Adventures in ESL: Student Teaching Weeks 8-9

The fourth edition of Adventures In ESL! Again, I hope you all enjoy these posts, and if you are a teacher or are learning how to teach (like me), please share some helpful tips on teaching methods, fun class activities, etc. They are appreciated. 🙂

*Note: This is an intermediate adult ESL (English as a Second Language Class). The course lasts over a period of 13 weeks and are held 2 days a week and are roughly 2 hours long each.

Week 8: Halloween Fun!

Moving on with the topic of jobs, in Tuesday’s class we reviewed job skills and started focusing on job applications. My class size was a bit small and a lot of the students were really quiet. I wonder why? I decided to let them fill out a job application for homework, but for a class activity I had them look at “bad” job applications. We went through each section and I tried to let them see if they could pick out various errors. Most of the small errors such as a missing phone number, incomplete address, and even some spelling mistakes were very easy for my students to figure out. However,  a lot of the bigger errors were harder for the students. I pointed out incomplete sentences and even offensive answers. For example: In the “reason for leaving job” spot of the application the person wrote “Boss was a jerk”. I thought “jerk” was an easy enough slang term they might have heard, but they really didn’t understand it. Despite that activity having some rough patches, everything went well!

Since Thursday’s class was the day before Halloween, I decided to have a more fun laid back lesson. To start off the class we did a bit of Halloween trivia about the holiday’s origins and everyone answered almost every question correctly. We played a Halloween version of Pictionary and had a lot of easygoing discussions about the holiday. We talked about “how they celebrated it”, “if they could wear any costume what it would be”, and shared scary stories. I tried to have them do the chain storytelling game like before except with the theme creating a scary story, but it didn’t work. Instead they kept retelling the famous story of La llorana (which is a way creepy story). The ESL students’ kids came down from the day care located upstairs to show off their costumes and the students and I gave them candy. They were so adorable! Eventually I did run of class material because the activities I had planned so I had them give me feedback about the class and what things they like doing in class.

Week 9: Please Speak English!

Again, the students were really quiet for the beginning of class. I think it’s because of the lack of exposure to English over the weekend so my class is the first time they’ve probably spoken English (somewhat) fluently since last Thursday. Though they were quiet they did show comprehension of the lesson material. We focused on preparing for job interviews and the steps you need to take in order to increase your chances of getting a job. To reinforce the discussion we did an activity where I put students into groups and had them rank things employers looked for in a possible hire from 1- 10. Some of the things on the list were: criminal record, references, education, and ethnicity. A lot of groups came up with the same top 5 answers and reasons to why they ranked some of the choices higher than others. I noticed they spoke a lot in Spanish today, so I was a bit frustrated. I had to emphasize that I wasn’t mad, but just wanted them to try harder in class. I told them how important it was to practice English as much as possible in class in and even outside of class. I went on to tell them about my own personal experiences of learning a language and that practicing only helps their English improve and understand the material better.

Thursday’s class was the last class focusing on the unit of jobs. We talked about the format of a job interview and reviewed the steps to prepare for the interview. After Tuesday’s talk about them needing to practice English more I definitely heard them speak in English a lot more during their “practice interviews”. As for grammar, the whole week we practiced adjectives and the many different ways we could use them to describe nouns. All in all, I can really see small improvements in all of my students and the skills each student struggles with the most is slowly becoming less difficult for them. I can’t believe how our time together is passing by and how it seems we just started our class only a couple of weeks ago we just started learning together!

Things learned:

• It’s okay to be firm with your students, they will not be offended or hurt
• Time flies by fast!
• Using teacher observation and evaluation as assessments only do so much! Rubrics are needed too!

See you next time! 😀