Today was interesting. A few twists threw the schedule out of whack, but we adapted. That seems to be noe of the key elements with TEFL; things are going to get messed up and you have to be able to adapt. Flexibility is the key.
We met the LEAP students as promised. LEAP is an acronym for “Learning English for Academic and Professional Purposes.” These are international students who are taking an intensive English course in order to be admitted to the University. There are eleven people in our TEFL class, and eleven LEAP students showed up for tutoring, so each tutor and teacher got matched up perfectly. This was purely coincidental. Apparently, getting the LEAP people to show up regularly is problematic, and you just cannot predict who will show up and who won’t. It’s one of the problems when dealing with people from multiple cultures; some groups treat time differently than we do.
From now on I will refer to two groups: LEAPers and TEFLers. The LEAPers are the non-English-speaking students and the TEFLers are my peers, the teachers-in-training. These are goofy-looking terms, but they are the most accurate way to identify the two groups.
Today was fun. Everyone introduced themselves and then we paired off. After that, we simply talked about why they were here, places they had visited, and very generic conversation. I was paired up with a girl from China who has been here since November, but many of the students are more recent. One girl came into the class for tutoring who had only been here for FOUR DAYS. That’s gotta be scary. Dr. C. assigned the LEAPers to make a brief one-minute audio tape of a paragraph they are supposed to read. When they bring in the tape (on the day after tomorrow) we TEFLers will listen to the tape and judge it for pronunciation, fluency and comprehensibility. We’ll be repeating this exercise several times duting the course. The LEAP program emphasizes these three factors heavily.
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June 12th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
WOW!
No time for fooling around there is there?
Lotsa luck….You are going to be challenged in a very positive way with these students.
Will you get the same LEAPer all the time?
~~P’tuny
June 12th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
“Will you get the same LEAPer all the time?”
I don’t think it’s specifically come up yet, so I don’t know for sure, but I assume that will probably be the case. It would allow for continuing academic growth without having to constantly work with someone new. Things are hard enough on the LEAPers as it is without having a new teacher every time.
Oh, and I didn’t mention in the main post, that we only see these LEAPers regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There are also “open tutoring” sessions where other LEAP students can just walk-in for help.