Teach English in Danma XiAng - Wuwei Shi

This entire unit was about teaching and learning. As a teacher, there are 6 different roles they can take on during a lesson. This includes the instructor, who contains all the information, the facilitator who is the provider of a learning environment, the mentor who is the role model, the psychologist who helps students' with their personal problems, the counselor who is there to give advice, and the policeman who controls the class. As a teacher, you have to take on several roles to keep the class in order and make sure that the lesson is going forward. Then there are the learners, there are many different learners that teachers could have. This could be from teaching individually, teaching groups, teaching at the company premises, at a language school, etc. When teaching learners, there are always going to be different levels, students that are learning because they are forced to, and students who aren't as engaged because of work, etc. So it is important to change up lessons, making sure the students are learning and try to make the lessons interesting. When teaching Business English, there can be several advantages and disadvantages to teaching adults. Some advantages can be that their maturity levels are much higher than children and adolescents, motivation is quite high, and their attention spans are much greater than children. Unfortunately some disadvantages can be that adults have jobs and their schedules can get busy, so sometimes learning English isn't a priority, they can sometimes be very self conscious of their mistakes, and teaching 'In house' can be a problem because students are still in the workplace, and if students are needed, teachers can find themselves with half the class gone. There are two different ways when teaching, either in groups or individually (one to one), both also have some advantages and disadvantages. Teaching 'one to one' can be great for focusing on just one students, it allows 100% focus, students can work at their own pace and they get much more feedback in comparison to group lessons. Although it can be difficult when trying to do activities since there are no other students for pairwork/ groupwork, so it is important for the teacher to be there and be involved as much as possible. Another problem can be personality difference, in this situation, the teacher needs to be professional, try to be open minded, and try to find some common interests. Finally, another disadvantage to individual teaching is that the students might get bored interacting with only one person, as a teacher it is necessary to get involved as much as possible and try to do different activities.When teaching groups, there is always going to be the possibility of dealing with different levels of ability. It is important to remember that, even with different levels, the teacher shouldn't go back and forth teaching the higher and lower levels. An easy way to manage different levels is through differentiation in activities. A great example is using graded activities, these are worksheets that contain lots of questions starting with very easy questions then getting harder. The lower students are able to do the first couple and the higher can continue to work on the harder questions. Forming groups of higher and lower levels is another useful way. Giving the lower students extra work to do at home can also help them in their weaker areas. Next there are the four different skills, the two receptive skills being listening and reading, and the two productive skills being speaking and writing. Attending meetings, reading emails, writing reports, doing presentations, etc. They will need to learn how to use all these four skills, so it is important to do lots of activities based on business that will help them when working. Finally there are several different teaching methods that are used. This can include Grammar Translation, the idea of this methodology is that you takes sentences from the native language and try to find equivalents in the second language. Although with this methodology, you can't always rely on translation as some language rely on the tense system and use tones or markers. Audio Lingualism is based on verbal drilling of the language heard. The Silent Way tries to allow students to try the new language though trial and error. Task-based Learning's aim is for students to learn the new language based on student activities. PPP (Presentation, Practice, Production) involves three stages of teaching. The Presentation stage is about eliciting the language, Practice is using the language in a structured way and the Production phase is where the students use it in more realistic situations. Lastly, there is the ESA methodology, which is commonly used. The goal of the Engage stage is to get the students talking and thinking in English, The Study phase is where the teaching takes place, this can include drilling, worksheets, gap-fills, etc. The Activate phase is where the students can use all their language knowledge from the lesson and create context based output. There are different ESA lessons including the Straight Arrow lesson which is Engage, Study, and Activate. The Boomerang lesson involves two activate stages (Engage, Activate 1, Study, and Activate 2). Patchwork lesson involves four activate and two study phases (Engage, Activate 1, Activate 2, Study 1, Activate 3, Study 2, and Activate 4).