Teaching English

This is the building we taught in.

One of mom's classes, it is winter and you never take off your coat.  No heat in the classrooms.

One of my classes, you can see the screen and the powerpoint lesson.

Teaching English

After our week long trip to southern China, we started to get serious about learning how to teach English to PhD. Students.  We each had 6 classes each week.  The classes were 2 hours long.  I was quite nervous and wondered if I would be able to really teach and make a difference.  We had the lessons of several teachers that had taught at Nankai for the last few years and so with the help of some outlines, we started making our power point lessons.  We started out with words of the day.  For example, the word tear: to pull apart, or tear: a drop of water that rolls down your cheek when you are crying.  We were trying to teach them that there are a lot or words in English where you need to know the context in order to know how to pronounce the words.  We would then have a sentence for each pronunciation of the similar words and each student would have to read one of the sentences aloud when his or her name was called at the beginning of class.  Example: Do not tear pages out of your English textbook, or a tear ran down his cheek when he heard the news of his grandmother’s death.  Then we would have the family presentation. We divided the class into families on the first day and this was a cute novelty for most of them because they  did not have a brother or a sister and the thought of having brothers or sisters was interesting.  We chose a mother or father for the family and then this group of students would have a presentation that they would give every third or fourth week.  The subject of the presentation would be assigned at the end of each lesson for the following week.  We would then discuss idioms, maybe ten each week. Example: “Pull your own weight” meaning to do your full share of the work.  Everyone in the family should pull their own weight.  We then would teach them how to make certain sounds.  What they needed to do with their tongue and how to shape their mouth.  Example:  the “th” sound is not used in Chinese and they have no experience in how to make this sound correctly.  In order to make the “th” sound, you need to stick your tongue out of your mouth and rest your upper teeth lightly on your tongue and then blow a little air out of your mouth.  This takes a lot of practice and so we would have them practice saying a lot of words containing “th”.  We would then have our thought of the day. Example:  “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”  Marcus T. Cicero c. 106-43 BC, Great Roman Orator, Politician.   We would then listen to a segment of the radio broadcast from Public Radio call “This I Believe”.  While they were listening, we would also have it on the screen so they could read it.  Then we would have each person read a sentence.  Then we would discuss what it meant.  This was in to help them get ideas, because part of their final would be to give a talk to the class about what they believe.  We would then have a listening segment, where we would play a song with pictures and subtitles.  This part of the lesson took the longest to make, sometimes more than 10 hours.  Thankfully, we had about 20 songs that other teachers had made and left for us.  I think I made maybe 4 songs in 2 years and the rest we borrowed from others.  We would then make an assignment for their homework and the family presentation for the next week.  Following this post, is a song that goes with the power point presentation of a lesson that we used in China.  Play the song when you get to the song in the power point and you can change the slides to show the words of the song and see the pictures that go with the words. This is one of the songs that I did.