Teach English in Wangtuan Zhen - Weihai Shi

My formal classroom experience before teaching EYL students online in private lessons, which began just five weeks ago, was in the college classroom, where I taught English composition, and eventually grammar, to developmental and regular adult students of widely varying skill levels, ranging in age from 17 to 70. Many of them were new to the daunting expectations of higher education, having returned to school after many years removed from any sort of academic setting. During this time and within these non-ESL classroom settings but about five years apart, I taught two foreign students: Kar, from Malaysia and Anka, from Mongolia. Each student was placed in one of my composition courses as a regular L1 learner. Aside from seeing their names on my class roster a few days prior to class (and only wondering only about whether I would falter in pronouncing them correctly on the first day of class), I had received no advance notice that non-native English speakers would be among my learners. For the class in which Kar was my student, I entered the experience as a new Graduate Teaching Assistant who was somewhat ready for the challenges of a classroom full of L1 students of varying skill levels and motivation but not at all prepared for even one L2 student. From the beginning of that first teaching semester, I quickly found there was little I could do in the classroom setting to adapt to Kar’s ESL needs aside from trying to stay mindful of his comfort level. I had no planned grammar lessons in this first composition course I taught, and certainly nothing like Harmer’s ESA method with its many outstanding lesson ideas in my toolkit. The course curriculum consisted of required readings (not adapted to ESL students), discussion, individual written responses and essay-writing. Grammar points were generally given attention at the white board as problems arose. With neither a grammar plan nor ESL teaching materials or tools, and with one student with limited English and some 20 other students for whom English was “first nature,” the course focus had to be on the L1 students. Kar’s speaking skill was adequate but not confident, and he was timid even in one-on-one conversation with me. He always sat in the first row, and I thought perhaps both respect for the teacher and self-preservation were factors here; sitting in front meant classmates could not turn around and look at him if he were to speak. I attempted to elicit responses during classroom discussions, but I avoided pressuring him or putting him on the spot. While I have since learned that acknowledging his comfort level and not singling him out are certainly expected of TEFL-trained teachers, as that term progressed and Kar rarely spoke in class, it became clear that his feeling of isolation was not diminishing, despite my basic efforts and the attempts at engagement by some other students. To further impede his ESL communication skills and isolation, he lived in a dorm with other non-native speakers. Several weeks into the term, I became concerned that through no fault of his own, Kar would not benefit much at all from his time in my classroom. Yet there was hope. When the class submitted drafts of their first descriptive essay, I discovered that Kar’s English vocabulary, detail and the topic he explored were of a higher level than many of the L1 students; all things considered, his writing skills were fairly strong. Later, I would find the same to be true of Anka, but even more so because Anka had been an exchange student at our local high school the year before entering college, and he was quite gregarious. In his second year immersed in English with a host family of native L1 speakers, Anka’s ESL skills were notably stronger. For Kar especially, but for Anka as well, I invested a good deal of extra time carefully responding to and discussing their essays, meeting with them during office hours as often as possible. In addition, after the semester ended and Kar prepared for his return to Malaysia for summer break, he took with him some grammar activities I had designed with the plan of returning to the university in the fall and meeting with me to review and prep for his second required composition class. What I discovered was that the essays Kar and Anka developed held a valuable key. The placement of each of these students in my non-ESL classroom was beyond my control, and I was both unprepared and restricted in my ability to adjust my teaching strategy to accommodate one non-native speaker in a class of 20, especially in Kar’s case, but with good vocabulary, depth of detail and interesting topics, their own essays provided the resource to not only improve their composition and grammar skills, but also their speaking skills. Discussing the experiences behind the topics they chose at length during office hours looped back into their writing and transferred more confidence into their speaking, which as noted was especially lacking in Kar’s case. In both of these classroom experiences, I learned to adapt both my expectations and my approach, but outside the classroom, discovering that it takes critical extra teacher-student / student-teacher investment for progress when non-ESL students are lone L2 learners in an L1 classroom. And I discovered in myself the desire to focus solely on gaining the skills needed for TEFL, which brought me to ITTT and the EYL work I finally began this past spring.