Teach English in LiushAdong Jiedao - Jieyang Shi

This unit introduced many concepts that I haven't thought about in years, since I was last in a classroom as a student or as a Teaching Assistant. As such, a lot of the rationale behind using gesture, voice, eye contact, and grouping interested me because I hadn't read about it from this side of the fence, as it were. I remember that I was not overly fond of classroom management myself because of the varying shape of classrooms at my university. Some rooms were rectangular with a rectangular configuration of long tables pushed together, with me at the short end of the rectangle, and there's no question that I didn't have ability to hear or engage with the people on the far end unless I walked around, which I often did not do. We sometimes made row classrooms into a modified semi-circle or \"relaxed horseshoe\" to ensure students could hear me and I could make sure they were engaged, not falling asleep. Having said that, I've never taught English as a Learned Language in a classroom, so I imagine that using non-verbal cues as described in this chapter is all the more crucial. Knowing when to pair the students for an activity, how not to dominate the Student Talk Time while not losing track of student progress, that seems to be the true balancing act. Depending on the personalities present in the class, my initial preference would be to get people to number off by threes and put them in groups for groupwork to avoid possible pair conflicts until I had observed who is more outspoken, who struggles, and who is the quiet one. I would be very mindful not to pick on the quiet students, because I am one of those quiet students in any subject except language, and I would monitor to see if I could put them with a partner with whom they're comfortable. My experience from one to one English teaching tells me that adult learners are indeed busy, they often have work and family issues crowding their thoughts, and I want them to learn without feeling backed into a corner.