Dear Teaching Diary: My Third 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 third week of teaching English in China. I taught 47 sophomore Accountancy majors. I would say that the majority of students in this class are Upper Intermediate. They're generally a little better at English than my Business English majors. And they need to be! These students need to pass tough ACCA exams that are set in English. If they want to make megabucks as international finance accountants working in Shanghai, then their English needs to be excellent.

What We Did

We mostly listened to presentations gave as homework the previous week. Students had to form groups and write a presentation about a famous person who they admired.

What Worked

The presentations were very well researched and were much better than my freshmens class's efforts. I was impressed that a couple of the groups chose less well known Chinese personalities. One was a rice scientist, the other made a range of hot sauces. The video the group showed with the person eating various food with hot sauce on it was very well received by the audience.

At one point the room's computer died. I made a good recovery of showing new material while I repaired it.

What Didn't Work

There are so many students that reviewing all the presentations too most of the lesson. As a result there wasn’t much chance to see new material. The other classmates got bored and weren't really engaged.

The new material about Made in China didn't work that well. The Experiencing English coursebook really is uninspiring in its choice of topics. And the listening tasks in the book are far too difficult for the students.

What to Work On

Two major issues came up in this class:

1. There is far too much noise from the class when students are giving presentations. In part this is due to the students' lack of presence. Only one student had really good presence while presenting, and he was excellent.
2. There is too much reading PowerPoint slides aloud!

I should try and get the audience more involved. Maybe I should solicit questions from the audience and score these rather than those doing the presentation.

I should figure out how to get students to do an unscripted presentation.

Postscript

Well I did eventually ditch the coursebook, and went my own way with lesson plans I made up or found online.0

I do still get students to make group presentations. However, I try to get the audience more involved. I will definitely ramp this up next semester.

One thing that is still very rare in any of my classes are students who have good presence. Only one student is of TED Talk standard when it comes to giving presentations. This is an incredibly valuable business skill to possess. In my own IT career I spent 20 years at the bottom rung of the ladder partly because I lacked the communication skills required to climb that ladder.

The hot sauce video was indeed really good and I've found that food is always a good topic to show in class. I rounded off the semester with a Christmas lesson. About the best task in that lesson was this Powerpoint slide:

I stopped setting homework for this cohort of students. I found out they had 32 hours of classes a week - 8 hours a week more than my IT students. They don't need any more homework! As my classes are very much bolt-ons to their essential topics of accounting and finance I decided to stop setting homework assignments. A bigger reason was that I found homework wasn't generally all that good for getting them to do the thing that's most essential for them - unscripted speaking.

By the end of this semester I was giving them unscripted tasks to do in class. The result was that they got more speaking practice, and had more time out of class to study on their own.

One other observation - accountancy is a great career to go into! With hindsight I'd wished I'd studied either accountancy or law at university. Instead I floated into IT which pays quite well but changes very fast and is far more age discriminatory than either law or accountancy.