pls help novice teacher!

[JJ]

I am going to teach my students next week. They are undergraduate students. i could not imagine that how my classroom look like. Do any teachers want to share your experince about your classroom? what kinds of problems that you face? and how you solve it? I am looking forward to hearing form you soon. Thanks!

[JapanG]

What country? What kind of class? How many students?

[JJ]

I am in Thailand. There are fourty-three students in class and i am going to teach speaking. The students are undergraduate students. Do you think what kinds of problem i will face? and how can i deal with it?

[Lorikeet]

I'm not sure what kind of additional problems you may have if you need to grade your students, but for ideas you might like to look at the "adult conversation" thread that is near this one.

[mariainnl]

I think the best advice I was given and continue to heed is to conduct a needs analysis - with each new student/class . A simple NA is to find out why the students need English and what level they are at.

If you are going to concentrate on speaking activities with such a large class it is probably best to have them work in groups of 5 or 6. Give them a task that involves them in speaking to one another in their groups - I have found lots and lots of such activities on this site. That way you can walk around the class and assess what their abilities are.

I think group work works very well with speaking activities as the students get much more speaking time.

Good luck and please let us know how you get on.

[Sally Olsen]

It might be good to read the thread on Thailand in the jobs forum and see what difficulties have presented themselves to other teachers. I concur with using groups to talk. If you have to grade them you might want to get a baseline sample of their English with a tape recording. They can give you a 20 minute informal talk on their goals and interests. You can give them sample written questions to encourage the initial talk. You can also carry on talk journals with the students - perhaps listening to their tapes and responding to one student every three weeks or so since there are so many. They can share tapes and critique each other. You don't have to do it all. Ask them to tell you about how they feel about the class, what is difficult, what is easy, what would inspire them to do better and so on and then respond. It will give you a good feel of how the class is going and what is missing for most of the students. Near the end of the course, return the intial tapes and get the students to pick out their mistakes and see how they have progressed. While they are in groups they can tape discussions once in awhile. Get them to choose a facilitator who will be responsible to get everyone to contribute to the topic - you should be able to pull these topics from things they told you they were interersted in or from topics in your textbook. The facilitator asks questions of people who don't contribute spontaneously and thus keeps a few students from dominating. You can examine these tapes any way that you would like from detailed analysis of grammar and vocabulary to passing them on to other groups to critique or grade. Try to get them to see where students have common difficulties and gradually build up criteria for a good performance. Students can also give short presentations in these small groups and if they want in front of the whole class and perhaps an outside audience. It might be good to check on web sites for clubs that promote public speaking to get hints from them how to encourage students and structure your course. Toastmasters is one that comes to mind. I would also look at textbooks and workbooks from their other courses to try and tie in with what they are learning in other classes. You can tape textbooks for the students so they hear a good model of speaking while they read. Try to get native speakers in the classroom as well to continue topics that the students have initiated and of course, you can suppliment the textbooks with stories from the Internet and from newstories depending on your facilities.