If you had told me five years ago that I would be teaching English in Thailand, I would have laughed. My teaching had been either to my sons or to adults at work. My English grades were never stellar and I can't speak Thai.
None of that has changed except now I have been teaching English for 2 1/2 years to students who can barely understand me. I said in my last entry that I was surprised to realize that my students speak mostly in the present tense no matter what they are asked and that probably came across as complaining. The complaint was about myself. I was annoyed with myself for not recognizing this sooner and now I needed to figure out how to fix it. That is what I do. I fix things. I want to fix my students ability to speak English and have to speak it clearly and confidently.
Nee is not a native English speaker so she came into this language from the backdoor as do many immigrants to the US. She learned English here with a very strong background in grammar. I knew of the grammar rules but couldn't tell them to you without checking them in a book. So why do I speak better English than her and most of the people around me here in Thailand? I think it has to do with how I learned the language. She and a few websites told me to teach English phrases and have them build on that. I found a list of phrases like I'm verbing and I will verb and such. I made up some worksheets listing these and tested them on one of my better classes.
I had them work in teams to figure out how to make sentences with the phrases. They tackled it with vigor and that lesson went well. I tried it again in another class and it bombed. Then it failed again and again. I usually try sometime five or six times before I move on and I decided to move on. Keeping on that idea, though, I started to see patterns in English that I had never given any thought to and wondered if I could teach that. For instance if I ask a present simple question about you doing something, I would ask What do you do or what are you doing; one being present simple and the other present continuous. Whenever I start using terms like that, my head starts to swim, but I figured the students had been taught these rules and I moved on.
Long before the Internet, we had libraries. When I wanted to apply for a job, I went to the library to research companies. When I wanted to teach my sons to read, I went to the library. When I wanted to build something or fix something...well, you get the idea. I went to the library. Jump ahead a few decades and now I am in a small town in Thailand. We have no libraries, at least none with books in English. I don't have many fellow foreign teachers to kick around ideas and I don't know how to speak Thai. Along comes Google and Facebook and LinkedIn and I am off and running.
There are many ESL websites filled with worksheets and ideas. I try them and keep them if they work. Most have not for me. Thus I am still searching. I do want to make a difference for whomever I can.
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