Training the Future

Just before the Christmas holidays, the company I work for outside school asked me to teach English to a group of students training to become computer technicians. A group of ten to fifteen people aged anywhere between 16 and 40, whom I would be teaching English to for 60 hours. Mostly technical English, computer vocabulary, how to answer a computer hotline in English, that sort of thing. For four hours every Saturday morning, paid peanuts. Sorry, not interested. I introduced a colleague of mine who has a lot of free time and who speaks fluent English: she's interested and would like to do the job, but probably won't be available for the whole course. The company didn't like that, so I got the job. Hmph.

General panic - I've-never-done-this-before-and-I-don't-know-anything-about-computers. Amazon had a couple of "English for computer users" workbooks, bought those, scanned through them, right, feeling a bit more confident now. I still haven't met the students yet, though, so I have no idea what their English is like. Maybe my exercises asking them to name the parts of a computer are far too easy, maybe they're far too difficult and I'll have to start from scratch. Bearing in mind that this lot have to take the TOEIC after their 60 hours, and get a decent score. I meet them on Saturday, my first four-hour lesson... what on earth...

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Four hours later...

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Right. That's done. I had planned on spending the first two hours out of the four on presentation and introductions: my name is, I come from, etc. I'd planned on teaching them how to introduce themselves and talking to them about what they expected from me as an English teacher, what they wanted to learn, what would be expected of them and how to achieve that.

We started at 8.00 a.m. At 8.15, we'd finished the introductions, the presentations and the expectations. In English and in French. One of the boys didn't want to introduce himself in English, saying "Miss, my English is just hello and goodbye". He tried anyway, did it perfectly and spent the whole four hours churning out computer vocabulary and getting all his sentences right.

A few of the sentences they made (with a little help from their teacher):

• It's a printer.
• The Shift key lets you type capital letters.
• A flexible keyboard is flexible and waterproof. You can take it everywhere and you can tidy it easily.
• An infrared keyboard is fragile. You mustn't drop it.
• You move the mouse. You print out twenty pages. You scan the document. You surf the internet.
• The printer has run out of ink. The photocopier has run out of paper. Ben has run out of energy.

It's quite a nice little group, I like them a lot and I think they'll work well together. So far, it's fine. I'm a bit worried about how they expect to get a decent score on their final English test, though, they're not very good. Up until now, they've asked me how to pronounce the alphabet, how to say the numbers up to a hundred and if the S on the third person singular meant we were speaking in the plural.