ESL Teacher

Although I now teach in a mixed-culture ESL classroom, I’m still always on the lookout for newspaper articles that are relevant to one of the countries of origin of my students. As I often have a large proportion of Korean students in my class, I tend to use interesting (and often quite unusual) stories about happenings in Korea – it helps the quiet Koreans have something to tell the rest of the class about, and my other students are also usually interested because Korea has such a different culture to theirs.

Recently, for example, I used an article about “smile training” that was a great success – I’d already heard from some of my students that their companies had given them special training on smiling at their customers. And this week I found an article about the pretty inappropriate behavior of Korean politicians which also amused both parts of my class. But in the past I’ve also used stories about famous pop stars in Colombia (and of course the famous (and beautiful) Shakira was included there) and the lack of small talk in German companies; the key is just to pick something that is unique and therefore interesting for most of the class.

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