Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Hater Depot]

[Manner of Speaking]

Hater,

Thanks for the article, it's an interesting read. Do you have a link to the story?

Cheers,

MOS

[Hater Depot]

Oops.

http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/nation/200602/kt2006020519163011970.htm

[inkoreaforgood]

There's nothing in that article that anyone with a year's teaching experience inside the system here couldn't have told them. Anyone can say "class size" and "teacher development", since it's quite obvious that the average Korean English teacher can barely manage a sentence or two in English. And 30-50 students in a class goes beyond ridiculous.

Good thing someone finally did a study

[VanIslander]

[jacl]

No one can effectively teach a class of 30 students to speak a foreign language. Especially when you teach said class only 2 or 3 times a week.

[kathycanuck]

At my private high school, I had 12 classes of junior students, each with 40 students, and only saw each class once a week...they knew they received no credit for my class. Can't understand it, they're still not fluent!
I also had one class of 30 senior students who I saw every day, who did make considerable progress over the course of the year. I tried to tell the powers that be that my time was being misused in this situation, but they were more interested in keeping the parents happy by having all the kids see the foreign teacher at least once a week than they were in providing any real benefit to the students. Very frustrating.

[bluelake]

Hehehe, if you want beyond ridiculous, read a story of mine.

Many years ago, at the previous university I taught at, I went to the dept. TA to get my rollbook. She said to me "Sorry." I wondered what she meant, until I was handed the rollbook; it had 500 students in it. I complained that that would be too many students for all my classes--she told me that was for one class! On top of that, I was assigned a half classroom (35 student capacity) to teach it in! When I tried to get to the class, not only was the room filled like myolchi in a jar, the halls were also packed. Other profs and students couldn't get to their classrooms and were quite ticked off. To get to my room was not easy, but I finally did; I told the students to go home.

I immediately went to the dept. office and told them how stupid the situation was. I was then given an auditorium (200 person capacity). When the students showed up, I told all freshmen to go home (it was not a freshman class and they made up half of the rollbook). After that, I announced it would be a lecture-only class, plus I told them how difficult it would be. I ended up with about 180 students.

It took a couple more years, but they eventually put a size limit on classes (I think sixty or so, IIRC).

At my present university, my colleagues and I teach academic English (grammar and composition), instead of conversational English, and the class sizes are a maximum of twenty-two students. Big difference.

[Manner of Speaking]

[Manner of Speaking]

The title of the article is also somewhat misleading. It isn't English-only classes which are showing no improvement, but English-only classes with class sizes of 30 students or over.