Teach English in Kangyi Zhen - Jining Shi

I am Sarah, I am from China and now working as an English teacher in Beijing, China. I have been teaching for ten years after I graduated, kind of experienced, however I still learn a lot from ITTT EFL course. In this course, I learnt something which I have already known but haven’t formatted in my mind. It’s really useful to learn something like teaching techniques, methodologies, how to be a good teacher and what types of students are there and so on, but the most vital and impressed me is the grammatical learning units. What is the grammar? In my mind, grammar is a rule of a language, no matter which language you are learning, you have got to get the grammar first, and then do more drills based on a correctly, native way. Grammar is also a kind of logic and culture as well. So if you want to try to speak English or some other language as or close to a native speaker, it would be a good and only way to know grammar well. What’s in grammar? there is a lot to learn, like tenses, relative clauses, modals and some very crucial sentence structures. They help you build your English mind and logical, improve your comprehension. Take English learning, as we know, it’s very important and basic to learn grammar, but it’s really difficult to get and use for non-native speakers. Why? One of the answers would be “Your mother language” . In my class, they are all Chinese students, of course so am I, so I completely understand how deeply the first language effects the second one. Chinese and English, two different languages, from sentence structures, pronunciations , logic and words order to culture. If a student has never been living in an English speaking country, he or she would hardly ever can understand and get this point. Secondly, teaching methods. Even Chinese students start learning English so early, at 7 or 8 years old or so, most of them are learning from Chinese English teachers who are not that professional in grammar teaching, and some of teachers including foreign teachers without TEFL certification only can speak English, but not good at teaching, In China, for most of schools and English training centers or clubs, they are specialize in teaching words and oral English, teachers from these institutions only require and encourage the students to say it out loudly but lack of accuracy. Thirdly, lacking of drills and repetition. From this ITTT EFL course, I learnt some ways of drills for grammar learning from which I am benefit a lot. In my class, for almost ten years, there has been hundreds and thousands of students come in and out, they are aged from 4-year old to 55-year old. I always come cross some grammar learning problems and mistakes that made by them. Here is an example, one day, in my class, after learning the past tense, I asked one of my students to translate a Chinese sentence into English. the sentence was: “I went to the park yesterday with a friend from my work.” , he did it like “ yesterday I with my work friend went to the park.” , from this example, it’s not hard to see what a big influence the first language has. In Chinese, time, place, subject usually comes first and then the events and results, which opposes to English. Although it’s hard to learn grammar, I aways use my way to help them conquer this problem. especially after I finished the ITTT EFL course, I have got some new ideas, follow the ESA methodology, take the simple past tense, first I ask them what they did yesterday, after collecting their answers, of course there will be some mistakes and errors, I introduce the simple past tense grammar, write down the rules, structures and definition on the board, some regular verbs and irregular ones. And after correcting the mistakes and errors, I will ask them to do some Chinese-English or English-Chinese translations follow the simple past tense basic structure on the board, the more repetition, the better. what I have learned is more than what I am writing here, working as a teacher, I should keep myself up to date, again, I really appreciate I started this course and finished, but there is no limit to learning, I have got to and must continue my lessons here, to try to make myself more professional and help students get their confidence back on to learning English. Thank you for your time to review my summative task.