Teaching the Business Types

Today as usual, I traveled by Taxi to Wanshua Chemical company, where 20 professionals dying to learn English await my arrival. I planned some lessons for the first time. I planned all of my lessons when I first came here to Yantai, but I found that I am better off just listening to what the students want, and catering to them in real time. Well, my students asked for more planning and structure last time, so I made a plan, gathered some business vocabulary, and downloaded some videos for them to watch. There was a lady in the back, whom works for the company, and she fell asleep after two hours of not participating. I don't blame her. Everyone else had something to do, but she was just there to observe. Two hours is a long time to observe.

So we watched a lot of videos. The students wanted videos. These are people from age 22 to about 40 or so. They all wanted to watch videos, and their other teacher lets them watch videos. So, I found some videos on CNN.com, and downloaded them: Three about the Obama Bush battle over words and politics, two about great entrepreneurs, two about the Beijing Olympics, one about Iron Man the Movie, and some technology similar to the Iron Man suit, and one about a car that runs on grease and disposed oil. They didn't understand very much of it, nearly none at all. I tried to stop the videos and make commentary, but it interrupted the flow too much. So, I just did a question and answer at the end of each video to judge comprehension. There was always at least one person who got it. Those people must have been in the zone. One CNN correspondent was mumbling and stuttering so much, I was having difficulty listening to him....blaaaaaahhhhhh.

Afterwards I gathered their homework, and we discussed their homework for next week: Bring a movie they like to class: in other words, something they can understand.

To put things in context, I did do some teaching. The first half of the class I read and covered material in the textbook. They learned how to find a bus stop, and ask for help on the bus. I am sure that will be useful if they go to the US. They might as well know it. They can all speak some English, but I can imagine how many words strung together rapidly and in quick succession could be hard to follow.