Dear Teaching Diary: My Second 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 second class teaching English in China. I taught 20 freshmen students on what was their very first day of university classes. For most of the students I was the first foreign national teacher they had ever had.

What We Did

I introduced myself. We also did the coursebook Real Listening & Speaking 3 Chapters 1 - 2 where are you from and shopping.

What Worked

My lead in (about me true/false) worked well.

This is a much better book! Both topics were interesting for the students. And it’s at the right level for the students – maybe even a little too easy for them. We covered more material than I expected.

I numbered the listening clips so I was able to find them easily.

I put some new vocabulary on the board.

Most of the students got the answers although a few of the boys struggled a bit. Chunking helped with the harder listening activities.

They liked the shopping related videos I showed from The Two Ronnies, especially the 4 Candles Sketch. They were perfect for lead-ins, especially as the students were sleepy after lunch.

I successfully took the class register.

What Didn't Work

I need to work on setting pair work and group activities. One activity worked, the other was a complete flop.

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

What to Work On

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

I should think of some activities related to any videos I show.

I should remember to set some homework that has clear goals. Simply "look at this website" is just too vague.

Postscript

I have of course noticed that the more times you do the same activity, the better you become at it. So recycling lesson plan tasks has really got me through the semester.

I have found it much tougher to teach the freshmen compared to the sophomore students. The freshmen don't talk much and they find it hard to maintain attention. In fact I found it easier to teach 47 sophomore students than I did a class of 18 freshmen.

I now know that initial impressions about coursebooks are very accurate. So hats off to my CELTA tutors for training me well. I hit the ground running and in my first week pretty much identified all the strengths and weaknesses of the two sets of coursebooks I was asked to teach from.

I don't like teaching 20 students in a classroom made for 50. So a couple of times this semester I have ended up making students move closer to the front of the class.

I noticed in this lesson that the students liked the video clip I showed them. So for each class I try to find a couple of short videos to use as warmers.

In my first lesson I noticed the girls were on average better than the boys. I say on average because the girls tended to be precisely that - average. ALL of my superstar English students in this semester were boys, despite there being far less of them. I believe that this echoes the exam results I saw back in the UK when I worked for an educational consultancy; boys do worse than girls but when boys are good, they are very good indeed.