Teach English in Jiulong Zhen - Qingyuan Shi

This unit was about teaching special groups. It covered the ideas of teaching beginners, children, adults, business students, monolingual and multilingual groups as well as one-to-one sessions. The teaching techniques will need to be varied based on what sort of group you are working with and based on a needs analysis. When working with children and larger groups, there are many considerations pertaining to behaviour and discipline. The content will need to be varied and the activities not too long and tedious. The teacher has the power to control boredom, attention seeking behaviour, student to student interaction etc. but sometimes issues stem from out of class situations which are out of the teacher's control. When working with business groups, they may or may not be highly motivated and they could be required to be in attendance by their company etc. These types of groups may have sporadic attendance and will potentially have issues in completing too strenuous a task and a high volume of work/homework as they will likely be engaging in the course on top of their normal work. One-to-one sessions can be very successful and will need to be tailored to the individual. Many activities which work well in groups can work for one-to-one but not all. Using a wide variety of activities will be beneficial and it is more simple than ever to make these activities specific to the student's interests. Among other things, this unit has taught me that students may be passive in assuming \"the teacher knows best\" but it is often more beneficial to force them to complete a questionnaire or some type of needs analysis in order to ascertain exactly what area they are lacking in before planning too much of the content.