A Report on One Year of Teaching English as a Foreign Language at Jeom-Ch¡¯on Jung Ang Elementary School in Munkyong, September 1996 to August 1997
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BY MICHAEL JAMES WILSON (NATIVE ENGLISH TEACHER)
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INTRODUCTION
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¡°Children concentrate and listen with understanding more effectively if they are motivated and engaged in purposeful activity while listening. It is important therefore to remember that listening is not a passive activity. Always asking children to simply ¡°listen and remember¡± places a great strain on their memory and tends not to develop listening skills.¡±
-from an Elementary school English Teacher¡¯s Training book
¡°EFL is different from native language acquisition in many perspectives such as linguistic, cognitive, social, affective ones. For instance, Korean is a left branching system, whereas, English is a right branching one. Let¡¯s think about English sentences: ¡°The book I read yesterday is so interesting.¡± However, in Korean, it can represented ¡°Yesterday I read a book is so interesting.¡± What this means in an EFL setting is that if the students in Korea start to learn English later, they will have difficulty in switching the fixed knowledge of systems. In other words, if some linguistic structures are fixed in the process of first language acquisition, it is very difficult to change them later. From a cognitive view, the same is true. That is, since knowledge such as phonological, syntactical and semantic systems are once utilized, it will take a lot of time for students to alter them later. My assumption is that if the students are exposed to English at an early stage, they will have chances to be flexible in handling both systems (English and Korean). In addition, from both social and affective points of view, the younger seem to be better in language learning. Imagine how naturally children express themselves and how social they are in their elementary school days! What I have mentioned above are the main essences of what the current research on EFL tells us. I also have empirical evidence which supports early English education. My daughter successfully became bilingual because she came to the USA at age 6 (although I do not want the young children in Korea to be bilingual).
-Lee Won-Hyuk, from the Korea Herald ¡°In My View¡± ¡®Early English Education¡¯. He is a PhD student at Indiana University.
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-¡°Ideally, a game should be below the level of their ability¡±. From Mr. Lee, ¡°Games for Language Teaching¡±
-¡°It¡¯s important to breathe life into language learning.¡± ? a Korean High school student who won an English speech contest.
This is a report on the teaching activities I carried out at Jeom-Ch¡¯on Jung Ang Elementary School, where I was employed as an English teacher from September 1996 to August 1997. In it I discuss teaching methods, teaching materials, lesson plans, and some cultural comparisons. It is by no means an academic essay because this is the first year I have ever been a school teacher. I am primarily a native speaker of English employed to teach conversational English, and to assist Korean teachers with their English curriculum. I do have some knowledge of educational theory, especially for EFL, but most of what I did here, I learned on the job. Maybe this report will be useful for future English teachers at this school, or for some Korean teachers, who can actually make sense of this English.
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