Hi KJ

The exchange of experiences and ideas in this thread is encouraging, and I've gleaned some interesting activities from both yourself and Fish that I will definitely try to use in the future. The pictures at the front of class with the lists of verbs and adjectives etc. sounds particularly stimulating, and I especially like how it can lead on to helping the students being creative in making up stories.

You made an interesting observation when you mentioned some non-majors being better communicators than their "major" peers. It says a lot about the study system in China.

One particular source of frustration for myself, and I suspect this is a common problem for FTs in China and other countries too, is trying to get the junior students to stick to using English while participating in group activities. As I haven't yet learnt how to transfigure myself into about 7 or 8 different entities at the same time, I can't monitor all the groups at the same time, but I can often hear too much Chinese being used in some groups in some classes. I found this to be a problem with some of my sophomore students when I was teaching them speaking and listening skills in Audio-visual classes. This may have been partly my fault though because they claimed the reason they did this was because they lacked sufficient vocabulary for the task. This usually happened while they were preparing sketches based on parts of movies they had watched days previously. Have you had this problem? If so what did you do to overcome it? This question is not just for KJ, but any other teachers out there.

Powerpoint is definitely something I would like to use once in a while. Unfortunately, technology and myself generally agree as well as your average plump Chicken agrees with a ravenous Wolf. Me being the plump Chicken! I know that a colleague has used Powerpoint in his Audio-visual classes, so I know that it's available here. Because of my clumsy record of using technology (that was often in bad condition anyway), I've tended to be a more traditional chalk and blackboard teacher. On the few occasions I have used technology (not Powerpoint, though, I've not tried that yet), the long delays while I piddled about trying to get things to work meant another long battle in regaining the students' concentration after everything was working. I guess I'll have to get over my fear and have a crack at it.