MY SERVICE PROJECT

My service project was to create and teach a ten-week course called "Building Better English Through Storytelling" with a team of teachers. This voluntary fieldwork teaching mainly aimed to connect teachers with the teaching environment and to offer students with efficient language exposure through modern theories being taught at the Graduate School of Education. Therefore, the course objectives were to help students become more confident in reading, writing, and presentation skills. In addition, class activities included reading and telling stories, folk tales, and legends from different countries; writing and revising stories; and building vocabulary. As a result, students improved pronunciation, listening comprehension, and vocabulary throughout the course.

The teaching team consists of five teachers (1 United States of America, 3 South Korea, 1 Jordan). The team taught one ten-week session (32 hours) of "Building Better English through Storytelling" course from October to December 2007 at a language center on one of the local universities in Philadelphia. The class met twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays for about one hour and twenty minutes each. Those classes are afternoon classes open to all non-native English speakers which focus on pronunciation, listening comprehension, and vocabulary. Student's proficiency levels were intermediate and upper-intermediate level and we had two students who were more advanced than the others (1 Japan, 1 Norway). Students came from different ethnic backgrounds representing Japan 1, Norway 1, Korea 5, china 1, Taiwan 2, Thailand 2.

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The two themes I have selected for this service project are based on my experience of team teaching at the Language Center: curriculum design and time management in the classroom.

The reason behind choosing team teaching approach as an overarching theme is that it involves a group of teachers from different cultural backgrounds working regularly, cooperatively, and purposefully to help students learn the language effectively and to gain experience from each others as well. In addition, the team members together set goals for the course, design the syllabus, prepare individual lesson plans, teach students, and evaluate the results. I chose the curriculum design process as my first sub-theme because it was totally new for me and my team members as well. Consequently, we found that designing a curriculum needed more hard work than expected. However, beginning with assessing students' needs and ending with adopting and teaching authentic materials that enhance language acquisition was a unique experience that every graduate student should look for. The purpose of choosing time management as the second sub-theme is that it is consider one of the challenges that are associated with teaching and that teachers have to deal with. Besides that, the time issue could even be more difficult when we team teach rather than having our own class.

Both the knowledge I gained from different courses in the Graduate School of Education, observation class, and my previous experience in teaching English language lead to a better understanding of those issues in language classroom, and what are the practical ways/methods/procedures to deal with them effectively.

Both themes I already introduced above - the curriculum design and time management- are interrelated and have a major impact on the success of teaming teachings approach. As a matter of fact, team teaching was not as straightforward as we had at first imagined. Clearly, some aspects of team teaching could leave little opportunity for teachers' to teach the language for the entire class time, but then the result depends rather more upon how the teachers as a team handle the process, and upon how the students react toward this new approach for them. Moreover, I heavily focused on items which caused concerns for the team which includes curriculum design, different teaching styles and classroom management difficulties that are part of the ongoing routines of running a classroom.

But despite the problems and difficulties we saw considerable values in it, if only because it is likely improve our teaching effectiveness and encouraged us to work harder to enhance our strengths, overcome our weaknesses, and invest more effort in knowing how to connect theory to practice. In addition, this interesting experience gave us the chance to discuss the role of each teacher in the classroom, what type of teaming structure will work for the class, design a full course, Share beliefs, and discuss teaching styles as well.

Finally, I believe that this experience provided me with the necessary tools for teaching English language professionally in my country, where we in deep need for such experiences and modern approaches in language classrooms.