No, it is selective reading from you. Again. I am not complaining that it is a thread about teaching, I am complaininging that yet again you try to make it an issue with private schools.
The responsibility for the standard of the lesson lies squarely with the teacher teaching the class. If the text book is unsuitable, adapt the material. For example I have a group this year using Kids Box 3. I think it is too hard for them so this last term we hardly looked at the book and I taught them the gaps in knowledge they had instead. No book, just me and a whiteboard and language games. Now they are ready for the book.
You cannot blame poor teaching on anyone but the teacher.
Back to anagrams again?! Oh dear! What I meant by supplementary material was additional material to compliment the grammar point or vocabulary group being taught. For example if you are teaching indefinite pronouns, you may supplement the class with comic strip creation. Or if you are teaching prefixes and suffixes you may create a matching activity where the students have a pile of words, a pile of pre/suffixes and a pile of definitions. Created by yourself nd cut up by yourself to compliment the grammar point being taught. Anagrams, acronyms and word association are filler games that have very little academic purpose other than to kill time. The closest anagrams get to being helpful is to test spelling awareness, which at most I would give to my YL students as a homework task, never to advanced teens or adults!
No, I am not an 'exam' teacher. Whatever insult that is supposed to be! Some of my classes are not exam classes, although they are all following CEFR progression syllabus and so exams are available should they want them. My classes that are taking exams are doing so in order to advance their careers or to get in to English or American universities. Your 4 minute oral exam is just not good enough. It is not an internationally recognized qualification. What I teach is.
You may be able to assess your students progress within your own class, but it means nothing. You can't grade them on anything useful to them such as the IELTS scale or the CEFR. A linguistics degree is not a teaching degree. Teaching conversational English a few hours a week in a Chinese university to students who have already been taught English is not real teaching; it's pre-planned chatting! Doing that for 7 years does not give you the experience required for an international grading comparison. A 4 minute oral exam created by, administered by and graded by their own teacher is nothing when compared to a speaking exam such as the FCE, Advanced or Proficiency. Look up what is involved with them and tell me again how your conversation classes would be effective in getting a student an actual qualification, rather than just a pat on the head from their universities pet FT of an elective class! If we're talking all round ability and fluency teaching effectiveness, I'm confident that I am far more effective than somebody who thinks anagrams are suitable supplementary activities for an ESL class!
And when I say exams, you know full well I am talking about IELTS And CESOL, which you have rubbished in the past. San Migs thought FCE was a training centre acronym! You guys have no idea what internationally recognised and standardized ESL teaching is! Your scope is limited to a few Asian countries, teaching conversational classes with no end goal. You say teaching is not a career but a means to an end for you and yet have the audacity to pontificate on the ethics of ESL teaching when to me, and any other real teacher out there, you are the unethical thing about ESL teaching!
- Re ethics in education -- Beth -- 2014-12-21
- Re ethics in education -- Somebody -- 2014-12-21
- Re ethics in education -- Beth -- 2014-12-21
- Re ethics in education -- Somebody -- 2014-12-21