Well teaching continues to be a challenging uphill battle. It’s definitely far more difficult than I would have anticipated – I mean, I knew it’d be hard, going into a completely new field such as we have with basically no experience beyond what we could call transferable skills from the world of business – however, it’s not so much the in-class teaching, but the lesson planning. Actually it’s a combination of the two.
The problem definitely stems from the fact that their language skills are all over the place. Their reading and writing are actually very good. If you ask any of the students to write something, 9 times out of 10 they can. Sure the English isn’t perfect, but it’s surprisingly good. Their reading is likewise right up there. If you look at their textbooks it’s actually quite amazing how difficult the text they are reading is. I would almost say that their reading is almost at an advanced level whilst their writing upper-intermediate.
Their speaking however is atrocious. I know speaking another language is by and far the hardest part. Well that can depend on the language I suppose – if you are learning Chinese, most of the time you’ll be able to speak it, not read or write it – but with English it appears to be the other way around. In order to get anything out of these students were have to physically pull it out. It is extremely tiring, and very disheartening. It goes up and down with the different classes. If we didn’t have our junior classes – particularly gifted – if we had to deal with nothing but the senior 1 teenagers, well I think we would have bailed on this job and headed home by now, I really do.
They are extremely frustrating, and there’s been little to no change in the 3+ months we’ve been doing this. Yes they are more comfortable with us, and I am sure they understand us better, but their actual output of spoken language is in most cases pathetic.
I know this isn’t a new problem in Chinese classes in China as you can see this kind of thing all over the forums at Dave’s ESL Café(www.eslcafe.com), where other ESL teachers have practically the same issues. The teaching scenario in China doesn’t help. Here you have huge classes which itself is probably most of the problem. That and the fact that they would do little to no speaking in all their other English classes – of which there are many. In fact English is one of the most important subjects as it plays a very big part towards getting into university or not – yet actually speaking English seems to hold little to no weight.
The fact there’s over 50 kids in each class makes it hard for a number of reasons. With the junior kids it’s not so bad, as they are all willing to talk and participate. With the teens they will only participate if pushed. Most are happy to give one word answers or do no work when asked. Most will have giggle fits and laugh into their hands if put on the spot – yet when we encourage them to write things down to assist them with reading them out – they don’t. They piss around, talk in Chinese and well sometimes I wonder why we bother.
The rooms aren’t small, but they’re also not large. There’s no room to actually get them up and do activities other than getting them to the front of the room – and that’s where they perform the worst. It’s not possible to push desks out of the way and do fun things in the middle as they are all overflowing with books. These classrooms are their daily prisons. It’s not possible to get them to do individual activities where we have them stand up and speak one by one – for after a few have had their turns the rest are bored shitless and start to talk. They don’t talk much louder than a whisper most days anyway, so once a few kids start talking even I can’t bloody understand what the student in the spotlight is trying to say.
It’s so frustrating. We skim the ESL websites looking for new ideas to try in class, new games, new activities, but practically 98% of them aren’t suitable. Some require actually doing things in class – physically, and we just don’t have the room, nor can we really take them anywhere outside, there’s just too many of them to manage that easily in the 40 minute timeframe. Nor can we physically take things in beyond printouts - we can’t take in 55 pairs of scissors or 900 coloured pens. That rules that kind of creative thing out. Nor do half the games or activities work. Roleplays are ridiculous, they really are. Sure, one group in seven will actually put one together, but most involve the group standing before the class, pissing themselves, passing around a sheet of paper that has nothing written on it, trying to make it up on the spot.
I swear to god, I don’t know what to do with these students. I would gladly shed myself of the senior 1 classes and teach more junior in their place. They have had their issues too, but they are infinitely more workable. I really like the kids of all classes, but 90% of the whole level just will not give anything beyond the bare minimum – and even that has to be dragged out.
Forget classroom discussions. They are a complete waste of time. When we plan a lesson around a classroom discussion, it involves us as the teachers explaining the topic, then dragging answers out of each and every kid. No-one volunteers anything. We have to ask them questions. We get a one word answer, to which we ask them another question then get another one word answer. The next kid just says, Me too! Bleh.
The school gives us no support in this area either. When we have told them the issues we face they say simply, Find ways to motivate them! I bet they don’t even know what they are being taught by their Chinese teachers. As long as the marks are high and the school fees coming in, who cares. Oh and as long as we have our two teachers with white faces and can tell other schools we have them.
I like teaching – I find it actually very much agrees with me as a person. I don’t like lesson planning however, I find it very difficult, and I think that is because of all the resources we find, most are unsuitable. What we have tried is a complete mish-mash of different ideas. Some have worked well, but most are just the same old pattern of getting nothing out of the classes.
This semester ends in about one month and it is the end of the Chinese school year. We are dreading having to teach the same senior 1 class when it becomes senior 2. We will then have to come up with a whole semesters worth of new lesson plans when we’re already just scraping by. We are hoping we get a new senior 1, or something else, so we can reuse all the lesson plans we have created to date. We are also hoping we do not lose our gifted class as they are the definite highlight of our week.
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