Be prepared when you enter the classroom. Remember always that you are a teacher first and that students respond best out of respect. Plan well, control your classes, motivate your students and many of the challenges will take care of themselves.
Elementary Aged Students
As a teacher in Korea, my favorite classes are those with upper-elementary students. Most of them are enthusiastic, boys and girls participate equally, and they make genuine efforts to communicate as often as they possibly can. Happily, this group (aged 8-12) makes up the bulk of the students at most language schools. Most of these children will be able to read at a basic level and, if they've been attending for more than six months or so, will be able to communicate many surprisingly complicated ideas.
English classes begin in grade four in Korean public schools, so most of the students in the upper elementary age-range will know some English vocabulary, even if they are just starting at the private institute. They will probably also have learned to read in English by the end of grade 4, even if they have never been to a private language school before. English textbooks and workbooks, often designed and produced in Korea by the franchise system with which the school is affiliated, are normally used as the core texts. The quality of these texts varies widely and is generally dependent upon how many editions of the same text have already been published in Korea (and thus had a chance to be used and corrected by teachers). One of my favorite lessons in my first Korean teaching post was, as the students' workbook boldly exclaimed, Strong, Stronger, and Strongerest!
Some schools also use American and/or British texts that are familiar to experienced English teachers of young learners. Bear in mind that selling books is one of the ways that both the individual school and the franchise head office make money. More advanced students may also be using graded readers, which are stories or novels that have been simplified for language learners.
Children in this age range tend to be a little less self-conscious than Western children. Games and activities that Canadian or American ten and eleven-year olds would tell you "sucked" are often well received by Koreans the same age. Both boys and girls are very competitive and enjoy any kind of competitive game, especially if boys are pitted against girls.
Teenage Students - Middle School and High School Students
Many applicants who haven't taught in Korea before express an interest in teaching adolescents. Unless people have already taught in Korea, It is easier for most of them to imagine themselves dealing with adolescents rather than with younger children. Contrary to what one might think, classes with Korean 13-16 year-olds can be VERY dull and challenging to teach. Korean parents tend to give quite a lot license to pre-adolescents. However, by the time young people head off to high school, the pressures of familial expectations (often unrealistically high) and social conformity (often impractical for learning) begin to weigh heavily upon them and they become much more self-conscious and disconnected from the real world. Sometimes they are quite simply worn out by the time they reach the English class at 7:30 or 8:00 p.m. Anyone who has taught in Korea can tell you about teenagers falling asleep in class and how all of a student's have to be consulted before anything resembling an opinion can be offered. This makes a lot of the usual pre-intermediate and intermediate fluency-based English lessons fall flat.
University Aged Students and Adults
As anyone who lives in Canada, the U.S., Australia, or New Zealand can tell you, large numbers of Koreans have been emigrating to, or temporarily working in, these countries over the past few decades. When a Korean executive is posted abroad, or when Koreans emigrate, they usually have little choice but to send their children to local English-language schools. After a few years of regularly attending an English school, Korean children can produce unaccented natural English that must be the envy of their parents. When the executive and his (almost always his) family return to Korea, or when the emigration project turns sour (it's easier to make money quickly in Korea than in most other places!), the children are often sent to language institutes to keep up their English.
These students are usually fun to teach. They are often just like studious English native-speaking children and the range of activities and materials that teachers can use is much broader than with regular Korean children. There are some schools that specialize in returnees; however these schools almost always require a B. Ed. and a few years' teaching experience. In institutes that don't specialize in returnees but have one or two classes of them, the most experienced and/or most qualified foreign teacher usually gets to teach them.
Check out our New Teacher Orientation, our Teacher Tips, our Lesson Planning Tips or Lesson Plan sections of our website for more information.
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