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Anyone teaching languages individually?

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
Siberiano
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
one-giant-leap.Registered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6493 days ago

465 posts - 696 votes 
Speaks: Russian*, English, ItalianC1, Spanish
Studies: Portuguese, Serbian

 
 Message 1 of 4
16 December 2012 at 8:10pm | IP Logged 
I tried teaching languages for some students all this year, and see there are some difficulties.

1. What curriculums (programs) do you guys use?

2. I thought it might be a good idea to have a wiki-like project with practical tasks (it takes much time to invent them and set a proper difficulty level). Is there anything like that? Last time I checked out wikibooks, it was dead and useless.

3. How do you design the curriculum? I've got no education on teaching. There is a book I used for self-teaching, but what's my role then?

4. How much do you play or do something "not serious", like listening to songs?
1 person has voted this message useful



druckfehler
Triglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 4868 days ago

1181 posts - 1912 votes 
Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean
Studies: Persian

 
 Message 2 of 4
17 December 2012 at 2:25am | IP Logged 
1. I'm teaching a German class as a hobby. I don't use any program, but I see the class more as a supplement for 'proper' language classes. A friend and I 'designed' the 'course' we're teaching, because we wanted something that actually reflected the reality of our students. It's all wonderfully unprofessional, but we get our grammar topics from a list of what people are supposed to learn at each CEFR level.

2. ESL collective is great for finding worksheets, maybe that's the kind of thing you're looking for.

3. As I said, we get the grammar topics from a CEFR overview of what should be taught at the specific level (A1-A2 in our case). We make worksheets and dialogues about situations in which our students have to speak German. I see my role as a teacher to correctly assess the students' level, their strong and weak points and provide them with learning material that is neither too easy nor too difficult. I also think a teacher should do their best to motivate the students, and my 'co-teacher' thinks the same, so we try to create a happy atmosphere with lots of jokes (often at our own expense - this is great for getting students to open up and feel less pressure about making mistakes). I'm convinced that your role as a teacher is to provide what the students can't do themselves. Not everyone can teach themselves a language, I suppose that's why you're tutoring in the first place. It's good to teach self-study techniques, but many language students seem to (think that they) need a guide, so you should have a plan for where you want to take them and how you'll get there.

4. We try to have 1 game per lesson and it usually takes 1/4-1/3 of the time. Every game has to make sense in the context of the lesson. We'll usually do games that drill certain sentence patterns, once we learned to sing a song, which was less connected to the lesson, but interesting vocabulary-wise. Listening to songs by itself makes little sense - you should be teaching something the person can't do on their own.

Good luck with your teaching journey. It's good that you're having these questions, I think it's necessary for a good teacher to have many questions. I've been teaching for a year and I'm still improving with every lesson I give - and sometimes I just notice all the things I'm still lacking, but that is also important for becoming a better teacher.


Edited by druckfehler on 17 December 2012 at 2:27am

5 persons have voted this message useful



langslav
Newbie
United States
slav.freemessageboar
Joined 4379 days ago

24 posts - 31 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Russian, Albanian, German, Spanish

 
 Message 3 of 4
20 December 2012 at 2:44am | IP Logged 
@Siberiano what foreign Language are you Teaching? I am a native English speaking person still learning Russian. I intend to get a Masters degree in TESOL Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (after I graduate this next spring and finally learn English, suppose to be a joke my son thinks I cant even speak English let alone Teach it)

let me know if you need any other English information. the Link that was posted above by Druckfehler is AWESOME, absolutely mind boggling-ly good.

I heard it was -50 F in Siberia today, stay warm.

This is a great Topic, keep it going.


Edited by langslav on 20 December 2012 at 3:14am

1 person has voted this message useful



Siberiano
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
one-giant-leap.Registered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6493 days ago

465 posts - 696 votes 
Speaks: Russian*, English, ItalianC1, Spanish
Studies: Portuguese, Serbian

 
 Message 4 of 4
20 December 2012 at 8:33pm | IP Logged 
Thanks for support! I taught Italian only. I wish I could do Spanish and Portuguese. I know how to start with them from scratch and start speaking. I have no idea how to start English from 0.

I taught 4 people so far. 2 started quickly, because they had experience in other Romance languages. We didn't have enough time to start talking though. Another student studied long time, but had some difficulties with all languages (English and even Russian), so it was hard for her to understand the difference between "Красная машина" and "Машина - красная".

I tried listening to songs and making simple dialogs, but this was harder than expected, since the time went too fast.

It's cold just here, in the center of the continent. But I'm fine, it's +26 C in my apartment.

Edited by Siberiano on 20 December 2012 at 8:37pm



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