Teaching the TKT Course

My late evening pre-int students have asked for more ‘energy’ in their lessons (I suspect that means games). On Friday evenings at least, for the next few weeks, I’m afraid they’re going to be disappointed. With a 9am-9.30pm split shift, they’ll be lucky if their teacher is still awake.

It is, however, my choice to do this. After endless postponements, the TKT course is finally up and running, and I’m team-teaching it with another teacher from our centre. Hence the 9am start for the morning session at centre 3, followed by my regular evening shift at centre 1. The break in the middle isn’t really long enough to go home, so lunch in Backpackerville…

So far, it has only been a week but I am loving it. The TKT (Teaching Knowledge Test) is a modular test run by Cambridge aimed mainly (though not exclusively) at non-native speaker teachers of English. There are three main modules, which we are teaching, each consisting of eighty-minute tests containing eighty multiple choice and matching questions, covering everything from grammar and phonology to classroom management, learner motivation, assessment and language acquisition.

It is, as this suggests, all theory and terminology (the glossary provided by Cambridge runs to forty pages), which must represent quite a challenge to the intermediate+ level students we have in the group. In my post-lesson feedback last week the training manager and I both agreed that they are going to need a great deal of review and recycling. Last week’s introductory lesson saw them go quite quiet during what should have been fun quizzes introducing some of the terminology! But they are a lovely, friendly group, and clearly very motivated – two of them travel eight hours overnight to come to the class!

With no previous teacher training experience, it could be quite daunting. But the training manager has said he wants it to be a training experience for us too. So he’s asked us to send him post-lesson evaluations each week, and later in the course he’ll observe us. And teaching a truckload of terminology to non-native speakers isn’t so very far from what we do normally – they just happen to be better at it than my beginners! Road-testing materials on Adrian and Phil in the staffroom has been fun too!

And it finally gives an outlet to all the stuff that’s been washing around in my head for the last 3 years of Masters and Delta. It kind of confirms my thought that in the future I want to be a Delta tutor, and, when I finally go home, a tutor on the Open University’s linguistics courses.

Postscript:

It seems trivial to be writing about anything other than Japan right now. However happy things are here, the situation there is constantly in my thoughts.

Who Let The Sheep In? - Our First Vietnamese Lesson

I couldn’t look at Carolyn and Amy, sitting either side of me. The urge to giggle was becoming unbearable.

The previous hour and a half of ‘Survival Vietnamese’ had been baffling enough, struggling to make sense of address forms and any number other than 3 (333 being the name of a brand of Vietnamese beer, it was the one number we all knew already). But then our teacher, Ms. Khanh, began to introduce the six tones of Vietnamese. One by one they were added to a diagram like the one below, with examples from the vocabulary we’d learnt earlier. Then the drilling started…

Ma… ma… ma-ah… maah… ma-aa-argh… Eighteen English teachers? No. We had been transformed into a flock of mildly embarrassed sheep. And Carolyn was starting to add a touch of vibrato to her ma’s for that extra hint of sheepiness…

(yes, I know the dotted line for the Hanoi ma is missing. It went AWOL somewhere in the process of converting to PDF).


The follow-up activity lost me completely. Momentarily distracted, by the time I zoned back in, the ‘Identify the Tone’ Quiz was moving too quickly for me to keep up. I’ve got a feeling the next fifteen weeks of lessons are going to be a bit of a slog.

To be fair, I had been doing alright earlier in the lesson. The basic forms of address Ms Khanh presented, weren’t too complicated if you’ve already struggled with Japanese politeness forms, and if, like me (and Ms Khanh apparently), you are prone to drawing pictures and diagrams on the board which make sense in your head as you draw them, but which are greeted with furrowed brows and perplexed expressions from your students.

And Carolyn and I won a lolly each in a numbers game. Ms Khanh called out a number and you had to hold hands with that number of people. If you couldn’t find a group to join, Ms Khanh dotted your arm with a red board marker. We escaped with only one dot each (thereby winning the lollies) by standing hand-in-hand in the corner looking nervous, and just reaching out and grabbing the hand of the next nearest person whenever Ms Khanh called out a number greater than two.

If nothing else it’s going to be interesting comparing these lessons with my other language learning experiences, as well as mentally making notes on and stealing ideas from Ms Khanh.

Japan

I know I sometimes give the impression of being rather blasé about earthquakes but I'm not really. It's actually more a mixture of practicality and not letting fear rule your life.

 Tonight my heart is in Japan. It is, and always will be, my second home.

Afterthought...It's not such a bad life...

I should probably say (before this blog gets blocked!) that the previous post was more a reflection of my experiences of Women's Day in Italy than Vietnam. That nightmare weekend near Paestum... 

Life is actually going pretty well here at the moment. Work is getting more interesting with level testing and teaching the TKT course starting this week - I'm very excited about that!

And the days off - when not spent going into school to plan aforementioned TKT course or just slobbing round the house because it's too hot to do anything - have involved open air swimming pools, hour long massages and sitting reading in coffee shops...It's really not such a bad life.

 

International Women's Day

Current status: Accepting flowers from students through gritted teeth, and muttering ‘Don’t get me started’ as people shout ‘Happy International Women’s Day’ to each other across the staffroom, before asking each other what the hell it is, why don’t men have one, and – the real killer – why is it international? Ask Pip a stupid question and you will get a very sarcastic answer…

After enduring two years of the Italian Festa della Donna, I had, perhaps naively, entertained hopes that here in Vietnam, if it was marked, it would be a rather more political affair. Vietnam is, after all, still a nominally communist country, and communism has historic ties to the date. The 8^th March 1917 was deliberately chosen as the start of that year of revolutions in Russia because of the demonstrations due to take place to mark Women’s Day. OK, different countries, different regimes and nearly 100 hundred years of water under that bridge, but you see my point?

So I was a little disappointed last week when my students described something very similar to the Italian version. A sickly sort of middle ground between Mothers’ Day and Valentine’s Day, but with (to my admittedly jaundiced mind) a darker undercurrent. Give the Little Lady some flowers and chocolate, pat her on the head, tell her she’s bella, and turn a determinedly blind eye to the lump in the middle of the carpet from all the crap you’ve just swept under it.

We may lack an awareness of the day in Britain and the States, but at least when it is marked it tends to be with the sense of anger and righteous indignation that it really deserves – that equal pay has still not been fully achieved, that political representation is still not truly representative, and that rape is a weapon of war. For a far better argument than I can give here, take a look at Mariella Frostrup’s article in The Observer last weekend [Feminism's Global Challenge]. Tell me, please, how giving flowers, or granting a day’s free admission to Graeco-Roman ruins really contributes anything to redressing those imbalances?

It's not about hating men, it's about justice - for everyone. So, for God’s sake – no, for the sake of both sexes – stop simpering and get angry! 

Cats with Thumbs - awesome!

Just come across this on Oye's Facebook page - awesome!

Another YouTube Masterpiece!!!