Brian's Japan Adventure

Finally, the TEFL training classes have begun! My schedule is pretty packed, but I have it easier than some. At my University, TEFL courses start at 8:00am and continue until 4:00pm with an hour off for lunch and 10 minute breaks in-between classes. That’s a lot of class time. There are four classes in the program, each one running about an hour and forty minutes every day: TEFL Practices & Materials, Workshop in TEFL, TEFL Theory & Culture, and Linguistics. The classes meet every day for five weeks, so it’s a tough load, but it’s over pretty fast.

Fortunately for me, I took the course in Linguistics last quarter, so I can skip the last class and leave at 2:00pm. It’s a lucky break, because the Linguistics class from last quarter was not a requirement and I had no idea that I would be needing it for this program. It just sounded interesting at the time, so I took it. I didn’t realize it would make y life easier so soon. More time to work on the mountain of reading!

Now, on to details about today’s classes:

The TEFL Practice & Materials and the TEFL Workshop are both taught by a new character in our story, ”Dr. C.” Since all the same students are in both of these classes and both classes are taught by the same professor, much of these classes appear to overlap and blur together. I suspect that in the future, I’ll be referring to Dr. C’s and Dr. M’s classes as if there were only two. We didn’t do much in the way of heavy “learning” today, but did all the usual introductory talking about what we would be doing in the future and requirements and so forth. Already starting tomorrow we will be meeting with ESL students that we will be tutoring on a (mostly) one-on-one basis. I have done some of this in the past, so I’m not too worried about it; it’ll be fun.

The Theory & Culture class is taught by Dr. M. who we’ve encountered in previous posts. Basically today was a fairly standard introductory session; there was an activity to get to know each other, and then we discussed the syllabus and requirements for the class. About the only non-administrative thing we discussed today was a discussion about the differences between ESL (English as a Second Language) vs. EFL (English as a Foreign Language). That is, ESL is all about teaching English in America (or other English-speaking country) to foreign students, while EFL is what I will be doing– going to a far-off non-English-speaking country to teach English. Thee are some important differences between the two.

Overall, today was mostly syllabuses and administrative stuff; no great excitement here yet. But there is a ton of reading to do, so I’m sure we’ll be getting into it pretty heavily tomorrow. I know the ESL students will be fun. Overall everything went well, and both professors seem very nice and knowledgeable, so I think it’ll be fun overall, even if the workload looks insane.

More tomorrow!

No related posts.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 6:48 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.