Teach English in Fengcheng Zhen - Qingdao Shi

The school in which I’ll be teaching English as a Foreign Language will be unique compared to the vast majority of high schools in China. My school’s curriculum will not be based upon test-prep for the Chinese college entrance exam, so none of my students will be permitted to go to Chinese universities. Instead, my school will function as a prep school for Chinese students to then go on to American university. This presents me with unique challenges and opportunities as an English teacher. On the one hand, I will have the freedom to craft specific courses that will have this objective in mind. On the other, my students must graduate from school with sufficiently advanced speaking and writing skills so that they will be successful in American schools. My students are going to need to prepare for the TOEFL and the SAT in order to get admission to American universities. This will be the foundation of the school’s three-year curriculum and the course books, and the final benchmark that the students need to reach. This will be the basic standard of knowledge that my students need to attain, and their production skills will necessarily have to improve to a high level to do well on these tests. However the testing is itself not enough, and I’ll need to have varied and multifaceted lessons to help them speak and write at a college level. In addition to the course work that builds up the content for the TOEFL and SAT, I must also incorporate ample opportunities for students to speak in English. Everyday lessons that involve speaking will be of course necessary, but I also want to simulate the kinds of speaking my students will need to do in the US. This provides many options for role-playing activities, from mock interviews, dealing with friends and roommates, and practical skills for getting around and being understood. I will also want to have them prepare presentations and public speeches, and to do group projects and the sorts of things they’ll encounter in the US in school. In Chinese culture and in middle schools, these sorts of skills are downplayed as test prep and teacher-focused learning are emphasized in the extreme. It will be a challenge for the first year students to break out of that mold and be confident enough to speak out, even if it means failure. For the second and third years, not only do they need to speak out often, but they need to do it well and confidently so that they’re understood. This will be a multifaceted problem that I’m going to have to work hard to solve. This entails that not only will the students need to learn about English, they also need to learn in English. In this way, my school will teach classes from other subjects in English, biology and chemistry for instance. This provides and extra challenge for our students because they need to master already difficult material expected of a high school student, but to do it in a second language. This challenge however could result in helping their English progress further than would normally be the case, because my students are going to be exposed to English far more often than just in English class. The fact that I need to prepare my students for American college also gives me the obligation of promoting the analytical and critical thinking skills expected of an American college student, and those skills must of course be expressed in speaking and writing. Over the course of a year, my students must learn to write often and well to get used to it. We will start with short paragraphs and descriptions as befits their level and capability, but we will work towards year-end projects that are multiple pages long and to the specifications of a college level research paper. The only way I can get my students to prepare for college is by producing college-level work, so great care will be needed to build them up step-by-step over the course of three years until they reach that point. These circumstances in the type of school I’ll be teaching at puts me in the unique position of being both a conventional high school teacher who’s concerned with his students’ futures as well as being an ESL teacher than needs to focus on the specifics of learning English. The way in which I want to approach this with my students is getting them to realize that learning English will have a drastic, tangible use as a practical skill that will enrich their lives and help them in their future careers as students and beyond. I also want very much to teach them those other critical thinking, analytical, reading, and writing skills that will be necessary for them to be successful, which is pedagogically different than teaching specific English proficiency. I hope that by showing my students this intention of mine, they will become highly motivated and achieving students. Mastering English for them will not merely be an end-goal for its own sake, but the means by which to better themselves and learn more about the world.