Job Discussion Forums

[chryanvii]

If you've never taught before, I highly suggest beginning with a training center. You will have smaller classes and a pre-planned curriculum with mostly motivated students. You will have a one year opportunity to learn the ropes, and then you can warm up in a university atmosphere after that.

[mcloo7]

Whats the best way to learn IPA? Is the wikipedia page good enough? And, sorry, I forget who it use who mentioned this, but, what's a good app for IPA? I could do a play store search myself. Thanks.

I still have some time to prepare for classes.

[Non Sequitur]

[LarssonCrew]

Someone said learn from Chinese teachers....bad idea.

I watched a Chinese class once, I'm a native speaker and I was bored to tears.

I think in China I would hate to be a Chinese learning English, there's no engaging from the teachers, no cultural connectivity.

It's difficult for most Chinese teachers who have never been abroad to know a practical use for our language, they're teaching to get their kid a high mark on tests, that's it.

Someone said leave pronunciation upto the Chinese teachers, bad bad idea.

There's always SOME pronunciation that Chinese teachers are not good at, no matter how good a teacher they are.

Preparing PPTs are ok, but my middle school students say the teacher just copies the textbook to PPT and has them endlessly repeat it over and over.

Class repeats are pointless because if one third can say it correct, you'll generally hear the students saying it correctly, but if you ask individually many will make some mistakes with it.

I generally find that you have to play devils advocate and pull the answers from the students. They are taught not to offer additional information, so in the end you hear 'egg' which asked what did you eat for breakfast, when they could give 4-5 bits of information, about time, location etc.

Finding something fun that actually gets them to talk is absolutely GOLDEN.

If you can find 'horrible histories' the English is quite basic and it's interesting ofr them to learn about some European history, but I would advice stopping the show every coupel of minutes to catch up with whats going on and if they understand.

One final thing, always have a backup ready, you never know when you'll get to class and there's suddenly far more students, or the power is out, or the computer has a virus, and then suddenly your plans are out the window.I always have one or two classes tucked in my mind ready for the day I've been sick and not planned, or the power is out etc.

[Denim-Maniac]

[Non Sequitur]

I worked a summer job for a very talented Chinese teacher who ran her own language school out in the boonies south of Shenyang.
She wouldn't use phonetics and had no difficulty persuading me not to either.
Parents would often sit in on classes on weekends and they began to ask her to include phonetics in their kids' classes.
Result? The parents enjoyed the classes because they were like their school days.
The kids? Rather less keen.

[Denim-Maniac]

IPA transcription is just one small part of the teachers arsenal. To some degree its like learning Chinese without pinyin. How we write English is not always related to how we say English.

With the exposure to language that students have (limited), and the opportunity to practise (generally also quite limited), its not realistic for students to always recall pronunciation without this 'key' which they can use to aid pronunciation.

Interesting poem often used to illustrate English spelling. If you can find a student who can read this ... Ill agree, they dont need IPA ever!

I take it you already know
Of though, and bough, and cough and
dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough and
through.

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps
To learn of less familiar traps.
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like
bird.

And dead; it’s said like bed, not bead –
For goodness sake don’t call it ‘deed’!
Watch out for meat, and great, and
threat,
(They rhyme with suite, and straight and
debt);

A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,

And then there’s dose and rose and lose
Just look these up – and goose and
choose,
And cork and work, and card and ward,
And font and front, and word and sword,

And do and go, and thwart and cart
Come, I’ve hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive,
I’d learned to speak it when I was five.

And yet to write it, the more I sigh,
I'll not learn how 'til the day I die.

[davelister]

http://archive.org/details/Learning-Teaching : Learning Teaching by James Scrivener, free to read online and download

From the perspective of a teacher of adults in a training centre, here are a few things for new teachers to maybe consider:

>Minimize teacher talking time / Maximise student talking time
>Silence is not golden, but be patient & encouraging
>Speak with an even speed of delivery, but not unnaturally slow or stilted
>DO ask follow-on questions to explore their answers
>DO be aware of meta-language; use language appropriate to their level, especially at lower levels
>DON'T confuse their English level for their intelligence
>Quick & minimal on-the-spot corrections (grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary) if really necessary by repeating them but correctly, or prompting them to self-correct by repeating them using a questioning tone; “I go shopping yesterday?”
>Make a note of common mistakes and use them as part of the consolidation exercise for the students as a group to correct.
>Encourage them to use full sentences, not one-word or broken sentences. Eg. not, "What did you do yesterday?" "Shopping."
>Be grammatical and don't use slang (unless it's the target language)
>Steer them to be realistic about subject matter; e.g. they may be into natural history but haven't the English vocabulary, so avoid such conversational cul-de-sacs (remember your meta-language)