Let the students do the work!

One of the classes I teach consists of a group of electricians-going-to-be-electronics-engineers - viz. very technically knowledgeable people (unlike me). Our English coursebook is not exactly the best I've come across (I'm being diplomatic here, it is really quite extremely dull, thankfully we've found a new one for next year), so I have struggled to come up with good texts as additions to the ones in the coursebook. Not being particularly interested in technical issues, I found it difficult to pick out which texts could be interesting and on a suitable level of complexity for the students. Then, lazy as I am, the idea struck me to let the students do the searching, so over the past couple of months, this is how we've worked: once a week, one student is responsible for 1) finding an article he (I'm not discriminating here, it's an all male class)thinks is interesting, on a naval or technical subject, 2)copy it and bring it to class where everyone reads it (so it can't be too long, a page or two), then 3) he goes through vocabulary, focusing on the naval/technical words of the text, and 4) tries to get a discussion going in class about the topic of the text.
I must say the students have done a good job on this, we have read about global warming and the opening of the Northwest Passage; electron beam freeform fabrication; the expanding Chinese Navy; the surveillance capacity of air force drones; and advice on how to save energy at home, among other topics. We usually spend a 40-minute lesson on this, and it gives the student in charge of the article practice in both chairing a discussion, and selecting and explaining complex vocabulary. The rest of the class get to read an interesting text, chosen by a peer, learn new words, and discuss. Nice work indeed.