Korean Job Discussion Forums

[proudman]

It's been awhile since I've posted here, but I'm hoping to get some ideas for teaching adults at a company. I'm struggling to come up with ideas and activities because there are some limitations. I'm starting a program at a well known Korean company that has never had an in-house English program. Everything is currently being built from scratch. Here are some of the challenges that I am trying to overcome:

First, the classes/lessons need to be fun, stress free and relaxing. But I am also expected to deliver quality lessons. One challenge that I am facing is that my classes are limited to 30 minutes. How can you teach a meaningful lesson in 30 minutes? It seems like with 30 minutes, all you can really do is chit chat.

Second, the company doesn't want me to rely too heavily on textbooks. So I need to develop activities that will be interesting and useful for them. I have NO experience teaching with a task-based approach, so any suggestions in this area would be greatly appreciated. From the research that I have found, it seems like 30 minutes is too short for a task-based lesson.

Third, most of my classes will be either 2 on 1 or 3 on 1. I will have some 1 on 1 classes as well. My question here is how can you incorporate a tasked-based approach with such a small class?

Am I overanalyzing the situation? I've basically been given free rein to develop the lessons and curriculum as I see fit. This is the first time that I've had this much freedom in regards to content and development of a program.

I'm open to all suggestions. I want to make this as fun and educational as possible. I recognize that just about all Korean "company men and women" are typcially overworked and stressed, so the class needs to be almost a chance to get away from their daily grind. PLEASE SEND ANY AND ALL SUGGESTIONS.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU HAD FREE REIN TO DESIGN AND PLAN AS YOU SAW FIT?

I really appreciate any and all feedback!

[Fishead soup]

Look up Andrew Finch" Tell Me More", or "Keep Talking" Most of it's Task Based activities and Peer Dictation. Lots of emphasis on Running Dictation.
The material has lots of Traditional Korean pictures with one or two Paragraphs describing it. In groups they have to dictate the material. There's also an Information gap with some Korean masks and a folk story that goes with it. There's the finchpark.com. You can print the stuff for free also you can access his material through the TESL journal just click things for teachers.

[Whistleblower]

There is a good book which is called "One-to-One Learning" by Wisniewska and is published by Cambridge University Press. It has some lesson recipes in one half of the book. It should offer some inspiration and can be changed to accommodate one to two or one to three learning. Think about setting up a blog and getting students to complete a task which is related to the aims.

[proudman]

Fishhead and Whistleblow: I really appreciate the information. I will look into both of your suggestions.

Whistleblower, can please expand a little bit on your blog suggestion. I've actually have been thinking about setting up a general blog to attract more privates. But how would you incorporate one into the company job setting? More specifically, what kind of tasks would you suggest getting students to complete?

Also, back to part of my original post. If you were given complete autonomy with in regards to how you want this program to look and run, what would you do? How would you make it a beneficial, fun, stress-free and relaxing environment? With the time constraint of 30 minutes for each class taken into considersation, what would be the basis or foundation of each lesson. After exchanging pleasantries and small talk, nearly 1/3 of your class time will have already expired.

I'd love to hear from any and all who teach or have taught adults in private or company settings.

THANKS AGAIN FOR YOUR INSIGHT!!!

[edwardcatflap]

Find out what your students want and need English for and plan your activities accordingly. Do they want to get better and be able to use English more effectively in their jobs or just mess around having a break for half an hour? Even if it�s the latter I wouldn�t recommend running dictations for Korean business men. If it�s the former you should be able to plan some task based business activities that you can set up and have them carry out in half an hour. Most business books have at least one task in each unit the students have to do that end up in a meeting or other kind of role play, so I�d suggest you get yourself a decent book and adapt them accordingly. Plan for say fifteen minutes for intro discussion plus brainstorming/eliciting vocab/grammar/functional language then fifteen minutes to set up and carry out the activity with a bit of feedback at the end. If they can�t apply themselves to something properly for thirty minutes they shouldn�t really be there in the first place.

[edwardcatflap]

double post

[SeoulNate]

It entirely depends on what you students want and need.

I have tutored many adults in the past and in general the tutoring centers around three topics: (assuming that they do not need basic language acquisition)

1. idioms. learning about them, how to use them and when they are appropriate. Centering lessons around that is quite easy when you start to break down the situations where you would use the idiom. At home, at the office, at the bar, eating dinner etc.

2. Conversation practice. Basically they just want to become more fluent in English speaking about a variety of subject matter. In the past I have always centered these classes around current events. Typically I will give them a newspaper or magazine article to read in English and then we will discuss it the next class as well as have general conversion practice.

3. Context and situation practice. This is a little bit more rare, but I have tutored a few people who wanted to practice certain situations, dinners, meetings, meeting new people, going out etc. For these, I typically wrote a script beforehand for myself about what questions I was going to ask and what they needed to do. For example, if we were practicing a business meeting I would hand them a card with their goals: introduce themselves, talk about the company, introduce a product or service etc. This also works on conversation as they have to respond to my questions.

All three could be used to teach a class, just decide what the students need and want and pick the topics from there.

[busanliving]

look for the books intermediate communication games, advanced communication games and business communication games, lots of easy to make communication based lessons. Some will run over 30 minutes though so maybe you could introduce target language etc in one lesson and do the activity in the next.

[proudman]

I want to thank you all for all of the great insight that you've provided thus far! It's a great starting point for me in developing the program. If you or anyone else can think of any other ideas or suggestions, please feel free to share. Your ideas will certainly benefit others that are in similar situations.

THANKS AGAIN!!!

[Castaway]

[Fishead soup]

[Castaway]

I wouldn't call dictation "speaking." It's merely reading aloud.

It also isn't a much of a reading activity, as it doesn't require any sort of comprehension.

And it isn't much of a writing activity either, as it basically entails transferring a text from one sheet of paper to another.

Overall, it's a lot of "fun" for the kiddies, but from the standpoint of pedagogy, it's not exactly the bees' knees.

[edwardcatflap]

[Castaway]

Learning to discriminate between certain sounds, recognize aspects of connected speech, etc. is one thing regular dictation is OK for. And of course you can (should?) always recycle grammar and vocabulary from the course to boot.

Dictogloss is a bit more challenging and useful in a lot of ways. It actually requires students to comprehend what they're hearing and to draw on what they know of the language to produce a coherent reformulation of the text.

Still, I wouldn't classify either activity as "task-based learning."

[winterfall]

If they work in finance related and have mid-high to high level English, you can make a class project around stocks. There's a few sites designed for newbies that lets them trade with imaginary money.

http://www.forbes.com/bow/b2c/category.jhtml?id=152

You can also make an activity around Prediction Markets if you plan on using a lot of recent news articles. It uses real money though on a Yes you think it's gonna happen or No you think it won't. They need a pretty high level of english to do this though and its US centric.

You can probably settle what to vote on week by week on whatever gets the most votes in class and let them know the outcome the next week. Interesting way to spark a debate on pros and cons in class. You can split the winnings with whoever made the most correct predictions

http://www.intrade.com/v4/home/

This Youtube Video is a Prediction market in a nutshell

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_MXvopRqps