Oral English: First Year Flaws

After six years of learning how to be a teacher, I am a little embarrassed at the mistakes I made during my first year of teaching, even though I have been reassured by far more experienced educators that these rookie mistakes are common; you learn and you do better next time.  What follows is the errors made in terms of my Oral Speaking Class; I'll save the other classes for a later blog.

From Left to Right: Me, Shirley, Justin.  One of our final rehearsals before their final exam.   And if your wondering at our less than professional attire, we were rehearsing in class that day, which meant a lot of dramatic falls to the ground and faux sword fighting, so we were teacher casual that day. 

One of the biggest mistakes we made was to make it very clear to our students exactly what we expected of them, not just throughout the semester, but of their final project.  Now, this might have been further impacted by the language barrier, but we definitely could have been clearer.

Of course, we thought we were being perfectly clear, when we handed out an outline of our final project and syllabus on the first day of class and took the students through it.  But we talked fairly quickly, in our excitement and our desire to get on with the course, and we just figured the students would read the syllabus and somehow, all of our thoughts and desires for the course would get downloaded into their brains. This did not work as we had planned, largely because we were not sure exactly what we wanted for this course, at least not realistically.  We had a lot of ideas and this wonderful ideal of where we wanted to end up, but not a lot of direction on how we were going to get there.  So, not only did we breeze through the syllabus, we were somewhat light on the concrete details of how we were going to arrive at our final goal.

Me, Leehom, Justin

Another way in which I was unclear in my expectations for my students was my lack of modeling what I expected of them, and in retrospect, I can't believe how long it took me to do that effectively and consistently.  I used multiple ways to explain a topic or idea, including pictures and video when applicable.  But when it came to explaining skits, and explaining body language, and intonation, it took me a long time to realize that I needed to model some of these things, not only to rely on video and pictures.  I explained the concepts of skits, but never modeled what I expected of them or how to perform a skit.  Overtime, I gradually got better at modeling, especially once I came to the realization that modeling something once was not enough.  Eventually I became adept at modeling everything; I modeled the various facial expressions and body language I wanted them to use; I modeled different intonation; I modeled entire skits.  Not only did this make it clear about what I was expecting from them, but when I was willing to share my work, and in the case of skits, to be a little silly and maybe embarrassed,  my students were so much more willing to do the same. I slowly began to spread that modeling to my other courses, so in my integrated English course, rather than simply telling them what and how to write when we did writing, I gave them several examples, we wrote things together in class, and I walked them through my writing process.

Me, Emerson, Justin

The other mistake that we made, especially evident in the second semester and is specific to co-teaching, was not making sure that each teacher in the group had the same idea of where this course was going. Now, it is difficult to plan a course when your three teachers are all over the world, literally.  Over the summer and winter holidays, the three of us bounced back and forth between the United States and China, trying to multitask visiting family, relaxing, and prepping for the next semester.  This meant we were not always in the same time zone or in the same mental zone on any given day.  So we communicated largely through email and then met in person a few days before the semester began to really hammer out any issues.  Now maybe if you had 3 teachers who had been working in EFL together for a dozen years, this would have been okay, but 2 of us were newbies, and in the case of the second semester, none of us had ever tried to teach an oral English class centered on the creation of an adapted script.

Chocolate, me, Big Barbara, Justin, Emerson

In short the mistakes I made were from lack of experience and from a lack of knowing how to prepare for an EFL classroom, and I got better at those things with each successive semester, although I am still far from perfect.  And despite these mistakes, and some frustrations with myself and the course, I had a wonderful time and our students showed tremendous growth in our targeted areas.  They did such a great job on their final exam and we were so proud of them.  And all of them passed their overall English exam that year.

Below is one of the final exam videos.  This is Romeo and Juliet that has been rewritten in the horror genre by the English majors.  ( I posted this one in an updated version of an earlier entry as well, but in case you haven't seen it yet, here it is).