ELT Experiences

Experiences for English Language Teaching

Tag: TEAP

How I Got Involved in Teaching English for Academic Purposes

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I have been very fortunate to be involved in an area of English teaching for the last few years which I find incredibly fascinating and extremely rewarding, especially when you see the progress that undergraduate and post-graduate international students make within a period of time. In this post and video, I share my experiences of how I got involved in the teaching of English for Academic Purposes (also known as EAP).

Before I share how I discovered this element of academic English and EAP, I really need to focus on what started my journey within the field of English language teaching. I first discovered the English teaching profession by chance when I moved to South Korea to teach English to young learners at a small private after-school institute. It was this that ignited my passion within English teaching and motivated me enough to undertake an initial teacher training certificate – the CELTA – after a year of teaching to these wonderful young learners.

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Week Two of an Online Pre-Sessional Course

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Last week, I blogged about my first week with the online pre-sessional course that I am involved with, and this post continues with my second week of remote teaching.

I started the first day by emailing students of all necessary schedules for their course, highlighting important deadlines and times of live Zoom sessions. I also scheduled individual students for an allocated time of their one-to-one tutorial, spread over two days. One reason I wanted to spread the tutorial over two days was that when I decided to have the tutorials over one day, I felt exhausted and had little time to respond to issues as they emerged. The benefit I found of holding half the tutorials over a day was that I were able to spend time responding to issues by emailing students or providing further information.

Anyhow, the first day I prepared the necessary PPT for the following day, listened to the student self-study input sessions, and also reminded students to submit their newspaper article in preparation for this week’s tutorial. I find myself having to motivate students to complete and engage with tasks, when particular students are not so intrinsically motivated to complete their autonomous self-study tasks. Perhaps I over-analyse or expect too much from my students but I do understand that the course is very similar to what students encounter when they undertake their courses at university.

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Week One of an Online Pre-Sessional Course

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I have completed two weeks of an eight week pre-sessional course. Over the past month, I have shared some of the events leading up to the course which included a day of IT training and two days of induction to introduce this new course. I thought I would share my first week of teaching an online EAP course with my thoughts and reflections. I made quite a few mistakes during the first week and expectations were usually not met. However, apologies if this post rambles on and feel free not to read but I do hope that it offers an insight to others who have had similar experiences.

The first day of the course was quite stressful. There were no face-to-face sessions via Zoom and all interaction was to be handled asynchronously via the University Canvas website with introductions to be posted on the discussion forum by each pre-sessional group. I posted up a video for students to watch, but I noticed that had students used their mobile devices to access the discussion thread, the video would not have been visible. However, a script was included below the introduction video so students would have been able to view this instead. I was hoping that students would have posted up their own introduction video but all decided to introduce themselves with text in the discussion post. I suppose there were no brave souls out there willing to share their verbal introduction.

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