Teach English in Jingyou Zhen - Taiyuan Shi

Teaching English is a career path that brings many rewarding learning opportunities. The aspect of teaching or learning a new language itself opens up a world of possibilities for both the teachers and students alike. For the teacher, there is the possibility of travel, cultural knowledge exchange, and watching students mature as an English learner. For the students, studying a language most widely used in the world, opens up opportunities to a world of change for living, travel, and work. To effectively enable students to learn English, many factors must be taken into account; for example, age, motivation, classroom size, etc… In this essay, I will focus on how a classroom demographic - namely monolingual and multilingual groups - can affect teaching methodologies, challenges faced in classrooms, and challenges to students. Monolingual groups of English learners tend to be in schools that reside in the students’ own country where English is not the native language. In this environment, all the students are usually of a similar English level. This provides several advantages to the students. First, since all students are at the same level, they would feel more comfortable with speaking English in class and less afraid to make mistakes. Second, all the students will likely share the same native language, and hence will discover the same similarities and differences between their native language and English, making the development process more uniform between students. All these are pros due to the similarities of the students that can help them build confidence among peers. However, also due to this, it is also easy for students to resolve to their native language when they encounter difficulties in English. Furthermore, students will not have real life scenarios outside of class to use English. As a teacher, one must accept the fact that the native language will be used from time to time, but continue to encourage English speaking among students during class time. Perhaps form help encourage this by forming English exchange groups outside of class for more practise. The lack of real life experiences can be dealt with by creating real life scenarios outside of class, for example, a class trip to an English facility and assign a task to the students to be done in English. Asking and predicting how the students will use English in the future can greatly help with designing such an activity also. For teachers, having a single culture to create lesson plans against and pull examples from helps make lesson planning much easier and more relative to the students. Also, the use of foreign popular media material would be an interesting topic in class as it provides students with cultural content that they don’t get to experience in daily life. The teacher’s role is even more important in this environment as he/she would be the sole example of proper English. Multi-lingual groups of English learners tend to reside in English speaking countries. Usually students of this group are people from foreign countries who have moved to an English speaking country due to personal reasons; for example work, immigration, or studies to name a few. Students from this category have a strong motivation to study English because they require it in their daily lives. Students will witness the English culture first hand while learning it in class. However, due to the different cultural and education backgrounds, classes might be formed where the students are at varying levels of English. This can cause students at the lower level to feel uncomfortable speaking in class. Also, due to different language backgrounds, different students would relate their native language to English differently, hence can further create a confidence gap between students. Teachers should look out for such scenarios and design activities such that everyone has a chance to speak. Stronger and weaker students can be paired together for activities to allow the weaker students a chance to be corrected while doing a controlled activity. For teachers, class time would be more challenging due to the differing levels and backgrounds, however the rewards are immediate. Students’ level progress would be faster as they would need to use English daily outside of class. Another reward is that teachers would witness the interaction of different cultures, which is a great learning experience. Cultural teachings would be even more interesting as they can be based from the different times of the year, hence allowing students to witness and discover it themselves outside of class. In conclusion, the demographics of the students are greatly tied to the location of the school. This in turn can create level gaps between the students and create teaching challenges due to lack of practise or motivation. There are many methods to try to resolve these issues including creating different controlled activities to even out the level differences and providing relative content to spark interest. Teachers will find it rewarding in both classroom types as there is cultural learnings to both and as the results from their efforts show.