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.