Teach English in Dazhai Zhen - Jinzhong Shi

I was fortunate when I began this course to have already had many years of teaching experience. In 2011, after graduating from university, I was unsure of my life goal and had a friend who was planning to go to South Korea for a year to teach English. At the time, they were taking in a lot of teachers, even those who had low qualifications. Since I was eligible for the job, I decided to follow my friend and thus began my teaching career. For the first three years that I lived in the city of Gyeongju, South Korea, I worked in an all boys high school. The school was notorious for having lower level students, which was fortunate for me, because I had little knowledge about teaching at all. I was provided with a number of resources and materials, but I used the Smartboard with the internet most of the time, with the occasional worksheets. It was fortunate that the guest English teacher community in Korea had an online material-sharing website, where there were tons of games, lessons, and activities for all levels. The one thing I was not provided with was a textbook, as the Korean English teachers felt they were too hard for the students (they had English class without me throughout the week where they were taught the content by the Korean teachers so they got the test material.) They told me I could teach “what ever I wanted”, which sounds lovely, but I eventually learned that some sort of structure was my friend. While working there, I became more comfortable in the classroom and I build a good rapport with my students. I taught extra after school classes for remedial students, and I also helped prep higher level students for TOEIC tests. After 3 years I was moved to work between several schools at once, but instead of high school, they were middle and elementary schools. It was a surprising challenge to switch from teaching teenagers, to younger children and pre-teens. I had to learn a new method of teaching, where a textbook was provided and I had to teach certain content by a certain date, which I quite preferred. Teaching younger elementary students brought challenges such as more behavioural problems, as well as lack of understanding of English due to their age. Students in South Korea are still learning their own language into the early years of elementary school, so for some it was extra difficult to grasp the English language. However, younger learners tend to be really excited to learn English, especially with a funny-looking “foreign teacher” running the class. Teaching middle school was probably my favourite age level to teach in South Korea. I taught at the same middle school for four years, so I built a great rapport with both my students and colleagues. One would assume middle school aged kids would be moody and hard to teach and control, which can definitely be true, but they are also at an age where you can start to see the adults they will become and they can still be molded. With the textbook, little grammar was taught, the focus of my class and job in general was conversational English. Each chapter topic had students working on the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, and I would use or create a game to end the class. Teaching English in South Korea, but after 7 years of teaching there, I recently returned to my home country of Canada. Since returning, I have begun working at a multicultural association, where I teach adult immigrants who are new to Canada. Many of them are refugees. Since completing the original TEFL course, I’ve taught several different levels of learners, from all over the globe. Our ESL curriculum focuses on task-based learning, and although tons of materials and resources are provided, I am free to create my lessons as I see fit for the students. Having completed this business English course, I now have a better understanding of how to do so, and can use what I’ve learned to further my teaching career in the future.