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At about three days notice I have picked up some English teaching up at the main part of the college. In fact the arrangement is that I will share the teaching load with a colleague as we both travel due to our project activities and need to honour our commitments. But between us we can just about manage to cover the required hours.
I am a great believer in ‘keeping my hand in’ by doing some teaching and outwardly this should be a great opportunity to try out lots of new things. But in fact the situation is not ideal. The classes we are covering have suffered a lot of absence by their designated teacher as her illness developed over the year. They have had countless substitute teachers and they are in no mood to go along with whacky experiments like trying to convince them that speaking English can be fun.
I have to tread carefully. Yesterday I was going over a translation they had done a while ago and had nobody to hand it in to. I had printed it on a transparency and got into trouble. ‘It is difficult to read. We usually have each sentence on a separate line…’ I did try to take one tiny step by asking them to review their translation and pick out one topic we should work on in class to improve their language skills. A little step towards learner autonomy and taking responsibility for their own learning but I could see that I was asking too much and very few of them followed my instructions.
I suspect that they don’t even use dictionaries. They are used to highly controlled texts which someone has pre-digested for them and added a glossary. The reaction when meeting a new word not in the glossary is irritation. We found that out in our first session when we presented them with a short easy text which we had found but which had no glossary.
So I can see that there needs to be a period of trust building before we attempt to step outside the paradigm.
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