TEACHER’S ENGLISH CLASS

For almost five months, I had to teach English three hours a week to the teachers in this school. For the last five months only one hour a week to the teachers (if that), but one and a half to all the grade three teachers in Munkyong, who total about forty. The textbook we now use is called “Side by Side”. These are four books and they are excellent. For my school’s teachers, I was expected to provide classroom lessons, but I was assisted, thankfully, by a Korean teacher. I wrote “listening test quizzes”, played anagram, crossword, scrambled word and word order games. I looked for proverbs, articles and children’s stories. Eventually, many teachers were bored with it, or it was too difficult, so I was asked to teach a lot of “classroom English”. This “teaching” was just speaking the sentence and them repeating. Then we started to watch “POP’s English Videos,” learning English through music videos. These music videos, taped from a popular TV English program, were vastly entertaining to me, but I don’t know how much English they were learning. I have heard about some Korean High school English teachers who have very successful classes through teaching songs. Classroom English became the staple diet of my classes for teachers. A basic conversation book was bought by teachers, which included a cassette tape, but this resource has only been briefly taught. I don’t have a set methodology for teaching teachers, but I do know most of them have yet to master middle school English.