Teach English in Mafang Zhen - Luliang Shi

My plane touched down, I collected my baggage, and waded through customs. It was only my second time in a foreign country and this time around I was there for an indefinite period of time. I was moving to Israel as an Au Pair and hoped to learn as much Hebrew as I could while I was there. It was my first time to live in another country and to be surrounded by another language. I had taken a very introductory level Hebrew course in high school and I was excited to see how much more I could learn during my stay in Israel. Before going to my first class, I had no idea what to expect! Riding the bus, then the train from where I was living into town, was only the first of many new experiences. At this point in time my Hebrew knowledge was close to nil, I didn’t know the alphabet, and could only remember a few sentences from my highschool course. (The highschool course was only for spoken Hebrew, not reading and writing.) Imagine walking into a classroom with close to fifty people and not knowing what to expect! That was me. However it ended up being one of the most amazing experiences of my life! In the first 3 hour class we learned the entire alphabet and about a dozen words. It was very fun! Because of my Au Pair duties, I ended up taking the night Hebrew classes, which meant that I had class three nights a week and each class was three hours long. Class was divided into two class periods with a 15-20 minute break about half way through. We also had a different teacher for each class period. There were 5-6 different teachers which meant that we might not get the same teacher twice in one week. At first I wondered why we had so many different teachers but then I started to realize that they each had a different teaching style and also slightly different accents. Having different teachers was a benefit I didn’t realize I had experienced until I started my TEFL course. My class was as mixed as you could get. There were about 15 different nationalities represented, every different background and experience you could imagine, and we varied in age from 20-80. After having studied through the CTBE, I have realized the challenges my Hebrew teachers had in teaching my Hebrew class. Attendance was sporadic, students were tired, and all the factors mentioned in the CTBE course were present in my class. The teaching method was primarily grammar translation. The target language was Hebrew, but it was taught from the platform of English. The focus of the course I took, was on speaking, however we were taught reading and writing a little bit. All of our homework was translating sentences from English into Hebrew. The goal of the Hebrew school I attended was to get the students out on the street speaking Hebrew as quickly as possible. We had a lot of drilling but also a lot of question and answer sessions. The teacher would ask a question in English and we had to spit it out as quickly as possible in Hebrew. The method was very effective for me but I know there were students who struggled with it. Without having studied this TEFL course I would not have known what category to place the teaching methodology into. Studying through these English teaching classes has helped me to be better at evaluating my own experiences, also having a foreign language experience has helped me to understand and better retain the knowledge I’ve gained through this course. When I started taking the TEFL course, my mind reverted back to my experiences in the Hebrew classroom so many times! Not only in evaluating how the teachers taught, but in seeing how the classroom was handled, how the various students learned, what the teachers objectives were, and essentially what a foreign language classroom can be like. As a child I read extensively and had some grammar courses in school, but when I started learning Hebrew, I suddenly started to understand and have a better working knowledge of English grammar. Having that enhanced understanding of English, from my Hebrew course, has helped me to better apply the TEFL course; also having foreign language class experience gives me a start to understanding some of the challenges students may face in my future classrooms. Learning Hebrew in Israel has been one of the best experiences of my life. While there I realized I have a love for languages, which was definitely a deciding factor for me taking these courses. I hope that soon I will have the privilege of sharing my love for language with other people by teaching my native language to people around the world.