Teach English in Lianhe XiAng - Chongqing

The course has been a very interesting and refreshing journey into english language teaching. As a matter of fact, I believe that a teacher must constantly learn and improve and adapt if he or she is to succeed in his or her mission, namely help others learn the english language. I have taught english for six years, at beginner to intermediate level, in the seven-fourteen age groups. Therefore, the grammar part was a useful review, and many of the notions and tools in the course were familiar to me. However, I would like to point out below some of these who were at least partly new and which I would like to develop and apply in my intended future teaching career, which would be teaching english to adults. The unit regarding the teacher?s role highlighted the many and complex facets of the people involved in language learning and teaching. I was certainly aware of most of them, as my experience so far has been related mainly to the manager, controller, assessor, prompter, observer, and model roles. This means that will have to work on providing all the roles needed by learners. I intend to do this by observing other teachers and by working on the participant and facilitator roles. They have been present in my teaching so far, but to a lower extent, due to the fact that I have not put much emphasis on pair/ group/ role-play activities. However, they seem to be a great help in giving students more speaking and interaction opportunity during the class, so I will try to use them as much as possible. The main age group that I have worked with is young learners, so the challenge will be to fully adjust to the teaching and needs of adult learners. It might be a challenge in the future to maintain a positive attitude of adult learners whose purpose is mainly english for work, as I have to build a set of fun activities designed for this age group. There is also the challenge of making these activities useful and value-adding, as adult learners tend to take away time from their family or work in order to attend classes. Therefore keeping them motivated and involved is extremely important for continued attendance. Another important item acquired during this course is the ESA methodology. It is extremely flexible and allows for interesting and motivating activities to be built in. Most of the activities presented in the course are common for all teaching. However, the application of activities by means of ESA is partly new for me, and I am extremely interested to study it further and develop my teaching skills in this direction. I look forward to the teaching practice part of this course, where hopefully more examples will be available to watch and learn from. Having had several years of teaching experience, eye contact, gestures and use of voice are by now frequently-used tools. However, using as many gestures as possible in order to minimize verbal instructions is a somewhat new concept for me, and it seems extremely helpful in order to save time, give more impact to instructions, provide some variety to the direction given to the group, and last but not least, help students learn these commands in english by using actions rather than translations. I would like to try and develop a set of gestures to designate the ?listen; repeat in chorus; right; nearly right; etc? situations with each group of learners. Cassette tapes have been somewhat of a nuisance to use, as the sound produced was not always the best for the size of the room or the number of students. Hopefully CD?s/ DVD?s and the equipment attached will be more adequate, and produce much better results. This is another tool I will have to learn to use more proficiently. In conclusion, this part of the course has been a great review of teaching methods and processes, as well as grammar, and I most certainly look forward to further developing my teaching skills in the practical part, where I hope to make the most of the group environment together with trainers and trainees, as well as contribute to the teaching and learning experience of the other participants.