Post Intermediate - Restaurants 1

Probably one of the most useful lessons that students can benefit from when travelling to a foreign country is Restaurants 1 from the Post Intermediate level. Although one of my regular students at Smith’s School of English, Kyobashi has been abroad several times, he always seems to have difficulty ordering in a restaurant. The menus can be quite an obstacle to get through, especially when the student has no idea what an entrée or appetizer is.

So we started off the item by going through a variety of headings that a menu might list like main course, entrée, side orders, beverages etc. Basically, any word that he might not have been familiar with he was able to jot down into his notebook. After we got the menu all organized we went through a sample menu that was comprised of popular foods and drinks that he was bound to encounter in North America or Europe. Some of the food choices led him to ask questions about steak and kidney pie, sirloin steak, and lamb chops. He wanted to know exactly what part of the lamb the chops came from so I drew him a quick illustration to save looking up the Japanese word up in the dictionary. Now that all of the item choices were familiar to him it was time to start ordering.

We flipped over a page to practice the ordering dialogue that requires the student to order a complete meal from the menu, including desserts and drinks. He really got into this part of the lesson and made notes of the alternate ways that he could pick his desired dish. We switched roles twice so that he had the chance to play the part of both the customer and the waiter. After I was pretty sure that he was confident with the dialogue, I closed the book, leaving only the menu open. He had been expecting this part of the lesson and focused himself on remembering the lines from the dialogue. So we went through the dialogue two more times until he could naturally respond to the waiter’s prompts, changing the lines to suit the situation. To make it a bit more challenging, I threw in extra questions which required him to think of what kind of dressing he wanted on his salad and what kind of topics he preferred on his hamburger or pizza. He handled the bonus questions with very little problem except when it came to inquiring as to what toppings or dressings the restaurant had to offer. I gave him an example question where he could ask the waiter to list what kinds of choices were available.

By the end of the lesson, he had ordering in a restaurant pretty much mastered. He expressed his thanks and told me that he’d be testing those lines out the next time he traveled to the United States on a business trip. He’d grown so used to just pointing at pictures that he was looking forward to ordering something that he really wanted to eat.