Job Discussion Forums

[Non Sequitur]

My experience is that ECs are open to all and you get wildly varying attendances.
In Semester 1 the freshers all turn out because of the novelty. You can get 60+ to these.
As they get BFs and the weather is colder - maybe 20 attendees.

[LarssonCrew]

Problem with letting student's choose topics is you will get the same boring topics everytime.

Food
travel[WITHIN CHINA ONLY]
School

Student's know nothing about the world outside of their studies, or some clique boring Korean cartoon or gaming.

'Name ten countries in Africa.'

*blank stare*

[Javelin of Radiance]

[NoBillyNO]

All I ever heard was much like the sounds that come from Charlie Browns Mother....good grief the regretful audio of 60 students making sounds from a trombone

[rogerwilco]

At my college the EC is planned by the students.
The EC is on Friday evenings, but by Wednesday of every week the students
have posted the topics and the song for the EC.
I do not go to the EC often, but when I do it is easy to kill an hour when many of the students are holding a paper with the topics and songs listed.

The topics are typically such things as "future jobs", "describe your future husband or wife", "what would you do if you were the leader of China" , etc.

[Non Sequitur]

[msinglynx]

I've done similar style english corners and they are helllllll.... My fall back move is to pick a straight forward topic (like travel), start with some greetings, jokes, ask about their week, introduce the topic, etc, then give the simple vocabulary and sentence structure, throw in some more complicated vocab and structure for the higher level ones (maybe 20 minutes for this, tops). Finally spend the last 35 minutes role playing this. It breaks up the mass into manageable groups, you can have better ones assisting the poor students and give them individual topics that are of more interest to that group.

I also like to start every new class with a short speech on personal responsibility and remind each student that learning is THEIR responsibility and that seeing me once a week will actually have barely any effect. I state specifically that it is impossible for me to satisfy all of them because every student has different needs. that means they HAVE to make the effort to find vocabulary words that are specific to their needs. The students can only agree with you because this is completely reasonable, they just havent thought about it like this. Students, especially adults, have specific goals. You can be a "teacher" and talk at them (shoving their goals at them), or you can be their partner in education and help THEM reach their goals. I find treating them as active participants in their education leads to more enthusiasm and independent study and overall better attitudes.

[Bud Powell]