Teach English in Sitou Zhen - Weifang Shi

In the Fall of 2018, I volunteered to teach a small class of students English while studying abroad in Shanghai, China. The students I taught were from all over the globe, from France, to Kyrgyzstan, to Korea, to China. I knew that I wanted to teach abroad, so I decided that this class would be a good starting point to practice teaching. However, I had no previous English teaching experience and therefore struggled to put together a coherent class. Having now completed the ITTT TEFL online course, I will discuss where I went wrong in my class preparations, how I would improve it after completing this course, and how I will use these lessons in my classroom going forward. To begin, I would have started off the class stronger than I did with more activities to get to know one another. The “pass the ball” activity recommended in Unit 20 would have been incredibly useful - it would allow the students to get to know each other, me to get to know the students, and give me a decent idea of what the level of the students was. In the past, I went into the class without knowing the size of the class, their English level, or what exactly I was expected to do. Therefore, I would then pass out a questionnaire at the end of the class asking students to fill out how long they’ve been studying English, what they hope to learn, and what they struggle in. In my experience, the students I had mainly wanted to practice conversation. Therefore, I would have used role-play activities to get students talking more. In addition, I would have used the ESA class structure. Before, I didn’t know anything about this type of lesson planning, and made the mistake of spending an entire class period doing Study activities, or an entire class period doing nothing but Engage or Activate activities. Therefore, I would re-structure the activities to follow a more stable and effective ESA lesson structure. For example, when I taught a class about Halloween, I would begin with asking students what they already know about Halloween, or what their favorite holiday is, or what a famous holiday in their home country is. From there, I would introduce Halloween vocabulary and traditions. After drilling the vocabulary a little, I would show a video, perhaps a segment of the Charlie Brown Great Pumpkin movie. A mistake I made during the Halloween class I’d taught previously was that I didn’t choose my authentic material carefully enough. My English class was fairly advanced, but still a little slow with listening comprehension, and I didn’t go through the video beforehand to pick out potentially problematic vocabulary, so most of the students were confused and lost during the video portion of the class. After taking this course, I would remedy that error. Following watching the video, I would have students pair up and talk about holidays similar to Halloween in their own cultures, or famous ghost stories, and then have the class discuss and present as a group. This is simply one example of how I would have changed the way I led my previous class. There were many days where I made the mistake of only focusing on Study activities, or focused mainly on Engage activities that got students moving and talking, but didn’t end up actually teaching them anything new. Thankfully it wasn’t a formal class - it was arranged through the university’s Multi-Language Club and therefore solely for extra practice as needed. However, I am glad I had this experience so that I can pinpoint where I made mistakes and have a better idea of how to correct similar issues going forward. Overall, my previous teaching experience left a lot to be desired. I was hugely inexperienced, didn’t understand how to put together a lesson plan, and was mainly making it up as I went. However, it did give me a learning opportunity, and now that I know a lot more about how to put together an effective ESA lesson, I can use my previous mistakes to build upon my abilities as a teacher and become that much better.