Teach English in Xingtai Zhen - Taizhou Shi

Since I teach English as a Foreign Language, monolingual groups are the students who speak the same language among them apart from English and the class will take place in their homeland, while the students of multilingual groups are from all over the world, they may speak several different languages in one class, which mostly take place in countries where English is the native language, students who learn it are residing there or have their own learning purposes. Since teaching students of monolingual groups take place in their homeland, they have similar cultural background, the rapport between students is relatively easy to be established, they may share similar interests so that teacher can target them and arrange them in lesson plans to get students motivated which could help to build successful class. Also, they may come across the same or similar language difficulties during lessons. I have been teaching in an international school in China for 3 years. Students are mostly from Korea, but 99% of them can speak Chinese. There are monolingual classes, Korean language only class and Chinese language only class. In classes like these, it is quite easy to find out their interests which is benefit for building rapport with them. Of course, there are some difficult time, when they don’t understand something, it has to be translated into their language or some students who understand explain to them in their language. It may help them to understand, however, in a long term, they might lose ability to try to understand the concept of English learning, instead, they can only remember it in their own language, every time they express something in English they have to think in their own language first then convert it into English. For teachers, classes like this, have to try their best to avoid using students’ mother tongue, which requires teacher’s more effort to monitor students, especially when they are doing the Active Stage, such as pair or group work, to make sure students communicate with one another in English instead of their mother tongue. When it comes to grammar class, it can save much more time, since lots of terminology would appear in this kind class. In multilingual classes, students from different countries can bring a greater variety of culture and ideas to the classroom. Two years ago, I went to the States as an au pair. Before we start our journey as an au pair, girls from all over the world, Europe, South America, Asia and South Africa, all gathered together to have essential child care lessons. English was the only language to be used for communication among us. Since not everyone’s English was not at the same level, we used English and body language together to talk with one another to maximize communication. Also, because we are of different cultural backgrounds, we really did have a lot to talk. In a situation like this, teachers can only use English but have to be as simple as possible, to make sure all the students have received the message teacher wanted to deliver, which needs much more effort from teacher. However, since all the students gathering together to make up a class like this is to actually learn English, they have a purpose to sit in the classroom. Either to literally learn English or have to pass certain exams. Therefore, they relatively have stronger motivation than the other group, which makes teacher’s job easier to be conducted. Teaching monolingual groups are as challenging but fun as multilingual groups. Each of them as its own advantages and disadvantages. It quite depends on the teacher himself/herself’s own preference. For myself, I care about rapport and knowledge deliver efficiency, therefore I prefer monolingual groups, which to me is less challenging compare to multilingual groups.