HOW DO YOU TEACH ENGLISH?

I originally had no intention of touching “How do you teach English” as I am absolutely no expert and at most generous estimations only have about 3 years of experience but people keep asking me said question and I thought I’d address it to the best of my abilities… which is to say, you should probably get a book on said issue.

Generally, teaching English is pretty straightforward. Your boss gives you a curriculum and the books, explains how many pages you are to cover a day and you plan a lesson around that. Before you enter class, you put on your EFL voice, which is over-articulating and then pausing as though each word in your sentence was followed by a period as well as never using anything short of literal English. (It’s actually harder than you think. If you slow yourself down and ask yourself “Does this make literal sense?” about everything that comes out of your mouth, you end up having a hard time knowing if it does.) You give a mini lesson, the kids ignore you or tell you how boring this is, you lay out what they are to do, the kids ignore you or tell you how overly easy it is, you tell them “Okay, now it’s your turn,” then they accuse you of not preparing them or the lesson being too hard, you choose a volunteer or claim a sacrifice to show that it can be done by someone other than you and you proceed until the bell rings.

However, at my school, things are a little different. I not only have no textbook to teach from, I have no curriculum and no active peer to ask for suggestions. My predecessor took the job so lightly that he describes it as “Eh, babysitting.” He blew off every responsibility he had to the school and often suggests I do the same. Granted, he’s the perfect counterpoint to my over-thinking, perfectionist and worrywart of a brain but if he’s what has blazed the trail for English teachers before me, they cannot think all that highly of us English speakers. It is true that if the school truly cared about the English classes I teach, they’d give me a curriculum but I’ve been hired to do a job and my self-respect is more important to me than getting away with the minimal amount I can. After all, I teach students who are striving to be international businessmen and women, ambassadors and international liaisons. They need real, functioning English if they want to be truly competitive.

In lieu of a curriculum, I have been informed that my “curriculum” will simply be my books of lesson plans.: my curriculum is to be set by me. Granted, when I heard that, all I could think of was the Sisters of Mercy song called “Ribbons” and the line “I tried to tell her ‘bout Marx and Engels, God and Angels, I don’t really know what for.” “Ribbons” is a song about the lunacy (and eventual destruction) that results from being stuck in a relationship where you express yourself through overly thinky means and the other person does not get it. Eldritch was trapped by love. I am trapped by contract. My education has me greatly versed in all the things a classical education would provide an indulged, ferociously curious, erudite Western and I am to teach students who are only on occasion interested in listening to me. Make no mistake, “Education is the lone commodity from which the consumer wants less, not more.”

All things considered, I decided to offer the students the opportunity to have a positive experience with English… the best of my abilities. I want my students to feel smart and empowered in English. How does one do that with students somewhat ambivalent about learning? Redundancy.

They have Chinese teachers teaching them the nuts and bolts of English. In their other classes, they learn about nouns, verbs, gerunds etc. In my class, they use it. In my class they not only hear the way English sounds but I offer them a view into how things are actually used, not just what is grammatically correct.
Depending on what the curriculum of the other English classes is, I base my class around that. If the other classes are learning about vacations or travel, I base my class around talking about vacations or travel. I have taught them that when they ask a Western “How far” is something, the Westerner will, most likely, not tell them “X kilometers” but a unit of time. When classes are learning about introducing themselves and others, they actually have to do it in my class. In their other English classes, they are given their options and must fill in the blank correctly. Any mathematically inclined chimp can do that and still know nothing about speaking English. So, in my class it’s a bit more complicated. I tell them what the book will tell them and then I explain the ways that varies from real English (ie. “How far” usually gets you a unit of time, not distance). I can’t teach politics and I certainly can’t teach that rigid dogma the Chinese are so fond of gets you nowhere with the English language but I can teach the kids who aren’t getting straight A’s that they might actually be good at real English. Case in point: the boy who is first in his class with English came in third out of four in the game I had them play. His hubris at being number one made him feel as though he could play Uno while I was teaching the lesson and still win the game took a bit of a beating. Ultimately, that boy has nothing to learn from me because he fills out forms well and that has killed his desire to learn from me but his classmates that beat him learned that, even for a brief moment, they could excel too. The underdog winning is not overtly political but it is distinctly American.

I find the major problem is when you get stuck in a class that just isn’t interested. Not every class is always disinterested and each one has its own specific flavor (I’ve got 24 different classes; I know this firsthand) but there are days when even the best, most attentive classes just do not care. Granted, there are days when you’re off the mark and there are days when they don’t understand but then there are days when they’re just not having it and there’s nothing you can do about that. The way you discern the times of when they’re bored from when you’re doing something wrong is to ask them. If, before you ask them, they offer up that they’re bored, chances are they’re simply not going to be paying attention for class. And, while you need to be somewhat entertaining, it is, ultimately, up to you to figure out how much of a dancing monkey you’re willing to be.

Basically, my classes are spoken English classes, which means they must get accustom to hearing me speak and they must learn to enunciate properly. Having taken my subject matter from the other teacher’s curriculum, my plan generally is shaped around an intro of casual conversation (ie. “How was your weekend?”) and then I explain how today’s topic is relevant to my life. For introducing other people, I introduced some of my friends and family. Then I lay out which few pieces of information I want from them about said topic (usually three to four pieces of information), I write out relevant sentences on the board for them to modify for their own expression and then I have each person try their hand at the paragraph. If the class seems particularly uninspired, I break them in to four teams and have them compete for the largest amount of people to speak the paragraph properly.
In a nutshell, it’s not rocket science and you have to be willing to regularly make an ass out of yourself but it can be really good when it’s good and not too crappy when it sucks.