Advice on GEPT teaching methods

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
1

Hello, recently my boss has taken over Chinese teacher duties of my GEPT class. However, she wants me to change my teaching style. She wants the whole class to answer (21 students) at the same time, but all give personal answers. So 21 different answers at the same time… She also wants me to listen to all the answers, chose a couple and give feedback after each question. All i hear is noise. Am i going crazy? This doesnt seem normal to me.

Also out of interest how do you all teach GEPT? I wouls like to improve if i can, and would be very greatful of any advice or to learn different styles.

2

I know this isn’t very helpful, but your boss is an idiot. :loco:

3

Yeah, she must be messing with you. Or she’s insane. One of those two.

4

Could be both.

I’ve just finished evaluating something a bit like that. (See “Testing Summer School Effectiveness”).

I wasn’t involved in the testing, but I gather they all had wee MP3 recording gizmo’s they spoke their answers into, and all the sound files were collected and given to lucky me.

Since they were all in the same room, even with this techno approach there was quite a lot of cross-talk. I often couldn’t tell whether the subject was completely silent and I was listening to the neighbour, or just a bit soft-spoken.

If they ask me to do it again I’ll tell them to fuck off.

In your situation I suppose, IF it was feasable resource-wise, which it almost certainly isn’t, you could use it to bluff them into thinking their response might be sampled at random, so they make an effort, but I doubt it’d be that much better than practice-then-pick-victim.

5

Ducked, i believe thats also what they do in the exam. Every student will speak at same time, but into individual microphones and examiner will listen to each individually. I tried to explain this, but i dont think the boss understands.

How do you usually teach gept speaking classes?

6

see below

7

[quote=“leonard221”]Ducked, I believe thats also what they do in the exam. Every student will speak at same time, but into individual microphones and examiner will listen to each individually. I tried to explain this, but I don’t think the boss understands.

How do you usually teach gept speaking classes?[/quote]

Well, not to detract from your boss’s idiocy, but the same idiocy is pretty standard in the speaking section of many textbooks.

My favoured sophomore textbook (American English File 3) has been extensively messed-up and dumbed-down in its new edition, and now looks a lot more like my text-book-from-hell, American (Air)Headway, perhaps because the latter is apparently commercially successful.

There is a lot of idiocy about.

Some of this idiocy takes the form of “Listen again and make notes. Compare with a partner. Ask and answer the questions with a partner. What do you have in common.”

Seriously?

IF they did ANY of that (which is doubtful) in a standard 40-50 student class that’s going to produce an un-moniter-able and un-assessable cacophany such as you describe.

With this kind of thing the best I can do is to have a fixed seat-plan with column groups, and circulate doing a clipboard pantomime and interjecting occaisionally while they “practice”, but I’m usually only recording FU levels of non-participation for penalty points, if anything.

I then pick a pair of victims random-ishly in each group, and the group shares their score. IF I was together enough to ensure everyone gets picked as a victim over the semester I could give indiv scores as well, but I havn’t been so far.

I don’t teach GEPT, but I think this is a general problem.

Since they lied to me both about limiting class size and selecting for ability for the forthcoming IELTS course (which were my pre-conditions for running it) , I’ll probably have to use the Babel-Room indiv microphone technique for the speaking test, since an IELTS stylee indiv. interview isn’t logistically feasable.