Exactly what type of lessons your students will need to improve their typing skills really depends on a number of things

• how much English do they know
• how much typing will they do (a housewife may do very little, but a university student may do a lot)
• how old are they
• are they used to left –> right writing or not? (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese are some examples of langauges that go right –> left)
• are they accustomed to 'Roman' style letters on a keyboard?
• are they accustomed to an English style keyboard?  They layout of keyboards varies between languages.
• are they accustomed to English style typed writing conventions (double space after a full stop, single after a comma, indents for paragraphs, margings etc.)
• and probably a lot of other factors that are specific to your students and situation.

Once you have a bit of a handle on what your ESL students need in terms of typing lessons, you can start to design a programme around those needs.

There are many typing software tools available to help students develop their basic keyboarding skills.  Mavis Bacon is perhaps the most well known, but there are others that are very good as well. 

One that I particularly like is Kiran's Typing Tutor.  It is free, very simple to use and gets students up to speed on basic keyboarding skills very quickly with a series of activities and exercises.  My only complaint is that in some parts the lessons are a little text-dense (a lot of reading), but that can easily be dealt with by the teacher walking the students through the information.

Once more advanced topics are to be covered (formatting, spacing and other meta conventions), you can use free online tools like google docs and zoho.com to have access to full featured word processing tools at no cost.  Once you're at this stage you'll have to build your own lessons that target the specific skills your students need to learn.

Simple tasks could be:

• formating an unformatted paragraph
• fixing formatting errors you introduce into text
• having students type up their own work and providing feedback on their errors

Anyhow, ESL typing lessons don't need to be onerous or scary.  Just approach them as another skill set that students need to learn and you'll be hearing the keys clicking in no time.

Cheers,

Eric  

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