How to make your class communicative?

[dianayap2006]

Hi, everybody!
I am an English teacher in China, recently, in my New concept 2 training course, I was told by the students' parents that the students oral English are not improving in spite of 3 months of study, I also feel the same way, since the course I teach is an after-class training course, we just have lessons on every Saturday for 3 hours, time is limited, and some important grammar, structures and phrases are also have to be taught, I tried to raise more questions time by time, but they seem eluctant to answer, how should I rearrange the time and makes the course more communicatively? thanks in advance for your

comments.

[metal56]

Hi, everybody!
, how should I rearrange the time and makes the course more communicatively? thanks in advance for your

comments.

Would the parents agree with to use of communicative teaching and learning methods? Maybe such methods are not well-suited to the local educational culture. Maybe such methods will leave the students even quieter. Not all Western teaching methods are globally useful or appropriate.

Just a thought.

[fluffyhamster]

Yeah, let's bore the kids to death with less communicative methods! But seriously, 36 hours over 3 months isn't that much, and is quite spread out (i.e. probably not enough, nor frequent enough). Parents can be quite ambitious for their kids and sometimes form unrealistic expectations of what can be achieved in these kind of circumstances.

[Anuradha Chepur]

metal wrote:

Not all Western teaching methods are globally useful or appropriate.

In my experience, the methods are useful in principle.
What is not appropriate is the outdated thinking and approach to ESL, which seems to be globally prevalent.

[metal56]

metal wrote:

Not all Western teaching methods are globally useful or appropriate.

In my experience, the methods are useful in principle.
What is not appropriate is the outdated thinking and approach to ESL, which seems to be globally prevalent.

I disagree. What you see as outdated is for some people very useful. For example, would you call it outdated to suggest that teachers in India, Pakistan, and Yemen avoid close contact games in class? When working with certain groups of Muslim children, are all "modern" Western ESL methods suitable/appropriate?

[Anuradha Chepur]

Actually I said the methods are useful in principle.
You have to modify them a bit to suit the culture.
For instance, there is this 'crossing the bridge' exercise, where in the original text, the woman goes to meet her lover when her husband is away on a buisness tour. I change it a bit and tell them the woman
goes to meet her mother. It works.

[metal56]

Actually I said the methods are useful in principle.
You have to modify them a bit to suit the culture.
For instance, there is this 'crossing the bridge' exercise, where in the original text, the woman goes to meet her lover when her husband is away on a buisness tour. I change it a bit and tell them the woman
goes to meet her mother. It works.

OK, but can you give us some examples of what you see as "outdated thinking and approach to ESL, which seems to be globally prevalent"?

[Anuradha Chepur]

The non-communicative method as alluded to in the OP,
focussing only on noun, subject, object, blah blah.

[revel]

Hello all!

I will bring my series of thoughts on this subject to the top again, it gets lost in the data base, since there isn't anything significant to add to it, though it is certainly not out of date. The thread is called "Interpretative ESL".

I don't consider anything used in class as possibly being out of date. Why, I have been using the same books for 25 years and they were published back in 1957. I often feel that it is the effort to seem modern and up to date that makes more recent books unsatisfactory to my way of teaching.

peace,
revel.

[sbourque]

How big is the class? You could make the class more communicative by adapting the materials so as to force the students to speak. For example, when I was teaching in China, I had a class of 28 which I broke into 7 tables of 4 people each. I used prepared dialogs based on the text to get students talking within the groups, and then had the groups write short dialogs similar to the what they had already practiced. While the groups were speaking, I walked around and made brief notes on what needed more practice.

If you need more suggestions, please PM me and I'll be happy to share.

[metal56]

I often feel that it is the effort to seem modern and up to date that makes more recent books unsatisfactory to my way of teaching.

peace,
revel.

What's more important to you, Rev, your way of teaching or your students way of learning?

[revel]

Hey Metal and the rest of you all!

Not one nor the other is more important. My conscience requires me to take individual learning capacities into account on a minute to minute basis. My way of teaching has developed through the observation of how my students learn, how they want to learn and what I can do to make sure each participant in a class is getting what he or she wants during the class. I try to find common denominators among the students, and that's never hard to do in my area (pronunciation, fluency, every-day speaking), but I also answer to the particular needs of any particular student.

Having developed a way of teaching which has been commented as being particularly based on "revel" does not make me dogmatic at all, has actually helped me to be more empathetic to the challenges that my students have in reaching their objectives in class.

Finally, being in the process of losing the vocation for teaching (meaning that I'm not paid enough, the hours are wretched, and I hope to change jobs in the next nine months), I'm not too worried about putting importance on any aspect of my classroom activity. It's what I do to pay for the house and food and cats and that's it. (What a pessamistic comment! Sorry about that!)

peace,
revel.