Teach English in Jietou Zhen - Rizhao Shi

Teaching groups Teaching has traditionally been done in a room full of students where one teacher does all the talking, this is known as a teacher centered approach but recently many teachers have moved away from this approach and adopted a more student centered approach which is often whats preferred when teaching groups. Student centered teaching is valuable because it can be used to teach groups that have different ability, ages and cultural backgrounds since your mainly there to be a facilitator and help students work through learning activities. Teaching a group of learners that have vastly different ability can be challenging and require additional effort but it will help you develop your teaching skills and lets you be more creative in the class. You will need to adapt your lesson to be interesting enough for the stronger students and at the same time allow weaker students to participate. One of the ways we can do this is by having open ended activities such as writing all the animals they know, the stronger students can write as much as they want while weaker students may only write two or three. Another way to make sure some students don't get bored is to extend the task for early finishers. Pairing up weaker students with stronger students is a great way to encourage peer learning, this will force them to develop communication skills with each other while bolster the confidence of the stronger students and giving the weaker students one to one help. Teaching a group that has people of different ages is common for adult groups and you will usually be in this situation when dealing with Business English lessons. When teaching Business English you will usually be working with a mix ability group as well and the younger students often have more English experience than their seniors so treat this group like a mixed ability group and be cautious to not undermine the seniors/bosses in front of their juniors. Sometimes you will be teaching a group of children of different ages which is similar to teaching mixed ability groups but is much more demanding so you will have to adapt the way you teach. When planning activities they will need to be challenging enough for older students and simple enough for the younger ones so it's a great idea to have activities with various difficulty levels. Encouraging peer learning is also a great idea with mixed aged groups, the stronger students will generally be the older students. The activities you do will need to be suitable for everyone in the group because a 8 year old may not like the same activities that a 5 year old enjoys, you can split the group up by age and have multiple activities if you can't find common group. Teaching a group from different countries is usually easier since they don't share the same first language so they are forced to communicate in English and these groups are usually in western countries so they are surrounded by English on a daily basis. The biggest issues with these groups is that they have different linguistic traits so it's much harder to pinpoint and predict problems your going to face during your lessons. Another issues is having so many different cultures can make it hard for you to know what gestures or topics are inappropriate or taboo so you must learn about your students culture so you don't offend anyone. Learning about your students culture will also help you build good rapport with them which will increase their engagement. Using multicultural resources is also a good idea since it will teach your students about each other's cultural backgrounds and make everyone feel involved and excited to share their experiences.