Teach English in Bailu Zhen - Lianyungang Shi

I am a fresh English teacher, in my spare time, I would like to read grammar books, watch English teaching videos from the Microblog, and taking all kinds of English Corners and FT classes in order to enrich my knowledge and improve my teaching skills, that’s also why I choose the TEFL course. I often found out the effect of one my class was not very good and satisfied, which was not only can be felt by myself, but from the faces of students, they were not joyful and active to answer every question, they seemed confused sometimes, in this condition, I started to do self reflecting because I wanted everything be perfect, then I realized those things above happened is not merely due to I do not know this knowledge very well but I may not use the best teaching skills. The way I showed the knowledge in my brain to them was not the best one. Teaching skills are like soft skills, or as magic, they draw a fantasy world appearing in front of students, give them a wonderful experience and deep impression of learning English. What are teaching skills? In my opinion, teaching skills are the methods you would like to adapt during your teaching and engaging with students under the guiding of the theory you truly deeply believe and agree with. Including teaching receptive skills, teaching productive skills, time controlling skills, eliciting skills, demonstration skills, etc. I learned English for years, since I was twelve in middle school, I think at that time the dominated theory is grammar-translation which I know the name afterwards, as a result I can not speaking English very well. At class, we focused on vocabulary, grammar and examination skills, we didn’t speak English at all except when answering teacher’s questions. Students were easy to feel bored and lose interests. In addition, the model of class is always like this ”Today, we gonna learn...” and “Before we start our class, let’s make a dictation of vocabulary from last class”, and no fun activity, no laugh, with the time going, the English what we finally learned is “dumb English”, which is becoming a rather well-known phenomenon in China. I do not want to say they did not teach with efforts, but the method is wrong, and it’s hardly to see lots of teaching skills in it. During these days’ study in TEFL course, I think I learned loads of teaching skills, I remembered there is one unit called video lessons comparing two lessons with the same course contents, the effect and the atmosphere in these two classes are total different. I think the teaching skills take a vital place here. Hence I made a short rough conclusion including but far more not limited to these good teaching skills, like using an excellent warm-up to establish good rapport with students before the class starts, eliciting and inspiring them by easy instructions or body language. Controlling your voice to make people feel comfortable and obsessed, sometimes you must speak slowly and clearly, however sometimes you have to be full of passion. Activity part, teacher shouldn’t too dominated but can participate a bit, monitor them and write down the errors you hear on the board meanwhile, correct them after the activity, always be supportive and very nice. Recently, China is in serious epidemic situation because of the Coronavirus disease, we English teachers can not teach face-to-face so we begin to teach online class, which is a big challenge for me because I never taught any online classes before and online is totally different from the offline class. What impressed me most is when I finished the first online class, I was frustrated, I think I can teach it better cause the teaching materials have been taught for multiple times, how come the effect can not satisfy myself? Fortunately the students were at least excited and active. I quickly made the conclusions and considered a lot, when I taught the next class, I add more quik quiz pare between each activity and keep the class rhythm slow, gave even much clearer and easier instructions, mute students’ speaker when it is necessary, etc, in the end, the class was much better. From this experience, it strengthened my point that keeping learning teaching skills are very important and if you want to teach a class very well, you have to master some essential teaching skills, it will help your class to be much more productive. Moreover, the teaching skills can not only be learned but be attained from your personal experiences and practices, generally the personal teaching skills can make you unique and standout. Always keep in mind, learning is a long long journey.