Job Discussion Forums

[waluigi]

Hi there, I'm currently in Korea but just sifting through a few job offers in China starting in September.

One offer sounds pretty good, but it says there are 55 students per class in this one university job. This sounds a lot to me... I mean how do you monitor their progress effectively if there's that many?

Just wondering really if these class sizes are normal for unis over there, and if not, what is? I'm used to teaching children in relatively small classes,so would be interested to hear what style of teaching is employed in these large classes of adult students....

Also is it normal to have a fine for breaching the contract over there?

[The Ever-changing Cleric]

45-60 students is the average class size in a chinese university.

They're more easily managed once you have a bit of experience dealing with it, and how you deal with it depends on what subject matter you're teaching.

btw, these are only average class sizes. Some (not too many) are smaller, some are bigger (and can be a lot bigger). I've dealt with the whole range of them so far.

If you have specific questions about anything else, just send me a PM.

[JGC458]

waluigi, at my first uni I had classes of 50-60 students so I asked for the numbers to be reduced and the school immediately complied. I would have given good reasons why I wanted/needed the class sizes reduced. Unfortunately though, academically sound reasons often don't make a difference in these situations. I was lucky, and also my current uni gives me a max of 30 students.

Cleric, I've seen it mentioned that folk can't send PMs until they've posted over 50(?) posts. At the moment the OP only has 2.

[The Ever-changing Cleric]

In the other thread on this same topic, I saw this:

[Nauczyciel]

waluigi, I had classes of 30 to 50 students. That's no big deal as long as you're there to give a lacture, but for language teaching it's counter-productive. And in most cases there's no way you'll get class sizes reduced - too much hassle with curriculum and stuff. And even if that happens, you won't get neat classes of 10 or less. Actually one of my classes was reduced by the dean on his own, but it was from 60 down to 30, so still a lot. You need to split them into groups and monitor if they try and do what you asked them to (ordered them to, perhaps), or if they chat about everything else. You can't be there for each of them anyway.

Breach penalty is a pretty standard privision in Chinese contracts, AFAIK.

[pstevenson]

I have studied and taught languages at the university level in the U.S. The upper limit on any language class, beginning or advanced, is usually 20 or 25, depending on the university.

[DHAPhotography]

From my experience the norm is more like 20 to 25 students.