A self-promotional video for an English teacher in Alcorcón, Spain:
Hello, my name is Steven Starry from MadridTeacher.com. I am an English (as a foreign language) teacher looking for special students for INTENSIVE English classes. In this “self-promotional” video I will summarize the main points of my “INTENSIVE program” for prospective students in my area IN and around the town of Alcorcón, just south of Madrid, Spain.
Though, I will probably eventually offer this same program via a webcam, after I get a little more comfortable with using this technology, or after the technology gets a little easier to use.
This SELF-study method is for very SERIOUS “autonomous” students with a LOT of initiative who absolutely MUST progress faster WITHOUT paying as much as in academies. My main objective with THIS program is to serve just a few young or middle-aged adults who might have recently lost their jobs or who might be currently attending a university or official school of languages, and who REALLY need to improve their level of English QUICKLY for future job interviews, and jobs.
I require that students work a LOT and study a minimum of 7 hours a week, including the one-hour class session, but possibly even longer for up to 11 hours a week, every week, while they only actually attend a one-hour session weekly, where most of what they will do is to present ORALLY via spoken presentations what they will have studied and MEMORIZED during the previous week. Again, a minimum of 7-11 hours a week is OBLIGATORY, 11 is preferable, more hours are optional. What does “OBLIGATORY” mean? Well, the classes depend on your doing the homework. If you don’t do the homework, I’ll have to cancel the classes.
In any case, in these sessions, I will test progress, answer questions, make suggestions, notice and correct errors, help practice dialogs, explain the usage of grammar and vocabulary, assign ABUNDANT homework, and so on. The usual thing. Oh, and by the way, I’ll speak more SLOWLY if it’s necessary for lower level students, and more QUICKLY for more advanced students.
In offering this program with its “OBLIGATORY” homework, I’m PAINFULLY aware that though students need us teachers to keep them centered, they also need us to be “friendly,” especially when we frequently must have EQUITABLE, or level eye-to-eye, conversation with them for them to progress in their speaking. UNFORTUNATELY, for most students being “FRIENDLY” includes our NOT being too forceful or heavy-handed, a sergeant in other words, about things that are perfectly obvious. And, also UNFORTUNATELY, telling students to study MORE must sound somewhat like telling smokers to stop smoking. It’s perfectly OBVIOUS, but they don’t want to hear it anyway. Smokers do NOT want to hear that they must stop smoking and students do NOT want to hear that they must study more. It’s human nature.
Students generally find studying SO difficult that they will do almost ANYTHING instead of studying. For me, the ULTIMATE and most RADICAL excuse for not doing ANY homework, or studying, or working, or sacrificing ANYTHING at all, is to BELIEVE, as many students do, that the ONLY way to learn really English well is to travel abroad to England to live and work for 6 months JUST to learn it. It’s like THROWING a kid into the deep end of the swimming pool just to teach him how to swim. Ok, so maybe they’ll learn how to swim or how to speak English, but there really is a much LESS radical solution.
I BELIEVE that there are a few things that students MUST do if they really want to ADVANCE, in their own home (and these are required in my “INTENSIVE” classes, by the way).
Firstly, the students MUST take responsibility for their own learning, and remain DECISIVE and motivated despite the difficulties and DISTRACTIONS. This includes coping with emotional and psychological difficulties. They need a certain level of emotional intelligence. For example, in my experience, NO student ever wants to MEMORIZE vocabulary or ANALYZE and PRACTICE grammar for very long because it’s “SLOW,” “DIFFICULT,” “STRESSFUL” and/or “BORING,” (that’s the emotional part) or simply “I don’t have enough time,” but both grammar and vocabulary are absolutely ESSENTIAL if students want to progress. Students CANNOT progress as quickly by simply having the same conversation class again and again REPETITIVELY about their one or two main hobbies, for instance football and tennis, which they would in fact consider, such classes as, “FAST,” “EASY,” “RELAXED,” and “INTERESTING.”
95% of life is “ROUTINE,” which is a synonym of “BORING,” and only the other 5% is “INTERESTING,” which is a synonym of “NEW” and “DIFFERENT” and “ENTERTAINING,” but many students actually prefer that we English teachers only prepare them for the “INTERESTING” bits. What about all the other areas of “ROUTINE” vocabulary and grammar that students must learn? These are things like language for shopping and speaking on the telephone. What’s exciting about THAT?! It’s USEFUL, but students actually always want us to be able to make that sort of thing FUN like on some quiz show on TV. We truly are the “television” and “Playstation” generation.
There ARE a few students who are apparently happy advancing little-by-little or simply maintaining their current level, but they’re DREAMING if they think they can advance fast without putting a lot of hours of work and sacrifice into it. Students generally complain about English teachers because they say, for example, that they don’t understand people in the shops when they go to England, or when they speak to a British guy on the telephone, but generally speaking, students RESIST letting English teachers teach them these “BORING” things, and we English teachers tend to be guilty of being patient accomplices to this “COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE” attitude. It is very difficult for teachers to teach without COOPERATION. It takes two to tango.
Secondly, to really INTERNALIZE an area of vocabulary words – for example, a glossary of words that have to do with the world of “television” such as “to broadcast,” “episode” and “sitcom” - and its related grammar – for example, “what did you watch on TV last night?”, to really INTERNALIZE an area of vocabulary words they’ve got to use it ACTIVELY, by perhaps giving very focused presentations which they will preferably have written out first giving them plenty of time to remember, analyze, prepare, practice and memorize all of it in a very relaxed, personal context, AND place. Basically, students remember a LOT more when it’s more personal and when they actually have to produce or teach something ACTIVELY than when they just sit and listen, as if teachers were a television program. And if they prefer to learn the vocabulary and grammar passively, it’s in one ear and out the other, which is largely a waste of time. They have to activate it. So, basically, much of the learning in my INTENSIVE program comes in the preparation phase at home when the students have to work with the language at a deeper more personal level away from DISTRACTIONS, and then again later in the production phase in class.
In other words, regarding the concepts of “PASSIVE” and “ACTIVE,” students, all of us, have two types of knowledge: a larger PASSIVE knowledge on one side and a much smaller ACTIVE knowledge on the other. Normally, most of us, for example, PASSIVELY recognize 15,000 or 25,000 words in our own languages, but we only ACTIVELY use just a few thousand. What this means is that if you read or listen to a text like this one and you can understand it and it sounds familiar, that is at least PASSIVE knowledge. If you can EASILY write a very similar text or say something similar in a similar way yourself, that is ACTIVE knowledge.
Doing HOMEWORK HELPS to ACTIVATE your PASSIVE knowledge. A lot of students prefer conversation, I think, because at LEAST it is active (and personal, so therefore interesting and memorable): speaking and writing are more ACTIVE than passive skills such as reading and listening, which are more passive than active. In other words, students learn how to speak English by speaking. The main problem with just having CONVERSATION classes is that students can easily and quickly reach a plateau and stop growing because it is very easy to always use simple grammar constructions such as the present and past simple for just about EVERYTHING. The same thing goes for using simpler vocabulary, for example, “NICE” instead of “beautiful,” “wonderful,” and so on. Students tend to have difficulty making PASSIVE knowledge ACTIVE, transferring passive to active, or ACTIVATING PASSIVE knowledge. When students are speaking actively, for example, they might not remember the words they need. They HAVE the vocabulary, they RECOGNIZE it if they see it in a text, but when they are speaking, it sometimes just doesn’t come, and neither does the grammar. Well, when students PREPARE to make a word or grammar structure ACTIVE for a spoken presentation, they won’t ever forget it as easily.
In any case, most conversation classes just do not have a preparation phase where students can practice passing this PASSIVE knowledge over to their ACTIVE side, and unfortunately it’s too easy to cheat, or use other vocabulary words. And, there’s always the temptation for passive students is to get comfortable with a mediocre level and/or a patient and forgiving English teacher, but the moment they get comfortable with mediocrity, they will ironically also lose the MOTIVATION to even continue at the same time. In my experience, and it’s ironic, nothing motivates as much as an exam preparation class. You know, “setting and meeting objectives.”
Thirdly, let me again EMPHASIZE that students MUST dedicate enough (and what is “ENOUGH” will depend on the individual student), students must dedicate ENOUGH time every week to ANALYZING the English language on an INTELLECTUAL level, and memorizing and practicing the same things repetitively, not once, but AGAIN and again. This will mean READING and LISTENING to lots of texts and recordings in English to decipher and understand them and then examining and analyzing the parts, or the vocabulary and grammar.
By the way, I will also assign a SONG, I hope, (or poem or other entertaining and/or cultural lyrical text) for students to listen to and MEMORIZE every week. And here’s ANOTHER one of those psychological obstacles I mentioned earlier because students will probably feel RIDICULOUS singing this song over and over again to memorize it, ESPECIALLY if there are people around. But, I believe it will help them to learn a lot of PRONUNCIATION and vocabulary. I will test this in the next class by asking something like, for example, “Pretty woman, walking down the . . . ? (street)” And I will elicit some of the rest of the song looking for ways that I can help with pronunciation. By the way, repetition is important for memory, and it’s easier to memorize vocabulary if you repeat it in a song, and something that’s relevant culturally speaking.
The funny thing is that adult students generally do NOT tolerate “SLOW” and “BORING” any more than children do: “are we there yet?”, “have we learned English yet?,” “is this interesting yet?,” but IRONICALLY, if I make learning the vocabulary more interesting and memorable, or easy to remember, by finding it in a song and asking the students to study it and memorize it, they might actually feel too ridiculous or who knows what to really do it, not to mention the fact that most students do not do their homework in the first place, unless it’s obligatory of course. But, songs ARE a fun way to learn and practice vocabulary and pronunciation, the mechanics of speaking in other words, outside of the class.
Fourthly, students have GOT to dedicate a MINIMUM number of hours to learning per week every week in a CONSTANT way. In my experience with group classes, it’s really EASY to identify the students who are studying persistently every week and the students who are NOT because the students who are ALWAYS studying ALWAYS advance faster. The same thing goes for punctuality and attendance. In any case, just two or three hours a week will NOT be enough for most students who want to advance quickly. It’s unreal. It’s a FANTASY. And anyone who tells you ANY different is foolish or cheating you. There are companies saying that you CAN, but you CANNOT learn enough English with just 1,000 words or in 30 hours to have a good-enough level to pass most JOB INTERVIEWs or to really use it SATISFACTORILY on the job on a daily basis. It just WILL NOT HAPPEN. In fact, if you become obsessed with shortcuts or magic pills, there are plenty of shameless scoundrels out there to take your money.
What’s MORE is that learning English is like going up the down escalator, a moving stairway, which keeps getting faster and faster the higher you climb. NOBODY, but NOBODY, remembers 100% of what they learn in one class session or EVEN 20% unless they spend time reviewing and practicing it. If you don’t dedicate enough time in the correct way, you’re WASTING your time because you just won’t REMEMBER much of what you’ve learned. A key factor in MEMORY is REPETITION, repetition and repetition. INTEREST is also important, but INTEREST is very personal, so it’s UP TO YOU to make learning English interesting. For example, when I give you a topic to prepare, say “television,” it’s up to you to find what’s interesting TO YOU about this particular topic, and to prepare to speak about THAT in your presentation. The BONUS is that because you are interested in that to begin with, you are more likely to need and use the vocabulary and grammar that you actually end up USING in your presentation in REAL LIFE out on the street. This will make the lessons a whole lot more MEMORABLE for you personally.
Finally, in order to attend my classes my students will have to already have or get some basic equipment and materials such as some textbooks, a computer, a microphone, a sound-editing program, an internet connection, Gmail, and so on. You can’t fly without an airplane.
Thank you for listening. My name is Steven Starry from MadridTeacher.com. By the way, you can find the text of this video on my profile webpage on MadridTeacher.com.
The text of the video.
