Difficulties in finding topics

[housecat]

Well, the point was that everything he'd learned in his texts was academic and formal. He needed, and liked, learning more about how people really speak, casually, in the States. Still kind of academic, but it was interesting, and useful, for that student.

[PapaAzucar]

A fairly useful topic that I don't think many ESL teachers cover is the internet slang like
http://www.internetslang.com/
http://www.noslang.com/
It may be bad English, but it is probably more useful than some colloquialism book, especially for the younger generations.

[Ducked]

I don't have any sustained one-on-one classes with yoofs.

I do, however, have 2-3 small-group "freetalk" classes a week at the school, (free in the sense that its an unpaid extra, NOT that they talk freely). I sometimes use prints of the TIME "The week in pictures" and get them to describe/explain/speculate on what they see.

I usually run this as a competition, though, which doesn't really fit your situation, so not really very useful. Sorry