How the internet help me improve my teaching career.

Tran Thi Lien Huong.

Making class times more and more interesting and motivating to students is a desire

of almost every teachers in the world. I am not an exception. From the time I chose the

job as a teacher of English until now, I have done my best to find out many different

ways to vary my lesson plans and make my class times become the most wanted ones in

the eyes of my students. To do this, I keep learning from other teachers who work near

me and also those who are so far away from me to enrich my teaching techniques. This

seems to be impossible for those teachers in the 1980s-1990s in Viet Nam, but it ok for

me now with the help of the internet.

When I was trained to be a teacher of English over ten years ago, I found teaching

knowledge of English really hard and boring. In those lessons, teacher often talked or

read, and then students wrote down all the things. After that, the students tried to learnt

by heart at home and they were asked to show how well they did in the next lesson.

Teaching pronunciation was also a hard work. The sources were not available at that

time. If someone were lucky enough, they found some, but not in good condition. The

teacher and students sometimes had to study without all the necessary facilities. The

teacher tried to pronounce sounds in the most correct way she could, and the students

repeated. That’s why it was so easy for them to make pronuciation mistakes. Sometimes,

they made mistakes but they did not know because the teacher, when having no good

sources to compare or for any reasons, made the same ones. I became the teacher of

English in the transition stage. I got the old training but had to teach with modern and

update ways because that is the only way to help me live on my job. Improving my
knowledge and teaching techniques day by day is a need for me to catch up with changes

happening in life and also in English education. I started it by searching with some key

words on http://google.com and now on http://google.com.vn . A new world opened for

me from that time. I have found a lot of website assisting me in my teaching. With

teaching knowledge of English, I can have some help from such websites as

http://www.uoregon.edu , http://searchenglish.britishcouncil.org, http://eleaston.com,

http://www.manythings.org, http://www.dailygrammar.com/, www.jamaby.com,

http://www.onestopenglish.com/, http://esl-lounge.com/, etc. Teaching pronuciation now

is an interesting work with the help from http://international.ouc.bc.ca/pronuciation/,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/wordsandpictures/index.shtml, etc. I can also provide my

students with a lot of techniques coming from the experience of many English learners all

over the world to study English better and faster. With such websites as

http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/ , http://puzzlemaker.school.discovery.com, I can get a

variety of puzzles for revisions, and I can make some myself to make my classtimes

relaxable and fuuny to my students. I also join some groups to share teaching experience

and get advice in some cases. The teaching now is my passion and favourite work.