Korean Job Discussion Forums

[R. S. Refugee]

This is I expect an age-old complaint, but I'm curious what people with much wider experience than I know about this question.

In other teaching jobs in Korea at large and long (4 weeks) uni-sponsored camps and teaching at university, we used a textbook. American Headway series was the one of the ones we used, and I thought it was decent. Certainly one would supplement and look for ways to spice up the teaching, but we had a core curricculum to build on.

In public schools we have nothing but the curriculum that we design ourselves. I'm sure I asked my supervisors some months ago. I think the answer was something like the students were too poor to buy a book, so use handouts. If that's it why do they have books for their other classes?

True, the KTs do complain about the books they're required to teach from and say those books aren't very good. But I'd rather for my students to have the continuity of a decent text as the anchor point of my classes.

What about other places around the world? Any of them use decent texts or do ESL teachers have to endlessly produce handouts?

[Yu_Bum_suk]

I've been able to order books for extra classes but for regular large classes I only see once a week I gues it's a luxury they can't afford. Besides, just imagine how many of those books would get lost if they were used for ungraded supplimental lessons.

In any event, since there aren't really any textbooks that have been designed for what we teach it might be better just to make handouts based on our own material and what we can copy out of a variety of other books.

[xCustomx]

I teach the speaking section from the regular textbook, but usually make my own materials and worksheets since the kids will literally fall asleep if I only use the book.

[KYC]

It is because the kids are too poor to buy it or the parents dont want to. The only class I have a book for is my advanced class & the school had to pay for the books. I didn't even select the book!

For my other classes, I used handouts that I find on the net or make them myself.

[Fishead soup]

When I worked in Suwon I got the students to buy Interchange(red). For the first month it was awesome. I fell on the stairs wearing those idiotic slippers that I was forced to wear and the tape recorder was damaged.
So I could no longer use the tapes.

Then students eventually started showing up without the book. It got to one point were the few books that were left were being shared.

Yu Bum Suk is right students will not take a coure seriously if they are not being graded on it.

If you need good materials then go to the TESL journal. Click under things for teachers. Then click under "Tell Me More" the online textbook.
This stuff was written for Korean students and it's truly awesome.
Boggleworld has some good stuff too.