Job Discussion Forums

[Deconstructor]

[Justin Trullinger]

[Jizzo T. Clown]

[Justin Trullinger]

[Guy Courchesne]

[Jizzo T. Clown]

Guy,

I usually try to speak about 10-20% of the time, which isn't too tough considering my classes are a decent-enough size (12-16).

Re: checking comprehension, It's not always so cut-and-dry. Some of these students can hide behind the others in class, and we're expected to get them into mainstream classes, so things do move pretty fast (for everyone). I simply don't have the time to cater to every student's whim. I do comp checks regularly, before we move on to something else, and the good students will let me know if they have questions (which is a necessary skill in any uni class).

At the university level, it's the students' responsibility to keep up with their assignments, and we in the ESL department won't hold their hands because that wouldn't be fair to them down the road. They need to take responsibility for their own learning.

Now if this were a conversation school (especially abroad), I'd be more inclined to stray from the material and spend more time addressing curiosities. It's just tough when you're expected to adhere to a set curriculum. You end up teaching to the middle, which is never a good thing.

[Justin Trullinger]

I talk far too much. In the bar, that is. Just ask anybody who knows me.

In the classroom, it's a different matter. Because I like to think that my students are there to learn English. (Ocasionally, this is actually the case. And I know, through both training and experience, that one doesn't learn a language through long explanations. One doesn't learn a language through hearing somebody talk about the language. One learns a language through appropriate practice. Stimulating students to practice, showing them how to practice, and helping them to learn HOW to learn from their practice, is most of my job.

I wouldn't be able to offer a percentage of how much of the class I spend talking, because it varies with the situation. But it should be low.

Of course, checking understanding is hard. And the question, "Do you understand?" is near useless. Most people always say yes, to avoid embarassment, and even if they really mean yes, that only means that THEY think they understand. Instructions, directed content questions, and student correction/explanation of the point at hand, all oten help me. But I'm not dealing with the group sizes you are, Jizzo. The only groups that size I teach are 4 years old, which calls for a different approach.

Take care,
Justin

[Gordon]

Good points about checking comprehension. Like Jizzo, I teach large university classes with about 50-60 students and frankly the slow ones fall behind. At this level, they must take responsibility.

[Deconstructor]

When students come to class, they must have realistic expectations. They must realize, for example, that the teacher is not Mr. Spock and can't simply touch their heads and go, "my thoughts to your thoughts, my language into your head". Students think they can bulldoze English into their heads by using their grammar books and dictionaries. There are no short cuts.

Teachers on their parts do the same thing: They walk into the class and try to bulldoze English into the students' brains through grammar and vocab.

I am astonished how little teachers realize that grammar is the least important of all skills when it comes to learning a language. One can get one's point across with very little grammar; while learning vocab with little or no context is as pointless as learning the form. Instead of teaching students to say 100 things with 10 words, we teach them to say 10 things with 100 words. What a waste! We never teach them skills, we never teach them strategies. We give them a gun and send them to the front without teaching them how to understand the enemy. It takes no time for them to be blown away. Both teachers and students think of language as a totally rational process learnable like math, hence, our fundamental failure.

The only way to learn how to swim is to jump into the water, not move one's arms and legs outside the water and pretend they're swimming. We pretend to teach students to be world class swimmers when they can barely float. Push them into the water and they drown.

[some waygug-in]

A lot of, if not most of the students here in Korea have no clue what expectations they should have in order to be good students. Most of them are being forced to learn a language that they have little or no interest in learning.

It can be argued that it's my job to get them interested and I don't disagree entirely, but there is a limit to how much a teacher can do.

I can try to make class fun for them, I can play games and songs...but then the parents and director are breathing down my neck saying that the students aren't learning.

I would venture a guess that the students can learn more from things that interest them than plowing through some boring old textbook, but I have to try and keep some kind of balance.

Too much "entertainment" and I become nothing but an overpaid clown, too little and the class is boring and the students refuse to participate.

I wish I had the magic answer.......but I don't. The best I can say is that sometimes I have classes that work and sometimes not.

I do think I am doing better than when I started out though.

cheers

[JZer]

[Deconstructor]

Help those who want to be helped. Adults who don't want to learn but are there, kick them when their up, kick them when their down, but don't let them waste your time.

When I work with children, I know that they never want to be there. There is a small anarchist in all of them and that must be respected. I learn their language as I teach them mine. I show them the utmost respect which is always reciprocated towards themselves as well as me. Motivating them is my #1 priority. Helping them love learning is my only goal.

With adults, it's different. Those who want to learn have my eternal patience, understanding and encouragement. For example, I have a Mexican student who has virtually no skills in English. She finds level one extremely difficult, yet she tries like Sisyphus. I will push that boulder up the mountain with her. Learning English is an epic task for her.

On the other hand, I have an Egyptian student who's missed 60% of my classes and does almost nothing whenever he does decide to come to class. To me, he is invisible and not a single second shall be wasted on him. If he is even a second late, he will be kicked out on his ass; if he dares to ask questions and slow down my class, I will, in the most subtle way, make him feel so small that only an electron microscope could locate him; if he dares to come to class unprepared and starts piggybacking, he knows that he will be the object of my wrath and sarcasm, and utter humiliation is all that he will feel for the next 3 hours.

I will go from saint to Satan on a drop of a hat. If you can get away with it this is the only way to deal with adults.

[some waygug-in]

You've obviously never had a hoard of little K-monsters trying to give you the "ddong chim".

I hear what you are saying, but what happens quite often here is there are whole classrooms full of students who don't care and don't want to learn. But their parents are paying and the director wants the money and I have to try to get them to want to learn.........somehow. If I were allowed to do my own thing and use board games, pop songs and other things, I think I would be more successful. But as soon as I start doing that, the director comes calling. "You are not doing any work in class. You are letting them do whatever they want. You have to make them work or you are fired. You have to make them do a writing assignment every class. You have to make them........blah, blah, blah.

I don't believe that you can 'make' someone learn. They either want to or they don't.

There are a few who think they want to learn, but soon change their mind as soon as anything vaguely resembling 'effort' on their part is required.

There are very few who actually are willing to put forth any effort on their own.



This is my fourth year in Korea now, and I think I could count on one hand the students who would fit into the last category.

To be fair, English is hard for them as is Korean for me. I find I have to really struggle to motivate myself to study Korean.

[Gregor]

Let's go back to the OP for a moment.
My friends and family (as well as I) had no idea what I was getting myself in for. Teaching ESL abroad had never occurred to any of them, and they had no idea what to think.
The only perception of any sort that I encountered was from my father, who was just bursting with pride that I would become something so noble as a teacher.
Bless his heart.
And, by God, I wanted to make him proud, and in the work that I have done in my career so far, I think I HAVE. I have become a good teacher, and I have helped others to do so as well.

It's really easy to take pot shots at ESL teachers. But, man, you can do something with it if you want to. Never mind the politics involved, or the business end (the school needs to have paying students!!), or any of that.
What is teaching? No, forget that. What is successful teaching?
This would mean engaging your students. Making them interested in the subject you are given them to teach. And it means, in any formal teaching environment, and I do not care what country you are in, you HAVE TO teach what the school that is paying your salary wants you to teach the kids.

I have a new teacher, just arrived. He was a school teacher in Britain, back in the 60s and early 70s. He got out of it because of cultural and political movements away from actual education for the students and in favor of political correctness.
NOW, he wants to get back into the classroom, and he is PERFECTLY happy with the constraints put upon him and his fellows here, by having to teach our curriculum...because the only yardstick that WE apply is the students making the required improvement in the language. They don't have to pass any sort of test other than what goes along with OUR curriculum. We are not teaching them, for example, to pass the (crap!) Chinese tests of English, but to actually use English in a practical way.

That's it, bottom line. If we can teach these people English, regardless of the people who say that we're just a bunch of charlatans (and some of those people post here regularly), then we are TEACHING. And my pop is right to be proud of me, because I DO manage to teach a lot of people to speak English.
This new teacher, as well, will have no reason to feel like he's wasting his time, because he has the opportunity to do actual, real teaching.
Now, HE'S a trained teacher. He has his PGCE. I'm also a trained teacher, but I became so after I started teaching. I got better, got more training, and there you go.
One other thing - this 60-year-old man, new to China and new to TEFL, did his CELTA and was delighted no end at how difficult it was, how FUN it was, and how much he learned. He told me the same things I have always thought about ESL myself - that the way we teach (at EF and similar ESL places) is MUCH more effective than the way we were supposedly taught foreign languages when WE were kids, and the method is MUCH different from what we were exposed to (and what HE actually DID as a teacher in the 60s).
Here we have a well-educated and experienced educator. A professional by any way you care to measure. And he is delighted and emotionally MOVED by the methods that the CELTA people have devised for teaching English. He admitted, freely and happily, that most of these methods (TPR, for one example) would never in a million years have occurred to him, but he is more than happy to put them to use.

Bottom line - The myth is that ESL teachers abroad are real teachers. And it's easy to laugh at. But the TRUTH is, ESL teachers abroad who take their jobs seriously really ARE real teachers, FAR beyond teachers of foreign languages even in our own countries, to this day.

Here's the sad bit - I won't qualify to teach in a public school in my own country.
But I refuse to let that take my status as a TEACHER away from me.

[Justin Trullinger]