Teaching Oral English

Oral English is a lot easier than reading and writing. Students learn by practicing, and they practice by speaking, playing games, doing roleplays, and even just listening to me speak. I basically get to come up with fun activities and roleplaying ideas that will force my students to use their spoken English with each other.

I set up an email address solely for teaching. I collected the emails of all my students and wrote everyone an email after the first day of class. I've been emailing about 20-25 of my students regularly. I think conversing with a foreigner is not only interesting for them, but also shows them that our English is a lot more colloquial and fluid than they've learned from their books and Chinese teachers.

I teach 6 classes a week, and each class consists of a 45 minute lesson, a 10 minute break, and another 45 minute lesson. I teach 6 different groups of students each once a week, so I only prepare one lesson plan per week. My students are between 21 and 35 years old, they are postgraduates at Jiangsu University, and they major in medicine, engineering, computer science, and a few other "hard sciences." I even have professors in other departments who attend my class to improve their English.

I want to keep a running outline of my lesson plans so that I can track what goes well and what explodes in my face. If any other teachers find this page - feel free to steal my ideas, plagiarize me, criticize me, do anything! I'm all about the open source community and the freedom of information. Copyrights and patents hurt more than they help. (How presumptious of me to assume that my original ideas are worth stealing!) :)

Week One

Introductions, rules of my classroom, and my grading policies. I brought pictures of my family, friends, house, apartment, and the mountains in Colorado to pass around. My classes were attended by an average of 60 students when in reality, about 40 are registered. This means that people are just coming to my class so that they can see and listen to a foreigner.

The class went well - I explained how public speaking is the best means for improving confidence in a language because you have the chance to prepare what you want to say before you have to say it - few oral English situations allow this luxury. Students gave a short introduction of themselves. I assigned them a 1-2 minute speech about any topic they select.

I explained the difference between a written transcript of a speech and an outline, and I asked them to prepare an outline to accompany their speech.

Week Two

First, I split the class into a few large groups and had students deliver their 2-minute speeches to their group. I hovered between the groups trying to listen to the speeches as well as I could. I collected the written outlines. I should have explained the difference better between an outline and a transcript, because I got a lot of transcripts.

I explained what a debate was, the format of a debate, and talked about how this is another area in spoken language where you can prepare what you want to say before you have to say it. I introduced four questions that I think my Chinese students will have opinions about, like the Olympics and the treatment of animals in China. I came up with pro/con sides to these topics and my students will prepare arguments with their teammates for the next class period.

I'm turning this into a competition so that my students will take more interest. I will judge the debates and determine who prepared the strongest argument. Each team will have an "MVP Debater," and each debate topic will have a winning team. Chinese students thrive on competition.

More when the weeks get here...