The Chinese Online Writing Lab provides several online services for English writing. You can E-mail your paper to this website and the editors of the website will revise your manuscript in 5 to 10 days. There are also online tutors who can offer comments to improve your writing. In addition, the “interactive writing style quizzes” focus on many writing problems and give practices through quizzes in Power Point format. All of these services are free and useful. You can get a lot of resources on this website.

Speaking Better English Online is a website from HK. This website provides good examples for formal speech. It includes authentic speech of celebrities and students. Besides the listening text of the speech, the content of the speech and some explanations in Chinese are also posted on the website.

        The English class is based on an all-English environment in Fu Hsing. Both teacher and students are familiar with such teaching and learning environment. Most of the students feel comfortable in the English class. Their listening comprehension is good enough to catch the teacher’s lecture and direction. They are asked to answer the questions and pose the questions in English.

        Question-based teaching strategy is important in Fusing. Especially, the students are encouraged to compose and answer the questions in English. By asking the questions, the students have the opportunity to think more about the reading task. Besides the direct meaning of the text, the connotation and further discussion of the text are explored during the teaching process. For example, a student asks, “what does a real basketball player mean?” Such question provides a chance to think beyond the limit of the text itself. It will bring more thoughts about the text because of the open-ended question asked by the students. Therefore, the teaching strategy not only helps the students’ learning about the language but also cultivates their ability of critical thinking. Another example is an activity of composing various questions in the end of the class. The students are asked to offer at least a question in English according to the text. The types of question include vocabulary, multiple choice, and translation. After collecting the questions written by the students, the teacher will asks the students from different group to answer the question. The students are able to make questions to play games.

        Group study is another special teaching strategy that I observed in Fu Hsing. The activities that I mentioned above are based on group work. The students are divided into groups of three. Each group has a reader, a questioner, and an answerer. By playing different roles in the activities, the students not only focus on their own job but also help each other during the learning process.

        Although the teaching is well organized in many aspects, the use of media aids is not so effective for the class. Fu Hsing has types of technological equipment as their teaching resource. The class I observed also shows the text on the screen during the teaching process. Nevertheless, the text on the screen is the same with the text books of the students. The media aids are attractive enough to catch the students’ attention. Moreover, the repeated text on the screen may also distract the students’ attention. This might be the disadvantage of using media in the class.

        The final school visit activity brings another appearance of teaching in reality. The teaching resource in a private school is rich. The teacher has many chances to be involved with professional training. The result finally reflects on the real teaching sequences and the students’ performance that we observed.

    Teacher Li-jen Huang is an English teacher of Kaiping Vocational School. I contact with her via my friend. The interview with Teacher Huang took place at a coffee shop on May 5. It took forty minutes to accomplish the interview. The interview questions are listed as follows.

1.      What is your educational and teaching background?

2.      What is your teaching belief?

3.      As I know that Kaiping Vocational School is famous for its distinct teaching belief, such as student-centered education, teaching without assigned text books, and mutual communication between teacher and students, do you agree with the teaching philosophy in Kaiping? Why or why not?

4.      Could you give me an example of your teaching plan in your class?

5.      How do you design it according to students’ interests?

6.      What do you think is the most difficult part when you put teaching plan into practice?

7.      What will you do when you find that teaching in reality is not what you expected and imagined?

8.      What kind of support helps you a lot in the teaching context?

9.      Since you are a young teacher, will you keep teaching?

10.  What is your short-term and long-term plan of career life?

II.                 Teaching and Learning Background

    Teacher Huang is from
Malaysia. She majored in drama at Taipei Art University. She has been teaching grade one at Kaiping Vocational School about one year. The other teaching experience is teaching senior high school English at cram school. Belief and Philosophy

    Student-centered approach is the distinct teaching philosophy of Kaiping Vocational School. They believe that all of the courses should be designed according to students’ interests and needs. Therefore, there are no assigned text books for every course. They also insist that good relationship between teacher and students should be equal based on mutual communication.  

    Teaching in this context, Teacher Huang agrees with the spirit of such teaching philosophy. She appreciates the realization of the teaching belief in Kaiping. For example, mutual communication can lead to a free learning environment. The students are encouraged to speak out their thoughts and feelings. They are also trained to think logically and to speak confidently in this learning environment. Any suggestions are welcomed in the learning process. As for designing the courses, the teachers are allowed to design the courses according to the students’ interests and needs. The teaching tasks are based on what will not only be useful for the students but also motivate them as well.

Nevertheless, she also point out that the student-centered approach in reality may cause some misunderstanding when the students take the teacher for granted. Therefore, she thinks that the boundary between teacher and students could be blurred but can not be totally excluded in order to make the consensus on the rules during teaching and learning process.

Barriers and Supports

    Since Kaiping provides a well founded teaching belief, teaching in this context is different from the other schools. The support in this teaching context is the cooperation between the teachers. Instead of individual work, teachers usually work in a group. They will design a teaching project together in order to develop the detail in each course. For example, Teacher Huang has some teaching plans based on the motif of hotel and restaurant. The teaching plan for the fist semester focuses on learning vocabulary of food. When it comes to the second semester, they put emphasis on conversation ranging from order, reservation, count to visit in a real hotel or restaurant. 

    The barrier comes from teaching in a real class. Even though the courses are student-centered paradigm, some of the students will not be interest in what you teach. For example, in Teacher Huang’s class, English class is like a disaster for some students. They have difficulties in learning English since they are junior high school students. What the teacher can do is to plan some appropriate activities. Teacher Huang will design some games to stimulate their motivation.

Career Cycle and Professional Development

    Teacher Huang plans to teach at Kaiping at least for two years. She will try to find a job related to drama in the future. During these two years, she will experience what she expects in a real teaching context. She hopes that she can learn more about education in Kaiping because they provide many chances for the teachers to exchange their opinions about teaching and to stimulate their thoughts about education. She is also willing to get involved with something about education and even related to drama, such as teaching drama and language at the same time.

III. Reflection

    The interview with Teacher Huang provides a good example of how to put teaching belief into practice in a special teaching context. It provokes some afterthoughts as well as more questions after the interview.

    Teacher Huang provides some student-centered paradigm in Kaiping Vocational School. It delivers a massage that realization is possible. Like the teaching plan that she demonstrated, the motif of a teaching project can be embodied in many ways. Learning language is not only related to language itself but also the students’ life.

    Beside, the experience of Teacher Huang brings some positive aspects of being a teacher in a Vocational school. According to her experience, she is still learning in such context not only from the students but also from her colleagues. During the process of planning a course, she learns something unfamiliar from the other fields. She does not think this is a burden. Rather, she takes it as another learning process.

    However, student-centered approach has its problem when teaching in reality. How can we make decisions completely according to students’ interests and needs? The difficulties come from the process of striking a balance. We should consider not only the students’ interests and needs but also the benefits they will have. But some students will refuse what you think is good for them and even they will not be motivated at all. How to act properly as a teacher in the student-centered approach may be reconsidered in a real teaching context.

    To sum up, the interview is a good experience for me to know the life of a teacher and different teaching contexts. There are many varieties in the teaching context. They are both challenges as well as chances for the teacher in the context.

The teacher in Zhongshan not only has good technological equipment but also demonstrates how to use it effectively. The class I visited is 二慧. The English teacher of 二慧, Ms. Lee used PowerPoint slides to facilitate one of the activities in her teaching plan. This is an activity about English recipe. The activity began with a PPT slide which showed two pictures of foreign dishes. The students would guess the name of the food and its origin. Then, PPT slide showed the steps of cooking these two dishes. Step by step, some pictures would come with the English description. These pictures helped the students to understand some difficult phrases and vocabulary in the recipe, such as “whisking with a wire whisk,” “stiff,” and “stirring.” Moreover, the PPT slides also provided a game for arranging the recipe correctly. The students had to guess the correct steps according the pictures. By using PPT slides, the teacher could decide the best way of presenting the recipe. It could be presented by pictures to stimulate the students’ motivation. It could also be demonstrated literally to challenge their reading ability.

The teaching plan focuses on the theme of “food” and expands various related activities. Besides the activity with PPT slides, the warm-up activity and what follows also connected to food. The warm-up activity is to find out the ways of cooking according to English definition. Additionally, the students were asked to distinguish different ways of cooking. For example, they had to tell the differences among boiling, stew, simmer, and steam. Another activity is about English proverbs which are related to food, such as “forbidden fruit is always desirable,” “one man’s meat is another man’s poison.” These activities all contribute to intense the theme of food in different aspects. The students are benefited because of the connection between these activities and the expansion of the theme.

        The above activities are based on student-centered approach. The students always work with a partner. This is good for discussion and mutual learning because they can learn from their partner as well as the other groups. Sometimes the students will doubt the other’s answer, but sometimes they are surprised by the other’s answer. Due to these crucial elements in the teaching process, the students have opportunities to discover more about the teaching theme through the activities and their classmates.

    The real situation in the class is in relation to the students’ background and teaching context. Fanghe Junior High School is a small in size. According to the principal, English course in Fanghe Junior High School is setting groupings. They are divided into different levels to learn English. The teachers will set appropriate tasks according to the students’ ability. The supports in the teaching context come from the school’s encouragement and the teachers’ devotions to many teaching projects.

         The teacher’s demonstration not only exemplifies what we have learned in class but also presents the problems in the real class. The demonstration is presented by Emily’s class (class 805). Emily says that it is part of her teaching sequences which contains review test, teaching new vocabularies, dialogue and requiring homework. She started the review test with oral practice of some important adjectives and verbs in the following test. During the review test, Emily walked around and observed the reaction of the students. When she found that most of the students could not spell the adjectives in their answer sheets, she decided to write down the key adjectives on the blackboard. Then the course came to teaching new vocabularies. At the beginning of teaching new vocabularies, the students tried to pronounce the new words. The teacher would not help them unless they made mistakes or had difficulties. Emily put emphasis on pronunciation and expected the students could pronounce by themselves. She acted as guidance and helped the students only when they needed. From this activity, the students were taught to cultivate their ability of pronunciation and reading phonetic symbols. The same strategy was applied in teaching new lesson. Students were asked to read the dialogue and underlined the sentences and vocabularies that they did not understand. Then Emily gave them the handouts of the lesson which explained the detail grammar rules in Chinese and highlighted the important usage in the new lesson. The problems in real class came from the students’ reaction. Although it was a routine course as every student used to take, different students got different requirements. For example, one of the students was required to achieve higher grades because he was the student form class A. Emily tried to stimulate him by comparing with himself instead of the other students. There were two students acted differently during the learning process. They were required to open books during the review test. Emily explained that their special background resulted in their learning situation. Although they were not as concentrated as the other students, they had their own progress. For instance, Emily asked them to remember at least all the vocabularies instead of the whole lesson. Besides, they were asked to be Emily’s assistances. Emily did not give up easily. Rather, she encouraged them by different ways. 

    The devotions of the teachers are also important in the teaching process. Inevitably, every teaching sequence is expected to cater to the exam in a test-oriented society. However, the teachers in Fanghe Junior High School bear a lot of enthusiasm and determination. What they did is more than simply training the students to be machines for the examination. Their attitude towards their job and the varied learning problems of the students will motivate the students and solve the problems that they met.

    Our school visit not only embodies the teaching theories that we have learned but also shows the possibilities of adjusting and creating in reality. Theory and practice are inextricable. The experience of school visit truly combines what we have learned in class and what happens in reality.

    Alice mentioned three steps of vocabulary teaching in her PPT which is clear and useful for developing a teaching plan. By presenting new words, helping students remember new wrods and making sure students make the new words their own, the sequence of vocabulary teaching is completed. Since each step is equally concerned, the focus will not be only  presenting or remembering vocsbulary.

    Today’s course reminded me of the way that my French teacher taught me the word “honest” in French. She just put her finger on her lips and also in front of her heart and said “here” (mouth) and “here” (heart) are the same. Without using any Chinese or English in her explanation of the vocabulary, I understood the word immediately and impressively. Furthermore, she also put the word in some contexts for us to practice, for example, describing a friend or celebrity’s personality. Gradually, I was more familiar with the vocabulary because I could use the word on my own.

    Therefore, to answer the question “what factors do you think are most important in getting children to remember words and patterns they encounter,” I would like to begin with three steps of vocabulary teaching as the fundamental framework to form an efficient teaching plan and to develop teaching strategies. Presenting a word a thousand times may help children to remember it eventually, but put some proper activities in the vocabulary teaching plan will lead to a much more meaningful and valuable result.

    My teaching philosophy is to stimulate learners’ learning motivation but not to extinguish their passion. To encourage them to involve actively is to communicate, to listen and to share. That means to influence but not to invade their originality, creativity and interests during the learning process.   

    I am not interested in teaching merely “language” because language is not only related to life but also something inside and profound. What I mean something inside is the personal feelings and creativity that he or she wants to express through a foreign language. As to something profound means that language represents everyday life as well as culture, philosophy, and literature. Moreover, language is the tool for the user to reach another side of the world.

    Since teaching is both a craft and a science, my teaching philosophy has to be realized and experimented through a theoretically grounded knowledge. Therefore, I would like to try all the language teaching approaches that I have learned. I also hope that I can know how to adopt these approaches properly and flexibly. So, maybe more philosophical thinking will be explored in the future.