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guobaoyobro
Joined: 10 Dec 2015
Posts: 73
Location: China
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 Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 7:17 am Post subject: |
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| OhBudPowellWhereArtThou wrote: |
This will save you a LOT of heartache at the end of the term:
1.When the department issues you grading books and class rosters, start setting up your books ASAP. Enter students' English names, their Chinese names written in Roman alphabet, and their Chinese names written in Hanyu. You can pick one or two students from each class to help you with the names in Hanyu. (If you are lucky and have a monitor who wants to be helpful have him/her help you. Failing that, you can have each student write his name in Hanyu at your desk).). When you turn in your books, the people in the department won't know whoPower Tool (yes, they choose those names), Rudolph, Shimzy, or Tom Cruise are. The secretary who enters the grades in all likelihood won't speak English, much less read English, so students' names written in Hanyu will be their only clue. (And don't wait until the end of the term to get their names entered in Hanyu).
2. For each class and for each day, create an attendance sheet that has their student number, and English name. Don't waste time taking roll. Pass it around. You may have a joker or two who will screw things up, but don't get flustered. Take a head count and take a guess about who is absent.
Treat the students like adults, and most will act like adults.
3. Buy plastic snap envelopes for each class in which to put a). graded papers or written evaluations and b). copies of assignments.
4. If you aren't given a textbook to work with, or if it is really not suitable for anything except recitation, ask if you can create your curriculum. Go online and find lists of idioms for the students to use in class.
Also, create scenarios which allows the students to create their own dialogs. Example: three students. Two are restaurant patrons and the third is a waiter/ waitress. One patron finds a fly in his soup. The group must discuss the problem and come to a resolution.
Create as many of these as you can. Keep adding them to your curriculum and use them in every oral English class.
5. Create short grading forms for each student for when they perform. Print the paper so that it can be cut into four separate forms. (You'll have to get a paper cutter for this or use a razor blade to cut an 8 1/2x11 inch paper into four pieces. The forms could allow you to grade for a few criteria: sufficiency of volume, pronunciation, use of proper idioms (if assigned) creativity. Keep it short, You need only put a check next to the criterion and leave a comment and/or a letter grade that you can convert to a final number at the end of the semester.
6. One way to keep the class engaged while the groups are performing: Cut up slips of paper for the other students to leave comments about the students' performance. Give the class's comments to the performers. (Make sure that the responses are written in English!. You don't need to read the class's responses).
7. Finally, you will probably be told to submit a syllabus for each class two days before you begin teaching. (Impossible) Haggle with the department and come to an arrangement which will allow you to submit your completed class activities at the end of the week. In all likelihood, the department will allow you to submit your "syllabus" for each class at the end of the term). For this, you will need a folder that will hold many preprinted forms upon which you will enter the class number, the date, and the time, page number (if applicable) and a brief description of the activity for each class. Make your entries during the last five minutes of class. Make a habit of doing this, and life will be SO much easier for you.
Be prepared for that last one. The department doesn't want a simple syllabus. It wants a year's worth of lesson plans submitted ahead of time.
The Chinese teachers have been doing the same thing for years, and they need to submit fresh plans only when they teach a new subject.
I can't stress enough the importance of being organized. The sooner you become organized, the easier life will be for you. You will be operating in an environment that will be insanely disorganized to your sensibilities. Your initial mission should be to concern yourself with your own organization. Get it together FAST.
In fact, you can start collecting websites for idioms. NOW. For dialogs, create situational dialogs in which the students talk about dating and marriage. Those are sure winners. Just STAY AWAY FROM POLITICS and explicit sex.
You'll get by on your university salary. If you're creative, you'll learn to cook in your apartment and save money.
Good luck. |
Killer advice. Spot on. Heed it! |
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OhBudPowellWhereArtThou
Joined: 02 Jun 2015
Posts: 1168
Location: Since 2003
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| Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 9:26 am Post subject: |
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Point about books, when I was interviewing with them I made it clear I wanted 'oral English classes only', it's written in my contract I teach 'oral English'. Yet one week before I'm due to start teaching, plane ticket bought, everything organized, I get a message saying they've given me a writing course. Too late to turn around and find a new job now so I suck it up.
This might help:
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/
Unless you teach upperclassmen, you won't need to teach citations. Make all of your assignments based upon students' personal experiences. theis does a lot to thwart plagiarism from online sources. Ask them to write about their happiest experiences, their most frightening experiences, what worries them, etc..
The worst part of teaching writing is the "correcting". Do your best to mark each paper with suggested corrections. Assign no grades. When asked why they have received no grades, tell them that nobody gets a grade until everyone stops turning gibberish. Watch what happens.
Assign twenty-minute in-class writing assignments to force them to practice. Be lenient with due dates. If they're taking their work seriously, they'll really sweat over the writing and be late with their assignments.
Good luck. |
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twowheel
Joined: 03 Jul 2015
Posts: 753
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| Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 11:48 am Post subject: |
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As a writing teacher, Purdue OWL will become your good friend. It's a fantastic resource.
Share this resource with your students. Make sure it becomes their good friend too.
twowheel |
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The bear
Joined: 16 Aug 2015
Posts: 483
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| Posted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 1:05 pm Post subject: |
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| OhBudPowellWhereArtThou wrote: |
Point about books, when I was interviewing with them I made it clear I wanted 'oral English classes only', it's written in my contract I teach 'oral English'. Yet one week before I'm due to start teaching, plane ticket bought, everything organized, I get a message saying they've given me a writing course. Too late to turn around and find a new job now so I suck it up.
This might help:
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/
Unless you teach upperclassmen, you won't need to teach citations. Make all of your assignments based upon students' personal experiences. theis does a lot to thwart plagiarism from online sources. Ask them to write about their happiest experiences, their most frightening experiences, what worries them, etc..
The worst part of teaching writing is the "correcting". Do your best to mark each paper with suggested corrections. Assign no grades. When asked why they have received no grades, tell them that nobody gets a grade until everyone stops turning gibberish. Watch what happens.
Assign twenty-minute in-class writing assignments to force them to practice. Be lenient with due dates. If they're taking their work seriously, they'll really sweat over the writing and be late with their assignments.
Good luck. |
Thanks for the advice, I have used that website before, good stuff.
I perhaps should have mentioned the 'writing course' was more EAP focused, delivered to second year students who expressed an interest in studying abroad, so personal accounts were not a main focus. In the end I greatly simplified (though not enough) a course I taught in a western university.
In hindsight I should have gone really basic, but with a week's notice and no syllabus, textbook, or any other materials save a computer/projector, I think I did OK. |
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backtochina2017
Joined: 28 Nov 2016
Posts: 123
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| Posted: Sun Feb 12, 2017 5:37 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| theis does a lot to thwart plagiarism from online sources. |
I make students provide 3 sources to begin with (wikipedia can be the first to get the ball rolling, but after that I need to see other sources referenced).
Next, I have them turn in short drafts early on. If they have to do a paper after 2 months or 4 months (if normal semester), then I have something from the first month to compare. If they are going to plagiarize, they will either have to be Nostradamus or excellent at dissecting an already written paper and know current online sources to support. In most cases though, Wikipedia would already have it (sun is at the center of the solar system  ).
Oral presentations and question and answer sessions at the end are good wrap up tests. If they have done the work themselves they can answer and speculate from their research. If they cheated, the noose has been hung.
Last edited by backtochina2017 on Tue Feb 14, 2017 12:16 am; edited 1 time in total |
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ChrisHenry15
Joined: 03 Jan 2015
Posts: 99
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| Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 8:30 am Post subject: |
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| Students simply find a Chinese source and translate into English. Doubt you'll be able to catch the ones that do this. Some may blatantly translate English sources but over time they'll figure it out. |
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OhBudPowellWhereArtThou
Joined: 02 Jun 2015
Posts: 1168
Location: Since 2003
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| Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 1:53 pm Post subject: |
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| The bear wrote: |
| OhBudPowellWhereArtThou wrote: |
Point about books, when I was interviewing with them I made it clear I wanted 'oral English classes only', it's written in my contract I teach 'oral English'. Yet one week before I'm due to start teaching, plane ticket bought, everything organized, I get a message saying they've given me a writing course. Too late to turn around and find a new job now so I suck it up.
This might help:
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/
Unless you teach upperclassmen, you won't need to teach citations. Make all of your assignments based upon students' personal experiences. this does a lot to thwart plagiarism from online sources. Ask them to write about their happiest experiences, their most frightening experiences, what worries them, etc..
The worst part of teaching writing is the "correcting". Do your best to mark each paper with suggested corrections. Assign no grades. When asked why they have received no grades, tell them that nobody gets a grade until everyone stops turning gibberish. Watch what happens.
Assign twenty-minute in-class writing assignments to force them to practice. Be lenient with due dates. If they're taking their work seriously, they'll really sweat over the writing and be late with their assignments.
Good luck. |
Thanks for the advice, I have used that website before, good stuff.
I perhaps should have mentioned the 'writing course' was more EAP focused, delivered to second year students who expressed an interest in studying abroad, so personal accounts were not a main focus. In the end I greatly simplified (though not enough) a course I taught in a western university.
In hindsight I should have gone really basic, but with a week's notice and no syllabus, textbook, or any other materials save a computer/projector, I think I did OK. |
The personal experience assignments are good for getting the students comfortable writing in English. I get the feeling that Chinese teachers in some universities don't spend much time on written English. I suggest the personal essay as a starter only. Once they can string sentences together coherently, they can make the transition to more academic forms.
I don't know about other university systems, but in the states in which I have lived and taught, foreign students had to pass basic writing classes that included the descriptive essay, the process essay, and the argumentative essay, all basic forms that require a certain level of mastery of written English. It is in those classes (usually) in which more advanced composition and style are introduced.
For at least the past twenty-five years in American Universities, responsibility for providing the finer points of academic writing is relinquished to the Writing Centers for the simple fact that there are too many writing formats to teach in a single freshman writing class in which there may be several majors represented, each of which will be required to write in the style of his major subject: APA for most science majors, MLA for Humanities majors (with the exception of History which usually requires Turabian), ASA for sociology majors, and Chicago style for anything requiring footnotes which can include several writing styles.
The differences among them are mainly citation format and heading format. MLA is pretty standard for most humanities. History professors will usually accept MLA format as well as Turabian because they are (or were) very similar with the exception of footnotes..
What makes APA stand out from the others is the required simple tenses and the heading.
If you want to give the students a leg up with good essay structure, the good old five-paragraph essay is a good place to start. It emphasizes the basic form: a beginning, a middle, and an end. From there you can expand your curriculum.
The OWL website is an excellent source for the most usual genres of essay.
The problem with teaching an all-purpose EAP class is that you won't really be able to teach the writing styles required by each discipline unless you segregate the engineers from the medical students and the rest of the majors. Even then, it's a tedious process of teaching just the citation formats. Each type of publication used in each writing style requires its own format (e.g., periodicals vs books).
AND ON TOP OF THAT, you have the added annoyance of the style books changing rules from edition to edition. I have spent a lot of time preparing for and giving writing style seminars (in the U.S.) only to find out that I had been working with an out-of-date style book (or books). I wouldn't find out that the citation style that I was lecturing had changed a bit with an edition that I knew nothing about. To say the least, I was red-faced when someone had the new style book which he bought in the university book store and did some in-class fact checking.
In truth, your best bet is to work with the basics and to get the students' prose to be very tight, precise, and focused. Purdue's OWL provides everything that students really need to know to become proficient writers. You can introduce them to the writing styles, citations, and research skills, but all that is something that really takes a LOT of time for them to master.
For more info about writing styles, check out this website:
http://ctl.yale.edu/writing/using-sources/why-are-there-different-citation-styles |
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Andrew108
Joined: 17 Mar 2012
Posts: 20
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| Posted: Sat Feb 18, 2017 4:38 pm Post subject: |
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A friend teaches at a uni in China and I was saying that he probably has a lot of spare time and why not do some extra teaching. He said that actually even though his contact hours are only 15 hours a week, due to the number of students, he spends at least that number of hours on test marking and coursework.
So something to think about. Might be that working at a university is not such a cushy number? |
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Non Sequitur
Joined: 23 May 2010
Posts: 4724
Location: China
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| Posted: Sat Feb 18, 2017 7:41 pm Post subject: |
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| Hence my oft-repeated advice to newbies to seek Oral English jobs. |
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OhBudPowellWhereArtThou
Joined: 02 Jun 2015
Posts: 1168
Location: Since 2003
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| Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2017 3:01 am Post subject: |
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| Andrew108 wrote: |
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So something to think about. Might be that working at a university is not such a cushy number? |
It's not so cushy if one does his job. It becomes quite a grind if one has more than two separate subjects (Western History, Business English, Western Literature, Oral Argumentation. My experience is that the university or college will provide the text books, and that's it. Lesson plans, notes, handouts, etc. are left up to the FT. It may be a different story of the English department has been farmed out to a Canadian or Australian outfit. |
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