This is really interesting to me. I haven't been an ESL teacher before, but I am trying my hand at being one unofficially one for someone close to me who is trying to reach fluency, but has plateaued at an upper intermediate level. These are all things I am trying to encourage myself, but I have no real idea how.
Is there anything out there on the internet about this, or do you have any pointers?
But very, very basic pointers: Free reading is actually the key. Read whatever you like. Read every day without exception. If the person is learning English, you're in luck because there are thousands and thousands of graded readers. Those are a great place to start.
Research has shown that you need to understand 95% of material before you can learn from context. This is massively important to understand. The advice of "If you don't understand it, skip over it and eventually you will understand" is well meaning, but is especially bad advice for learning a language which does not share a root as your native language. It can work well if you are learning French from English, for instance because the average English speaker knows something like 10,000 French loan words and can generally figure out what things mean from context. If you are going from Chinese to English, for example, you do not have that advantage.
When reading something above your level, scan the text for words that you don't understand. When you get to about 20, enter them into a spaced repetition program like Anki. Memorise them. Then re-read the text. The next day, re-read the text and get 20 new words. The next day, re-read both and get 20 new words. Keep doing this until the text at the beginning is as easy to read as your native language. Then start skipping that part. Every once in a while go back and read earlier chapters, etc.
Once you have read one book all the way through, find another book by the same author. They tend to use the same vocabulary and expressions from one book to another. You will almost certainly be able to read this book for pleasure without the need to look anything up. Switch to a different author for studying, but keep up the pleasure reading. Bootstrapping yourself to the point where you can read for pleasure is really important because it allows you to "study" without undue effort. For some reason, allowing your brain to relax is important for assimilating the information (at least in my experience). All work and no play makes for a person who is not fluent in the language.
As soon as possible, stop using dictionaries that translate from one language to the other. Instead, find a children's dictionary in your target language. Use that in Anki (yes, it's a royal PITA to enter definitions like that in Anki ;-) ). Also, if you wish to learn grammar, purchase a grammar text book for children in the target language and learn it exactly the way school children learn grammar.
For watching TV, keep a pad of paper next to you at all times. Whenever you hear a word you don't know, write it down (as best you can). Look up the words later. Start with children's shows. Watch them exactly like a 3 year old watches TV: "How on earth can you watch that same cartoon 500 times in a row?!?" In the same way as the book, as soon as one episode is as easy to watch as it would be in your native language, you will be able to watch the entire series for pleasure.
If you are very low level and you can't understand anything, use subtitles in your own language and watch for understanding. Once you've watched it a few times and have basically memorised it, watch it again with subtitles in the target language. This makes it easier to pick out phrases to study. Keep going like this.
Of course, it's easy to get bored with this stuff, so feel free to give up on a book/series for a while, or do something else. There really is an infinite amount of stuff to read/watch -- especially in English.
I won't really talk about how to read something to get information. This is really just scanning, but it's kind of an involved topic. I actually taught my students this so that they could game the university entrance exams. However, the main thing here is to get very, very good at question forms. Be able to convert between a question and and answer and back again. Then once you have a question, you should be able to locate the text that answers that question.
In a sibling message I described how to improve pronunciation.
I hope those things will help. One more thing you can do to really help your friend is to invite them to join you in as many normal events as possible. Take them out to the bar. Take them out to picnics. Especially when you have a group of friends going out, bring them along. For a long time they are likely to sit there in a corner and not say anything. It's important to tell them that this is completely OK. It's practically impossible to insert yourself into the conversation at first. Eventually it will happen though. Tell your other friends not to worry about whether the language learning friend is having a good time. Just keep including them on everything. This will help more than anything else you can do.
Find a youtube channel or something else with many, many hours of someone talking in an accent you find pleasant. I use librivox audiobooks for German (free, in many languages). Try and imitate them in sentence sized chunks. This is slow and boring. Listen. Pause. Try and imitate them .
This will work but it's pretty boring. More effective, faster and much more boring is the short text approach. Take a short text and just say it over and over again trying to improve your accent. Listen to the original. Say it yourself. You can read it until you have it memorised, no problem. Record yourself. Compare the original and your latest try. If you keep trying you'll improve very fast.
1) Find some songs in the target language and get the lyrics. Sing along with the music. Have the music coming in on earphones. Once you think you're good at it, record yourself at the same time. Listen to yourself and try to improve.
2) Find some material where you have both audio and written versions of the material. You can often find children's stories on the internet like this. Also some news channels will have both written content with video. Also you can get audio books. Listen to the audio. Then read the material. Once you think you can read the material out loud, try to read the material at the same time as the audio. Try to match pacing and intonation exactly. Once you think you are good at it, do the recording and listening trick.
You can imagine that my Japanese students enjoyed doing karaoke in class :-)
However, the teachers at the school I taught in were almost all very accomplished English speakers. Yes, they had an accent. Yes, they made mistakes. But they were all fluent and proficient to a very high level.
One of the things I asked the teachers was, "How did you get to be fluent in English?" As I expected, not one replied that they became fluent at school. Then I asked, "Where did you learn most of your English?" Again, not one replied that they learned most of their English at school.
In reality, it is impossible to learn English in a classroom. The subject is too big. There are about 1500 common grammar rules in the language, so it is common to ask the students to memorise that grammar. It's achievable in 3-5 years. But you won't get fluency. Neither will you get proficiency with the 20,000 word families that you need to achieve adult level proficiency. In the end you get students who can tell you what a subjunctive clause is (well, they can tell you in Japanese, anyway), but who can't order a drink at MacDonald's.
This is not really a failure of the system because while we can teach fluency, you still won't get students who are proficient to any degree at the end of 3-5 years of classroom study. There just aren't enough hours. The students do not have enough desire or even need to learn the language. Only those who study independently will learn English.... and they would have learned English anyway.
Or would they? At the end of my tenure, I decided to change tracks. Luckily I was given free reign at my school. Instead of teaching English, per se, I taught my students how to learn English on their own. For a 50 minute class I kept my instruction time down to 5 minutes (which was hellishly difficult, I can tell you). The rest of the class was a series of explorations in things like, "If I don't know, how can I find out?", "How do I read a book to get information out of it?", "How do a read a book for pleasure?", "How do I watch TV and understand what's going on?", "How can I improve my pronunciation without paying someone to train me?", etc, etc.
My hope was not that my students could speak English at the end of the class. That was impossible. My hope was that my students would feel, "I can learn English if I want to. I know how to do it." It's now about 5 years since I left teaching and many of my students can speak English very well. Several of them got jobs where speaking English was the key component of their job. I like to think that my classes helped them out, but of course the reality is that the thousands of hours they put in after my course is what taught them English. I hope I was able to nudge them into a place where those thousands of hours were possible for them.