gave them an example on the board of a poster I created myself for London. They worked on that for two days and presented it yesterday. They had to go to the front of the class and convince us to visit their chosen place.
I let them use their imagination and draw at will. Some presentend quite expected posters about Italy, France and Germany and were able to talk quite fluently – for their level- about they production. Others came up with completely unexpected choices: one drew his ideal holiday house, other his own seaside resort and one girl drew her idea of *Paradise*. That was an impressive display of imagination, it was a pity her English didn’t allow her to speak much about it, but I was fascinated because it has a lot to do with the topic of my dissertation.
I asked them to keep their work with me as a souvenir of our lessons and they seemed really pleased with it (!) I suppose in a certain way they are still just kids
