Job Discussion Forums

[CNexpatesl]

For those of you that started out teaching in training centres and/or kindergartens, how did you prepare yourself for the switch to teaching high school or university ages? Assuming you had no experience with that age group before, how did you become competent at teaching them if you had none?

[doogsville]

I had teaching experience with all age groups prior to coming to China , so I can't answer your question directly. What I would say however is don't confuse age with ability. It's the students ability and current level of language proficiency that dictates what you teach them, not their age. I teach both English majors and non English majors of the same age, and their ability is very different to my classes are different. You could teach a class of non English majors in a university who need lower level material than teenagers in a language centre.

I did make the move from a language mill to a university, though I already have a lot of teaching experience from my life before TEFL. To be honest it's not a great leap as long as your teaching material is sound. This means either a decent textbook provided by the school, or using your own material appropriate to the students level. One of the biggest differences is class size. I went from fifteen maximum in the language mill to thirty to a hundred students in a class in my current job. Forget games and group work in that situation, pair work or working in threes with the people beside you is about it for me.

Lessons can also be much more like a lecture than a language class if you have to teach writing, business English, western culture etc. The students will sit there expecting you to simply provide the answers to the questions in the textbook. Don't let them, make them work for it as much as possible.

Edited to add. Of course, classroom management techniques will differ according to age, but in my experience, not by much, since the average Chinese university student still behaves like a secondary school teenager. Even adults need way more 'input' than I would expect from their British counterparts in order to get them to take an active role in their own learning process.