Korean Job Discussion Forums

[ajuma]

Oh for *bleep* sake!! I didn't say that pronunciation was the ONLY thing that should be taught!!! Just that it's a good idea to teach the CORRECT pronunciation of some words! I didn't say a thing about "r" and "l"! Who cares? I DO care when my uni students say "I'm from Jeju ISE-LAND"! It makes them sound like morons!

Of course "r" and "l" CAN be important! One student said that she liked "rabbit dancing". Sure sounded like "lapit dancing" to me!!

[pauly]

Thanks for all the responses. Just to clarify my situation a bit, I am in a high school where my classes are 50 minutes long. The Korean English teachers are either a little younger or a little older than me. I will be teaching three classes of teachers with no more than five teachers per class. They seem pretty open to having a topical conversational class where I prepare a topic based on current events, a short story, poetry, etc. and we just discuss it. If you've done this before, what have you done that seemed to work?

[peppermint]

if they want current events, try articles from USA today- the language is fairly simple but it's decently written. Articles from one of the Korean dailies ( I like the Chosun more than the Times or the Herald)once in a while too.

[NearlyKorean]

When teaching adult conversation I use the book

"Talk Your Head Off and Write, Too."

It has serveral topics to discussed.
It includes a list of vocabulary words, a set of 10~12 discussion questions,
and some activites to complete....

I found the book can easily be adpated to level of the students. It is also good for classes where the level varies as the more advanced students will help the lower level students....

All in all, I feel it's a good book and goes for about 14,000.

[wild sphere]

[wild sphere]

[hellofaniceguy]

[Badmojo]

[wild sphere]

[Len8]

Was a thread somewhere about teaching middleschool girls who weren't in the least interested in learning English. They seemed to know the system, and would try to get away with murder so to speak. you could lay something like that on them, and follow the lesson up with some of the responses posted to the original post. Maybe they have similar problems, and they might be stimulated to know how we would have handled the same or similar problems.

[wild sphere]

[coolsage]

Having taught at a teachers' college (kyodae), to which current K-teachers of English would come for refreshers, I think that I can speak to this one. What they wanted and needed most were materials that they could use in their own classrooms. We worked through a great many English teaching games together (Heinemann is a good source, for one). The teachers would actually play the games, time the preparation, get a sense of the learning outcomes, and go home each day with something in their bags that they could actually use once they returned to their schools. The ultimate target audience is not themselves, but their own little charges.

[wild sphere]

[tommynomad]

The first time I trained other teachers, we were half a day and three hours of theory into the class when we realised we'd made a major programming error. Theory, after all, is something any decent teacher can study and discover on their own. We (the director and I) collected some feedback after lunch, sent the participants home with the promise of a better program starting the next day, and went to her house. Five hours, a pad of poster paper and a couple of joints later, we had competely rewritten the program according to the students' needs, instead of our anticipations of those needs. I think I learned more from teaching that program than they did from taking it!

What do teachers need? Tactical, practical strategies and programs to use in the classroom with their own students. All the rest is incidental and/or ego.

My favourite sources: Eric Jensen, Karl Rohnke and a book called Caring and Sharing in the Language Classroom by a woman whose name escapes me.

[pauly]

Thanks everyone. Your replies have been most helpful.