kstorm

Hello everyone! My name is Karli, and I too have the pleasure of working with Konstantin Shestakov. I currently teach two online classes a week--one to Russian teenagers, and the other to a small group of business professionals. I am currently a graduate student at Indiana University, and I previously taught English at the University of Languages in Baku, Azerbaijan as a Fulbright ETA. Anyway, I am here to provide you with some of my experiences teaching English to my class of teenagers and professionals. First of all, as you all know, active participation on the part of the students is key. One big difference I have noticed between, say, Russian high school and college students and their counterparts in the U.S. is that, in my experience, U.S. students typically complete their homework assignments. In my class with the Russian teenagers, however, this is not always the case. The female students tend to complete their homework assignments far more regularly than do the male students. From wha (of course this is not always the case!). I can tell this difference appears to have something to do with typical gender roles/stereotypes of males in Russian society. It seems to be more acceptable--or is far more expected--that male students do not always complete their homework or actively participate as often in class as do female students. I must say, though, that there are always exceptions to this particular observation; for example, I have one male student at this time who completes his homework 90-95% of the time and typically does his best to participate in classroom discussion. He joined the course a couple of months ago and is therefore the newest student in the group. His hard work has been paying off, though; he has already caught up to the students in the class (with introductory skills in English) who have studied with me since the beginning of the course. I am also seeing evidence that he is surpassing them in his listening comprehension skills and general communication skills. The one or two students in my class with higher levels of proficiency have also steadily improved in their abilities to understand spoken and written English and in their knowledge of new words and phrases. The aforementioned students are those who also actively try to participate in classroom discussion and for the most part complete their homework on time. I have had a couple of students who, although they began the course with higher proficiency than some of their classmates, have failed to improve much due to their regular absense in classes or their failure to complete the small tasks I've asked of them. It is no surprise that active participation in classroom discussion/asking answering questions and homework completion has, in my experience thus far, contributed positively to the students' abilities to speak and understand English. The higher the level of enthusiasm there is for learning the language, the more a student learns! That said, the students who were obviously only taking my class at their parents' request typically didn't do much in class (or come to class regularly, for that matter). One skill that I have noticed has been difficult to improve is that of the students' abilities to write in English. Being that my courses are taught online, there is only so much that I can do to encourage students to write in English. I use "fill-in-the-blank" and matching exercises in addition to the students' homework tasks (which are often times Power Point presentations). Whereas some students go a great job writing in English for their presentations, naturally I've seen the tendency for students to simply use Russian-English translations generated from an online translation site. This of course results in translations that are often difficult to decipher and contain many errors. What I prefer, in general, is that students come up with something to tell the class, and show the class pictures. I usually don't like to have a whole lot of information written on one slide. My students almost always put everything on their slides, however, and simply read off of them. In most cases I don't think this helps the students to improve their English-speaking abilities (especially when the words were clearly copied and pasted from someplace like Wikipedia or derived from some online translator). My preference is that students use the words that they KNOW...and that they don't use complex words and phrases that they clearly don't understand and won't use spontaneously later. Using new vocab is great (when you spend time learning those new words and phrases and aren't simply regurgitating information from someplace else). Anyway, those are my impressions. It was been wonderful working with Konstantin Shestakov; he has wonderful ideas for topics, discussions, and teaching formats, and I have already learned a lot from him. If more students had such teachers, then English proficiency among non-native speakers would quickly improve!