New Week with New Class-EAP

Monday 7 July 2008

This whole week I requested to be with EAP (English for Academic Purposes).The EAPs is located at Nathan Campus, thus I will be based here for the whole week. The office is smaller than the one at Mt.Gravatt and has less staff. As soon as I stepped into the office, I saw this great pigeon holes for teachers to pick up important information such as announcement, personal notice and other things. Every morning, the teachers need to check if they have received anything. I thought it was a very good idea in terms of communication among teachers and administrators. We can perhaps adopt this means to our faculty, so that we would have better communication and to keep the teachers updated to things. They actually have the pigeon whole over at Mt.Gravatt as well. Another thing, they regularly display a subscribed magazine or academic article reviews for teachers to read.

Anyway, English for Academic Purposes (EAP) is geared towards those who are interested in developing their English academic skills in order to help them prepare for courses in the university. There are many different areas that they can take such as business or academic skills. This particular class I am having this week focuses on Academic Writing. The teachers are Robynne and Joy. The class contains about 16 students with the Arabic dominance; however, they tend to speak more English in the classroom.

I had to get to the Mt Gravatt campus early this morning to catch an inter-campus bus to the Nathan campus by 8:15 when morning classes usually start. I was introduced to the teacher whom I would be helping in the classroom. Once we started to roll to the classroom which was a bit far from the office, I offered the teacher a hand to help with her stuff to take to the class. Here I could not help but felt amazed with how prepared she was. She had a trolley full with teaching materials in it. Very cute, I thought. Today we had Academic Reading, Project, Writing and Computer. Another productive and beneficial classroom management that I found here is that they utilize the computer lab for writing purposes. Normally what they do is to have students work on their essay writing in the computer lab hour with the supervision of the teacher. This way, students could practice their typing and at the same time it is good the teacher to check over their papers.

I visited and helped out in a Pre-EAP class for about two hours (just to get the feel of it). The teacher is Joy, who just filled in for another teacher for two days. I noticed that she likes to write down the class' activities on the board, reinforces students to employ English-English dictionary, explains instructions repeatedly, and asks for indication for students' understanding (this is something new for me). Right in the beginning of the class, she wrote down the itinerary on the board,so students knew ahead of time about the activities they would be doing. After introducing herself to the class, she introduced vocabulary and a reading exercise before the read or today's topic. She gave out a vocabulary worksheet with a mixed set of word meanings in strips of paper so students could work in pairs to match them up. Another thing, I thought was different, she asked students to give her indications on how well they understood the tasks and her instructions. By showing their fingers to her, she was able to identify if they understood without their friends noticing it. This way students would not feel embarrassed or feel like they were dragging the class if the teacher had to repeat the task or instruction again. This is what happens to my students back at Sripatum University, which stops them from asking questions in the classroom. One more thing, I admired her with the fact that she did not mind giving apologies to the students when she confused them or made mistakes. I found that this eliminates the tension in the classroom.

In this class, I helped students in the group discussion of modern medical science. I pretty much worked as a devil's advocate, throwing questions based on the week theme provided in "Cutting Edge" for upper intermediate. We had quite productive criticism and discussion on different issues: "Will we be able to live forever one day?" "Will we ever eliminate disease?" "Will it be possible to clone human beings?" and "Will we be able to buy the perfect body?" Other than that I helped explain vocabulary.

Before the morning break, I had a class with Robynne, who teaches an EAP class, whom I will be working with for the most part. The core course focuses mostly on academic writing; therefore, the class dynamics are a bit different from the two levels that I had in the past couple of weeks. The students in this class are more independent and having a plan to continue university degrees; hence, they are more anxious to learn and willing to master their English skills.

Today the class focused on essay writing, particularly on general statements (thesis statement)and concluding sentences. "Introduction on Academic Writing" by Alice Oshima and Ann Hogue. The classroom started off with a reading activity. The teacher gave out a set of two different reading articles. After the read, the students worked in pairs and told each other's story. In the next hour, they were assigned to write a two-paragraph essay based on their chosen article. Here, they typed as they think in Computer Lab (this I think is good for a writing course to have them work on the computer, so they can practice their typing skills as well as computer skills. Perhaps we have our students work in Computer Lab for the writing course over at SPU). In the afternoon, the students practiced their note taking skills by watching a VDO about bedbugs. While watching the program, the program wrote key words, especially idioms and expressions, down on the board and discussed them with the students. After watching the program, they had a discussion about the program. What I did in the classroom on my first day with them was observing to get the feel of the environment, the teaching style and the class dynamics. Also, I learned that there are many other ways to make writing courses fun and more creative and productive. We can easily adopt the teaching styles and activities to our teaching and use them with students. We can set up a theme for each week and integrate other skills in the lesson; for instance, we could have them watch a VDO program, talk about it with their partner and write about it accordingly. Here, they are able to practice their listening, speaking and writing skills. Also, the classroom environment is good. There are posters or students written materials stuck on the walls even some worksheets from the previous days always available for those who might have missed classes. The students are encouraged to use English-English dictionary in the classroom, so that they would think in English. How GREAT!