Hello everybody,

I'm new to the site, it seems a really friendly place for discussion of these matters. I chose to register and tell you all about my situation as I'm somewhat out of the loop, as far as getting the opportunity to discuss thing with people working in more usual TEFL/TESOL situations goes.

I took the Trinity course in the UK this summer and, through a series of random twists of fate, found myself in an amazing job in Poland. Not, like I'd expected, working in a school, but as a full time member of staff in a company which is determined to learn English.

The company itself is totally unique, extremely easy going and friendly. They are very open with me and give me a free reign, which of course has some disadvantages at times as well as the obvious benefits.

My job has taken a couple of months to settle into some kind of routine fit for description, but it goes something like this: Three mornings per week, I teach 1 1/2 hour lessons to 2 different ability level classes. These begin at 7am, an hour before the usual start of our working day. As you can imagine, attendance flucuates quite unpredictably and it can be quite difficult to energise these groups of weary volunteers into dynamic conversation filled classes at such an hour, and with the prospect of a full day's work ahead of them.

After that, I spend time working on various projects of my own, such as; an in-house English language newspaper (this, I hope, will become a pivotal part of my overall teaching plan, provide materials, impetus and plenty of opportunities for practising English as my colleagues will be interviewing each other, submitting articles etc. and will hopefully give me a good way of guaging their improvements over time), and I've been creating things like an email style guide, a phrasebook for the field workers (who are currently outside my general teaching remit), stock phrases for contracts and offers, little themed pamphlets about idioms, "Word of the Day" emails and such. It is very hard to plan a day's work though as the majority of my time is spent when somebody comes and asks me for help translating documents from and into Polish, checking their English communications, letters and emails or even scripts for presentations. The result of this is that I can go from one minute feeling like a bit of a spare part to suddenly finding myself leaving the office 4 hours past the usual finishing time having worked together with one of the guys on some excruciating jargon filled document or another..

A good deal of time is even spent simply loitering around the corridors and coffee room engaging in conversation with everybody. It is hard to regard such stuff as work though really it is probably of great benefit to them and gets everybody thinking in English - they never know when I might just show up!

Anyway, sorry for waffling on so long there..

I've started to feel lately that the honeymoon period is over, and some of lessons in the mornings are becoming increasingly amorphous and directionless and certainly a long way from the style I practised in my TEFL training. My learners seem to enjoy them, and numbers are holding up well, but I'm not totally satisfied with it. I have a tendency in real life (as well as on forums ;)) to go off on long winding stories. At that time of the morning, people seem more than happy to let some eccentric raconteur regale them with jokes and tales and duck out of participating themselves. They seem to have learnt already that just a few a moments hesitation will result in me picking up the baton and give them another 20 minutes to sit back and relax!

I haven't been using a syllabus as such, and have rather just focused on what I perceive as common mistakes, common 'avoidances' and just the things that I see them needing to use frequently in their business and personal lives. This has been fairly successful up to now, but I can forsee me running out of ideas or the overall scheme of work losing its shape completely like this. They also could do with a system that enables them better to see that they are making improvements day by day.

So, really I'm just feeling a little bit out on a limb at times, I'd love to hear of any stories you might have about teaching in unusual situations, to hear any words of advice you guys might have. 

How to get conversation classes moving.... ideas for generating English practise outside of the lessons ("English zones" - internal telephone 'chinese whispers' style notation practice, are some of the types of things I do..)

Anyway, I hope I haven't bored you all to death and look forward to hearing from you!

Czesc!

Chris

below you will find one of my 'idiom' sheets that I dish out every couple of weeks..

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