Congratulations!  You’re past the beginning stage and now are able to start to use language more creatively!  Of course, you’ll still stumble and make mistakes, but that’s normal. You might even find that your pronunciation isn’t as good as it was when you were saying memorized phrases, but that’s OK.  It will improve again if you keep at it.

What to Aim for:  You still need to learn lots of vocabulary, so keep on with the Vocabulary-Building activities, such as Listen and Do, but build more complex activities out of those words.  At Intermediate level you can string together sentences, but they may not yet sound like smoothly connected paragraphs.  Listen to native speakers talking in paragraph-level chunks and notice how they connect words and ideas.  In communication situations, you want to notice some of the variations in the basic scripts.  What changes when one of the basic variables in the communication situation changes, such as the age or status or gender of one of the participants, or the time and place?  You want to learn how to make appropriate changes to what you say and do when the situation changes a bit.

Language Skills:  You should keep working on your listening comprehension, but you will also be working a lot on speaking at this stage, especially conversations.  If reading is one of your goals, then you may be able to find some easy books for children.  At the higher intermediate stage it is good to read children’s school books (very early grades) to learn both language and culture.

Techniques for Intermediate Learners:

Listening:  Familiar Stories, Shared Experience, Series

Speaking:  Illustrated Life Story, Series, Shared Experience, Familiar Stories

Conversing:  Role Play, Dialogue Variations

Reading:  Picture Books, Familiar Stories