I am a professional Chinese teacher. I have ever taught all kinds of students, they were kids、teenagers、adults and old people. I would give students the sentence patterns every session, ask them to try to speak as more as they can with the words they ever learnt.In this way, the students could express the same structure with different words and tense. It helps the students realize how important it is to make vocabulary and grammatical models automatic in order to express themselves better in their Chinese lauguage and to be prepared to answer the most frequent questions of native speakers.