Wonderful Experiences In China ¡ª¡ªAndy (French)
INTERNSHIP BRIEF
Position: English language teacher
My task as a foreign teacher in CIC was to teach English speaking to those students whose level of English was rather low and who consequently needed a lot of encouragement to have the courage to open their mouths. Initially I taught two different classes, and I soon took over the parallel class of one of these classes. I was not given course books of my own, but for one of the classes I got the book that the Chinese teachers are following when they teach the students grammar and other aspects of English. I was asked to provide the students extra material on the topics studied in the book that would make them speak. Consequently, I tried to find and develop different games and other relaxed activities to make the lessons as funny as possible. I found that most of the students were really difficult to motivate to study English, and my lessons varied from being rather successful to complete failures. Over time I learned to know the students better and they learned to trust me, and teaching became easier and easier.
The other group I was teaching I was supposed to train for the speaking part of the IELTS examination. I tried various different methods, gathering all the material by myself, as I was not given a book for this course either. This group was particularly difficult to motivate to study.
A couple of months before the end of the semester, I was given another group to teach, this time one whose level of English was far higher than that of the other ones. The aim of this course was the same as for my other group¡¯s, namely training for IELTS speaking, but the methods I used were completely different. I was given a book which contained IELTS questions and sample answers, which I decided to use as the starting point for discussing the students¡¯ own ideas on the topics. My communication with this group was a lot easier than with those whose level of English was lower, and I got along with this group very well.
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