Teaching Co-Operative students

Today it's the first day of teaching (Cooperative Program) again after 2 months of teaching in Australia. This program was for those who would have to do there internship in companies and organizations for about 4 months. Prior to working, they needed to have some kind of English competency. The lesson comprised of four different topics in English business. The first two that were introduced today was preparing for a trip and booking a flight and a hotel room.

It was fun actually to run activities with the students. They seemed to interact better. Perhaps I was fortunate to have students who were majoring in English for Business and Communication. The first activity that I ran this morning was to pair students by employing words, phrases and sentences that would be taught in the first chapter. Once they had found their partners, I had them read them out loud in class. Then, I started introducing them vocabulary words. Power Point prepared by my colleague was utilized throughout the lesson. It was good to have the program; however, I could be detrimental since the teacher might not have enough time to do other activities that would have emphasize some of the points he or she might want to focus on.

Working in pairs and groups was also effective. I have them role play in pairs, but some of them were still stuck with the old way of doing it--memorizing the dialogue. Thus, I walked around and listened to them pair by pair to make comments. Another activity that was very effective in regard to reviewing a dialogue. I had my students repeated a dialogue with me once. Then, we started to interact by me reading person A's line and students would read person B's line and switched. The third time, I had them choose which line they would like to say, then, I had them close the book and we said the dialogue without reading. They really enjoyed doing this activity. There was another thing that I had students do--writing dictation. I had them listen to a conversation they learned in the last two hours, then I had them write down as many words, phrases and sentences that they had just learned as they could to review them. It was fine.

I was a good start of teaching Thai students again. One important thing of teaching is great attitude of the teacher and students!