My First Teaching Lesson

I've never been an official "trainer" before, but at most of my previous jobs I have trained new employees and I've done a ton of presenting during my undergrad Speech Team days and on the Entrepreneurship MBA business plan competition circuit.  I also used to run an education department where I hired expert trainers all year long and watched many of the best in the business.  While I knew I had a lot to learn about language training when I got here, I now have even more respect for this group of professionals, as I am discovering it is far more difficult than anticipated.

I attended a seminar today for future language teachers and to show us the true basics of starting to learn a new language, the instructor taught us how to say, "Hello.  My name is ____.  It is nice to meet you." in Bulgarian.  This experience was eye-opening, because it put us in the place of our future students who may not know a single word of the English language before they find themselves in our classrooms.  There were only three of us in the seminar, but it took more than 15 minutes to teach us just that short Bulgarian phrase.  The instructor only spoke in Bulgarian, so we had to figure out what he was saying by his gestures and tone, and he said he actually moved much more quickly with us than he would in a real class.  Whoa!

If an instructor only speaks in the language he/she is teaching, this training style is called monolingual.  That means you can't say, "Tschuss in German means bye in English."  You have to wave, walk away and say, "bye," so the students understand the meaning without hearing the word in their own language.  It takes a long time to teach the basics monolingually and there's a lot of repetition and practice for the participants.

At the seminar, I had to present a demo lesson where I taught the participants about the different bills and coins of US currency.  I showed large pictures of the coins and gave each student one of each to examine.  I told them the value for each coin and asked the students to tell me which coins would make up a certain amount, such as 48 cents.  That checked their knowledge of the values and pronunciation of each coin's name.  Then I told them some additional words we use in America when talking about money, like buck, grand and change.  There was no direct feedback at the time, but I think the demo went very well and they had lots of comments and discussions about the currency after the session, so that made me feel good.