During the days leading up to my first class in Korea, my anxiety seemed to keep growing. I was worried about going blank, not having a smooth transition between topics, and students falling asleep from boredom among others. Several scenarios kept playing in my head.

I had made a lesson plan, which included a warm-up. To get the first class started, I was planning to ask students to pick English names for themselves and share with the class the name had picked and why. I imagined that this would be a fun activity for them. Furthermore, I had decided to incorporate a CI. I had planned on after picking the first student to tell about his English name, he would then pick another student to the same and so forth until all had a chance to speak. This warm-up activity, in fact, was well-received by the students. I could tell that they had had fun coming up with a name and finding out what others in the class had picked. I also found out that during their English classes at school they had never used this CI (a student asking questions to another student). Hence, I have decided to try to incorporate this CI more when the opportunity to use it appropriately presents itself.

After listening to my recording, I am able to identify many areas to work on. I did expect it to turn out this way and I am by no means discouraged. Determining what my problem areas are, I believe, is the first step towards change to be a better language teacher.

First and foremost, I have realized that I nominated students to answer questions I had posed throughout the class. This was most likely due to the fact that once I had invited anyone to reply directly at the beginning of the class, no one had taken the initiative. However, I kept calling on the same two students most of the time. After further analysis I have realized that these two were the strongest and the weakest students in the class. This is definitely an issue I need to work on…

Furthermore, I could see that I had had a hard time sticking to my lesson plan. I had gotten sidetracked a lot. I witnessed for example that I had started with telling them about the name “Bob” but then I was talking about sports shoes somehow.

Another area I need to work on and perhaps the one I should work on first is that I need to create more opportunities for students to converse in English and construct learner participation. As I am doing a conversation class, I do not have a curriculum to follow and able to devise my lesson plans freely. Transcribing my recording made me realize that I had used, almost exclusively, closed questions during classroom discourse. I encountered numerous times such sentences coming out of my mouth: “they don’t mean the same thing, right?” To make things worse, I realized that I definitely did not allow sufficient wait-time for students to response or possibly even more students to respond. I need extended wait-time, more open-ended questions and I need to work on “probing” students further with questions to allow them to converse more and hence increase their learning potential.

I am not quite yet sure if the boys I am teaching are just shy in general or shy/uncomfortable around non-Koreans (at least for some time) or merely displaying a low interaction level. I need more time to “figure them out”, to understand their personalities, their reasons for learning English, their motivations, etc. However, practicing an extended wait-time from next class will hopefully increase their participation in classroom communication.

The bottom line is that I feel I am on the right path working on identifying my problem areas and trying to formulate different strategies to use to improve how I teach. I know that I am building my pool of skills, knowledge, experiences, and networks to draw from and I need to engage myself in continuous professional development to continue to learn and be able to apply new knowledge, strategies to move forward. 

During the days leading up to my first class in Korea, my anxiety seemed to keep growing. I was worried about going blank, not having a smooth transition between topics, and students falling asleep from boredom among others. Several scenarios kept playing in my head.

I had made a lesson plan, which included a warm-up. To get the first class started, I was planning to ask students to pick English names for themselves and share with the class the name had picked and why. I imagined that this would be a fun activity for them. Furthermore, I had decided to incorporate a CI. I had planned on after picking the first student to tell about his English name, he would then pick another student to the same and so forth until all had a chance to speak. This warm-up activity, in fact, was well-received by the students. I could tell that they had had fun coming up with a name and finding out what others in the class had picked. I also found out that during their English classes at school they had never used this CI (a student asking questions to another student). Hence, I have decided to try to incorporate this CI more when the opportunity to use it appropriately presents itself.

After listening to my recording, I am able to identify many areas to work on. I did expect it to turn out this way and I am by no means discouraged. Determining what my problem areas are, I believe, is the first step towards change to be a better language teacher.

First and foremost, I have realized that I nominated students to answer questions I had posed throughout the class. This was most likely due to the fact that once I had invited anyone to reply directly at the beginning of the class, no one had taken the initiative. However, I kept calling on the same two students most of the time. After further analysis I have realized that these two were the strongest and the weakest students in the class. This is definitely an issue I need to work on…

Furthermore, I could see that I had had a hard time sticking to my lesson plan. I had gotten sidetracked a lot. I witnessed for example that I had started with telling them about the name “Bob” but then I was talking about sports shoes somehow.

Another area I need to work on and perhaps the one I should work on first is that I need to create more opportunities for students to converse in English and construct learner participation. As I am doing a conversation class, I do not have a curriculum to follow and able to devise my lesson plans freely. Transcribing my recording made me realize that I had used, almost exclusively, closed questions during classroom discourse. I encountered numerous times such sentences coming out of my mouth: “they don’t mean the same thing, right?” To make things worse, I realized that I definitely did not allow sufficient wait-time for students to response or possibly even more students to respond. I need extended wait-time, more open-ended questions and I need to work on “probing” students further with questions to allow them to converse more and hence increase their learning potential.

I am not quite yet sure if the boys I am teaching are just shy in general or shy/uncomfortable around non-Koreans (at least for some time) or merely displaying a low interaction level. I need more time to “figure them out”, to understand their personalities, their reasons for learning English, their motivations, etc. However, practicing an extended wait-time from next class will hopefully increase their participation in classroom communication.

The bottom line is that I feel I am on the right path working on identifying my problem areas and trying to formulate different strategies to use to improve how I teach. I know that I am building my pool of skills, knowledge, experiences, and networks to draw from and I need to engage myself in continuous professional development to continue to learn and be able to apply new knowledge, strategies to move forward.