Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Globutron]

My friend in China is getting a little run down...

He's at a University teaching business English but nothing is planned and nobody other than himself has anything to do with the two hour lessons to 18 ish year olds.

So he must come up with lesson plans every time. I personally think it's not really possible or viable to try to come up with something new and interesting every time, so does anyone have any idea to get through a year like this?

Some kind of routine plan that doesn't get too boring...? I dunno, Every little helps, as Tesco say.

I'd dread it personally, I have everything planned years ahead of me so I don't need to think. But this also means I can't really help him.

[machoman]

hey, i taught in china two years ago at a middle school with ZERO provided materials. i had to make everything from scratch. i played a lot of ppt games with them that i used before in korea. i just changed the relevancy to chinese culture. i wonder if you can still play these kind of games with uni students. in my experience, korean students go crazy over pop culture references, but chinese students LOVE LOVE LOVE anything with numbers/gambling/money.

btw, how often does he see the class?

another good thing to do is to work on a project that takes a while to complete, so that it buys him some time to prepare for the next lesson. in my class, we made english zines. in my after school class now, i make vlogs or video projects with them. so maybe he can set up groups of students to present something.

he can do listening activities. what i do is make a slideshow of my travels and make a statement about each picture, then i make a listening worksheet out of that.

there are good discussion topic books he can buy online. just photocopy the articles, have the students read it and discuss the questions afterwards.

chinese students are accustomed to singing, and my students used to always ask me to teach them a song. what's his background? what did he study?

[Mr. Pink]

[D.D.]

Teaching university in China is quite easy. Most teachers split the class into groups and give them a topic to talk about. Then the teacher joins one group at at time and makes conversation.

Thats the basic oral english lesson with a large class in China.

I stood up the front and would get the class to see how long we could keep a conversation about nothing going. So the students got into talking to me about their weekends and common stuff in their lives. At first the class could do about 5 minutes before the conversation died but by the end of semester they could do 45 minutes. I made them all pay attention by asking questions anout what the last student had talked about.

I would tell them to all watch a movie and then we would discuss it in class with question on the board.

Dont push them during exam times. Let them study and the students that like english will come up and talk to you while theothers get ready for exams.

If you see the kids are really tired show them a movie and stop it a lot and ask questions to try to wake them up and stimulate conversation.

Eat with them or hang out on campus between lesson and be available for them just to feel free to chat with you.

I did a lot of exercises in class that was about bringing shy students to the front and doing stuff to open them up( like improv) and become less shy. Once students had got over being shy the English started to flow out of them.

[mc_jc]

My questions to your friend are; how far ahead does he plan his lessons?
Did he assess the situation after he started teaching so he could come up with lessons and activities that could both educate his students and also keep them focused?
Does he go online and look for ideas and activities he could use in his classes and put them in his lesson plans?

When I was an ESL teacher in Korea back in the early 00's, I also didn't have any lesson plans or curriculum to follow. I had to come up with my own ideas as to what I wanted to teach my students. Most of the time, I was only given a textbook and thrown into a classroom and told to "go teach them"- that is the biggest problem with the ESL industry.

Does your friend know about warm-up exercises and how to review previous lessons? How about lesson reinforcement?

There is a lot your friend could do to make a 120-minute class.

But it all depends on;
- students' linguistic level
- How many students are in the class
- The school's expectations and curricular goals
- What the students need and what they want.
- What is their academic level- are they undergraduate or graduate students? (your friend could teach business presentation skills, interview communication drills, pronunciation/ intonation drills [I know Koreans and Chinese really wanted to 'brush up' on their accents]).

Has your friend made any kind of assessment?

[rollo]

Look on line for ideas. There is a lot there. Having a good plan is what teaching is really about. Your friend will get better with this as time goes on. there ae certain little tricks tactics to teaching in China that you learn. If there are other foreign teachers at his school he should talk to them.

[metalhead]

So many unis in China, so easy to get work there, surely he could quit and just find a better job, especially as he is in-country which is how one finds good gigs there.

[Vagabundo]

what bugs me about China (have some interest in teaching there) is that it restricts YouTube and I find YT to be invaluable to me in Korea, both as an interest spark and often teaching material, or related teaching material.

[Globutron]

You guys are really juicy when you want to be. Like apples. though most the time I find apples more trouble than they're worth.

I'm going to flood him with some of these ideas right now, and I am going to give them a look too.
Time to quote:

[metalhead]

China has blocked all the big torrent sites now, too. The solution? Pay 60 American dollars a year for a VPN and then you can access all sites to your heart's content, and the speed is decent, too. This is a must-do for China I'd say.