Teach English in Handong Zhen - Zhumadian Shi

Although I have been teaching ESL for almost 9 years in japan, this course has given me a great basis to plan my lessons in a more coherent and fundamentally sound way. The need to engage students at the beginning of class has already changes the way I start my classes, seeking out an interesting image or video that is related to the topic of the lesson and getting students to discuss what it is, or what they think about it. In addition, the course has helped me to understand the importance of providing students with enough time to study the material before moving on to the activity. As we all once studied in the past, we can appreciate that the students probably just want to get to the fun part or the game at the end, and sometimes as teachers we can be tempted to oblige, particularly if we have an exciting game prepared, but without enough building up of the underlying language, the game will almost always fail to deliver any meaning, or will be too hard for the students to do, leading to frustration on their behalf. While my current classes are oral communication classes focused on listening and speaking, having a solid understanding of the underlying grammar is important. As native speakers we often fail to see how complex our own language can be and thus are ill-prepared to explain to a student why we us "by" in one situation and "until" in another, or the difference between "He has been waiting for three hours." and "He was waiting for three hours." While this course can't begin to cover all the grammatical aspects of english, it has provided a solid basis and has pointed me towards resources that can be used to build on it.