Teach English in Yuquan Zhen - Datong Shi

Sarah Berg Username: Teflcoursenet_266729 ITTT Course Summative Task Topic: “Personal teaching experience.” I draw additionally from the prompt “the value of observed teaching practice” I am going to reflect on the personal teaching experience that I gained while simultaneously taking this ITTT online course. To gain teaching experience, I accepted an offer to be a Teaching Assistant (TA) for a class offered at my university. The class, called Advanced Communication Strategies, is offered solely to non-native English speakers through a program for the academic development of international students that my university (located in the USA) offers. The teacher of this class, named Dr. Yang, offered me a chance to participate as I am going to be an English teacher in South Korea under the Fulbright US Student program, and she had been mentoring my application process. It was important for me to take this opportunity, and to accompany my classroom learning with the online ITTT units, so that I could practice what I was learning in the online course at the same time as I was being taught and observed by Dr. Yang, who is an experienced figure in the field of ESL/EFL teaching. One such example of the value of observed teaching practice is that I was able to execute my own lesson plans under trustworthy supervision. I discussed the Engage/Study/Activate model with Dr. Yang, who gave me advice, potential activities, resources, and the time in class to facilitate a full ESA lesson plan of my own design, twice. The repetition was valuable for me, as I was able to note specific areas of difficulty in my first lesson, and try to engineer them away in my second lesson. In my first lesson, I was given the subject of medication, with a focus on learning over-the-counter medication names and using them appropriately in conversation. My Engage stage took the form of a simple discussion of what medications are commonly known in the US and in China (all but one of the students were from China), which I personally learned a lot from. The Study stage involved drilling of common medication names: Tylenol, Advil, Pepto Bismol, aspirin. The Activate stage asked students to each choose a brand-name medication, and use their computers to find a short video advertisement for it. Students would then each have to present their advertisements without sound and market their medication. I formed these activities based on student interests (most of our students were business/finance majors) and affinities (all enjoy using their computers in activities). However, the lesson was not as engaging as I would have liked it to be, especially in the Activate stage. The discussion I was able to have afterwards with my teacher helped me identify places where I went wrong. For example, many students decided to choose hospital-grade, life-saving medications -- the kind that aren’t advertised on television, and they then struggled to find video ads. I also did not show the students an example of the kind of video I would have liked for them to find, and as university-age people watch less and less television, they didn’t have a point of reference for what they were looking for. Lastly, I pressured students to present in time slots that were too short. As a result, students felt uncomfortable, and we ran out of time, so some students “got out of” presenting. By being tasked with identifying these areas of difficulty, I was able to think about avoiding them in my next lesson plan. Not only does this benefit my next lesson plan, but it benefits every lesson plan afterwards, as I am training myself to reflect and seek feedback on my classroom performance in a continued manner. Including this significant takeaway, I experienced and learned several new things during my time as a teaching assistant, heavily influenced by what I was reading in the ITTT units. The most significant experiential conclusion, for me, was the importance of forming meaningful and friendly connections with English language learners, and understand their personal motivations for developing their English speaking skills. Being able to speak with and observe students reassured me that I can be a person to help aid individual development and advance personal goals. I also was reminded of the fun and interest of cultural sharing, which renewed my desire to facilitate conversation between groups of people who come from different places and have different languages.