Reflections from my summer internship at my High School
by Tianzhe Chen
Over the summer I worked as a practice teacher in my high school, Harbin Normal University High School. My job contains classroom management as well as English teaching. Through these 34 days practicing, I have more thoughts towards English education, the profession of teacher and my previous students experience. In this blog, I’m going to focus on English education problems.
When I started to teach English, I often designed lots of group discussion activities for students. I thought these activities can help students broaden their mind as well as improve their English expression skill. However, the fact isn’t satisfied: students don’t participate in these activities, they just talk irrelevant things or stay quiet. When I asked them about their thoughts, nearly no one answered me.
The situation is different when coming to activities that related to reading. Most students would participate and gave right answers. Reflecting on this problem, I think that I can find answer though English learning pattern in China. Chinese English teachers often pay more attention on reading and writing, since these two skills are tested a lot in English exam. In contrast, English listening and speaking skills aren’t paid attention to in English exam. Let me take my city as an example. When I was a high school student, we were announced that we didn’t need to pay much attention to Listening test during the college entrance exam, since no matter which answer you choose, you will all get the full mark. Additionally, although we have speaking test during the college entrance exam, no matter what you say, you can get the full mark. Under this condition, students have to do lots of exercises that related to writing and reading. In my high school time, many students can get nearly full mark on English reading tests. However, if you ask them to read English text, they will read it stumbling.
The situation I mentioned above comes from “exam-oriented education’’ (Kirickpatrick & Zang, 2011). Students are only asked to learn things that related to pass exams (Kirickpatrick & Zang, 2011). Meng etal. (2021) agree with it and point out that this English education can enhance students to become English learners who get high marks but be poor at English skills. An example comes from IELTS (2022) has demonstrated the harm of this education more clearly: the mean Speaking score of Chinese IELTS testers is 5.6, which is 1.7 lower than the highest one. Additionally, the mean Listening score of Chinese IELTS testers is 6.1, and this mark is 0.9 lower than the highest one. This example shows the problem of exam-oriented education significantly since Chinese students has such a big gap in comparison with other countries students. As a result, for teachers, they should try to do something for students that under “exam-oriented education’’. For example, my high school English teacher often asked students to describe their weekends on Monday. This method is really helpful, since the question is easy for students to think and answer. Because they have done the essays related to this question before, so that they could know about what to say. Although it is a easy one, it can still help students improve speaking skills through their English expression.
As a practice teacher, I also tried my best to help students improve their English skills. For instance, I used English to teach, which can help them improve listening skills. Moreover, I tried my best to encourage them to express their thoughts during group discussion activities. I walked around the classroom to help them think of questions and provided them some clues. Instead of asking people to talk about their thoughts , I used the attendance book to ensure they would share their thoughts. Although it is compulsive, yet I can hear their thoughts. I know that as a practice teacher, my help is really limited. However, when seeing some of them could volunteer to provide their thoughts, I felt that my efforts weren’t wasted.
In next week’s blog I will share my reflections on classroom management.
Tianzhe Chen is a student on the BA Education, Culture and Childhood at The University of Sheffield.
