My apologies to all for not updating the forum sooner- I’m now halfway through my 3rd (very snowy) week teaching the IBS group in Jena, and I’m extremely pleased with the group’s progress.
Their self confidence is growing, and they’re no longer hesitant to speak, and generally express themselves in English… They’ve also committed the NATO alphabet to memory, and I’m very proud of them for that.
The group shrank somewhat before I got there, and the permanent number is just 5 students; all very eager to learn.
The group works at a fairly elementary level, and the first couple of days were essentially where we got to know each other, and where I could determine the strengths and weaknesses of each student, so as to best teach them.
The first week was technically demanding, as there was no internet in the classroom, which was quite detrimental, however this was due to renovation work, and was remedied by the 2nd week.
I’ve been doing extensive vocabulary work with them… I start each quarter of the teaching day with a new vocabulary list of 15 words, and they seem to very much enjoy learning new words, their definitions and implementation. This is time consuming, but worthwhile, as they then use the new words in class work.
In the 1st 2 weeks we covered:
Adjectives and adverbs; which allows them to construct more complex English sentences.
Present Simple Tense
Present Perfect Tense
Past Simple Tense
Active and Passive verb usage
On the advice of Frau Goethel from IBS, I’ve also given them numerous speaking and listening exercises; primarily from the New Headway Elementary text, of which IBS has copies.
Few/Some/Much/Many (this is somewhat difficult for them to grasp, and so we’ll be doing some “refresher” work on this tomorrow).
Personal pronouns
Possessive Pronouns
Countable and non-countable nouns
Definite/Indefinite/No article(s)
Comparatives and Superlatives
Correct use of “Have” and “Has”
Correct use of “Since” and ‘For”
Prepositions and time/date/day (At Christmas, on Thursday, etc.)
May and Might (permission and possibilities)
Regular and irregular verbs
Verbs + Gerund/Infinitive
Reading comprehension (from English-Test website)
I’ve also found it helpful to break up the theory work with the “Name Game,” where I write the name of a well known person on a card, show it to a student and the others must guess their identity by asking only (correctly phrased) yes or no questions (“Are you male,” “are you an actor,” “are you American,” etc.)
Of course, given the level of the group, it will be necessary to incorporate short “refreshers” of key points in the coming weeks, but they grasp most things and have excellent recall, which is how I guess one wants the learning process to go.
I will update later in the week with a recap of the 3rd weeks progress.
Best wishes and Happy Teaching!
