track | BSU Teaches Abroad

So I have had the opportunity to teach this past week. When I arrived, students were preparing for and taking midterms, so there was little opportunity to teach or even observe classrooms. In this school, the students take about a full week from lessons to take their midterm exams.

I have been teaching in a grade 12 English class. The students’ English proficiency is very good in terms of reading and listening, and they are able to speak fairly well, but their writing needs the most work. Students tend to have a great vocabulary, but sometimes use words that sound awkward (e.g. She received surgery) or make simple grammar errors (e.g. tense or subject-verb agreement). I do think that this is a great school to come to if you want to be an ESL teacher, teach language acquisition, or want to work with EL students. I’ve also found that, even though every student in the class may know the answer to a question, they are hesitant to raise their hands and participate. I am not sure whether it is because they do not feel their English is good enough, or whether they are afraid of being wrong, but I am going to spend the next month here working to build their confidence in both areas.

The school is divided into two tracks: the domestic program and the international program. The domestic program is for students who want to go to college in China, the international program is designed for students who want to study abroad. In the domestic program, students still take English, but they are taught by Chinese teachers, mostly focusing on vocabulary and grammar so they can pass written exams. The International English classes are ideally taught by native English speakers and focus on skills that will help students succeed in foreign colleges (American and European mostly). So where the domestic students might read a story and focus on comprehension, the international students might read a text and consider ways to analyze the text, write about the text, and discuss the text in English. The students pretty much stay in one class all day (except for meals, breaks, and physical education) and the teachers move from classroom to classroom.

I taught one class (same class; 3, 40 minute periods) about Farm-to-Table, where we focused on some basic rhetorical analysis: understanding the author, audience, and purpose/theme/message of an article. After I introduced the article (background: what is Farm-to-Table, who is the author, and what do I want you to think about while we read) we read the article, I had them respond to specific questions in pairs and write down their answers, we discussed it as a class, and I had them write about it. Many of the students were able to understand by the end of the group work, and gave me some good answers while I was walking around and talking to them one-on-one, but were reluctant to speak in the whole class discussion. I know you might be thinking that I just haven’t built a rapport with the students, but this is something that many teachers have said about the high school students. The middle school students, I have heard, are more likely to take risks and participate.

I am teaching the same class (different period) a young adult novel about Native Americans. To prepare for that, I am having students do a short research project about Native Americans. They seemed much more engaged in that project. When I was asking them questions about what they knew, or what they thought about different things, they were really active and engaged in the class. They know a surprising amount about Native Americans, but they also have some misunderstandings about them. I can’t wait to start reading the text to see what they think about it! It’s a really fun novel.

Finally, I just wanted to share some of the pictures from the school. I also visited the Qingpu campus earlier in the week, which looks like is has a great early education program, but no high school (and I didn’t see the middle school). I’ll post those pictures in a different post.