Friday, July 21, 2006
First Week Reflections
Well, we've made it to the end of our first week of teaching. Wow! It has been an exhausting week, mostly because of the teaching schedule. Each day we each teach 3-75 minute periods. This is very differnt from teaching in the States, where each day we teach 1-48 minute period. However, from a conversation two of us had with a New Zealander teaching at a language institute here, our schedule isn't nearly as bad as it could be. (His summer teaching schedule is ten hours a day, five days a week.)
Today I asked the students to bring to class with them an artifact that represented a significant relationship in their lives. I broke them up into small groups and had them share this with their group members. I walked around and listened in on many of the conversations. It was neat to hear them doing this mostly in English and to find out a little bit more about them.
Today we also started another theme - communication. I chose the sub-theme 'slang' since I was planning to use the Simpsons DVDs I brought with me. Several years ago, I attended an interesting conference session on the use of sitcoms in the ESL classroom. This included websites with episode transcripts, which is a plethora of language for the students. Using these, I created a cloze exercise and provided students with a list of words to fill in while we watched the episode. Most of the students were already familiar with this sitcom, so I didn't have to explain too much about the characters. The students seemed to like this exercise. Plus, it provided nice variety to the other activites we had already done during the week, which is a challenge when teaching in an intensive English program such as this.
In an effort to reduce the amount of work this teaching schedule requires, our brainstorming sessions now consist of coming up with creative ways to do this, such as experiential learning projects.
When I was teaching in the IEP in the States, where the teaching load was also quite heavy, the teachers designed several experiential learning activites for the students, such as visiting an elementary school for the day. Of course, this type of activity is ideal for the target language culture; however, we were thinking about having the students design the activity as a class, get feedback on it from their instructors throughout the week prior to doing it, then, at the end of the week, all three classes and four teachers would take part in this activity.
Because we aren't teaching the student population we thought we would be and weren't informed of this ahead of time, we've had quite a time of trying to find materials to use in our classes. To make matters more challenging, the four of us are teaching the same students, so we have to have a lot of different materials so that we don't overlap in our teaching. Most of us have turned to the Internet as a primary source; however, we have still been faced with the issue of overlap. hopefully we better planning on the part of pnu, next year's teachers won't face this frustration.
Today I asked the students to bring to class with them an artifact that represented a significant relationship in their lives. I broke them up into small groups and had them share this with their group members. I walked around and listened in on many of the conversations. It was neat to hear them doing this mostly in English and to find out a little bit more about them.
Today we also started another theme - communication. I chose the sub-theme 'slang' since I was planning to use the Simpsons DVDs I brought with me. Several years ago, I attended an interesting conference session on the use of sitcoms in the ESL classroom. This included websites with episode transcripts, which is a plethora of language for the students. Using these, I created a cloze exercise and provided students with a list of words to fill in while we watched the episode. Most of the students were already familiar with this sitcom, so I didn't have to explain too much about the characters. The students seemed to like this exercise. Plus, it provided nice variety to the other activites we had already done during the week, which is a challenge when teaching in an intensive English program such as this.
In an effort to reduce the amount of work this teaching schedule requires, our brainstorming sessions now consist of coming up with creative ways to do this, such as experiential learning projects.
When I was teaching in the IEP in the States, where the teaching load was also quite heavy, the teachers designed several experiential learning activites for the students, such as visiting an elementary school for the day. Of course, this type of activity is ideal for the target language culture; however, we were thinking about having the students design the activity as a class, get feedback on it from their instructors throughout the week prior to doing it, then, at the end of the week, all three classes and four teachers would take part in this activity.
Because we aren't teaching the student population we thought we would be and weren't informed of this ahead of time, we've had quite a time of trying to find materials to use in our classes. To make matters more challenging, the four of us are teaching the same students, so we have to have a lot of different materials so that we don't overlap in our teaching. Most of us have turned to the Internet as a primary source; however, we have still been faced with the issue of overlap. hopefully we better planning on the part of pnu, next year's teachers won't face this frustration.
# posted by About Me @ 8:11 AM 
