Teach English in Zhangqiu Zhen - Liaocheng Shi

I initially undertook the battery of courses available with ITTT in order to broaden the scope of my credentials for living abroad. In the late summer of 2018, I moved from a small town in Iowa with my wife, who had recently graduated with a doctoral degree in linguistics and had obtained a professorship at a prominent university in Kazakhstan. We moved thousands of miles from our familiar American home to the capitol city of Nur-Sultan, and she quickly became consumed in her work at Nazarbayev University, teaching linguistics and teaching methodology to undergraduate and post-graduate students. Struggling for an idea of what I could do with a bachelor’s degree in political science in the heart of Central Asia, I decided that while I was here, I could at least turn my talents towards imparting my knowledge of my native language to those who wanted to learn. It has been many months since that happened, and in that time, I have completed both the main TEFL course and this CTBE course. I have also, fortunately gained employment with a lovely little school in the old Soviet part of town, teaching younger learners of all levels. In my experience teaching these past few months I have found my knowledge gained through the TEFL course to be invaluable. I was a complete novice to the ideas of syllabus design, materials usage in the classroom as well as how to even begin to think about structuring lessons. The fact that a model, ESA, exists at all was tremendously confidence boosting to me, as it gave me a clear way to move forward. As I deal with students of all backgrounds and knowledge levels in the classroom, it was essential to utilize my newfound teaching knowledge to effectively communicate the intent of each of my lessons. I have since starting my teaching helped to work with our center to redesign critical diagnostic and placement assessments to help better organize our student body into discrete levels. I found that I was the first native English speaker to have been employed at this fairly young company, the rest of the teachers being L2 native Kazakhs and Russians. I’m also trying to assist in adding more flexibility to lesson planning based on the knowledge I’ve gained through the ITTT courses. A typical lesson for me has played out exactly as outlined in this CTBE course, and I admit to at first being daunted by the task of having to split my teaching role amongst being an instructor, a facilitator, a mentor, a psychologist, a counselor and a policeman. Teaching such young children can often be a rowdy experience, and I have had to many times improvise an activity or game with our center material in order to recapture the attention of the class. Needing to be flexible and not structure a pure Straight-Arrow lesson plan is hectic, but ultimately rewarding. I can see that through my roles as both counselor and psychologist that the students are increasing in confidence, and both of those roles constantly give me new material to engage the learner’s attention in meaningful ways. I have also found that through observation of other teachers’ classes and their observation of my own, that we have all grown together as a staff in terms of our ideas for lesson planning and keeping the students engaged. In conclusion, I would say that yes, it is rather daunting to be embarking on a career as a teacher abroad in a society unfamiliar to ones own. I admit to struggling initially with the formality of cultural sensitivities that exist here in Asia, and the idea of “saving face” has been constantly drilled into me since I first stepped out of the airplane onto a new continent. I am glad that I had total immersion to guide me in my acquisition of both the language and cultural norms here in Kazakhstan, and I am grateful that I have the continuing value of the ITTT course to assist me in my new career as an English instructor. It is, and will continue to be, a very rewarding experience.