Chinese Business Culture

Today we had my friend Michael from Canada on a Skype call for the class. C had his personal laptop with portable Internet with him for us to get connected and after some technical disturbances we were finally on-line and talking to Michael. He told us a little about his background, being Chinese originally but with most of his life lived in Canada. The focus of the class was his recent experience working in China for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. The session resulted to be the best one so far according to my students. /JAW

Presentation Skills: Body Language

Last class I wanted to see the presentation skills of my new students in action, with special attention on their body language while presenting in front of a group. First, we read through a study about body language as a presentation skill, starting out questioning "While you're talking, what is your body saying?". As we all know, eye-contact, hand-movements, stance and the tone of voice are important details when conveying a message, these to be in accordance with the content of what we say. Interestingly, a point I hadn't put much thought to before is the fact that it's not enough to feel comfortable as a presenter, being relaxed and natural when speaking, but depending on the size of the audience you'd have to scale up the expressions, the power and body language behind everything you say in order for the audience to feel comfortable too.

In conclusion, my students made a 5-minute presentation each, and it was obvious that they have much experience in presenting their work.

/JAW

Reference: http://totalcommunicator.com/body_article.html

Lie To Me - Great TV

This month was initiated with a 10 minutes long section of a great new TV-series. First class with the material we worked with a 2-minute section only, focusing on understanding an interrogation with a suspect (the bad guy) his lawyer, a scientist and the FBI behind the spotlights. The idea was to understand the scene first by only listening to the interrogation. I (the teacher) knew this was a relatively advanced group, but I was much surprised that on the very first listening my students could identify correctly the main characters, and that the scene was an interrogation. To know that the interrogator was the scientist was not too easy though, but on a the second listening things started to become clearer. Additionally, the scientist was British, which added to the difficulty of understanding the otherwise already fast English.

A couple of listenings, a checking of complicated vocabulary in the transcript and a full-video watch later, the complete picture was revealed. An interesting topic with focus on body-language and "micro-expressions" was very much welcomed by the students as a part of their English comprehension progress. Let's see how much more of this we'll include in the forthcoming sessions.

/JAW

A Teacher Writes

I started classes for a new group today. Excellent group! Very pleasant and amusing people. Well, mostly they are here in Colombia. The great thing about this group is that it's relatively advanced and the members really enjoy talking, and don't have any problems with shyness or embarrassment and simply find the way to express themselves. The group consists of three gentlemen and one lady. I'll call them C, J, G and V for now.

First class I introduced myself as an education economist, presenting my masters thesis briefly and initiated a conversation/debate concerning private schools vs public schools for the poor. Since it's a quite controversial topic the discussion was interesting to follow. C told the story about his own education back in the days when teachers used to hit the students with rulers, contrasting this to todays situation with complete lack of discipline in many schools, although in no way implying that the old days were better. J mentioned that the different opinions in the school of his children, where some argue that small children in the age of 5-6 should be able to do whatever they want, whereas others argue that guidelines and rules need to be reinforced.

V had a funny example with her 4-year-old niece who invites her instead of her own mother to children's parties since the mother is too strict. On the other, hand with the freedom of her aunt she goes crazy and seems to act totally without control. The different philosophies of child education and up-bringing is highly interesting and the topic really deserves to be studied before practiced.