Dear Teaching Diary: More From My Second Week Teaching English in China!

Periodically I write down my thoughts and reflections after a lesson, particularly if I think the lesson was a milestone of some sort.

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 maybe your students.

I wrote this log after one of the classes I took in the second week of teaching English in China. I taught 35 sophomore Business English majors. I would say that the majority of students in this class are lower Upper Intermediate (if that is a thing). Like most Asian English learners, their spoken English lags their reading and writing.

This class doesn't have a textbook. At first I was worried about this, but as the semester progressed I used the other classes' textbooks less and less each week.

What We Did

A lesson about technology.

We saw 3 groups of students do a presentation from last week.

We watched a video about old British phoneboxes. Then we saw that the phoneboxes were scrapped because everybody has mobile phones now. We saw some uses for old phoneboxes.

We wrote a list of things mobile phones do that used to be done by standalone machines (e.g. alarm clock).

We ordered smartphone features in order of importance.

We listened to a recording about technology that will become obsolete.

We watched some Dom Joly Trigger Happy TV sketches about a guy with a loud Nokia mobile phone. I set a homework task to get the students to make a new sketch based on the ones I showed them.

What Worked

I successfully took the class register.

The funny videos were very popular.

Showing interesting photos and asking for comments worked quite well.

The feature ranking game worked very well. For future reference it should be possible to line up 14 students at the front of the class.

The presentations from last week were a good inclusion. The students really need to work on their presentation skills though.

What Didn't Work

The listening exercise was a bit boring.

What to Work On

I need to be a bit more precise in homework setting. The students didn’t know whether to write dialogue or make a movie. In hindsight they should be able to film a movie to show in class.

Student presentation skills need A LOT of work! I should do more of these activities.

I should have chosen better material for the listening task.

I should try and use the room PC where possible, especially if students are using USB memory sticks!

Postscript

I teach 4 cohorts of the Business English major. This cohort is by far the most lively. It might be something to do with the fact that this is the only class I teach in the afternoon straight after lunch.

I've come to like lively students because it's so much easier to get them talking! In such a class I can spend less time getting them to actually talk, and my main task is to make sure they keep talking in English and not Mandarin Chinese.

The getting students to stand up and rank things in order was straight out of CELTA boot camp. The tasks are pretty easy to set up and generate a lot of unscripted dialogue. It was a little more difficult with 35 students in the class. However I worked out that I could get 14 students lined up in the front of the class.

In this lesson I finally realised that if I set homework and the students bring work into the classroom, they might want to plug their USB devices into my own personal computer. That really scared me, so I switched to using the classroom computer for showing student work. Unfortunately the classroom computers have seen better days and we have the occasional unplanned reboot, but at least I keep my own computer free from viruses and dodgy USB sticks.

It isn't always easy using the classroom computers though. Every one is different. Most have all kinds of malware on them that pops up windows and special offers (especially annoying if you're showing a video at the time). Sometimes the computers are set up for Chinese language input, and it's not always obvious how to change it. In one classroom I teach in the computer doesn't actually have English input - the choices are Chinese or German!

I would always recommend if you go to teach in China that you bring your own laptop with you. A 15" screen size or higher will also allow you to just about get away with showing Powerpoint presentations should the classroom computer or overhead projector fail altogether.

It's also a good idea to find one with decent speakers that can be used for listening tasks in case of other IT equipment failure. Or you can just use a bluetooth portable speaker. Don't bring one with you as they're really cheap in China and sold in many stores.

Finally this lesson was the one in that I set them homework of making a video. This one became a bit of a classic, and the resulting homeworks were excellent. If you ever teach millennials, then you might be amazed at how good they are at shooting videos. They also enjoy this kind of task tremendously. Watching the end results was also a lot of fun. I came away with the impression that Chinese students aren't boring drones at all - in fact they have terrifically active imaginations.