For starters, there is school. I am quite comfortable in my school now, and lesson planning has become second nature to me, which is a welcome relief. If I'm being honest with myself I would say that these last two weeks have been more stressful work-wise than I would like. As all teachers here eventually discover, our teaching systems are very flawed, and there is little we can do to change them. My frustration of the week stems from a lesson with my youngest class, who are on average 7 years old and have been studying English for about 2 months now. I stayed late after one of my classes to help them with their homework, and it came to my attention that the school's expectations of the students is completely unreasonable. While I can't paint you a picture that will thoroughly explain the context of this story, I can briefly explain that I have just been working with the students on household items (toothbrush, comb, table, chair, etc.) and simple prepositions (in, on, by, under). In their homework they were working on questions like "Is the chair under the table?" In class we use flashcards and the whiteboard to teach vocabulary, so there is some focus on word recognition for vocabulary and simple sentences (for example: "Yes, it is." "No, it isn't."). We also teach phonics, by teaching the alphabet and teaching the sound that each letter makes. What we do not focus on much is how to use phonics to get to word recognition. Shane schools expect students to learn whole word recognition before they learn how use their phonics to sound out words, which means that, while it is impressive that a young learner can see the word "toothbrush" and pronounce it, if they are shown the word "toothbrushes" they will either not understand the word, or will not pronounce the "-es" because it is foreign to them. The concept of word recognition teaching is presumably taken from a Chinese approach to reading, which has to rely on this method because of the logographic nature of written Chinese, however it fails to allow the students to utilize the productivity of language. My frustration with this system began when I was informed by my manager that one of my students (the smallest and probably sweetest little girl in the class) started crying when she could not understand her homework. Remember that these students have only been studying for 2 months, and expecting whole sentence recognition and comprehension is unreasonable, especially remembering that they are 7-9 years old which puts them in a similar age group as American children who are learning to read. Can you imagine asking an American 7 year old to comprehend full Chinese sentences? Even if they are in an immersion school you probably don't even expect them to comprehend full English sentences at that age. While I admit, that rant does not change the situation, it does put into words the inspiration for goal to change the way we teach reading in the school.
On a happier note, there is so much happening outside of my school life in this country (which, while it might sound like I dislike my school, that is completely untrue. I adore my school and classes immensely, and if I didn't care about them so much, then I wouldn't care to evaluate the ways I would like to improve things). October 10th is a festival known as "ten-ten" day in Taiwan, a holiday to commemorate the start of the uprising which eventually lead to the establishment of the Republic of China (also known as Taiwan). Ten-ten day is a national holiday, and many businesses (including the buxibans) were closed, so a group of 11 people, consisting of teachers and Taiwanese people, went for an all-day scooter trip through the mountains. We at lunch in a French restaurant atop the mountains, crawled through a bat cave, had dinner at an Indian restaurant in Taichung, and my favorite thing about it was the complete spontaneity of everything, we literally picked the events and directions by randomly screaming "left", "right", or "straight" each time we came to a set of lights.
 |
| Enjoying 10-10 day in the mountains. |
Last weekend was the annual Chili cook-off in Taichung, an event featuring local bands, and lots of homemade chili. First of all, I just want to say that every time I go to Taichung I am amazed at the number of foreigners who live in the city. I know that Taichung is the third largest city in the country, which results in them employing more people, but there are easily hundreds of foreigners that live there, and to be surrounded by English speakers when you are used to being a minority is a strange feeling. Second of all, I have some amazingly talented friends here, two of which performed in the concerts portion of the event which made the event more personal.
These past couple of weekends have been very "low key" which has allowed me more time to explore the city I live in. Markets are very common in Taiwan (and I know I have mentioned the night market in multiple posts), and today I visited the day market. The night market is very focused on food and games, while the day market is where you would do most of your shopping (it is easy to find cheap clothes, shoes, fruit, bedding, etc.).
This week I also began meeting with my language exchange partner. Language exchange is, as it sounds, an opportunity to practice your language skills with a native speaker of the target language (so in my case I help a Taiwanese woman speak English, and in return she helps me to speak Mandarin). Having a language exchange partner is a fairly common experience among the teachers I know (however for many people they don't last long). My Mandarin is coming along very slowly, I have yet to make a major break-through with it, but I manage to get by and get what I need, so I believe that is a start. The trick to learning in an immersion setting is to keep using what you know/learn, so that is exactly what I do.
No comments:
Post a Comment