Speaking Beyond the Classroom: Exploring Ideas, Issues, and Perspectives through English Conversation is an enrichment textbook for university students of English as a foreign language (EFL). It connects spoken English with critical thinking and brings artificial intelligence (AI) into speaking practice in a guided and ethical way.
The book is organised around four topics drawn from students’ own lives and from wider public debate. Chapter 2 asks whether our choices are really ours, looking closely at social pressure and personal responsibility. In Chapter 3, readers examine what technology and AI are doing to the way people relate to one another. Chapter 4 turns to education itself: its purposes, unequal access to it, and the future of learning. Chapter 5 asks how a fairer world might be built through shared responsibility for social and environmental problems.
Each topic contains five subtopics, twenty in all, built around issues such as the ethics of AI, inequality in education, and consumer culture. Authentic conversation prompts give readers a real reason to speak. Along the way they learn to build an argument, state an opinion clearly, and defend an idea without shutting the other side out of the conversation.
All twenty subtopics share one nine-part structure and end with a formative assessment. At the close of each topic, a summative assessment and a reflection pull the five subtopics together. Readers rehearse with an AI speaking partner, move on to real conversations through Speaky and Episoden, and keep a Progress Record that makes their development visible to them. The book is written for students who want to speak English with growing fluency and to think carefully about what they are saying.
