First Week in the TEFL in Prague Program

Hello all!

     We officially started our teaching program on Monday! For those who don't know about the program, it is called TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) in Prague and is a month long intensive course that trains us to teach English to non-English speakers. This is a well-respected course through the biggest language company in Prague and our certification can be used at language schools all over the world. We attend class from 9 A.M. - 5 P.M. Monday through Thursday and from 9 A.M. - 12:30 P.M. ending with an optional Czech Language Lesson class. Mariah and I are definitely attending this extra course!  

     So far I can say that the program is indeed as intensive as they say. This week we have already had to teach twice, which is no big deal, but it was definitely unexpected. On Monday we had the pleasure of  watching our excellent instructors teach a demo lesson to the classes that we will be teaching and were asked to prepare a 5-15 minute warm up lesson for the next day.  

     Let me take a minute to tell you about our class. Mariah and I are both placed as teachers with the lower-level English students for now and then will switch to the upper-level class during week three. These are students that are newer to the english language. They don't quite understand sentence structure, they are limited in vocabulary, their accents are still very heavy, and they make PLENTY of mistakes. But here is the beautiful and fun thing, their average ages are about 65! They are ADORABLE! They are so funny (Especially Hana [say it with a long a sound like ah] and Rudolf)! They're incredibly sweet and they just are loving life and loving learning from us and the other instructors before us. They always have smiles on their faces and try their hardest to learn the language.

     Our warmups that we taught yesterday were great! Mariah had them play a "Guess Who" game where they paired up and described someone else in the room. It was very funny. I just chose a topic (technology - of course) and had them discuss the topic and had questions for them. I know what you are thinking, 'Josh their average age is 65, why would you talk about technology?' Well most of them have a smartphone believe it or not! The goal isn't to actually teach them anything. The goal is to get them talking and comfortable. At one point I said to Hana, "What do you do with technology Hana?" she replied, "Nothing, I don't like it, I HATE IT!" and then she burst out laughing! It was hysterical! They were so much fun!

     Today, we attended class in the morning where we learned from our instructor Jarmila (say Yarmila) the correct structure of a reading lesson and how to lesson plan. It was interesting information and actually inspiring to the process of teaching music in many ways. Then we each had to teach a 45 minute lesson in the afternoon to our lower-level class. Talk about stressful!

Jarmila

Figuring out the framework for teaching an EFL student using the Communicative Approach

     I taught first of the three people teaching today. I taught a lesson on illness. Mariah taught a lesson on school. The students loved both of our lessons and were very respectful and seemed to enjoy themselves. We were graded by Jarmila and we both had higher than expected "marks" (as they say here).

    After class, we hopped on the Metro to Anděl (pronounced Ahndyel) with our friends Kacey and Allison and stepped out into a wine and Czech food festival at the shopping plaza. So we quickly weighed our options, "Should we go home to our frozen pizza or have some of this amazing smelling food?" Naturally, we decided to seize the opportunity and bought a massive plate-sized fried potato pancake and a six inch kielbasa with sour dough bread for 80czk (less than $3.74) What a great dinner!

That is all for now! Class tomorrow and Friday with our first Czech language lesson! Stay tuned!