I work in an EFL context (Ecuador) and I am an NNEST (en-NEST), namely, a non-native English speaker teacher, so I...

I work in an EFL context (Ecuador) and I am an NNEST (en-NEST), namely, a non-native English speaker teacher, so I always do my best to provide comprehensible input as well as expose my students to other speakers of English. Recently, I have done the following (apart from teaching members of an indigenous community in the Amazonian jungle):

I recruited volunteers from among the ten thousand expats living in my town (Cuenca) to come to my classes at the university and work with my students in small groups while the other half of the class was working in the language lab. As soon as the students came back from their 20-minute session with the American / Canadian speakers of English, I asked them to provide written feedback about their experience. Sometimes they misinterpreted what the guests were saying, so I asked the volunteers to provide their autobiographies and we matched the facts with what the students assumed to be the case. We had fun.

I am also giving English lessons in a day care centre for children coming from underprivileged families. In their case, too, I found volunteers who give these students conversation classes during the week. In my Saturday sessions, we often go back to what has happened during the week, write e-mails to the volunteers, or apply for jobs with expats who run businesses here. All this is done in English and is "all about them".

I do a bit of teacher training as well. Last November I ran a short course on academic writing (for teachers who then went on to teach academic writing to postgraduate students). I nagged and nudged the teachers to start writing academically: they began writing book reviews and short articles, and a colleague of mine and I ended up writing a concise book on non-native English teachers' identity issues!

We are now starting an (international) academic writing buddy network. We will be setting up ad hoc trios: an experienced mentor at the top, a fairly experienced mentor in the middle, who will also be a mentee of the top mentor, while mentoring the inexperienced, novice author at the bottom. If anybody is interested, I can send you the proposal. A related article is to appear in EFL Magazine in December.

I understand that these are not exactly tips that you may wish to try out in your classroom tomorrow, but perhaps they will inspire you to create projects / design activities that allow your students to use language in authentic situations (whatever that might mean) and step out of the confines of the classroom and accomplish real tasks in the real world.