Freda Chen from Tainan
I’m a certified Taiwanese local elementary school English teacher. After more than 20 years of teaching, I have never stopped searching for beneficial training courses. Last year’s TYLEC course at the British Council fulfilled my long term desire and has effectively helped me develop from a more or less traditional style teacher to a self- driven and constantly reflective teacher. Thanks to the solid training, including varied input sessions, energetic workshops, guided observations, non-stop peer discussions, and intensive teaching practice observations, I have more and more ideas and energy when it comes to designing and delivering my lessons. I sincerely appreciate the British Council’s help in improving the quality of English teaching in Taiwan. I’d like to invite you to join the TYLEC course. I guarantee your enjoyment.
Wayne
Before I started this course, I felt my teaching ability was going in circles and always coming back to the same place. I felt I wasn’t moving forward and at times after I finished a lesson I would feel that I hadn’t done enough to reach my students. I would follow the school’s planned out teaching method of teaching by focusing more on pronunciation rather than the fluency of their English.
I now feel that this course has greatly shaped my understanding as a teacher. Having thorough input sessions, assessed teaching practices and access to observe six experienced teachers has been an invaluable learning experience for me as a teacher of young learners.
I am able to reach my students on a more fun, challenging and interactive level. Now I feel equipped with greater knowledge of how to engage, encourage and help students achieve their full potential in class. There are many parts of the input sessions I use on a daily basis with my students, for example, story book reading times are now fun and interactive for my students.
Having studied this TYLEC course I feel I am much more confident when planning and teaching students who are young leaners. Already I can see so many positive results through the increase of their daily language usage and interactions with the lessons I teach. My confidence levels have increased greatly through the knowledge I have gained during my course.
Monica
TYLEC is a great course because it focuses on the skills needed to teach Young Learners. TYLEC provided an excellent way to help me develop my skills in the young learner classroom.
The guided observations gave me the opportunity to integrate many ideas into my classroom and improve my teaching skills, by providing my students with a motivating environment.
The teaching practice observations were really significant for me because I learned to reflect on my own teaching practices and this helped me to improve myself using the skills that I have learned.
Through my practice observations when I was preparing for my TBL lesson. I realized that I was underestimating my students abilities, which wasn’t good for my students because they would feel discouraged. So now I don’t give young learners too difficult or too easy tasks to avoid students losing motivation and their interest to learn. Instead I provide them with some challenging activities and my students are responding very well.
During the input lessons, I learned a lot from all the trainers, especially from Steven Murray. I learned a lot of things for example: classroom management, how to prepare an effective task-based lessons, how to develop reading skills, how to teach phonics in a more interesting way, how to develop grammar and vocabulary in my class and so on.