Teach English in FengshAn Zhen - Huanggang Shi

Teaching individuals one-to-one and teaching groups can require the teacher to take a different approach towards designing lessons and managing the learning experience. It is important that English teachers are prepared to teach individuals in a one-to-one setting as recently there has been an increase in demand for individual lessons, especially from students who come from a business background. However, there is still a demand for student group teachers as well. There are advantages and challenges to teaching individuals in one-to-one lesson scenarios. In these situations, a teacher can approach a lesson with the expectation that the potential issue of mixed-level students will not have to be dealt with and that the needs of the student can be clearly recorded. The teacher will likely find the individual teaching experience to be particularly fulfilling as many students in individual lesson situations are highly motivated to participate in the lessons. In addition, the teacher can get to know the student well. Although there are great advantages to teaching one-to-one such as getting the satisfaction of working with often a highly motivated student, there are disadvantages as well. Individual lesson cancellations are not uncommon, and the teacher should be prepared to exchange enough contact information to communicate about scheduling lessons. There is also the issue of teacher fatigue in one-to-one lessons due in part to the fact that the teacher often has to be the partner of the individual student for many learning activities. In the face of these challenges, the teacher in this scenario would benefit by planning many course book activities and being well aware of the student’s experience and interests to keep the lessons both interesting and practical for the teacher and the student. Furthermore, it is useful to vary lesson plans and include such one-to-one activities as reading short stories and goal-oriented activities. Teaching to groups is certainly different than teaching to individuals. The advantages and challenges of group teaching can vary depending on the group being taught. For example, teaching to a classroom of children would most likely not be similar to the experience of teaching to a classroom of adult business learners. Teaching to children can be fulfilling because of the students’ curiosity, but it can also be hard because children usually have a shorter attention span than adults have and quite a bit of alternating from one activity to the next by the teacher might need to occur. In addition to teaching a whole group instead of one person, the teacher has to keep in mind the possible mixed-language levels of the students in the group. There are many variations of student groups the teacher could encounter, such as beginners with different kinds of experience. The teacher could be teaching a multilingual class and would need to be aware of the students having different native languages and that English is the only common language to work with. If the teacher was to be teaching one student in individual lessons, the language level and native tongue of the student could be the only things the teacher would have to keep in mind when lesson planning. Although there is less time to do so, it is still possible for the teacher to speak to a student individually for a short period of time in a group classroom setting. When the teacher teaches a group, the classroom environment needs to be considered in terms of set-up in order to make it conducive for group learning to occur and the intensity of discipline can vary depending on the age, experience and motivation of the group in general. Overall, it is important to get experience teaching individuals and teaching groups to see which, if not both, scenarios the teacher would prefer to teach. There are benefits and drawbacks for each of these two main teaching contexts.