Job Discussion Forums

[schminken]

Maybe I am under too much stress. Maybe I care too much. I don't know. All I do know, is that I am about to lose my mind.

Ok Situation: Only English teacher for one specific Studiengang at a Fachochschule. All students are engineering types. There are no course books. I make all the course materials myself which you all know takes oh, about a bazillion hours. The students have had 9 years of teacher centered, grammar based classrooms. They know that already. I do the whole Lehrplan: Business English, Technical English, Presentations, Academic Writing, everything. I trusted Penny Ur. I trusted my communicative language training. I trusted my Delta training. I trusted my lovely TESOL Masters methodology. I talked to collegues. I talked to fellow teachers and asked them what worked in their classes. On and on. I'm not being passive here and it's getting to the point where I have no Leben because I'm too busy writing new materials and refining them, hoping all the while that it will click.

The problem? Most of the students just don't care. It's a technical study. They say "English is so important" but when it comes down to it, all they want is a mark gathered from a test of which the material came from a memorized script. English is a "soft skill". Give them something easy: Bored. Give them something techical:bored, Give them something more academic: ooh that's too hard. If it is too fun, they think it's not worth learning. If it's actually academic, then it gets the old "yawn this boring". Yes, I know, just fail people. But now I feel my classroom is ruled by the almighty mark. It's not about actually learning anything or producing language or fluency.

This bothers me. The things that are "GUARENTEED TO WORK!(TM)", do not. It's like these German-speaking engineers are the exact opposite of any methodology in language teaching. Yes I've done a needs analysis. Of course! They have needs AND Wants. I've tried both. So let's say, they say something like, "It is very important that we talk as much as possible". Ok no problem. So you set up all these discussion groups. Nothing. They just want me to tell them what to say, they all speak German so there is no need to negoiate any meaning, or they are just lazy and want to do nothing.

The only things that have REALLY worked are for example, when we do international cooperation with other universities and they have to communicate with students in other countries. (Technical Project work and presentations) Or for example, one time when we doing job interviewing, I suprised them with an Human Resources native speaker from a local tech company to do personal interviews with them and give them CV tips etc. They liked that. It was real world. And technical people just sometimes cannot think of "imaginary situations" in which to produce language. The problem is, I do not have the money, time, or resources to do things like this every class and I'm going crazy.

Ok so I'm just venting. It's just getting to the point that I do nothing but prepare and research only to have it not work like I want in the classroom. It's really affecting me. Stop me before I go completely crazy. Am i just investing too much?

ok Carry on!

[butterbrot]

Short answer: you ARE investing too much!

Longer answer:

Engineers (generalising here) are not going to be as able to learn new languages as artists (for example). Their minds are geared to the concrete and language learning involves abstractive thinking facility - everyone's different and this is NOT a criticism of engineers' learning ability. Statistically, men have a more difficult time learning languages than women. Right brainers vs left brainers and all that jazz.

So don't try so hard to do what's not possible. You can be creative and work your fingers to the bone and continue to allow the students to rule the lesson planning and content or you can choose another way.

If the almighty 'mark' is king, let it go. Your students are adults and they know what they want. If what they want is different from what you think they should have then you've reached an impasse. It sounds as though you've been enabling a class full of people who would prefer that you take the language direct from your brain and graft it onto theirs. But they have given you a clue - follow it, to the best of your ability.

They want real world communication and who can blame them? They don't sound 'lazy' so much as they sound like engineers: they want a purpose and a quantifiable result. Language learned out of context is slow-going, boring and ineffective but there are precious few real-world settings we can produce in any classroom.

You don't say how large your class is or what latitude you have in taking them out of the classroom for some real-world experiences, but brainstorm some do-able ideas from these.

1. Take them to visit a lecture given by another professor who teaches (anything) in English and have them write a report (in English) on what they understood or learned.

2. Give them the assignment to find and interview an English-speaking manager, employer, worker in a company about their job. Most people would be thrilled to be interviewed. Have them write an "article" for a "journal" (in English) which details the interview and what was learned.

There may come a day when they, as engineers, must publish something in their field in English - in print or on the Internet. This will give them feedback on what they will be able to do when that time comes and may motivate them to learn more.

3. Assign them to find a manager in an English speaking country, write them an email (in English) asking about employment possibilities and report back to the class (in English) what happened.

4. Ask them to tell you which professional journals they read and then ask them to name a corollary in English. Ask them to write (a letter or an email) to the English engineering journal and ask about their criteria for publication and report back to the class (in English) what they learned. Tell them they must then write a short article about an aspect of their professional area of expertise to submit to this English periodical for publication.

You can do any/all of these things in groups or singly. Forming groups of same-profession students to brainstorm an article for publication would probably work well.

If you know any other English speakers, ask them to come and give a talk, with question and answer period, to your class. If I were asked to do this, I'd be happy to give a hour or so for free. All English teachers with specific and generally interesting hobbies, previous jobs, etc. should be willing to exchange as speakers in the classes of other teachers. This is real-world.

Good luck and, don't work so hard! Make your students do the work.

[schminken]

Butterbrot,

Thanks for such a thoughtful response. I feel a bit better.

You are right. I know engineers in general want something with quantifiable results. i think a lot of my problem is that I am not like them. I don't think like them. There is nothing logical about me. I like abstracts! They do not. So I keep judging them on my own internalized criteria of what is good and what is bad.

I know I need to work on this.

[crashartist1]

Schminken, it sounds like you are in wrong class for your teaching methodology, Butterbrot has excellent ideas and I do hope you heed his advice. If you have a Masters in TESOL, you should have known this coming into the position. You have engineers right? Then you should have understood that they are �thick ego boundary� learners and you are �thin ego boundary� teacher. The thick ego boundary learners are bottom to top learner that require structure and form for a specific purpose. Set goals and aims are needed for facilitation of internal motivation as the external motivation is already in place. As a thin ego boundary learner you learn everything top to bottom, just taking immersion and letting things solve themselves out. You are in Germany and working with engineers and you are not taking a structured approach to the curriculum? Apparently you were not doing your needs analysis very thoroughly if you could not realize that quantitative measures were necessary for L2 acquisition for thick ego boundary learners, actually you don�t need to do a needs analysis at all, just open your eyes and see that you are in Germany and teaching Engineers.

[monkel]

i teach business english to bosch managers here in turkey, most of whom are mechanical engineers. they all come from plants which make automotive products.....and they're very engineery.....

first: in my 4.5 years experience, they are the most gifted students i've ever taught. so i have to disagree about the engineer-brain idea, especially since, to my mind, those who are technically minded can often observe the details really well. moreover, to my mind, grammar is patterning, and a mathematico-logical type, if you want to be Gardnerian about it, would surely go for that, no?

second, have you tried www.onestopenglish.com or www.businessenglishonline.net ?

i use both a lot, and there are a lot of role plays, and real situations. my engineers like it, and it's all commmunicative stuff. hope it helps

monkel xx

[schminken]

Actually, when I open my eyes, I realize I am in Austria NOT in Germany.

I do realize these measures are necessary. The point is these guys are are study in contrasts. I think I'm frustrated with the fact I can't please everyone and English is not a priority for most of them. I can accept that but it's difficult when I have to fill a 4 hour class

For example, if I do Business English and we cover meetings and negotiating, I invariably get a group of people within the class that say, "I sit in an office all day and do chip layout. I do not need meetings in English. Therefore, this is useless". The other half of the class likes it and finds it useful. Then we have a group that is the "Grammar is the basis of all things and we must do that all the time". So then I do some grammar. I usually concentrate on grammar German speakers have problems with. These people are happy but the others are bored and just want to communicate. Then we have people who say, "Learning to read and write technical documentation is very importatnt in my job. I know I am weak and need to improve my style" Well, to do that you actually have to write something and when I give them this kind of task, they complain and say, "We work 60 hours a week and go to school. We have so much homework in our other (technical) subjects. We don't have time to do this." And they don't! I should point out I teach two different groups: The first half are day students. They don't work, are young, and are "easier". The other group are part time and also work, have families etc.. They are not attending my class because they want to necessarily learn English. They are there to finish a tertiary abschluss and get a title so they can make more money at their jobs.

Now saying all of this. I must say there are some students that are great. I know it's my problem of being to thin-skinned and wanting them to like English and find everything I do useful and interesting.

[butterbrot]

crashartist,

Your post was harsh and I couldn't find anything either constructive or useful in it. "Thin ego boundary"? "Top down" and "bottom up"? While I quite understand those terms (no need for you to elucidate further, thanks) it wasn't a useful response to a basic "I'm having a hard time with these classes" post.

However, I'm prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt because I'm willing to consider that:

1. you may be an engineer yourself
2. you might be L1 German, struggling with the finer aspects of English "polite speech"
3. you could be a very young, new teacher who has been everywhere, done everything and met everybody or,
4. you were having a bad day yourself



Teaching language is often fairly lonely because we don't have much opportunity to network or vent with our peers. Each of us has "those types" of classes and each of us succumbs to frustration - it's normal and has nothing to do with how well (or not) one is educated.

schminken,

[schminken]

Thank You Butterbrot. Your support means a lot to me. I was just trying to get out some frustration because there's no one to really talk to about these things. Most of my collegues on the faculty have the attitude that it must be the world's easiest job to be a native speaker language teacher. What do I have to do really? I can just waltz in a do whatever, right`? (I mean that sarcastic).

My classes aren't always terrible catastophes! I hope I didn't make it sound like that. I just have _those_ classes where I just want to run screaming from the classroom! I'm sure we all do.

[Joker]

You're not alone. I'e been teaching a large group of software developers for quite sometime and sometimes I felt that I wasn't accomplishing anything. I wanted to give up and move on to something else until I realized that they (like me) weren't having any fun. Each day I promised myself that I would quit the minute things got boring, but they didn't becuase I challenged my students to think what really mattered to them. We started looking at real world problems (e.g. outsourcing) and worked together towards remedies. The problem was that management felt that their deficiencies centered around software but the reality was daily communication on the telephone, in correspondence, in presentations and in meetings. Once I had a target, I could quickly design a resolution. For example, disagreeing with Indians about software solutions. We focusedon the intercultural differences (Indians find it disrespectful to say "no" to a customer) and work towards a divergent solution using appropriate language. Listen to your students and they will tell you what matters to them