Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Seoulman69]

How much of your teaching is grammar related? Is it minimal? I teach children and would like to move to teaching adults but my grammar and linguistics comprehension is not very high. I know the basics but going into depth about modal verbs, infinitives and gerunds becomes more difficult to explain.

[PatrickGHBusan]

It will vary depending on the classes. As a rule of thumb however, adults tend to be mroe demanding on grammatical explanations.

[Thiuda]

[Seoulman69]

[ACT III]

Odds are you'll be teaching a conversation class, so hopefully you won't have to dive into the finer points of grammar. Like those pesky article rules. Usually students at a half decent uni have had ten plus years of learning grammar but haven't had much experience actually speaking. That's your goal. Get them to use that passive knowledge in speaking. That said you do need to know grammar fairly well so that you can guide the speaking to excercise some aspect of grammar. And for that handful of English nerds that will ask the obscure questions. My advice is to take a good conversation book at the upper int to advanced level and review the grammar points in the back of the book. And if you can pick up a copy of practical English usage by swan (can't remember his first name) for those oddball questions you should be good to go for the grammar stuff. Teaching, well that's a different subject.

[air76]

Most likely you'd mostly be teaching conversation since you wouldn't be applying to the top university jobs. That being said, EVERY conversation book has an element of grammar in each unit.

Realistically, if you can't explain the difference between something as basic as the present simple, present continuous, present perfect, and the present perfect continuous, then you shouldn't be teaching at that level because while the classes focus on conversation you still will be getting a lot of grammar questions and need to be able to explain why one tense is used instead of another in the exercises in the book. NOW, before people start crapping on my head for saying this...I am not trying to tell you that you shouldn't apply for the jobs. One of the profs at our school (ironically the only guy with an MA) is incapable of teaching grammar and an all around bad teacher, and he was asked to re-sign. So...the real answer is, if you don't want to teach grammar you can work around it and skip the stuff you don't know, but if you really don't know what a modal or helping verb is, then you'll definitely be made to look like an idiot once in a while as students will ask you questions about why a sentence is correct or not and will want more than a yes/no answer.

The thing is this, though, any upper-intermediate conversation book will contain 95% of the grammar that you'll ever need to teach...so you could go pick up an American Headway 3 or something and study it yourself, teaching yourself all the grammar in the book.

Oh...and most universities will ask you about your teaching methodology in the interview...so you at least need to do some research so that you can BS them.

[djsmnc]

Grammar I'm not deal with in the my university