Just think you have TESOL certificate and now you’re qualified for English teaching job anywhere in the world. You choose China for your teaching destination and you have succeeded in interview for esl job. But you don’t know that sometimes your academic knowledge is not enough to teach or handle student while students are from China.
Understand your student:
As a teacher before teaching you must know about your student. If you may able to know their background, interest, hobbies and the reason why they are wanting to learn English it’d be easy for your teaching. But it’s seen that most of Chinese are not interested to learn English they are there because they no other choice.
The best way of teaching English
Role Play:
Role-plays are useful for learning about foreign cultures as they can be used to act out stories. You can try some practical use e.g. shopping, ordering food in a restaurant, job interviews, airport/hotel check-ins, handling enquiries, enquiring about a job advert and dealing with customer complaints.
Videos: This method is all time favorite for every student. It can help your student to improve their English.
Games: This is a bit of a challenge for Chinese students because they are unable to plan in advance what they say and are forced to think on their feet. This provides more authentic oral English scenarios but may be too advanced for elementary students.
Discussions and debates: This is another good process to teach English to Chinese students. Elementary-level students will obviously need much simpler activities. Those that I have used include describing pictures, simple questions and answers, greetings, introductions, talking about ambitions, routines and habits, making suggestions, invitations and excuses.
How to teach non-English subjects in China
Sometime you might be teach non-English subject in china. Chinese students are love stories. If you are trying to teach any other subject then story telling method will be good for you. Do try to include as many interesting stories and pictures in your lesson as possible.
Chinese students are also very competitive so Using a quiz also has the advantage of forcing the students to open the textbook.
One other enthusiast method is presentation. Chinese students absolutely love doing presentations and the class also enjoys a lesson more when taught by their peers.
Exam in China:
The Chinese education system is very exam-focused. To fail an exam is extremely embarrassing for a Chinese student so foreign teachers are under immense pressure to pass everyone. Your challenge will be how to design an exam in such a way that all your students will definitely pass.
Open book exams are quite popular with some teachers while others choose simply to set a homework essay. Try to avoid any sort of closed book exam or essay-writing exams.
So it is depends on you that which method will you use. Each method has their respective pros and cons and your students will get bored if you only use just one teaching method. A good teacher will usually use a combination of some or all of the ideas. It is a good idea to survey your students on a regular basis, this will give you valuable feedback on your performance and may even throw up some lesson ideas that you have not thought of before. Or you may ask your fellow teachers what methods they use in their classes.
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