Report of English Teaching Practicum in AMC Language School

1000 words
During the learning of English teaching courses in the past one year, I am really happy to finish the mission teaching students in Jeso Elementary School. In the end of last semester, some classmates of mine and I were picked by our teacher, Ms. Chiuping Huang, had the chance to pratice in AMC. With those experiences in Jeso, I have been familiar with several principals and procedures of teaching, especially some do’s and don’ts when we face those innocent children.
Our teaching place is in a cram school, which is totally different from common school in my first imagination. The purpose of cram schools is making profit of course, which really made me feel nervous at first even before my practice. The manager, Mr. Tony Wu, had an interview with us at beginning. Few days later, we were distributed to different branch schools. Luckily, I was distributed to the branch that only cost me five-minute ride and one of my classmates work with me in the same branch. The manager, Mr. Hsu Jer, gave us a flexible schedule to choose our available time. I went working for four days per week, and six weeks in total. There were two days for junior high school, one day for children, and one day for daily conversation. I was amazing that I could teach to different age group; therefore, I could observe the different teaching method on the one hand and find their different learning obstacles on the other hand.
In junior high courses, the teacher, Mr. Moset Yeh, who gave me considerable time to observe his teaching and even much chance to teach on stage. Those students are all third grade, so they all have to prepare for the approaching Basic Competence Test next year. Due to the test-oriented learning, teacher mostly uses grammar translation method. The type of question includes many common vocabularies, phrases, grammars, etc. There are all multiple choice questions, but it is devided into two parts: single questions and group questions. The latter is more difficult to students, because the there will be always a paragraph like letter, time table, map or messages or statistics. According to my observation by correcting their test sheet, some of students will be easily misled by wrong statements because of their carelessness or misunderstanding to sentences. Moset also assigned many kinds of exercises except multiple choices, like verb varietion and vocabulary dictation. Only the minor of them were not familiar enough with those basic words. All they have to do are memorizing vocabulary by heart and answering questions as careful as possible.
Children course is the area that I want to learn most, because it was exactly related to what I have been learning currently. They are all elementary school student, too. Compare with the children in Jeso, they are more obedient. They have more talent, motivation and resource in learning English. Even some of them are beyond expectation, especially the proficiency to alphabet and its pronunciation. Iden Lin is the teacher, who gives reward and punishment fairly. For example, anyone who forgot to have their communication book signed or bring their homework was punished by her. Of course, she also gave rewards like drinks or presents when they won any prize in a contest. Therefore, I think it is a sample which every teacher should be like that, to children especially. Despite I wasn’t required by Iden to teach in front of students as frquently as Moset, she always invited me to comment on their oral and written expression, such as pronunciation, reaction, spelling and writing. It made me to realize more criteria to fair judgment. The methods used by teacher are direct method and audio-lingual method. The former is the way that teacher uses to explain the meaning of a word; the latter is to train their speaking and listening ability. There was a test held for students to upgrade to the higher level, one student didn’t pass it. I found she had a problem in spelling words: she couldn’t remember each pronunciation of the alphabet well. Therefore, it affects the grade of listening directly.
Conversation course was my favorite time in the four days. Because I could both practice my English speaking with foreign teachers and enjoy their interesting teaching methods. They are in elementary school student or junior high school. Teachers mostly used audio-lingual methods and total physical response to teach. All of them don’t speak Chinese, so they sometimes posed funny actions or postured to explain what they want to say. To make the class funnier, different teachers used different ways to keep students’ interests. Occassionaly, interpretation is also an important work to me when students were still confused about the teacher said. Because Moset is also the director of all English courses, he assigned homework for students every week. But it is optional, they could also don’t do it. What’s more, he said this is a free course, so students have to pay the book fee only. One thing confused me was that every week comes a different teacher until the black, Kenny, showed up. I once heard Moset mentioned about that; in short, it was their attitude to this job. But whatever, it is also a good chance students can try to listen to different accent of English.
In the last two days, many teachers and I were had to send DM at the main gate of neighborhood elementary schools. I finally knew that how hard it is when working under a big sun, and not every person accepted the DM. Luckily, we finished the painful work. Now the new semester has begun, I don’t have time to do such important and responsible work. I feel I was really lucky when I heard from other classmates said they didn’t do so much like me. So here I give my best regard to teachers at Lunghwa and AMC Language School, I will cherish the rare experience from the rare chance and keep sharpening my teaching skills.