I am currently in Japan teaching high school students in a private high school. My head teacher has so far admitted that he doesn't know quite what to do with me as I arrived half way through their year and I have struggled with boredom, still asking if there is anything I can do and offering my services, I have been teaching for a year now and feel somewhat capable and very willing to help but quite useless...
BUT, recently he has asked me to come up with a curriculum for six months or a year starting April, that I would teach alone or with him...yay...I have a project!! Sanity returns!!
This has however presented me with other problems:
1. I have never written a curriculum and don't know how to do it! So any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!
Here are the details:
My teaching role: My role is a native speaker English teacher. As far as I can tell there hasn't been many native speakers at this school and nothing has been set up by previous teachers. As far as I can tell the previous teachers did conversation lessons but I don't know what materials they used or if they used any materials etc. I think I'm the first to be asked to write up any formal curriculum.
Where: Japan, private high school
Class size: 20-30 students
student age: 15-17
level: mostly total beginner, also pre-intermediate class
length of class: 45 mins.
no. of lessons per week per class: 1 or 2
students needs: speaking and listening skills
students weaknesses: pronunciation, using L1
Aims/objectives: practical daily needs conversation classes
Textbooks in use: Japanese books (all written with Japanese instructions for tasks and really complicated English sentence structures to put into order etc. when most of them can't even have a basic conversation, quite frustrating...especially as I don't speak much Japanese, find myself guessing what they are supposed to do!)
2. My head teacher is really nice and all but we have quite different ways of teaching English. I don't know about other teachers but I did CELTA and there they taught us to use English only in class. I've talked to my head teacher about this but he seems to think quite differently..."we think translation is quite important as otherwise the students don't understand"...and so I realised this from observing my first classes here... what was "English class" could well have been "Japanese class" for the lack of English that was spoken, and it's the same with most classes I've observed, and if I've had an assistant in class helping me teach in the few lessons I have done so far they have pretty much translated all that I've said!! (I don't know where the line is for absolute beginners with using their L1 for instructions etc and should it be used at all? - sorry, question on the side!!) So I'm not sure how I can plan a curriculum with such different ideals!!?
So sorry this was so long!! Thanks for your patience...and hoping there's someone out there that's come across similar difficulties and can offer some advice...would be greatly appreciated!!
Thanks!
). He was the "native speaker example" and co-taught with some other teachers as part of the JET program. I remember him drawing pictures of fast foods and having the kids order them like in a restaurant. He did conversations, games, and native speaker modeling.