Mr Hua's training workshops

Report by Jenny Su, Branch Director

On the first day, Mr Hua gave us another detailed presentation on the TELL Road Map. I found that this time, I finally understood how this educational blueprint worked, and the focus of each learning stage. Teachers need to have a very clear understanding of this in order to plan effective lessons and select supplementary material at each stage of the learning process.

Following on from this, Mr Hua, discussed Hua’s teaching materials and the ways in which they should be used. In particular, the Practice sections in Sound and Spelling should be omitted, in favor of spending more time strengthening students’ speaking ability and fluency skills. For this reason, Mr Hua has been spending a lot of time looking over and selecting supplementary materials that would be suitable for this purpose, and of the appropriate level to match the students’ ability.

With regards to Rhymes and Songs, Mr Hua stressed the correct way in which new material should be presented to students who have already learned several rhymes. After my demonstration, Mr Hua’s feedback regarding the logical flow of my classroom language was particularly useful.
I said, ‘We have learned Rhyme one and Rhyme two. We are going to learn a new rhyme.’ However, Mr Hua pointed out that these two sentences did not link together logically. A better way to link the old and new material would be to say, ‘We have learned two rhymes. We are going to learn a new rhyme.’ Or, ‘We have learned Rhyme one and Rhyme two. We are going to learn Rhyme three.’ In this way there would be more logical balance between the two sentences. This was a reminder to me to pay more attention to the language I use in the classroom. Whenever Mr Hua speaks in the classroom, he not only pays attention to grammar, but also to whether or not he makes logical sense.

In addition, Mr hua discussed the importance of helping students develop good articulation skills by making them aware of the rhythms of the language and the stressed and unstressed syllables or chunks. Tapping out the rhythm is a good way to show students where there needs to be stress or squeezing together of syllables. This is a technique I am now putting into practice in the classroom and the students are also able to join in with me. In terms of correcting students’ articulation and pronunciation, the most effective way is to drill each student individually. Although in the beginning this appears to be a very time-consuming exercise, the results warrant the effort, and the time needed to maintain these skills decreases rapidly later on.

Taking Mr Hua’s Xin Dian class as an example, when Mr Hua taught the class ‘Don’t be the leaf’, he spent a whole lesson drilling the students on speech articulation skills. Last Saturday, when I taught the students a later passage of the same text, because of the work students had already done on stressed and unstressed syllables with Mr Hua, I needed only to present the new vocabulary for students to be able to cover the same amount of material in only forty minutes. These kinds of results show how constant reinforcement of these skills is effective in language teaching.

As we moved onto looking at supplementary materials, Mr Hua chose a selection of texts from the Sounds of Language series for us to practice. ‘What is good teaching material?’ This was the question Mr Hua wanted to address. Firstly, it needs to contain repeated sentence patterns in order to increase students’ exposure to the language and give them more opportunities to practice. This is also the reason we emphasize the importance of drilling rather than worrying about speeding through the curriculum. Focusing on pace often means that students do not gain a solid grounding in the material, or worse, they learn nothing at all. On the other hand, repeated practice means that students have many chances to hear and practice the same material and it will eventually sink in. Therefore repetition is a crucial part of language learning and a teacher has to patiently work on the same things again and again in order to ensure that the students learn well.
Another quality of good supplementary materials, is that they not only teach language, but also contain instructive material.

For example, the text ‘The sun is a star’, not only trains students in articulation skills, but also teaches them about natural sciences. The teacher can use this opportunity to ask students questions in order to check that they understand the contents of the text.

Obviously, the purpose of learning a language is to be able to use it. Therefore another important task that the teacher has is to teach students how to use the language correctly. This is why it is necessary to employ a communicative approach to teach, in order to check that this is being achieved.

Another area that Mr Hua talked about, was the qualities of a good teacher. He specifically used the word ‘霸氣’, which refers to the indisputable power exercised by a feudal lord in ancient times. According to my understanding of what he said, this refers to the way self-assurance manifests itself in a good teacher. Because of his or her expertise and familiarity with the material, a teacher has this kind of authority in the classroom. This demeanor is reinforced not through treating students with a tight-lipped severity, but through constant study and self-improvement on a professional level.

As for myself, I probably fall into the category that Mr Hua describes as ‘客氣’, transient and not yet established in my field. I have some way to go before I reach that point, but hard work will eventually lead to that kind of confident professionalism.

How can we apply the things we learnt in this workshop in the classroom? The skills practiced during the workshop, namely speech articulation; speaking syllable by syllable and chunk by chunk; tapping out the beat to highlight speech rhythms, need to be perfected and used by every teacher. In particular, Mr Hua spent time correcting teachers’ articulation, and each teacher needs to make sure that he / she works on those areas and develops clear articulation before asking the same of his / her students.
As every branch now has access to the Sounds of Language series, teachers need to read through it and select excerpts that they think would be suitable for use in the classroom. During workshops, we can discuss how best to include this supplementary material in our classes.
As for the article ‘The Philosophy of Sounds of Language’, all teachers have been asked to read and learn it to the point of being able to remember and recite sections from memory. In line with Mr Hua’s teaching, teachers must pay particular attention to speech articulation; foreign teachers can play an important part in helping local teachers improve their phrasing and intonation.

Personal targets:

Work hard and stay on track. As Mr Hua always says, there is no reason why a woman should not have an extremely successful career; the most important thing is to be motivated.

Be an effective mediator. Communicate all the skills that Mr Hua taught us to all the teachers in my branch, in order that we can establish a quality benchmark, demonstrating that our methods are really the most effective for Taiwanese learners of English. I need to become an effective medium through which all the knowledge passed on to me can be transmitted to each member of staff in my branch and applied in our work.