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Greetings from Germany!

I'm an American, living in Germany and I've just been hired by a private tutoring school to teach English immersion. I don't have any "real" experience teaching English as a foreign language, but I have all the TEFL books at home.

A little background information is in order so please bear with me:

English begins with the 3rd year of learning in Germany and ends when the students graduate, 13th year. I'm not sure what level I'll be teaching, yet; it depends on what the tutoring school can pull together for me. I let them know my hours and they organize a group of 5-8 students. They like me because I'm a native, since native speakers are hard to come by in this neck of the woods. This school offers tutoring in all subjects. Most of my students will most likely already be having trouble with English, and their parents are paying money for extra tutoring because the student is falling behind in school.

I'm not necessarily dealing with students who are desperately unmotivated, but based on my experience living here for 8 years, most students see English as a "drag" and as "have to". If they are in tutoring, it is because they want to improve their school performance. My job is to capture their interest.

I want to develop a good rapport with my students from the first day. I've read about creating dialogues from words used in the curriculum, but I don't think my students will be interested in speaking so soon. I also don't want to spend the hour lecturing. Any ideas? I appreciate your help!

Would you be able to do some research projects on subjects that would be interesting to them, like animals for younger students or foreign cities or sports for older ones? If you have enough computers or books in English this could be easy. They'd be reading and writing, and you could be there for help (speaking and listening).

Hello Srta. Daniels,

Thank you for responding! I'm hoping to do such projects with the students, in which case it would be my first task to find out what interests they may have. However, I'm not sure that I'll have much freedom to be creative. This tutoring school publishes they're own materials and as far as I know, the students work independently.

I'm pretty sure I'll be more of a facilitator/coach, but hopefully I'll get to introduce some of my own games, too. For instance, I have Cranium's "Hullabaloo" (English) which works like "Twister" There's a set of floor pads in different colors, shapes and images of food, animals, instruments. I would announce, "tip-toe to green", or "touch your hand the triangle", "who is standing on the guitar?", etc. My own kids love this game. Obviously it's geared for younger people, but the bigger ones could find it fun, too. Totally interactive!

I go in for a few days at the end of the month to observe another teacher in action. I'm sure this will yield more information as to what kind of structure they have in the school.