Teaching English in China: Primary School Teaching 10/1

            The class observed was a full class (around 50?) of Grade 6 students in China. The teacher used visuals to introduce the topic of talking about holidays. The lesson was introduced by a question “What is a holiday?” Different pictures  such as one of the beach, the city, the jungle, and the Arctic are presented. The students said the words and spelled them out. They also talked about each setting, ie. For the beach, there were hints in the image and also clues given by the teacher to ellict the sentences: “You can sunbathe. / You can lie under the sun. / You can swim. / You can make a sandcastle.”  Sometimes the teacher would ask a question about the picture such as “How is the weather?” such as for the jungle image, and then the teacher uses their responses to talk about it more and naturally lead to talking about the activities – You can walk through the jungle. / You can see many animals.

            The students often said the answers in unison and spelled out words, which may not be what we are used to here, but I thought it was appropriate within the context, as we need to take into consideration the cultures and customs of the places in which we are teaching. Even though some of the teaching method was more traditional, I thought the teacher did a great job making everything flow smoothly and the introduction of topics and target language was always natural. She also explained words such as skyscraper by first checking if they know what “scrape” means, and then explaining it further by saying that the words together literally means that the building is so tall it almost scrapes the sky. Adding the imagery was a great way to make definitions interesting and memorable.

Something else I took note of was the fact that the teacher used her own photos in the slides that almost had short journal entries on them. “I went to the jungle. It was very hot! I walked through the jungle and I saw a monkey…..” She used her own photos for the beach and New York City as well. I thought her adding that personal touch made the students interested and were immediately engaged (whispering to each other “Is that her?..”) We also saw that the teacher transitioned into the topic of past tense by saying “If I’m talking about today, I say ‘I go…’ and if I want to talk about yesterday, I say….” to ellicit the answer “Yesterday I went…” from the students.

            After a review of all the phrases, the teacher had each person read them one by one (going up and down each row of students) It worked out pretty well and the students were even able to correct one another! A follow-up activity was matching the things you see with the places in which you see them, such as snowman with Arctic. Before the last activity where they practice with the person next to them, the class went over the past tense verbs in “I went to..” “I saw…” and “It was…” The teacher instructed them to have a conversation with their partner about a holiday they went on or pretend that they went on. I think this was an important part of the lesson but with the class size, it was hard to supervise and keep everyone on track even though she was walking around to different students. What ended up happening was that some students were just chatting instead of practicing. I am very curious to learn what to do in this situation. As a final note, I really liked that the teacher took what was a more of a traditional teaching style and made it her own by planning with intention.