Tomorrow's the big day! I actually have to get in front of beginning English language learners and teach them from a lesson plan I prepared with the lead teacher's supervision. I'm pretty nervous, especially since I haven't heard back from the teacher yet about whether or not my lesson plan looks doable. But I have lots of resources, a teacher's guide, some cool handouts, and plenty of student to student (S>S) interactions planned to increase student talk time (STT). Yay, I'm (re)learning terms!
It's a fairly simple lesson, involving classroom objects (nouns) and some basic object position (preposition) words. They already learned the words last class, so we'll see if they remember anything from last Thursday. It's a big gap, especially if they didn't practice. Mostly I'm concerned about not talking down to them, but I think you sort of have to speak in vastly simplified language with a lot of gestures at this point. The head teacher is very good at emoting/gesturing and speaking clearly and slowly with beginning level words. While it's weird for me to hear, I imagine it's a relief for the students to hear, since they're only hearing English in class, with only about a half dozen Spanish words she occasionally throws in if she knows them and they're not getting the idea in English.
She uses the same overall lesson plan approach I've been studying though, which makes this process much easier to coordinate. The PPP lesson planning is Presentation>Practice>Production, and I've tried to gear my lesson plan for tomorrow using that format. I do have a tiny bit of presentation at the beginning of each section with giving directions, and students are still very pre-conversational in this class, but we're doing what we can to encourage them to communicate. On this side of things, I'm afraid I'll take 70 or 80 minutes for my 60-minute lesson plan, but in reality, they may move quickly and I may talk too fast, which could potentially bring the lesson plan down to 40 minutes (I can't imagine that with 5-6 activities though...!).
Oops, sorry. I got a little caught up in the process and forgot I'm supposed to be blogging and eventually create postings of general interest, even though I'm still writing for myself at this point!
Regarding the traveling process: I'm still not sure to what extent I will use the TEFL Institute's job assistance services. I think I might have a recruiter in mind, and they just posted on their website that they begin taking applications for March '11 starting Oct. 4--mere weeks away! I need to get on the ball with letters of recommendation, finishing certification, volunteering with a more likely age group, and looking into interviewing and stuff. I'm getting the sneaking suspicion that the GEPIK program (teaching in public schools in suburbs of Seoul) is a pretty competitive program. Yes, I do have my undergrad and master's in English, and I will have TEFL certification plus some classroom experience, but, but...! Bother, I need to shut down the worrying. Yearning for Morning Calm indeed...
Oh, I did a little investigating into the Seoul-based church whose site actually had an English version. My brother was very familiar with the church in Jackson, MS where the Korean pastor had worked during his time at seminary, and it sounds like a good recommendation in his favor--very internationally-minded, and welcoming to people from all sorts of cultures. I was trying to find out where the church was relative to the suburb I might be interested in. Using the patchily-translated map of the Seoul subway system, Google Earth, and my Korean phrasebook, I managed to figure out where both approximate spots were. Unfortunately, it's about an hour commute one-way. And no Sunday train times were listed that I could tell (surely the trains run on Sunday...?). But on the positive side, it only costs about $1.25 each direction (1,500 won) if I understood the exchange rate right. I need to contact the church and see what's what. Can't hurt to find these things out in advance, right?
I downloaded a sermon to listen to since they were available. This was one from Exodus in a series they're doing for their English language service. The teacher (an intern teaches the English service) taught expositionally, which was exciting, and quoted both Tim Keller and C.S. Lewis in examples. Win! It also sounds like there were quite a few EFL teachers in the congregation, since a few illustrations were directed as, "I know a lot of you teach in hagwons..." It just might be worth the trip.
Though I haven't had time to practice my Rosetta Stone in the last week and a half, I have been trying to find and watch some Korean language movies. I'll save that for another blog entry, but so far I have watched "Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War" (reminiscent in cinematic style to "Saving Private Ryan") and "Il Mare" (the romance/drama/fantasy that Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock's "The Lake House" was directly based on). More on those later!
Now it's time to get to bed and rest up before a full day of work and then a full evening of teaching. Praying I can conserve some energy for when I have to be emotive and excited!
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