No teaching experience but how to prepare for interview?
April 24, 2012 8:08 PM   Subscribe

I'm in Korea and I have an interview coming up with an institute (hagwon) as an English instructor. I have no teaching experience but my recruiter would like me to prepare something to say about the curriculum I intend to use...

I have an interview coming up tomorrow with a hagwon. I have no teaching experience, except for some tutoring I did back home, but I'm not sure if my recruiter made them aware of the fact. Regardless, the recruiter suggested I prepare something concerning the curriculum and teaching materials I plan to use as an instructor. This school is supposedly more 'intensive' rather than a casual English class, according to the recruiter.

I really have no idea in terms of what type of curriculum I plan to implement. If a school is more 'intensive', wouldn't they have a curriculum in mind already and provide all the necessary teaching materials?

Any ideas?
posted by AngryTypingGuy to Work & Money (3 answers total)
 
They'll probably have a curriculum already. However, you'll likely have to supplement it with your own materials. It might be useful to have an idea of what a typical lesson looks like. For an hour class, this is typical: review last class and/or warm up activity for today's lesson (10 mins), grammar/vocabulary exercise (15-20 mins), freer practice activity (20 mins), review/error correction (10 mins). If you don't know how to structure a lesson, and you don't know what activities look like, buy a book on teaching English. Kyobo will have lots. Good luck!
posted by smorange at 12:43 AM on April 25, 2012


SDAIE strategies like visual vocabulary charts and sentence frames will help students access and produce conversational and academic language in class. Google SDAIE and look into ways you can support these English language learners by providing them the supports they'll need to effectively learn English vocabulary, grammar, and colloquialisms (so they don't en up sounding formal and robotic). You'll probably need to model prosody as well -- that's reading and speaking aloud in the target language in a normal, natural way. Also, how will you help students practice their newly acquired language skills? Depending on the age of the students (sounds like they're adult learners?) you can use partner talk and group discussion to great effect, particularly when trying out sentence frames that you've modeled.
posted by These Birds of a Feather at 2:52 AM on April 25, 2012


How much do you trust your recruiter? I agree that it seems odd that a hagwon which does 'intensive tutoring' is going to give you much freedom in terms of syllabus. It could be that this is just the standard suggestion that your recruiter gives to all candidates, regardless of institution, because it works for a lot of them.

To be honest, there's no way you're going to learn enough in a few hours to be able to bluff your way through curriculum design if you have no teaching experience with an interviewer who has the first clue what they're doing. On the other hand, they could be fairly incompetent at recruitment and looking for you to jump through a few hoops. Given either scenario, the best you could do would be to read a few articles about English teaching syllabus design and materials to get an idea of the issues.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 10:55 AM on April 25, 2012


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