It's still Saturday morning. I thought I may as well continue writing and procrastinate about going back in to work on a Saturday morning. I have another teaching program to develop before Monday - the day after tomorrow.
The university has a new contract to teach English to Vietnamese government officials for 30 weeks. We did placement tests for candidates for the course last week and some were still being done on two days ago.
The classes start on Monday 15th and I am the only person who will be teaching them. This is a bit daunting.
I'll be running two classes five days a week; my last class for the week will end on Friday afternoons at 7 PM. I have a short "curriculum" from Saigon which I must follow, which says: Module One-Introductions; Module Two - Reading a work email; Module Three - Responding to a work email, etc. So I have to prepare material and assessment based on this. I appreciate the document, it's good to have something on which to build.
I've been using any opportunity where I was sitting in front of my computer this past week to try and build a fuller curriculum, or is it a syllabus? from these scant guidelines. I'm padding it out to include a numeracy element, and a train-the-trainer element. I'm using Headway and the CSWE materials as a guide and will try to marry the these with my Saigon "curriculum".
YouTube also has snippets from the Aussie TV show "Border Security" which I'll try to use. Can you imagine the unit on introductions; "What's your name? Where is your passport? Why have you come to Australia? Do you intend working?". This is going to be interesting.
The contract also extends to training lower-level government employees in Saigon, so I contacted my counterpart teacher there. He was very helpful and told me about what materials/books he'd used that he found too advanced or way out of the interest and vocabulary range of his clients. He started teaching the course last week.
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