Aihua

See also: Dealing with young students; Locations of teaching; Teaching resources and training; and Teaching responsibilities.

At Aihua, although we teach all levels of students, the majority of our students are young learners of primary school level, and any teacher who joins us must be able to deal with such students.  We also teach kindergarten, pre-school, middle school, high school and adults.

When dealing with young learners especially, we hope that the teachers will teach in an animated and lively fashion.  We expect our teachers to teach in such a way not only because Chinese students are overburdened with the workload from the public school system, but also because if the children are bored and not paying attention, they will not learn.  Teachers should utilize games and activities, so that the students may learn without even knowing that they are learning.  The focus of our teaching should be on oral English, although reading and writing will need to be addressed as well, but to a lesser extent.

Do not focus on vocabulary alone.  Work as well on sentence building.  Do not ask student questions that may be answered with one word answers: encourage them to answer questions with sentences.  Do not ask questions of the whole class.  This will encourage them to speak out of turn.  Instead, select students, ask them to stand, and ask them questions individually.  Do no pass over a student who cannot answer a question correctly.  Let the student see other students answer the question correctly, and then try again.

A difficulty that our school faces is that students are compelled to sit important English examination in the public school system, but because we focus on oral English our teaching does not adequately prepare our students for these examinations.  This should not be the case.

In order to address this problem, we need to do the following:

• Avoid focusing on vocabulary.  Teach the sentence as the smallest unit of language.  Flashcard activities can be useful as an introductory part of a lesson, but if overused this is very lazy and unproductive method of teaching.
• Offer constant correction of students’ grammatical errors, so that our students’ understanding of English grammar becomes instinctual.
• Ask open (who what when where why how) questions rather than closed questions (is do will, etc), and insist upon replies in complete sentences. Correct all errors, and have students repeat response without errors.
• Coach students in pronunciation and intonation.
• Integrate oral and written English.  Support oral English with written English.
• Focus on our own examination system.  A change in policy to place stronger focus on our own exams should help to prepare students for public school exams, and should also provide us with mechanisms to identify which of our students are falling behind.