last message to friends ©Thor May 1999 back to Last Message index
ESL materials & ideas developed in China
"Introduction - Last Message to Friends"
The ideas for the projects in this collection were developed in China from 1998 to 2000, working with postgraduate Masters and Ph.D. students in a good university. That is, the material is reasonably demanding and intended for students who are capable of independent and creative thinking. Such students would also need some working command of English to express the complex ideas involved. With those provisos, there is no reason that this material cannot be adapted to a wide variety of contexts and cultures with both native and non-native speakers of English. Indeed, creative teachers could easily extract and simplify elements of it for less capable or less fluent students.
The majority of English language teaching world-wide involves one-off lessons which at most occupy a teaching period of one or two hours (frequently much less). There are good reasons for this, ranging from student attention spans to the energy of teacher planning (if there is planning at all), to the revolving door syndrome where teachers ricochet between classes in often erratic patterns.
Projects of the kind listed here require considerable preparation and planning if they are to succeed properly -- not one-off stabs at an idea grabbed in desperation on the fly. However, with good preparation the rewards to capable students are correspondingly larger. Carefully sequenced activities which extend across several periods have a real chance of engaging the talents, concentration and memory of learners. Thus challenged, able students can often innovate and open new options which will surprise an alert teacher.
My own use of the projects was in each case an experiment. On the whole things worked out pretty well. Where I had doubts I tended run small pilot exercises to test the mood and engagement of particular classes of students. Sometimes this gave me a signal for some hasty adaptation, but that is part of the fun of teaching. Of all the Chinese groups that I taught, the most imaginative, bold and motivated were in fact not regular university students at all, but classes of night students who had paid a fairly hefty sum (not to me!) for the privilege of encountering a rare native speaker of English in central China. These people ranged from full university professors to entrepreneurs to medical students to various species of administrators, all mixed together and of varying ages. They were a joy to engage with, and a reminder of the rewards that teaching at its best can offer.
"Introduction - Last Message to Friends" copyrighted to Thor May 1999; all rights reservedback to Last Message index