Teaching Experience in the UNA

Last week, I had an amazing teaching experience with my classmate Randall. We prepare two lessons about culture to his Inglés Integrado group. The group has a low-intermediate level and there are 30 students in it. They are students from all Univesidad Nacional Schools.
On Monday 10th, I started the class talking about culture. A brainstorm led the students to express their feelings about culture. Then, we talked about stereotypes. The students had a lot of fun pointing out negative stereotypes about “smelly” countries, extremely confident people, stereotypes about poverty or dirtiness form some social groups in every country, and of course, positive stereotypes as tasty food, wonderful crafts, friendly people and exotic environments.
Now, the mood of the class was ready to work in groups. Students got in groups of 4 or 5 and every group chose an envelope. Each envelope had pictures about well known aspects of an specific culture: United States, France, India, China, Africa and Mexico.
Each group had a big board paper and markers in order to create a descriptive chart about the chosen culture.
The group needed a lot of helping in vocabulary, but the students had a lot of information about every culture, so they shared anecdotes, movies comments, gossips, and more.
The students understood each other very well, and they shared personal supplies as color markers, stickers, glue, and information between work teams.
With the visual aid ready, each group presented to the whole class some aspects about the culture of India, China, United States, France, Africa and Mexico.

They needed a lot of help for the speech but they were enthusiastic and chatty.

For me, the experience with university students was new and I enjoyed it a lot. It is different to teach a second language to children, high school students or adults who want to speak English. These university people are full of dreams, work, experiences and hope. They share what they want to do in a few years: travel and make money to buy all this particular things from some cultures: jewelry, paintings, crafts, and they want to visit museums, parks, monuments, places full of History and magic as the Chinesse Wall, Tah Mahal, Egypt Pyramids, Sahara Desert, New Delhi, and hundreds of exotic places. One of the student talked about visit the Spatial Station MIR and moon walking.

For the Assessment part, they need a lot of help because it was the first time that they use that kind of rubrics. I was glad to read their comments, because they were suportive and nice.

They finished the class time having fun, laughing and asking for new words in English. I felt comfortable with them and I loved the experience. Luckily, I had a second chance with them observing Randall’s teaching performance and that is another good anecdote. Please check his blog to enjoy it: http://cultureanduniverse.blogspot.com/.