The second English lesson

I held the second English lesson for the group. The topic was again Business correspondence.  Something big and unique had happened to me on the first lesson. I felt like I had BECOME a teacher. It wasn’t something I ”had to” do to complete my pedagogic studies, but what I was craving to do. Giving the first Russian lessons had felt somewhat unnatural and strenuous, but this had changed. I had started to soar and enjoy sharing knowledge and skills to others about a subject that was dear to me.

In other words, I had already been looking forward to this lesson. Preparation still took a couple of hours, but I wanted to build a logical and solid structure, where different tasks would bring variation: tasks where the students would participate by speaking and me teaching would come one after another.

We started by checking a homework At the hotel, where the students filled in the gaps with appropriate words from the word box. Then we reviewed last lesson’s business letter structure of an enquiry. I advised the students to take notes, because the material was not available in Moodle. Then we finished checking another homework. I realized I didn’t have the Finnish key words with me, only the sheet with the underlined answers, so I had to think how to proceed and what the students would say. There was another additional problem: the computer was not working, so I couldn’t access Moodle. I had decided it wasn’t a problem since I could show all the materials with the document camera. I told the students to say both the Finnish word and the sentence, where the equivalent was, and then I revealed the correct sentence. This was a bit messy, but we got the homework covered. I also remembered to check that the students were able to see the sentences that we read on the screen.

I find it irritating that most students are quite passive and it takes a long time for anyone to participate or comment on anything. I knew that on today’s lesson we had several exercises to check and we didn’t have a lot of extra time, so I had brought a hacksack (a little ball, also known as a footbag) with me. I gave it to one student and she was to say the first sentence. Then she would pass it on to another, whose turn would be next. The students seemed to enjoy that.

Then I showed the students 2 specimen letters of an enquiry from the book called Commercial Correspondence. The first letter was very short (p. 9) and I made the student think if it was a good letter and if any vital information was missing. Then I showed another sample, which was closer to the task that the students would write (43), and we looked at its features together. Then I gave them a checklist of key points to remember (p. 37) and I encouraged the students to take notes of that. Then we looked at some key terms that the students wrote down: enquiry/inquiry (Am.E.), quantity discount, supplier, (written) quotation.

Then we finished the last homework, positive and negative. My aim was to go through that quickly, so that we had enough time to write the business letters. For Hotel staff reviews I read the words out load and the students raised their hands when the word was positive. Then in the Tour box the students took turns in saying the positive words, one by one, and for the Beach section the students spontaneously said the positive terms. At this point we had almost half of the lesson left, which was as I had planned.

I asked to students to look at the company profiles of their partner company for 5-10 minutes. When they were ready, I instructed to write their first business letter. I went around in the classroom and checked every letter that was being written. I advised the students in the letter titles, correct order, some with spelling, articles, and how to divide the information into logical chapters. Several students had a hard time deciding what they would enquire about the partner company. If there was no logical choice, for example if the two companies were in different cities, I told the students to use their imagination to invent a reason to order from that company (e.g. the best product or a service that was not available in their own city ), and to state that in the letter. I found this part of advising and helping the students very rewarding. I sometimes find it difficult to encounter or approach people (“Do they like me?”, but working with these students was easy, and they we also open on one-on-one contact for my suggestions, and they seemed to trust me.

The homework for the next class was ‘Sightseeing.’ We finished the class exactly 13.45. Again, after this lesson I got this sensational feeling that this was something wonderful that was happening to me. The lesson had not been perfect, but I had not been very nervous beforehand. And the rest of the day I was just really excited about the opportunity to try teaching.