Learning Disabled

Today was the students' Chapter 3 test.  First, Katie prepared them for it a bit more.  She was worried about the listening comprehension part.  Listening comprehension has never been my strength.  I'm a grammar person, so when I helped students through a vocabulary exercise, I gave them suggestions on how to use grammar to figure it out.

I think the rest of the test turned out to be easy for them, though.  I taught them two of the other sections, and they seemed to come naturally to the students on Wednesday.  The last part was a cloze exercise that students could figure out using grammar or the recording.  Dictation would have helped them with that, I think.

There was a mistake on one question: none of the answers made sense.  Katie said she purposely didn't tell the class about it because part of doing well in this class is using test-taking skills, and students will need those for the TOEFL and IELTS in the future.  I often wish I were more familiar with those tests!

While the students were preparing, Katie asked me to help the Arab woman.  Katie had said she thought the student had some sort of learning problem.  So far, though, it had been hard for me to read the student's natural ability because she hardly tries.  During group work, she's constantly on her phone.  She hasn't erased the answers in her book from previous times in this class, so Katie is going to lower her grade.  She often refuses to open her mouth when the whole class is repeating a word, yet she can produce correct pronunciation when I work with her individually.

A practice listening comprehension exercise was the first time her disability became clear to me.  While the recording was playing, I would point out the main ideas and tell her what to write: "Networking."  "Part-time job."  Instead of writing these simple phrases, she wrote other details in the recording.  Her spelling was almost unintelligible at times.  On Friday, I asked her about her goals for learning English, and she said she doesn't want to go to a university or have a career.  I really feel bad for her--languishing in this class might be making her lose motivation.  I mentioned it to Katie after class, wishing we could have her tested and identified so she could receive help for her disability.

Presentations About Our Lives

During yesterday's class, Katie finished Chapter 3 in the book.  The students will have a test on it on Monday.

Then we all worked on posters about our lives.  On one side, each person must have six pictures of things he or she has done in the past; on the other are pictures of the person's future.  It was a chance for each student to use past tense verbs and do a fun presentation about him- or herself.  We had started the activity on Wednesday.

First, I helped a struggling student with grammar and pronunciation while Katie walked around the room to help other people.  Each one had written his or her twelve sentences on a separate piece of paper.  My student often left out articles, so I tried to prompt him to put them in toward the end.

Then, I presented mine.  (Katie had done hers on Wednesday.)  So far, only two students have had time to go, but I think it will be a fun opportunity for people to get to know each other.  I remember cutting pictures out of magazines in Spanish class, and I enjoyed it!

Second Observation

Yesterday, I taught for the first 50 minutes or so again.  This lesson was pretty different from the first one I taught, I think.

Planning was different because the section of the book that I taught out of had many small explanations for me to make, then shorter activities to lead.  There was a lot of pronunciation, which was fine.  Also, it called for a CD, and my CD didn't have the radio interview that students were supposed to listen to!  I emailed Katie about it ahead of time, and she tried to cue her CD for me, but we still had problems.  My computer doesn't have track numbers, so I counted the tracks ahead of time, and that number turned out to be off.

Afterward, both Katie and my advisor told me I had dealt with that problem well.  Katie even said some teachers have been asked to leave the school for, among other things, taking half an hour to deal with technology mishaps.  It's typical to have trouble with computers and CDs, but it's how a teacher responds that counts.

The more I am observed, the more confident I become about my teaching.  I feel like more of a professional now, with my own ideas about how to teach.  When Katie teaches listening and speaking, she focuses more on body language and how to present oneself.  I agree that those factors are important, but I still think the students really benefit from instruction in pronunciation.  (Plus, I really liked my class on how to teach it!)  We each have our own style.

Games

Katie went through more of the book yesterday with the students.  They also had a review game with vocabulary they had been learning.  Katie divided them into two teams and had one person from each side face his or her team, with his or her back to the board.  The teacher wrote one word at a time on the board.  Each team had to explain or define that word to the person who couldn't see the board.  We had some "policing" issues with students speaking Arabic or turning around accidentally.  We let them look in their books and use ESL (not bilingual) dictionaries.  The students were really engaged!  Arab culture is very competitive, Katie told me, so it was easy to get the class into this game.  I've had students play games like charades and pictionary before, but this game really worked for a speaking class.  I might replace parts of the book with games the next time I teach this class, so this one was a good model for me.

Interviewing

Today's class was about interview skills for colleges and jobs in the United States.  First, Katie spent ten minutes setting up a computer while I went over two pages from the book.  She suggested that lesson right before I gave it.  After class, she told me that was intentional--she wants me to think on my feet.

The lesson went well, I think.  I'm developing my own style: I group the students differently from the way Katie does, for example.  After class, I told her about my idea to use the book as a jumping-off point for other discussion.  Katie said that could work great.  The way she teaches, there is a very defined difference between using the book and doing other activities.  I mix them together more, but both ways work just fine.

After the computer was ready, Katie talked about some things that are good and bad to do and say in interviews.  She played some bad interviews on YouTube, stopping them periodically to point things out.  Then, she had the students do mock interviews.  Most of them chose to be interviewers.  There were three teams of those: Harvard, our university, and another nearby school.  The remaining four students went into the empty classroom next door, where I helped them prepare to be interviewed.

Katie handed out a list of interview questions.  First, I had the students read through them and go over any vocabulary words they didn't understand.  I told them to give long, developed answers.  Then I asked each student a question on the list--they did well.

While most of the students went into the other room to interview, Katie sent me one student at a time to work on a question he or she wanted help with.  I gave them advice on what colleges tend to look for.  It was a great chance for me to get to know the students better.  I think it was also an opportunity for them to be introspective and figure out what their best personal qualities were, what they were most proud of about themselves, etc.

First Observation

Yesterday, I taught for the first hour or so.  I went through the book, but tried to adapt some of the activities to make them more interesting for the students.  When I was planning, Katie gave me a chart to use.  It had the activity (including page number), dynamic (pairs, whole class, or individual), the instructions I would give, and the number of minutes it would take.  I like that idea--I might use it again in the future.

I still felt a little rushed, though.  I didn't have time to ask the students how their weekends were, do a warm-up, or anything like that.  Because of time, I didn't have the discussion of how to become good at something that's initially hard.  Katie and my advisor, who observed me, said I did well.  The vocabulary in the book was difficult for the class, but I defined some new words and gave the students strategies to take notes, deal with a hard assignment, etc.  I hope they can use those strategies in other subject areas, too.

After my lesson, Katie worked with the students on pronunciation.  The students had fun, I think.  She gave them some chants to repeat, then listened to each one individually for the rhythm of English.  Some of them faltered at first, but they all got each sentence right in the end.

Test Day

Yesterday, the class took two tests: one on past tense verbs, the other on listening from the book.  The past tense verbs test was dictation.  Katie had made up sentences about individual students, each one containing a verb on their list.  The students had to write each whole sentence, and would receive feedback on the spelling of all the words in each sentence.  They would only be graded on the spelling of the past tense verbs in the sentences, though.  I thought that was a fun idea.

To prepare them for the past tense verbs test, Katie had the students quiz each other in pairs.  Most of them had clearly studied--it's a good class.  One of them admitted he had not, however.  It was evident from his attempts to answer his partner's questions.  Katie has told me after class that she thinks he isn't as smart as the other students, and tries to cover that up.  Many of the students think that by talking with the teachers before class and being polite, they can negotiate their grades.  That may happen in Arab culture, but not here!

Katie has been telling the students all the time not to make excuses.  She said the student who failed told her he had a headache.  We laughed after class--people with headaches can still pass tests if they study!  I think he, and some of the other students, give up sometimes when they think they can't do well in English.  The Arab woman did the same thing last class.  I'm going to give a long lesson on Monday, and there's a life lesson I think I'm going to try to impart.  Maybe these students could cover up their lack of knowledge in high school, but that won't work in the real world.  Furthermore, it shows real maturity for someone to admit he or she needs help and study harder.  Perhaps these students don't realize that can happen in college and graduate school.  It's a message that could even reach the good students, because everyone has something (English or not) that they need to do, but is hard for them.

I gave a pronunciation lesson before the test, too.  I had told Katie that I noticed the students were having trouble, so I showed them how to shape their mouths for each vowel.  She said I'm good at diagnosing the students' needs--it seemed that what I can work on is actually time management.  It turns out that I think activities will take longer than they really do.  On Monday, I plan to have a mental time limit for each activity.

The Textbook

Today, the students plowed through several pages in the textbook.  Katie has done so many activities outside of it that she said she thought the Chapter 2 test would be easy for them.  However, she needed to make sure the students were familiar with the format.  Also, many of the listening comprehension questions in the textbook are similar to those on the IELTS standardized test.

Class was quieter than usual because of the book.  The better students among the Arab men were mostly the ones who participated.  There were true or false questions on a recorded conversation, as well as questions about intonation and vocabulary.  The students were good at figuring out the meanings of words from context, which Katie said is on the IELTS, too.  There was a part that had students listen to a recording about learning styles; Katie had them practice taking notes.

We finished with a pairwork activity.  One student in each pair told the other what to draw, and the other student was supposed to use his or her listening skills to draw that picture.  They had handouts with pictures of squares, lines, etc.  To begin, we went over vocabulary such as "upper right corner" and "lower left corner."  I helped the Arab woman and Korean woman.  I think the Arab woman is a very visual learner--she often got answers right when she focused on writing.  But when the students were supposed to repeat words orally, she didn't do so until I prompted her.  When it was her turn to draw the picture, she cheated by looking at it, not listening to her partner.  Katie said the Arab woman would benefit from a one-on-one tutor--I agree.

Past Tense Verbs

Yesterday's class was fun.  The students were all rejuvenated after the break.  The first thing Katie had them do was a surprise speaking presentation.  They had two minutes to prepare speeches about their breaks using past tense verbs and sequence words.  She said they would have to do something like this on the TOEFL or IELTS, so it was good practice.  I wonder how she graded them.

Next, she had them do a cloze activity in their packet on past tense verbs.  They worked in groups of two and three while Katie and I monitored them.  Katie had me go over the answers at the end.  I had each person spell each verb out loud, which Katie said was good--Arabs have trouble with spelling.  Classroom management is still an adjustment, though.  The class and I agreed to start with the Bhutanese student and go around the room, with each person saying one answer.  Yet the moment I called on him, everyone else started talking.  After a little while, the class settled into the proper routine.  Katie said I should have told everyone else to be quiet from the beginning, though.  In Arab culture, students call things out and work together.

When I monitored the students, many of them had trouble with words that change tense according to vowel: hang/hung, choose/chose, etc.  I wonder why we didn't spend more time on pronunciation in the speaking/listening class, because I'm not sure they can hear the difference between each two vowels.  One student said /hang/ (in IPA), which is neither "hang" nor "hung."  Another student had a good question: is "read" pronounced the same in present and past tense?  We did read the list of present and past tense verbs aloud together once, but it seems like they need more help.

We did another activity out of a grammar book by Betty Schrampfer Azar.  One person would tell someone else to do something.  The other person would do it, and then the first person would ask him or her what he or she had done.  The other person would describe it in past tense.  The students worked in pairs, then as a whole class.  It was fun for them to move around, I think.

The last activity of the day was to talk about the 18-24-year-old brain.  We flipped to a reading in the textbook about that.  It was interesting that the students admitted the brain at that age is not fully developed.  I looked at the book during break, and I like that this chapter has a study skills theme.  Katie said she doesn't like its focus on intonation, however--Arabs tend to be good at that.

Teachable Moments

Today was the last class before spring break.  When the students come back, they're going to have a test on past tense verbs.  On Wednesday, Katie put the students in pairs and had them write 2-3 minute speeches.  (She changed it to an individual activity at the end--they weren't doing their own work.)  So today, we spent the whole class period working on the speeches.

Katie and I walked around the room for almost the first hour, monitoring students.  We helped them with pronunciation and grammar.  The next hour, each student gave his or her speech.  In between, Katie went over how the students were graded and had each person watch for one thing.  We had a mini-discussion of strengths and weaknesses after each speaker.

I definitely saw improvement in the students I had monitored, which made me feel great.  There were still areas where I was unsure about the effectiveness of my teaching, though.  Katie and I had a short meeting after class, when I asked her if we had missed anyone as we checked students' work.  There were two students who had more mistakes than the other seven.  Katie said we might have, but she didn't grade them terribly hard.  She keeps telling me that each teacher will have a different style.  I think if I was teaching by myself, I would make a big effort to get to everyone so that grading would be fair.

During the meeting, Katie and I also talked about different forms of assessment.  The students had done very well on the test they took on Monday.  It was controlled practice.  The speeches were much harder, though--she told the class that.  I saw the difference between getting grammar and pronunciation right on a simple listening test and trying to actually talk like a native speaker.

We talked about how to find a balance between the needs of the outgoing Arab men (six students) and the others (one Arab woman, a Korean woman, and a Bhutanese man).  The Arab woman is taking the class for the third time.  She's very shy, but Katie said in class that she is a strong woman for going in front of the class to speak.  The Korean woman is very serious and intrinsically motivated, but it can be hard to get her to write creative stories and speeches.  The Bhutanese man is older than the college-bound students, and set an example today.  He presented a story with a moral: selflessness.  Afterward, the rest of the class sat in awe.  They said the story was "beautiful."  Katie used it as an example: "He doesn't just do this because he has to, it's because he loves it.  You guys should do what you love."

It was really nice for me to witness a teachable moment.  It's one of the things I want to focus on in my professional growth--thinking on my feet.  I think Katie is really good at shaping the young Arabs as people in this culture, and I hope I do that someday, too.  It must be a great motivator for them.

Practicum

Now, I am participating in a practicum at an intensive ESL program at my university.  My class consists of mostly young men from the Middle East, one Arab woman, a Korean woman, and an Asian man.  It's a middle intermediate class on listening and speaking.

I missed the first two classes when I was taking comps, so my first class began with a quick test.  I feel that I learned a lot from my supervisor, Katie (not her real name), about how to introduce a listening test.  She had clearly listened to the CD ahead of time.  She knew that it goes extremely fast, so she played it two or three times in each section.  She also read some of the directions aloud even though they were written for the students.  When I started teaching before graduate school, I never questioned tests or textbooks--but Katie knew the test's flaws.  One section wasn't well organized; that was the one she played the greatest number of times.  Afterward, the students seemed comfortable with how it had gone.

Next, Katie handed out a list of present and past tense English verbs.  The class went over the different forms as well as the rules--there are many of them!  She gave everyone an index card and asked us to write a present tense form of a verb on it.  After checking to make sure that no two people had the same verb, she had us stand in a circle, holding our cards in front of us for everyone to see.

We made a story together.  Each person had to make a sentence with his or her verb in it, in past tense, and repeat all the other sentences from the beginning.  I started it, about a dog.  As the story evolved, the dog became a model student!  I noticed that Katie had been emphasizing American educational values throughout the class--she made a big deal out of telling the students to keep their eyes on their own tests, for example.  The students seemed to have fun making the dog get up early every day, go to class, and do well on his English test (with some prompting from the teacher).  I hope that I can take advantage of teachable moments like that, silly ways to maximize learning opportunities.

Lastly, we got into small groups, each with a baggie full of sentences.  Some were correct, Katie explained, others not.  She had us gamble for pennies, which seemed to motivate the students.  My group consisted of the Korean, the Arab girl, and one Middle Eastern man.  The girls were much quicker than the guy at giving answers.  He would wait for them to say whether the sentence was correct, then still hesitate to give his opinion--I prompted him.  I started only letting the penny go to the first person who got it right, and that seemed to make him go faster.  My reasoning was that culturally, students are used to working together, so he needed guidance to own his individual work--the American way.

Overall, I am very excited about my practicum.  I have enjoyed getting to know the students so far, seeing what Katie does, and trying out some concepts I have learned in my classes.  I look forward to doing some informal research on this class!

Headaches, Armaches and Legaches

Yesterday, Min and I talked about parts of the body.  She drew me a picture and labeled the many different parts in Chinese.  I asked her if there was a song for kids with the parts of the body in Chinese, since there are so many in English (Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, The Hokey Pokey, etc.).  She said no, but she used to play a game with her son when he was little: she would say a part of the body, and he would touch it.  We played that for a while.


Min had suggested a lesson on parts of the body in case I needed to go to the doctor while in China.  She introduced me to a Chinese friend of hers, a neighbor whose husband is studying here.  As we studied, Min and the friend asked me questions about how tell a doctor what is wrong in English.  For example, people can have a toothache, headache, stomachache, etc. but not an armache or legache.  Why?  I have no idea.  We have to say "My arm/leg aches."

Min said it's cheap and convenient to go to the doctor or hospital in China, and that many Chinese Americans move back for that reason when they grow old.  She could not believe that people have to wait three weeks for an appointment here!   She said it would only cost about $20 to have a dentist pull a tooth, too.

She pointed out that sometimes the same spoken word corresponds to different characters, which is something to watch out for.  She said when she was growing up, she had to take a class in Chinese calligraphy, but her 12-year-old son does not do that now.  It's always interesting for me to learn about Chinese writing, even though I can't read it!

Food

Today's Mandarin lesson was at my place.  At my kitchen table, Min quizzed me on this week's flashcards.  It's helpful to learn how lexemes fit together.  For example, the word "fan," "meal," is contained in the words for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  I realized as I studied the past few days that I had been getting the tones wrong, so I recorded most of today's lesson.  That way, I'll be able to imitate Min's pronunciation in the future.

Min introduced lots of food words, and we did a skit in which she pretended to own a restaurant and I ordered food.  She explained some rules about eating in China: the number of dishes at a formal meal is usually a multiple of four, and the first one is soup.  There are some conventions about the order in which people eat hot or cold dishes, too.  She gave me words for the five tastes, including bitter.  In the summer, Chinese people eat a bitter cucumber-like squash to prevent marks from forming near their mouths due to dehydration.  We agreed that there probably isn't a word for those marks in English, because the Chinese word reflects traditional Eastern medicine.

I'm learning a lot about daily life in China.  For example, there are snack carts in cities.  There are Western restaurants with food such as hamburgers, and people can use knives and forks at  such places.  In fact, it is possible to ask for a fork (instead of chopsticks) at a Chinese restaurant, too.  I'm glad that Min is helping me, because she pointed out something about the word for "waitress" in my guidebook.  Ten years ago, the term listed was acceptable; now it is slang for prostitute!  It's good that I won't use that term out of ignorance!!

On to Grammar

In the week between the last lesson and this one, I tried to practice a lot.  I made flashcards for all the words and expressions Min and I had gone over; I think I quizzed myself every day except one or two.  It felt like taking private music lessons: my teacher would be able to tell however much or little I had repeated these words to myself!

I learned a lot of simple words such as numbers, please, thank you, etc.  There were also full expressions on the list, and those were by far the hardest for me.  If I'm hoping to live in China, I might as well learn some common phrases besides "Do you speak English?" and "Where is the ATM?"  So today, I asked Min to teach me some Chinese grammar.

She gave me a list of personal subject pronouns; there is a "you" plural in Mandarin, and there is a plural suffix that only works for people (on "we," "they," etc.).  There are no case-marking particles, so the word for "ball," for example, would be the same whether it is the subject or the object of a sentence.   Min also wrote down some expressions that are related to words I already know--"Good morning" and "good afternoon," for example, are close to "hello."  Min taught me how to ask how much something costs, and to bargain.  We're planning to try a skit next lesson, after I get a chance to study all my new expressions.

Even though I'm starting to see how Chinese fits together, some aspects of it are still hard.  My phrasebook listed two words for "no," to be used in different contexts.  I asked Min for some practice on how to figure out which word to use when.  She explained that there is an entire verb for negation!  In some ways, Chinese grammar is simpler than English, though: there is no passive voice in Chinese.  Learning these things makes me appreciate the challenges that Chinese students of English have to deal with.

On Writing

The whole time I've been studying Chinese, I have been wondering what it's like for Chinese students of English to learn our writing system.  Learning Chinese characters seems hard to me, but at least they look like pictures of what they mean.  Whenever linguists in my graduate program have talked about English orthography, we have commiserated about how much harder it is than languages like Spanish or French.  People don't have weekly spelling tests in their native tongues all around the world.

 So I asked Min about that, and she said that Chinese students tend to find the English writing system easier than Chinese--at least English has an alphabet!  She began learning English at twelve years old, but most Chinese people today begin at four or five.  They start learning grammar around age twelve.  Min added that she is writing two articles about teaching for publication, and she is getting help from a professor that we both had, so she can write in the American English style.  I hope I can see her original version, in a more Chinese writing style, as well as the revised, American one.  That would be a window into Chinese culture for me.

Similarities and Differences

Today Min and I went over numbers.  I had practiced pronunciation twice with a website since our previous meeting.  It was still hard, though!  To me, counting from 1-10 in Chinese sounded like a song.  When Min asked me what individual numbers were, I really had to go through my song and pick each one out.  Also, she showed me hand gestures for these numbers, saying they are widely used in China.  These gestures are different from American ones--a fist means 10, for example.  Doing the gestures helps me remember the numbers, so I hope I can find a website that helps me review that way.

What I did improve on when I practiced without Min, I think, was reading Pinyin.  She expects more from me than that, though!

There are some interesting patterns in Chinese.  For example, Monday is literally "1 day," Tuesday "2 day," etc.   Also, any number with a hundred and a teen has a one in between.  Two hundred eleven in Mandarin, then, is literally "two hundred one eleven."  Min pointed out that Chinese syntax is very different from English, and we noticed that Mandarin has no copular verb.  I expected to find myriad differences between the two languages.  Yet so far, I haven't come across any phonemes that are absent from English--in fact, Mandarin even has English retroflex /r/, which is rare cross-linguistically.  I wonder if that will help me teach Chinese EFL learners to distinguish between /r/ and /l/ in the future.

Min had some questions for me about English and American culture.  She wanted to take a pragmatics class, but unfortunately the pragmatics professor at our school is away this semester.  She said she understands graduate students and professors when she has conversations with them, but she can't understand undergraduates.  So she asked me to teach her some slang, and I told her she could come with examples of words she doesn't understand in the future.  I gave her a copy of our college newspaper, which has slang in columns sometimes.  

She also inquired about what parts of the human hand are called in English.  When we went over the names of the fingers, she asked why the pinky finger is called that.  I laughed--I didn't know!  That's just what kids are told in this country!  I'm sure there are moments like that when she teaches me, too.  She said Chinese children are taught that if they don't say "excuse me" when they ask for directions, the person they ask will give them wrong directions on purpose.  Politeness seems very important in Chinese culture.

English Teaching in China

After the language lesson, Min and I talked about teaching English in China.  She said Chinese teachers teach writing and grammar there, while foreign teachers do listening and speaking.  At a university in Shanghai, I would probably do ESP (English for Special Purposes).  I was glad to hear that, since I figured that students would be more motivated to study exactly the kind of English they planned to use.  During my teaching classes this year, I had been thinking about how to have students do skits of business meetings.  I could get lectures about business from the Internet and have students look for key points about pragmatics and pronunciation.  I'm starting to get excited!

The First Lesson

Originally, Min and I agreed to spend half of each lesson on Chinese, half on English.  I bought a guidebook to Shanghai with a phrasebook in the back, and thought we could start there.  Halfway through the time, though, Min said she was having so much fun teaching me Chinese (explaining a lot in English) that it was fine with her to just keep doing that.

First, she explained the tones.  She knew tones would be hard for a native English speaker like me.  My book listed four, but in fact there's also a neutral tone, so it's as if there there five!  Chinese has characters, of course, but also Pinyin, which is supposed to be a sort of phonetic transcription (in the Roman alphabet) of Mandarin Chinese.  I found Pinyin hard, though.  It doesn't match up exactly to what an English speaker would expect (not that English spelling matches up to pronunciation!).  The vowels, especially, gave me trouble.  Sometimes an "i" would be pronounced as a schwa or wedge.  Min would first say each word on a list, having me repeat.  We would then do that once more.  She said I did that correctly, even with tones.  (She's so patient and nice, though...)  Then, when I had to repeat the whole list, invariably I would make mistakes.  I'm learning.

Min said that each Chinese word has two characters: the one on the left corresponds to the meaning of the word, and the one on the right, the tone.  I should learn that well as a pronunciation helper in the future.  The falling-rising tone goes down really low, too.  If Min can say it, so will I!

 One of the first words I learned from Min was "ni hao," which means "hello."  I've been to China once before, on vacation with my family in 2005.  There, we understood this word to be two syllables.  With Min today, I found that my family and I had all been pronouncing the tones completely wrong.  "Ni" and "hao" each have the falling-rising tone, which makes each one sound like it has about four syllables!  It seems like a lot of travel and learning about other cultures is like that.  Whatever you thought you knew, or learned in your own country, or even from a little bit of travel, is kind of the same but really totally different.  For me, part of the fun of working in this field is that I'll never know all about every language or foreign land, no matter how long I've been teaching.  There will always be more to learn.

About Min

I am pursuing a master's degree in linguistics for teaching English to speakers of other languages.  My university is in the United States, but this year, one of my classmates is Min (not her real name), an English teacher on a fellowship from China.  Min already has a master's degree in linguistics, and teaches English writing, grammar, and linguistics at a prestigious Chinese university.  I'm going to graduate in May, and have been planning to apply for teaching jobs in China.  So when Min offered to teach me basic Mandarin Chinese, I jumped at the chance.  Who wouldn't, when there's a chance to go to China without leaving home?