Dear reader, 

This week we dived into our new programs for the new year: TEE & TESOL (adult programs) are on campus and run for 2-3 weeks here at the English Village. 

TEE & TESOL are adult language programs that allow Korean English teachers to acquire a teaching certificate from our organization. 

TESOL stands for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages and is a general name for the field of teaching that includes both TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) and TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language.)  

TEE stands for Teaching English in English in the classroom.

All of these programs are intensive English teacher training programs to help them improve their teaching skills. They focus on enhancing teachers’ professionalism in educational skills and techniques.

Every year DGEV hosts these adult programs in January, Eric has volunteered to be a coordinator on the program with two other teachers Wayne and Jade. Getting introduced to the program and the responsibilities required, they learned of some bad feedback from last year’s 2020 program, the main complaints were that our teachers here were unprofessional and a lack of care or reasoning as to why they were learning the subjects they were. Which makes a lot of sense to us knowing some of the teachers here. This job can create a very relaxed work ethic, to say the least - teaching 12 years olds for 40 minutes a day on either library, hotel, or zoo, you get paid very comfortably, have a good amount of vacation, and an overall relaxed nature to the job - easy to not strive for much and keep the status quo. So to have an influx of not only adults but adults that know the job better than most of us - we are not professional teachers, in fact, most of us don’t have any teaching certificate being here. With an unmotivated and untrained group of teachers… I can easily see how the program would acquire some negative reviews. 

So Eric’s on a team of three: Wayne (brit), Jade (South African), and Eric along with our Korean staff member Heidi who is helping liaison between the Koreans and us. The goal was to make it a transparent experience for the TEE/TESOL teachers, show what we know, our experiences, offer our western views on teaching English, provide content they can take away, resources, and importantly: conversations on how to teach English and have them practicing their English the whole time being here. 

So the coordinators have been working away at making sure the program is geared in the right direction. After we came back from holiday break we had two days, Thursday and Friday, to be fully prepared, the program kicked off Monday, January 10th. Eric gave another brilliant speech at their orientation that made the Korean staff tickled that he was a coordinator. 

During this time the adults will be staying on campus sleeping over in the B dormitories - we also have two high school groups of Korean students staying in the dorms as well for a two-week program. This is the first time we’ve had students staying on campus since the shutdown of the pandemic in 2020 so the energy here has been a buzz with new visitors. We have never had a bunch of people at our breakfasts or dinners, so now entering the cafeteria and having 30+ people milling around and grabbing food from the buffet table, is pretty surreal for us newbies as we’ve never experienced a more “full” experience on campus. There is also a bit more work that comes with that in entertaining said guests over the weekends or evening hours. The kitchen staff is back to full shifts and we have Korean staff that helps with the watching of the high school students. 

I had assigned three classes: Grammar 2 Nouns & Verbs, Conversation 2, and Grammar 5 Conjunctions. Grammar 2 and Conversation 2 was the first week, which I was relieved to see, I was happy to be one of the firsts and get it out of the way. Nouns and verbs are easy to talk about, I discussed the many different ways to think about how students can learn and memorize those words. I brought up my own struggles with starting to learn Korean and how I’ve gone about memorizing words. We did two exercises: one was in groups of three they had to write as many nouns and verbs they knew in two minutes and then we did a topic circle game. 

The conversation class is just a class that gets them to practice their English and have fun practicing. I took my conversation class idea from a podcast I listen to John Lovett’s, the game he has is “Hot Takes” having to defend a hot take in one minute. I expanded it to two minutes giving them time to struggle or think of words and thoughts. I printed out slips of paper with topics, they then would pull them out of a hat randomly, stand in front of the class, and “defend their hot take.” I started my class by explaining the rules, one student volunteered to start, as the student was starting to defend their hot take I had another student, Silver - her English nickname - raise her hand and suggest a change in the ‘game.’ She suggested we get the whole class upstanding and that we pair up and defend in pairs the ‘hot takes’ - I welcomed the suggestion and asked the class to get up and get in two lines, I joined because we had an odd number of students. Then one line grabbed a hot take and we had one minute to “defend” the hot take the person across had to “oppose” the hot take, each person had one minute. Then we passed down the papers one way and the second row of students shuffled the other way so we didn’t overlap. It is kind of hard to describe, but just imagine a group of 13 adults in two rows talking all at the same time discussing ‘hot takes’ like green is the best color and we should all live underwater. This doubled, tripled their speaking time, and I really appreciated Silver’s interjection in admitting they all were happy with standing up and interacting at the same time. There was magic in having everyone talking at the same time so no one was particularly nervous with a whole class looking and listening to them, there was an ease too in knowing everyone was doing the same thing, then the time limit allowed them to know they’d have a new topic in one minute to try all over again. It was fun and they all enjoyed it, I haven’t been involved in a class like that I think ever. 

(I wrote this first part at the end of week one, the next part is written after week two of the adult program.)

I was sent on a two-day stint of STEAM at an elementary school in Cheongdo to Geumchon Elementary. The students are on their end-of-school-year break. America takes its break from June-August, Korea takes its break from December-February, this STEAM was a winter camp in a way, to keep the students engaged but not part of the regular school program. It was really relaxed, the students weren’t wanting to do much work but we played games and looked at some of my fun power points. 

We have our last week of TESOL this week, TEE left at the end of this week. 

We are tasked with some big Cyber English class projects for the month of February, as DGEV received more funding for that and will be leaning into expanding that program in a big way this upcoming year. We’re going to be making a Cyber book and powerpoint series, expanding for different grades in English. So - stay tuned. 

Photo highlights: moon light, wall tapestry, and new reading chair from Christmas haul!