Teaching ESL

I have made it through my first week of ESL classes thanks to the helpful advice of my mother and Tante Cha and many prayers from all of you! I managed to persuade the Academic Dean, Carren, that it would be better to place the Certificate (Beginner) and Diploma (Intermediate) students in separate English classes. As a result, my weekly schedule consists of two one hour afternoon classes from Monday to Thursday focusing on conversational English. My greatest challenge has been preparing appropriate lesson plans and encouraging the students to speak freely, not just in response to my questions. They are quite used to sitting and receiving instruction versus active participation.

We had somewhat of a breakthrough yesterday when we played the game '20 Questions'. I split the Diploma class into four teams and each team had to choose a person from the Bible while the other three teams had to guess who their person was. The object of the game was to ask as few questions as possible to find the correct answer. Once they understood, we were off and they became so engrossed in the game that they kept passing me their next name idea. We had some heated discussion when one team gave incorrect answers in an attempt to mislead the other students and win the game.

I am diligently reading through the many ESL teacher books I brought along and have a major project looming before me: Carren and I have decided to give credit for my course. That means I must put together a course outline for the remaining eight weeks of the semester for her approval and come up with mid-term and final exams, all by Sunday! It's a daunting task but I'll get it done with some help from home (hint hint) and your continued prayers. My abilities and creativity are being put to the test - that is exactly what I asked for when I decided to do SALT…