Shanghai VS.

Teaching adults English can sometimes be very trying. In my company, the classes are small, and the text books suck. As a result the students often vote for a ‘free talk’. This would be fine if free talk actually meant have a group conversation. Instead free talk translates to have me run and hold a conversation with people who often don’t want to talk. I mean, sometimes, the conversations come easy, the students and I get along, it feels almost natural. Other times, not so much.
English Corner is not like a regular class. There are no text books involved and the idea is for student to come and chat. The only problem is they don’t always want to chat and the conversation between the students is limited which means again, I do most of the talking. Let me break down my English Corner history.
1)Bombed, big time. I had nothing to talk about, new to the job, very…..strained…..conversation.
2)I came in blazing. Started talking about health, exercise, which lead to relaxation, which lead to music, which lead to me saying I liked rap music. This then lead to me trying to get the class to make a rap and sing it. Which was pretty funny in itself. And from there to censorship. Very solid, but kind of strained, again I had to push the convo from place to place.
3)I pulled an article out of a newspaper about how South Korea is implementing a new banknote with the face of motherhood on it. Some feminist groups were protesting saying this reinforced gender stereotypes (men work, women at home). Interestingly I played the role of the feminist as the student disagreed with the feminist groups.
4)One student showed up, just chatted, it was fine.

Which brings us to yesterdays session. I needed some games to play with them as the whole conversation thing with a big group was getting to be to much of a chore. So I decided to find some games. The thing is English Corner is kind of like a long car ride. And I’m the parents and the students are the kids. Since I’ve never been a parent, I had to trust the internet for tips on car travel with kids
Among the games played was make an advertisement for any product. This one worked…ok. The real hit of the show was categories. Everyone loved it. It reminded me of car trips with my sister. Only this time I had the most rhythm.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 3:18 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.