A Report on a Short-term English Training Course

王淑娟

On the morning of July 17th, 2009, the English train-ing programme for teachers from primary and high schools was launched as scheduled, which was jointly sponsored by the Education Bureau of Tongzhou, Jiangsu Province and Canadian Bond Education Group. Six experts in Eng-lish teaching were invited to carry through the short-term training programme for 300 English teachers from 90 schools in this area. Mrs Silvia, the chief of the experts, said on the opening ceremony, that they were very glad to give lectures in Tongzhou and very happy to have such a chance to exchange their teaching experience and, share teach-ing fruits with us. It was reported that this training course was a cooperative project which involved the Bond Educa-tion Group, one of the largest private education institutes with the longest history of engagement in international co-operations in Ontario, Canada. The training class was di-vided into two batches, one from July 18th to July 28th, the other from July 29th to August 7th, each with 150 teachers who were grouped into two seniors, two juniors and two primaries. The six experts carried out six hours of teaching exchange activities respectively with the six groups every day.

Fortunately, I, as a rural English teacher, took the opportunity to participate in this course. During 10 days training I really learned a lot. So gladly, I am eager to share it with all of you.

For us junior groups, we were pleased to have Nancy and Pauline as our teachers, both from Toronto University. So here Id like to present you with the teaching arrange-ment for the training course.

Below is what I have learned from the training course.

1.Responsible and hardworking teaching attitudes. Although it was a short-term training course, Nancy and Pauline got well prepared for each class. They brought so many teaching materials to the class, such as pens of all colours, magazines, newspapers, music-player, hand-outs, ad-hesive tapes, maps of Canada, even a piece of contract with initials on it. And they worked really hard for long hours. Everyday, they had to work six hours with a short break at the lunch time, that is three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, almost without any rest between the classes. We Chinese teachers seldom work like this. We dont work for so long hours. So all of us ad-mire them very much for their teaching attitudes.

2.Useful teaching skills and advanced teaching theories. From this training course, I have learned a lot, such as how to do a survey and a presentation, how to use marking symbols, how to present the students with pictures, diagrams clearly and quickly, the ways to concentrate on a certain topic and explore more about the related one, how to display the students works, how to build the students vocabulary with songs, poems, magazines, how to evaluate writings with RUBRIC and so on. In a word, I acquired many useful teaching techniques from it.

3.Western classroom cultures. From the training course, I also find some differences between Chinese classroom cultures and western ones. For example, western teachers always write down the date and the number of at-tendances at the upper right corner of the blackboard ev-eryday; but we, never. Another example, western teachers frequently change students seats, sometimes arranged in a line, sometimes in a circle, sometimes in a rectangle, sometimes nose to nose, now and then back to back; but we, seldom.

4.The spirit of working as a volunteer. All of the six experts were voluntary. They came along from a distant country in such a hot summer. Almost everyday they were wet all over because of sweat. Their actions are so good example of devotion to all of us that everyone should learn from them.

5.Active and optimistic philosophy of life. Though not young in age, Nancy and Pauline are full of passion and enthusiasm for their work like the young. They walked around the classroom and communicated with us ceaseless-ly; they danced and sang in the classroom happily; they were so humorous and exaggerative that the whole class bursted out loud laughters from time to time. Compared with them, we are in our twenties, thirties or forties, much younger than them. But some of us are reluctant to work and waiting to retire. What a different philosophy of life!Having realized this, I will learn from them and live mean-ingfully in the rest of my life.

The training course was a great success. Even though there were some weaknesses, such as cell phones ringing, some absences from the course, the defects couldnt ob-scure the virtues. It improved our teaching skills, renovated our teaching ideas and provided us with a wonderful plat-form for growing. I hope more and more training courses of this kind will be launched in the future.

(责编 周侯辰)