Dear Teaching Diary: My First Lesson Teaching English in China!

Periodically I write down my thoughts and reflections after a lesson. I was taught on the CELTA that self-reflection is a great way to get better at teaching. It's particularly important if you teach somewhere like in a Chinese university. Generally speaking you rarely (if ever) get peer observed. So the only person who can really gauge your teaching effectiveness is you and your students.

I wrote this log after my first class. I taught 40+ sophomore year students.

What We Did

Experiencing English book 3 chapter 1 about global warming. We started on book 3 because book 1 hadn't been delivered to the students yet. Hey - welcome to China!

What Worked

My lead in game [guess what's true/false about me] worked reasonably well.

All of the students wrote their names on a piece of paper like I asked them too.

I did OK at chunking the listening clips, but they still found it hard.

The book's gap fill exercises worked quite well.

They were fairly interested when I was searching Baidu for photos of a White Christmas. Not many students have seen snow in real life.

My own chosen video about Global Warming was better than the book material – I could have made a lot more of it to help make a better lead-in.

What Didn’t Work

The coursebook isn't that great. The level is too high for the students and some of the listening exercises are hard even for me. Also there is lots of weird stuff (e.g. wtf is a Green Christmas – it doesn’t explain what it is).

The students had a go at working in pairs but they really struggled to find examples of global warming around them.

Really these students were not at all interested in the topic of Global Warming.

There were a lot of students not really paying attention. It's harder to monitor them in this classroom, and the class size is so big.

I couldn't take the register as I didn’t have a list of students, and there were too many to manually check.

Pair work is difficult in this classroom due to the 3 + 2 + 2 + 3 seating arrangement.

Aaargh there’s no blackboard in this classroom.

What to Work on

I need to prep the classes so I know the answers to the questions in advance.

I need to look for more activities relating to the lesson topic.

I need find a list of students for this class.

Postscript

3 months later and things have become a lot clearer. I did eventually get a class list and found out there were 47 students in this class. 47 is way too many to have a truly effective lesson, but I have done my best.

It turns out my initial impressions were correct about the textbook, and I stopped using it mid-way through the semester. I did more listening tasks from the book, and they continued to struggle with the material. In fact I also struggled with some of the listening tasks - and I'm a native speaker!

I did get much better at choosing topics that were engaging for the students. But with 47 students to entertain, it was never likely to be the greatest class I ever taught.