TEFL Harrisburg North Carolina

Summarize what I have personally gained from this course is hard. Before taking this course, I had a couple of years of teaching english as a foreign language under my belt, but felt like an un-effective teacher when it came to teaching at public school. I had been using the same teaching methods, games, and structures. I always wanted to focus on the students grasping the concept and using the material, but most of the students don't have the opportunity to work on the secondary language or fall back on their native tongue. Plus with students having their classes cancelled or the school not really focused on the retention of the student's knowledge but the quantity of the lessons, I feel that the students don't get the material. I felt that it was necessary to take this course in order to find new ways to be an efficient teacher and to help the students learn a new language in a new approach. Also I want to get students to retain the material instead of cram and dump. This course has taught me several things when it comes to being an effective teacher, teaching methods, grammar lessons, and lesson planning. I wanted to be an effective teacher in the classroom, but at some points in the school year I feel that the role of the teacher becomes harder and harder. I have read in many texts about how to get the students motivated, but after a certain time it no longer is effect. In Korea, most third level students at middle school don't care about their classes after June, because in June they take their high school entrance exams. Reluctant students are everywhere. I know that using pair work helps students be more engage, but with large classes the students have a tendency to use their native tongue. Controlled practices and role-play do not always work at keeping the students motivated or help they learn. They always forget what they have learned, because they don't practice or drill enough. With the roles that I have learned in this course, I learned that being a tutor, resource, or monitor/observer in the main classroom does not work after this time period or in a large classroom. I found that if I am prompter at the beginning of the class period by asking simple questions work. Most of the time, I am the manager/controller, because of the class size. As the manager, I am giving a lecture and trying to maintain the interest of students. I am a model in and out of the classroom, because not only do the students come to me but so do the Korean teachers who teach english. By taking this class, I learned new ways to set up the classroom and teaching practices. With the teaching practices that I learned, I have been able to change up the class. Instead of just being an audio teacher, I started using more of the presentation, practice, and production method when I find things in the chapters that are important. I have the students listen to a conversation, then say a skeleton conversation. After the skeleton conversation, I have the students use the skeleton conversation with the blanks filled in to present it to the class in a role playing activity. During my summer camps, I teach the students by blending the communicative language teaching and community language learning methods. My more advance students pick the topic that they want to learn, and then we talk about it in a seminar-like class. The students talk about what they like or don't like. Plus they talk about the things that they do/don't understand and how it relates to them. During our discussion, the students practice real life situations with these topics. Example one of our discussions was about how cigarettes kill people, the students came up with ways to get people to stop smoking by using real life situations and people that they knew who smoked. I find that the blend of the two teaching techniques works well with small classes. I find that with using the study, activate, presentation practice production, and audio techniques work better with larger classes. With these techniques, the course was able to give me more insight on how to use a combination and blends to make the class more entertaining. With this course, I learned more ways to present grammar. Plus I brushed up some of the grammar skills that I was shaky on. Some of the grammar lessons, I felt lost on. By taking this course, I learned what areas of grammar I was lacking because speaking and writing have different grammar rules. Even in college, I felt that my grammar skills were weak compare to others. After finishing each grammar unit, I looked up things in other resource books and made notes of what I didn't know in case students asked. What I learned from teaching non-natives is that their grammar skills are far more superior than native speakers. Before each lesson or unit, I review the grammar that I don't know that I will be teaching and then try to find a way to present it to the lower level students so that they will know. english vocabulary is hard for students to master. With this course, I learned new ways to teach pronunciation and meaning. Sometimes the way one country pronounces a word is different from another country. Also teaching the students stresses and intonation is hard sometimes because I have to tell them why it has different meanings by the way it is said. I use to think that my lesson planning was par before taking this class. However if I was to use my current lesson planning for small classes, it would be boring and meticulous at only studying. I learned how to break up the studying with activities. However at the end of class, I try to assess what the class has learned and what it needs to focus on. However with only being able to teach a class once a week and most of the time it is cancelled, I feel that my lesson plans have to be shortened in order to get through everything before their exams. Three chapters in two months is hard when a teacher needs at least 3 class periods to cover all of the important parts in a chapter. What you should know is that I meet each class once a week, but most of the time the classes are cancelled because school events, holidays, or teachers needing to go to other meetings at the last minute. Now with the lesson plan that I learned from this course, I have learned how to make three class periods down to two with more studying and some activities. How to be an efficient and effective teacher for teaching a secondary language is difficult when the students don't have the opportunity to practice the new language. Most students in the classroom talk in their native tongue when they don't know the word, but this hinders them. With the english education being downgraded in the certain provinces, students do not really care to learn another language. They understand that english is a global language, but they don't get the opportunity to practice or they feel that they will never use it in their everyday life. What I have taken from this course is how to present the material in new ways and to bring a new ways of teaching. I like learning about what to do when I have problems with getting the students motivated or helping them learn english. I have been using the warmers that I have learned from this course.