Observing the teaching of an English Oral Class…
I am very happy that
I do not teach until the 19th - Observing how an Oral English class is taught is different then how I thought it would be.
The teacher I was shadowing had me introduce myself, the students just had this weird look before I said anything, then they just had saucer eyes (bold statement for asian folks :-p ) when I started talking.
I did Q&A for the first few minutes while the teacher stepped out.
First questions were Are you Chinese?, Do you speak Chinese?, Where you born in the China
? (obviously did not pay close attention to my introduction for that one 
) After I gave the answers to each of those questions, the classroom started buzzing with talk amongst the students…
Teaching this subject (at least at this school) requires a lot of prodding, in terms that virtually all the students do not volunteer to do speaking roles (even though its their major) – you have to somewhat call people up or nicely force them to do it :-p . Much of the class time was used for discussion/analysis amongst students on topics about movies & the short story read today.
Role-playing of the short story was also very interesting, as it was all improv dialog.
It was somewhat difficult to get volunteers for the first round, but it was a very good performance, the second/last round, I think the teacher spent more time prodding students to volunteer than the actual presentation It seems the guys are a lot more shy than the girls – that and it seemed their english in general wasn’t as good as the girls…
Ideally I hope to observe the teaching styles of the other 2 teachers and come up with my teaching plan this week.
Observation of another class »