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Milwaukiedave
Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Location: Goseong
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 Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 7:40 pm Post subject: Teaching English to professors |
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I have a class teaching MBA professors and I'm trying to find something in terms of a text to use. One of the things I'm taking in to consideration is I don't want the materials to be too remedial or childish. We meet two times a week for an hour and a half.
I tried to do a search, but it wasn't pulling anything up. |
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jinju
Joined: 22 Jan 2006
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| Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 7:42 pm Post subject: |
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| Why not brush up on their area of expertise and find relevant issues to discuss? |
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dutchy pink
Joined: 06 Feb 2007
Location: Incheon
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Juregen
Joined: 30 May 2006
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| Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 8:47 pm Post subject: |
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MBA professors already have extensive knowledge of vocab in their field of expertise to be honest.
Did they explain the target of these lessons?
Is it to improve their writing skills for publishing purposes?
Is it to improve their abilities to teach class?
You should clarify what the needs are more precisely. |
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mj roach
Joined: 16 Mar 2003
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| Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 12:05 am Post subject: |
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'The Vest-Pocket MBA'; Jae K. Shim, Ph.D; (Prentice Hall)
and the 'Wall Street Journal'
should offer enough 'structure' to get them 'talking' (which is probably their 'goal' - ie. intl. conferences, symposiums, etc.) |
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Corky
Joined: 06 Jan 2004
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Milwaukiedave
Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Location: Goseong
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| Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 3:09 am Post subject: |
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Thanks for the recommendations thus far. I'm going to look into all of those. I'm trying to keep my mind open to suggestions.
One book I found is Business Roles 2 (Cambridge University Press) that has several different business simulations. Has anyone used that book?
For clarifications, the focus is on improving their speaking ability. Based on the interviews I've done with the professors that will attend the class the areas that need to be addressed are: pronunciation, vocabulary, intonation and getting them to slow down the speed of their speech.
The reason behind the English course is because they are going to start offering courses in English taught by Korean professors.
Last edited by Milwaukiedave on Wed Oct 24, 2007 3:23 am; edited 1 time in total |
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shaunew
Joined: 17 Apr 2007
Location: Calgary
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| Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 3:11 am Post subject: |
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Try backpack level 1 or 2  |
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Juregen
Joined: 30 May 2006
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| Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 6:14 am Post subject: |
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| Milwaukiedave wrote: |
The reason behind the English course is because they are going to start offering courses in English taught by Korean professors. |
Where did they get their PhD? Do they know it takes years to be sufficiently fluent to even be able to teach at that level?
I think they are in for a big surprise. |
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Milwaukiedave
Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Location: Goseong
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| Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 4:53 pm Post subject: |
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Some got their PhD's in the US, a few got them here in Korea.
We finished the interviews yesterday and the last professor was so bad, I rolled my eyes after he left the room. It's obvious that he (and a few others) haven't spent enough time or effort learning English and shouldn't be teaching class in English. Yet, I'm being told to go "soft" on my evaluations. Maybe that's a good thing since I have to teach them for the next 7 weeks.
Either way, it should be interesting. |
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halfmanhalfbiscuit
Joined: 13 Oct 2007
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 10:30 pm Post subject: |
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| First up,get a fix on how your company has advertised you.What have they paid for,what are they expecting? |
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kentucker4
Joined: 03 Sep 2007
Location: Georgia
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| Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 10:37 pm Post subject: |
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| Hey, I'm also teaching an adult class. They aren't professors, but their English is pretty advanced. One of our Korean teachers was originally teaching them and now he quit. So they just threw me in there and told me of nothing to aim for or anything. Now the adults are complaining that my two classes I have tought them lack structure. Like I'm just supposed to magically pull out good lessons with no time to prepare nor any information or advice. |
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Milwaukiedave
Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Location: Goseong
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| Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2007 3:25 am Post subject: |
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| halfmanhalfbiscuit wrote: |
| First up,get a fix on how your company has advertised you.What have they paid for,what are they expecting? |
Well it hasn't been advertised because I work at a university. The school is paying for the materials (which haven't been chosen yet) and paying me extra for the classes.
| kentucker4 wrote: |
| Hey, I'm also teaching an adult class. They aren't professors, but their English is pretty advanced. One of our Korean teachers was originally teaching them and now he quit. So they just threw me in there and told me of nothing to aim for or anything. Now the adults are complaining that my two classes I have tought them lack structure. Like I'm just supposed to magically pull out good lessons with no time to prepare nor any information or advice. |
Yeah, this sounds familiar. I started at the school this week and they want me to start the classes next week and have all the materials, syllabus, etc. ready by then. Not going to happen. |
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halfmanhalfbiscuit
Joined: 13 Oct 2007
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2007 4:05 am Post subject: |
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No,what I meant was what has admin or whoever told the students the classes are going to be about?
With advanced students I always found the biggest problem was admin/management coming to some agreement over classes which was inevitably never told to me and would be the basis of complaints from students. |
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Woland
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2007 5:23 am Post subject: |
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| Milwaukiedave wrote: |
Thanks for the recommendations thus far. I'm going to look into all of those. I'm trying to keep my mind open to suggestions.
One book I found is Business Roles 2 (Cambridge University Press) that has several different business simulations. Has anyone used that book?
For clarifications, the focus is on improving their speaking ability. Based on the interviews I've done with the professors that will attend the class the areas that need to be addressed are: pronunciation, vocabulary, intonation and getting them to slow down the speed of their speech.
The reason behind the English course is because they are going to start offering courses in English taught by Korean professors. |
I'm currently teaching a class at my university for professors (all depts) on how to teach courses in English effectively. While I have a rare enrollee whose English is really too weak for them to seriously contemplate teaching their course in English, most of mine got their PhDs abroad and are quite solid. They can teach in English.
What my colleague who teaches the courses with me and I have discovered is that the real issue is not the professors' English, but their being able to present the material effectively and interact with students to help the students learn it. Their big concern is with the students' level of English - whether they can comprehend what has taught. Part of what they want is ways to check comprehension, involve students, and make their classes successful.
We've built a curriculum for them that involves lots of discussion of classroom assessment techniques for checking comprehension, presentation strategies to help students with comprehension of readings and lectures, and microteaching, where they practice what we've talked about and give each other feedback.
We've also started to make extensive use of the lectures that UC Berkeley has put up on youtube (www.youtube.com/ucberkeley), examining them as models of classroom instruction. I especially like this because, to borrow gopher's term, it demysitifies the native speaker lecturer. When they see presentations that they can critique, when they see Berkeley profs giving lectures that could be improved by better skills, they begin to realize that they are up to the task. I also show examples that I think are impressive in terms of how they involve students and get them to demonstrate their own learning. Just this week, we had a two hour discussion of a ten minute segment of student presentations.
I have to say that we also get into occasional discussions of the language policy itself, the reasons behind it, their responses to it, how they teach the classes they have in English, the strategies they use (including use of Korean) for teaching effectively. I treat them as competent adults and get rewarded with some great discussions and insights. I learn from them things I can use in my grad level classes.
If you have a large number of people who are too weak to benefit from something like I described, you will have to go in a more language focused direction. Perhaps you could offer separate classes for the lower and higher English levels, with the higher one focusing more on effective presentation strategies and the lower on building spoken English. This split would prevent boredom or frustration from a mixed class with only one focus.
PM me for further info on my classes. I may be slow in responding because KOTESOL is this weekend, but I will get back in the next week. |
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