TomUK
Member
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2007
- Member Type
- Student or Learner
- Native Language
- German
- Home Country
- Germany
- Current Location
- UK
I am currently staying in a small village in Isaan (Thailand) and several times I was asked to go to the village primary school to teach a little bit of English. I finally gave in and my idea was that I would attend English classes where the teacher would ask the students to talk to me in English using whatever vocabulary they already know. But what I then experienced made me want to cry:
I was greeted by the headteacher who could only speak very little English – fair enough, he doesn't teach the language. The students who I was supposed to teach then asked me to come to their classroom. Inside six students where sitting at their desks watching a video which showed English words for Thai food, and in the same room two other students were watching another video about geometry. There was no teacher present and the level of noise from these videos was quite high. The remote controls did not seem to work and so I just pulled the plugs. I then gathered all the students in one part of the room and tried to find out what their English knowledge was like. They were all about 10 years old and their English was fairly limited and when I asked to see the study books they were using it transpired that there were no books. So I then insisted on the English teacher to appear in the classroom and to teach English so that I could observe what English vocabulary the students know. It turned out that the teacher could hardly speak any English – actually the student's English was better than his. He then proceeded to write lists of words on the blackboard which he copied from a notebook, some of them weren't even spelled correctly. I was then asked to read these words aloud and then the students had to repeat what I had said. I personally found this to be a totally pointless exercise. If these words had appeared in a story the students had studied I wouldn't have minded, but these were just random lists (e,g, drama, music, western, horror movie, romance, comedy etc.) with no real life value for the students as far as I am concerned. I was at the school from 09:00 – 11:30 and that's all we did.
Later I was told that English classes are normally on Wednesdays and Thursdays, so I will go back there tomorrow for some more “fun” , and my hope is that the English teacher will stay in the teacher room while I am in the classroom, because I will not allow a repeat of this farce in my presence.
I am not an English teacher and I have no teaching experience whatsoever, but I am thinking of teaching the children words from their village environment like house, farm, cow, fence etc. This way I hope these words will have some meaning for them and they might remember them after I have left. I will only be in the village for another three weeks and therefore what I can do will be very limited. I have already given up on the idea of discussing Hamlet in the third week (that was a joke). I would value any input from English teachers regarding what I could or should do.
By the way, in spite of what I have written above I enjoyed the experience with the children very much.
TomUK
I was greeted by the headteacher who could only speak very little English – fair enough, he doesn't teach the language. The students who I was supposed to teach then asked me to come to their classroom. Inside six students where sitting at their desks watching a video which showed English words for Thai food, and in the same room two other students were watching another video about geometry. There was no teacher present and the level of noise from these videos was quite high. The remote controls did not seem to work and so I just pulled the plugs. I then gathered all the students in one part of the room and tried to find out what their English knowledge was like. They were all about 10 years old and their English was fairly limited and when I asked to see the study books they were using it transpired that there were no books. So I then insisted on the English teacher to appear in the classroom and to teach English so that I could observe what English vocabulary the students know. It turned out that the teacher could hardly speak any English – actually the student's English was better than his. He then proceeded to write lists of words on the blackboard which he copied from a notebook, some of them weren't even spelled correctly. I was then asked to read these words aloud and then the students had to repeat what I had said. I personally found this to be a totally pointless exercise. If these words had appeared in a story the students had studied I wouldn't have minded, but these were just random lists (e,g, drama, music, western, horror movie, romance, comedy etc.) with no real life value for the students as far as I am concerned. I was at the school from 09:00 – 11:30 and that's all we did.
Later I was told that English classes are normally on Wednesdays and Thursdays, so I will go back there tomorrow for some more “fun” , and my hope is that the English teacher will stay in the teacher room while I am in the classroom, because I will not allow a repeat of this farce in my presence.
I am not an English teacher and I have no teaching experience whatsoever, but I am thinking of teaching the children words from their village environment like house, farm, cow, fence etc. This way I hope these words will have some meaning for them and they might remember them after I have left. I will only be in the village for another three weeks and therefore what I can do will be very limited. I have already given up on the idea of discussing Hamlet in the third week (that was a joke). I would value any input from English teachers regarding what I could or should do.
By the way, in spite of what I have written above I enjoyed the experience with the children very much.
TomUK