Teaching on Monday

Today's class went better than the class I had last Thursday.  I the group I had today had better speaking skills than the first class I taught.  I am teaching Spoken English to Chinese students that want to be able to teach Chinese to foreigners.  The main thing I need to do is to get them to talk, and I hope I can build their confidence.  I am going to try to approach this class as a way to show them how they might teach English to western speakers and help them improve their speaking skills.  It seems kind of strange that a welding instructor is going to try and teach Chinese students how to teach Chinese but that is what I am going to try to do.  Next week the assignment is for my students to teach me about the food they like to eat.  I want to learn how to write the characters, read the characters, pronounce the words, and more important what the food is like, and why I should want to eat it.  At least today I had some people engaged in a conversation.  The students are as nervous as I am and I tried my best to help them relax.  I have been working very hard on speaking slowly, and loud enough that they can hear me.  I take extra time to make sure everyone understands what the assignments are.  When they all shake their head yes, I ask them to tell me the assignment, and then I explain it again.  I will see how this goes next week. 
Today at the cafeteria I ordered a fish dish.  I can read the different characters for fish, beef, pork, chicken and tofu.  So I knew I was getting fish, but that is all I knew.  Most of the food we order, we know we are going close but we don't really know what it is until we see it on the plate.  The fish was good but you don't get a fillet here.  The fish is just cut up any which way and fried.  So if you like bones then this is for you.  I would hate to feed this to a young kid.  Everything I have eaten so far has been very good.  I think tomorrow we are going to try one of those egg pancake things that look really good.  They make them at a food stall right outside the campus gate.
I am going to try and meet with my English department chair to discuss the possibility of using the tumble books from the ICC electronic library to see if those materials can help the students improve their speaking and listening.  I can log on to the website and read them on the hotel system.  I plan to show the hotel manager how to use the tumble books.  He is working on improving his speaking skills and he has been helping me to improve my Chinese.  I also can sit in on a Chinese language class tomorrow, so I may do that.
Being in the classroom around these young students has been a wonderful experience.  The CLC students are a great bunch of kids.  Everyone seems to be doing just fine.  They have a wonderful opportunity here and I think they are going to take advantage of it.