Reflect on your experiences as a language teacher and learning in this latest speed-dating workshop. What difficulties did you encounter? How did you successfully relay concepts that were foreign to your classmates as your students? If you were eventually granted the opportunity to teach a full semester-long course on the target language, what strategies would you adopt?
Before teaching my peers a Hangul lesson as part of the speed-dating workshop, I knew that there was the probability of not having all of my peers engaged in the lesson. Therefore, I had planned ahead and created a handout that outlined the lesson we covered, provided examples of the material, and offered online citation in case anyone would like to do more research on the topic after the lesson. The handout worked well and as a result, I did not encounter any significant difficulties during my experience as a language teacher. Aside from providing my peers with the handout I mentioned previously, I also made a PowerPoint to relay the material to my peers/students. Each slide had examples of how to accurately use the material I covered and at the end of the PowerPoint, I included an example of how people address each other in Korean using a picture from a Korean variety show that I enjoy watching (SBS’s Running Man). After I was done with the presentation, I opened the floor for questions, which was a successful way to engage further with my peers and to respond to any of their inquiries. As such, if I were given the opportunity to teach a semester-long course on the Korean language, some strategies that I would adopt include: using PowerPoints to convey information, providing handouts so students may follow along, and offering various examples to ensure proper usage of the material. One strategy that I would like to improve however is the manner in which I would get students more engaged. While the handout and the Q&A session worked effectively during this short experience, I believe that I would need to include more interactive exercises (such as group activities and worksheets) to confirm that students truly understand the lesson and are able to apply what they have learned.
Comments
You did a great job at the workshop! It was very thoughtful of you to give out handouts before the presentation as that was a great way to provide sufficient information to us as students. It was hard for me as well when thinking of ways that could get the audience engaged. It becomes even harder to manage the pace when there is no beforehand knowledge of how much background your target student has in Korean. However, I think you came up with a very good solution to that: using handout as a teaching tool. More interactive exercises would help as well!