Teaching English at College

[madizi]

I'll start to teach English in September at college in Changsha and would like to know about your experience in this matter. How should I behave in classroom? Which teaching methods did you use?

Do you know any good webpages with English teaching materials, especially business Chinese or something about insurance profession?

Thank you in advance!

[roddy]

Maybe look for business news stories on the BBC's Learning English site?

[simonlaing]

Hey madizi,

Have fun in Hunan, the food is good, nice and spicy. Make sure you go to Zhang Jia Jie, it's amazing.

Anyway for teaching the key idea is to keep changing the activity every 10-15 minutes so the students don't get board. If it is like most places you will get a massive class of 30 that you will only see once a week,

Back in the day I followed this format.

Warm-up 5 -10 minutes

Introduce vocabulary , read, have them read and correct the pronunciation. Apple , banana etc.. 10 minutes

Have a review time? where you ask them personal questions about the topic? What is your favorite fruit? Which are better Apples or Bananas 10 minutes

The last 20 minutes or so we would play a games, (several on www.genkienglish.net/games.htm, or Dave's ESL cafe) or make up a funny skit of haggling to reduce the price of fruit or trying to decide which friut is the best.

Also look for props for your classes. You could buy the fruit your self, or do what I did and borrow the plastique fruit from the kindergarten. (They have great stuff there)

I played one game using the Water cooler cart and they had to go to different stations ask the price , buy so many of something and calculate it. I had a stop watch and had a couple of teams do it to compete it was a riot. )

Be careful of making your classes to fun other teachers will come to investigate and check with a glare, how can you learn when they are laughing so much.

Bring clipart and or ESL books if you can because you won't find quality ones in China.

BE prepared to be a rockstar,

Have fun,

Simon:)

[madizi]

Thank you both. Simon, you helped me a lot.

I did teaching before in Slovenian university, teaching Chinese. But I didn't teach English before. I assume that teaching English is not the same as teaching Chinese.

I'll have classes with 50 students in each of them. I hope that I'll get a classroom with multimedia (computer, LCD projector, speakers,...), but I don't know if I could get it, so I have to be prepared for ordinary class with blackboard and chalk.

So, I have to be rockstar? OK, let's rock......

Any other ideas or experiences?

[Rincewind]

College students tend to have longer attention spans than high school, so you can maybe expand some ideas. I used to have a class at a University where they had me teaching the same students for 4 hours back to back then the next day a different group of students for another 4 hours continuous English. That took quite a bit of preparation as you had to have plenty of material to keep talking for 4 hours.

The British Council web site at http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/ has be a source of many of my lesson plans. The BBC worldservice has a teachers resource at http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/teachingenglish/ and https://www.onestopenglish.com/ has some. There are loads more sites, just Google for 'teach English' or similar.

Always write your lesson plan. That way you can reuse them later. Always be prepared for the unexpected. Have two lessons planed so if one flops you can do the other. Especially true if you have a multimedia based lesson and the computer/projector/dvd decides not to play fair.

Make picture flash cards for the vocabulary. They work with college students just as well as with kindergarten. You can also use them to make games and activities.

Put variety into your class. I'm often told to teach only spoken English. I never obey this. I need to use a little bit of reading or writing to break the tedium and keep the students attention. I just keep such activities short. If you make the class varied in this way, I find the students don't pester me for a game.

Find a text book to use. I'm currently using the Interchange English range published by Cambridge Uni Press. You can buy it in china for about 40 yuan of a bit more for the teachers version. There are many other popular books. Your college might recommend one. You can then use this book as a syllabus for your lessons. It also gives you a source of exercises that you can adapt and expand.

[madizi]

Thank you.

Do you know of any internet site or Windows application for flashcards?

And yes, I was told to teach pronunciation, but I think that I won't stick to that. Besides reading and writting, it would be also nice to review grammar. But then, my preparations would be very time consuming. I don't know how to decide.....