The teaching - Week 1

27. Apr – 1. May

The journey of my coop experience, the ESL teaching at TOPS course, has started.

I spent lots of time to get to know the students this week because I think it is one of the important factors to be a good and friendly teacher and it went very well.
When I went for classes, double tutoring as well as my own afternoon classes, they were very welcoming and accepting me as a teacher even though I’m there for my teaching experience.
I felt really involved as a teacher and appreciated with the students’ attitude toward me. It actually made me less nervous and gave me a cheerful feeling. ^^*

There were different levels of students, from Level 1B (Beginner) to Level 3(Post-intermediate) who came for my extra afternoon classes and I found that it is pretty hard to carry on the lesson as there are huge gaps among students especially with the reading .
I talked about it with my work-supervisor, Elizabeth, and we decided to change the time table for different levels. – Monday and Wednesday afternoon classes are for any level of students and Tuesday morning class is for only level 2 and Tuesday afternoon is for level 3 students (reading).

Also, instead of having reading and writing classes on Monday and Wednesday we decided to focus on ‘speaking’ that students need more practice and help as most of students don’t speak English at home and the school or class is the place where they speak and practice English.

I think the first week went pretty well than I thought and I found myself as very enjoying it! I hope I can learn lots of new things in ESL teaching and want to keep this motivation until the end-