I am interested in this position
because I would like to see more of the world. From a young age, I
have wanted to be a man of the world. I mean I have wanted to know
and understand the way people live in other parts of the world. I
started out my cross-cultural experiences and learning with Japan. I
traveled to Japan four times between 2001 and 2007 thanks to the aid
of my stepmother who is Japanese herself. I spent a month living with
another family with a homestay program and came back a much less
pickier eater (my father was very grateful). In 2007, I actually
studied for three weeks at one of the leading universities in Japan.
My college was a liberal arts college designed to expose its students
to each type of learning and to encourage combining different types
of learning (Math&Science with Language arts, Social Sciences
with Physical Sciences, etc.) so that graduates so that I majored in
Political Science but was still able to study the Japanese language
and its culture and spent a semester studying Chinese as well. Now,
for over two years, I've lived and worked in Thailand. The
adjustments I've had to make to live here (giving up some of the
comforts I enjoyed in the United States, changing food habits,
becoming fluent in a foreign language) have made me a stronger, more
well-adjusted person.
In my TESOL course in London, we were
told to reduce the teacher's time speaking as much as possible. The
ideal ratio was about 30% of class time being a teacher to student
interaction and the other time spent on activities that had student
to student interaction. As J. Marvin Brown (creator of one of the
best Thai language learning programs) described it: language learning
is about acquiring habits more than acquiring knowledge. The students
in the class need to learn to be good listeners and speakers of
English and need practice playing each role, so the teacher's job in
any classroom is to create situations where that student-student
interaction can happen. In the same way that a pilot learns on a
flight simulator and then flies a real plane or a dance student
practices Samba with an instructor and then uses Samba moves in a
dance club, teaching English needs to be about modeling real-life
situations which the learner could encounter so that the student has
experience in these situations and can then use his or her English
skills when he or she encounters the modeled situation in an everyday
context.
I've been struggling with my University
students to teach what one would think is a basic thing: how to
construct a sentence. I originally wanted to teach students how to
form questions and answers, but all my students seem to get from the
lesson was how to distinguish a subject, verb, and object so I
expanded on that and tried to teach words that look similar and have
the same meaning but are different parts of speech. Students really
struggled with that concept and how to identify the part of speech of
any word in the sentence so I became convinced that what the students
needed was more work on how to construct sentences. I made a diagram
to show how to construct sentences with intransitive verbs and
intransitive verbs because basic sentences differ in form depending
on whether the verb of the sentence is transitive or intransitive,
but before I could teach the diagram I recently taught a lesson on
the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs.
In conducting the lesson, I followed
the basic pattern taught to me by my TESOL course. I defined
transitive and intransitive verbs, got plenty of examples up on the
board, and then had to explain that many transitive verbs can also be
intransitive verbs. Then I gave what I thought was a simple rule for
distinguishing between a transitive verb sentence and an intransitive
verb sentence: A transitive verb sentence has an object. An
intransitive verb sentence does not.
We then worked as a class with example
sentences to discern whether the sentence had a transitive or
intransitive verb with OKI've been struggling with my University
students to teach what one would think is a basic thing: how to
construct a sentence. I originally wanted to teach students how to
form questions and answers, but all my students seem to get from the
lesson was how to distinguish a subject, verb, and object so I
expanded on that and tried to teach words that look similar and have
the same meaning but are different parts of speech. Students really
struggled with that concept and how to identify the part of speech of
any word in the sentence so I became convinced that what the students
needed was more work on how to construct sentences. I made a diagram
to show how to construct sentences with intransitive verbs and
intransitive verbs because basic sentences differ in form depending
on whether the verb of the sentence is transitive or intransitive,
but before I could teach the diagram I recently taught a lesson on
the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs.
In conducting the lesson, I followed
the basic pattern taught to me by my TESOL course. I defined
transitive and intransitive verbs, got plenty of examples up on the
board, and then had to explain that many transitive verbs can also be
intransitive verbs. Then I gave what I thought was a simple rule for
distinguishing between a transitive verb sentence and an intransitive
verb sentence: A transitive verb sentence has an object. An
intransitive verb sentence does not.
We then worked as a class with example
sentences to discern whether the sentence had a transitive or
intransitive verb with OK results. By OK results, I mean that the
same people who normally answer questions in that class were
answering all the questions as usual and judging by the faces of the
other students they seemed to be grasping the concept instead of
looking overwhelmed or furrowing their brows in confusion.
Next, we worked as a class to determine
the formula of sentences like "A dog bites bones" would
produce a formula like [article] -> [singular subject] ->
[transitive verb] -> [plural object] would produce a sentence like
or "Silly girls go to the Linkin Park Concert" would
produce a formula like [adjective] -> [Plural subject] ->
[intransitive verb] -> [preposition phrase]. Then I gave students
a worksheet with formulas and asked them to create sentences from the
formulas.
From here, my job as a teacher became a
guide or support. I walked around the classroom checking that
students were working and helping them with their answers. Many came
to consult me at the same time and I wished our class sizes were half
the size. That class, in particular, has over fifty-five students
that come regularly whereas the class list says there should be
seventy-seven.
I've given students an hour to complete
the task, but many of them will not finish or complain that they are
hungry and those students I will let go. There are many other
students who stay late with me, make a queue, and we work together to
understand the material and the difficulties the student is having
with the material. results. By OK results, I mean that the same
people who normally answer questions in that class were answering all
the questions as usual and judging by the faces of the other students
they seemed to be grasping the concept instead of looking overwhelmed
or furrowing their brows in confusion.
Next, we worked as a class to determine
the formula of sentences like "A dog bites bones" would
produce a formula like [article] -> [singular subject] ->
[transitive verb] -> [plural object] would produce a sentence like
or "Silly girls go to the Linkin Park Concert" would
produce a formula like [adjective] -> [Plural subject] ->
[intransitive verb] -> [preposition phrase]. Then I gave students
a worksheet with formulas and asked them to create sentences from the
formulas.
From here, my job as a teacher became a
guide or support. I walked around the classroom checking that
students were working and helping them with their answers. Many came
to consult me at the same time and I wished our class sizes were half
the size. That class, in particular, has over fifty-five students
that come regularly whereas the class list says there should be
seventy-seven.
I've given students an hour to complete
the task, but many of them will not finish or complain that they are
hungry and those students I will let go. There are many other
students who stay late with me, make a queue, and we work together to
understand the material and the difficulties the student is having
with the material.
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