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?
For the past workshop, I talked about Korean words and phrases when describing certain countries and nationalities. It was pretty hard to manage the pace of teaching as it could be too fast to some listeners who had no background at all in Korean, while it could also be too slow for people who have already known the language pretty well. Also, it was hard to know whether I have delivered the message as I intended to, since there was no timely feedback available during the session. There are two techniques I found useful while conducting the speed-dating workshop: The use of pop quizzes and pictures. By using lots of related visual images, I found that my audience paid more attention to the contents when the photos of flags showed up. Also, by giving out pop quizzes on words/phrases I just introduced, I was able to interact with my audience more.
Speaking of some techniques that helped explain certain concepts to people who had no background in Korean during my presentation, I mainly made comparisons to how that concept would be in English. In such way, he/she could bring themselves into the Korean cultural setting and better understand the meaning behind certain expressions in Korean. If I were to be granted the opportunity of teaching a semester-long class on Korean, I would adopt a systematic way of teaching the language course such as following the agenda listed on the Korean textbook, learning the formation of sentence structures before practicing making any sentences and so on. Besides that, I would add more cultural aspects to the normal class by introducing certain pieces of Korean history each week and having discussions on what is happening now in Korean society.
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