Archive for the ‘Teaching shy students’ Category

I have to fly away from my Yahoo BB internet connection now, and I may be some time. So while I am gone from cyberspace, you all have a chance to read the over 200 articles I’ve written elsewhere- starting with this month’s supply:

15 easy ways to bring change into the classroom

15 ways of dealing with students who pause before they speak

15 ways of dealing with pre-experience Business English and ESP students

15 ways to boost your teaching and lesson planning creativity

15 places to start getting published

15 ways to correct spoken errors

15 ways to bring lucky chances into your classroom and lesson planning

Done already? Well, I’m sure you’ve all been good and read the entire list of articles etc in the September list further down this page already, so the extra homework for the keen this month will be having a look at:

TEFLtastic articles (reorganised a bit to have more links to articles elsewhere on the same topics)

and

TEFLtastic worksheets (ditto)

Number one: cosplay

Only joking- I mean of course that the status of English teachers is not so obviously low that when I met the love of my life and asked her to marry me she actually agreed!

You won’t hear a lot about it on the TEFL forums, but there are actually a lot of other advantages to choosing Japan to teach in: (more…)

1. German students trying to be cool

2. Japanese students giggling at everything you say, until it just isn’t flattering anymore, however cute they are

3. Chinese students falling asleep, then making you feel guilty when you do the topic of daily routines in the lesson after you told them off about it and you find out how little sleep they get at night

4. Korean students giving you gifts that are nicer than anything your boyfriend or girlfriend has ever given you and so making you feel guilty that you half ignored them because they were neither too loud nor too shy

5. Belgian students being odd in a completely different way to all the other Belgians let alone the other students and throwing you every time

6. Russian students making instant calculations of your financial worth

7. Spanish students complaining about the food (Ha! And a slice of jambon in a dry baguette is a delicacy??)

8. Brazilian students taking the piss out of the one poor Portuguese guy

9. French students just being so damn French

And that’s me out of stereotypes for a bit, and anyway that list of cultural cliches was not at all what I was planning to write when I sat down at this keyboard. So here goes with the first three sensible points on how cultural differences can affect what you do in the classroom :

1. Strictness
People from different cultures might react differently to giving students the answer key to check their own answers, bumping everyone’s score up in a test, being strict about absenses and lateness of the class register, allowing L1, chit chat when groups have finished early etc.

2. Groups and individuality
Students might be embarrassed by it being obvious that they are a higher or lower level than the rest of the class. You might also find that they will prefer to come to a concensus and report back to the class or teacher through a spokesman. This can also affect the use of competitive games and praising people who do well. They also might not want to reveal personal information that makes them stand out from the crowd.

3. Personal hygiene
There might be differences of sensitivity to body odour and the smell of food on the breath, wearing masks when you have a cold, or blowing your nose in public.

And the other 30 points, which are not only serious but also made the cut and made it into the actual articles, can be found in the TEFL.net article pages here:

15 important cultural differences in the EFL classroom

15 more important cultural differences in the EFL classroom

and the same things specific to Japanese students:

15 cultural differences in the Japanese classroom

And while we’re getting a bit of culture:

15 criteria for a good EFL cultural training lesson

15 more criteria for a good EFL cultural training lesson

and last but not least

The 15 most fun cultural training topics

With many of those ideas being available as worksheets on the new TEFLtastic worksheets culture page:

Cultural training worksheets for EFL classes

That enough culture fer yer?

Someone else took their frustration out on the world by choosing rush hour to dive in front of the Tokyo-bound train again this morning. That’s one way of coping with pressure, I guess. It all makes me wonder- any Japanese people ever been so shy about speaking English in class they took the ultimate escape instead? The closest thing I have heard is an urban myth going round at my university that the reason the tower in the campus square was closed to visitors was that two Chinese students had taken a jump off it together, and then there is the classic story of people topping themselves off with a pencil during the exam…

I’ve certainly had Japanese students who seemed stressed enough in the class, starting with “Takeshi” on my first teaching course (CELTA). If you asked him a question he didn’t know but thought he should he would start drilling into the middle of his forehead with a knuckle and grunting, as if he was trying to physically pull the idea out of his head- and which point all the trainee teachers learnt about not putting too much focus on one student and letting the other students help him. Don’t know if he was asked to act up by the trainers to make sure we didn’t forget that important teaching point, but I might try that tactic next time I am a teacher trainer on the CELTA. You could have one student who pretends to have a panic attack everytime a grammar explanation was unclear, one student who falls asleep everytime the teacher drones on for 5 minutes without giving the students a chance to speak etc. etc. It’ll be like the SAS EFL training course. Coming soon!

Immoral? Insensitive? Ungrammatical? Let me know by clicking below:

Teaching (college student) teenagers again despite my best efforts to avoid it, there is one factor in the classroom that stands out more than other kinds of classes and, subtly or sometimes not so subtly, affects the classroom dynamic of almost every class. This certain something would, however, under no circumstances get a mention if my lesson was observed and is not written about in any books on teaching English I have ever seen. This is the totally taboo TEFL teaching factor X.

In this case, the X factor we are supposed to ignore manifests itself as a couple of starry eyed girls who are working hard in my class for reasons not connected to my lesson plans, whilst others no doubt perk up and do their homework much more for the blond teacher in their British culture class- and not due to his skills in using pairwork. And many of them are specifically planning to use their language skills to get a western boyfriend when they live abroad next year- you won’t see that written on your average needs analysis interview form!

Another more extreme example was a Belgian female student that picked up on every mistake a Brazilian student made after she saw us chatting outside the school gates. On the other side of the coin, I’ve had several very shy students who would most certainly come out of their shell a bit more if there were no people of the other sex in the class at all. I can think of one particular one-to-one student who I really wanted to tell my boss to find a female teacher for, but somehow felt it was something I couldn’t say.

Of course, I am not the first teacher to notice this and it does in fact get mentioned- by lecherous teachers who’ve had a few too many down the gaijin (ex-pat) pub. Which is one reason why the rest of us try our best to blank the whole factor out. But surely, if my female students want to be able to mix with their British counterparts in Liverpool or Folkestone on a Saturday night (ｇod help them) they are going to need to be able to say they “fancy someone”. In fact, if they want to bond with some of their British female sisters they are going to need to be able to mention specific pieces of body vocabulary that I will certainly not be mentioning near my students! But if I knew of a vocab book of slang that filled in the holes in my classroom syllabus I guess I could approach it that way?? I guess what I am thinking of is an all-female discussion class once a term or a book like “Taboos and Issues”, but with the topics chosen by what the students will need to be aware of and able to talk about rather than what teachers want them to be aware of.

As far as tackling difficult stuff in the classroom goes, slang for vomiting (you should see their faces when they click what a “pavement pizza” is) is about as far as I go, and probably further than my boss would like me to…

Other reasons to tackle this subject: differences in dating culture and personal safety when they go abroad. The most satisfying moment in the classroom is when you help a student understand something they had completely eluded them before and they will always wonder have they ever lived without- my best one being when one Russian student in London found out that “come up for a coffee” is very different from “would you like a cup of tea?”. We never learnt the story behind the look of shock and sudden comprehension on her face…

One other connected unmentioned taboo: some schools in Japan (not mine), only employ male teachers because they know it keeps the main housewife/ OL (”office lady”) customers happy. Whether they have to pretend to be single like members of a boy band I am not sure…

Comments? Advice? Disbelief that a 19 year old could fancy me? Write it all below: