How Does an EFL Teacher Teach Discipline?
In the comments of my last post, user Hopfrog asked about being too tolerant or too strict in class, which got me thinking about discipline in general. It’s always hard to establish fair discipline in the classroom, but EFL teachers face a few other obstacles. They typically don’t speak the native language, so verbally reprimanding bad students doesn’t work. Nor does trying to explain a complicated rewards system, because they just won’t get it. Foreigners, particularly in China, are also seen as a funny novelty and are rarely taken seriously as professional teachers. So how does an EFL teacher discipline their classes?
I wish I knew…
The Chinese teachers always made the naughty students stand up, so I tried that several times with mixed results. The middle school students would turn quiet whenever they had to stand, but the primary kids would either keep talking to their friends or take this as an opportunity to wander around the room. If I turned my back on them, they’d just sit down again. It got to the point where I had to take their chairs away, and if they still acted out, I made them wear their backpacks, too. Believe me, I don’t like that it had to come to that, and I was always trying to think of a better solution.
When I taught for ILP, we used a system that rewarded the kids with tokens whenever they spoke the target phrase correctly or what have you. This was to encourage them to listen and participate so they could earn enough tokens to exchange for prizes at the end of the day. In theory, tokens are a great idea, but in practice, in the hands of inexperienced teachers, it easily falls apart. 70% of the time my students fought, they were fighting over tokens. If they felt like they deserved a token, but I didn’t give them one, they threw a fit and stopped participating. They usually only paid attention long enough to get a token, anyway, and gave up if you weren’t dishing them out fast enough.
I liked the idea of students being rewarded in some way for participating, but when I started teaching classes of 50 in Changzhou, I couldn’t afford to give candy or prizes to everyone. I had hoped that just calling attention to their good or bad behavior would be enough, whether it was drawing smiley and frowny faces on the chalkboard or putting green and yellow cards in a bag. Only the good kids cared about me assessing their behavior, though, while the bad kids just wanted to see how many yellow cards I would put in before giving up. In the case of the bag, near the end of class, we would take out a card. If it was green, we played a game for the last five minutes. Some classes responded well to this, but most just didn’t care.
It’s frustrating when everything you try to get them to settle down fails. I know I said before that a good lesson could compensate for that, but let’s face it, even the most well-crafted lessons crumble when the students aren’t in the mood to learn English today. But rather than yell at the kids, which never worked and usually got more laughs than scared looks, the best thing I could do was to stop. Stop everything, stand there, and wait for them to be quiet. If we were playing a fun game, well, guess what, the game just got put on hold. If we were doing a normal lesson, maybe the students were glad I finally shut up. I had to wait five minutes sometimes before I could go on, and I felt like I was going to explode inside, but I wasn’t going to teach if they weren’t going to listen. And they eventually saw that, too.
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Responses to “How Does an EFL Teacher Teach Discipline?”
Comments RSS Feed – All CommentsHopfrog — 16 March 2010 @ 1:07 pm
If there is one thing making me hesitant about going over to teach it is probably this issue. No way am I going to travel halfway around the globe, taking a serious paycut, to teach if the students just don’t care.
My thing, and my questions about getting the class in line, really relates to getting the ‘bad apples’ to just be less disruptive so that the students who want to learn can do so in relative peace.
What percentage of your students do you think were really motivated to learn English? somewhat motivated? and not motivated at all?
Were there any other strategies you could employ to seperate the two groups? I would hate to basically give up on a group of kids, but if it meant being able to effectively teach the ones who were really interested it would seem like a possible strategy. Maybe allowing the bad apples free reign in the back of the class if they didn’t disturb those who wanted to sit in the front? Then again, you’d probably just have an out of control circus in the back of the class. Or basically promising the bad apples an easy path to a passing grade as long as they agree to keep in line. Then again, from what I have read, everyone passes in Chinese schools. Its seems like teaching in China is a series of catch-22’s. Much like trying to reprimand kids verbally when their reaction is only to laugh at the laowai whose Chinese is comical to them and whose English they can always pretend not to understand as it suits them.
Wow, the more I read about it, the more I appreciate all you teachers who stuck it out over there. What a challenge. I may just have to be patient and try to find a gig teaching older students or night schools where adults go that actually want to learn. Teaching those kids sounds like a nightmare.
Jessica — 17 March 2010 @ 7:33 am
Smack them upside the head. That’s what their Chinese teachers do.
Or pinch their ears.
Jess — 17 March 2010 @ 9:12 am
I’m teaching middle school students in Suzhou, China, at the moment and face these very problems! Most of my students are fairly noisy so I refuse to start the class or talk over them until they’ve all stopped talking. If they really take the piss, I will choose the worst student and send him or her outside to stand in the corridor for a period of time or until the end of class. They really don’t like that because then their Chinese teachers can see they’ve been punished! I’ve only had to do that twice, with what I call my ‘nightmare class,’ and now they behave much better.
Clark — 17 March 2010 @ 10:08 am
Jess, good call. I should have mentioned that in the original post. I would sometimes asked a student to leave, and they were always mortified. Anything but that! When my girlfriend pointed out that if the student wandered off and got hurt after being kicked out, however, I could get into serious trouble.
Hopfrog, the problem with sending the bad kids to the back of the class is that there are too many bad kids! And the foreign teacher’s grade is of so little value, the majority of the students wouldn’t care if you offered them an easy pass.
In the primary school, it felt like there were only 4-5 well-behaved students in every class and about 8-10 terrible ones. The rest would only be good if Mr. Nielsen was on fire that day. So, again, a lot of it boils down to your lesson. And it may be that you have a lesson with different parts that not every class does. If I was going into what I knew was a bad class, I’d say, “Well, we’re just not going to do this activity.” But the good classes would still get the full lesson.
Hopfrog — 17 March 2010 @ 12:02 pm
Wow, I guess its best to have a realistic view of what happens before diving in.
As an American, the thought of pinching ears, or anything like that is something I could never even imagine doing. When I went to school, paddles and things like that were commonplace, but nowadays, I don’t think you can even give a kid a nasty look in America without repercussions. Is physical discipline by Chinese teachers something that really goes on? I just could never bring myself to do it, again, mainly because of how that has transformed so drastically in this country.
Have you ever had a kid call your bluff when being asked to stand or sent outside? I can imagine that would be the worst possible scenario. From what I have read, I guess having a really good lesson and just refusing to teach is the best approach to get them to settle down.
Clark — 17 March 2010 @ 1:12 pm
Chinese teachers aren’t supposed to physically harm the students, either, but… they do what they can get away with. The teachers at the primary school would often smack the kids in the head with a book or, if they were really mad, push or kick them down the hall. Seriously. I never saw anything like this take place in the middle school, though.
Just about every student wants to call your bluff, because they don’t think you, a foreigner, would really try to discipline them. I had one primary student refuse to stand and wear his backpack when asked. I got so sick of telling him I meant it, I finally held his backpack out the window and said, “You can either wear this, or I’m going to drop it.” The whole class was screaming, “Wear the backpack! Wear the backpack!” He finally did.
Jessica — 17 March 2010 @ 8:22 pm
I was sarcastically pointing out that because the students know that we don’t hit or pinch them, they are often on their worst behavior. I wasn’t really saying you should do that. I was so shocked when I saw that in Hefei.
cr7cr8 — 19 March 2010 @ 1:17 am
Never mind, some Chinese kids are just not learning material naturally , some of them even not good at their first language, How could you expect them to learn a second language. If I had such chances in my childhood, I would definitely ask an EFL teacher to introduce some western literacy, such as reading a story, even more, hugging me while reading.
Clark — 22 March 2010 @ 11:20 am
They work so hard in their other classes, the foreign teacher’s turn ends up being “break time.”
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