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Being a new hire despite being familiar with the country

Being a new hire despite being familiar with the country



June 10, 2015

I have nearly finished my first year at the Women’s College in Sharjah and I have to say that culturally, personally and pedagogically, has been a truly amazing experience.

I arrived in August of last year and the campus totally blew me away by the vastness and amenities available to the students and staff. I am continually in awe of the magnificent grounds, considering we live in a desert terrain. I hope the students appreciate what fantastic facilities they have and take full advantage of them.

At the beginning of the first semester, the place was heaving with students. The first thing that struck, quite literally, was the waft of fragrances as you walk down the corridors. Then there were the mobiles!

Social Media

Culturally, I presumed I would have no problems adapting to teaching at HCT as I have been teaching in the Middle East for twenty years. How little I knew! HCT has become exposed to the massive social selfiemedia culture the younger generation are involved in. The students are obsessed with chatting online, taking selfies and posting themselves on forums. Is it pure narcissism? Obviously  Facebook and emails are not the in thing to keep in contact with friends anymore! What is even scarier is the lack of students actually taking the time to converse face to face? Saying that, if the students are not messaging / reading messages whilst walking down the corridors, you do hear animated tales being divulged, followed by screams of laughter (in Arabic!).

Monolingual classes

The second challenge was teaching monolingual classes. In my previous experience I mainly taught multilingual classes. The initial difference at HCT was a classroom management issue. I was definitely the foreigner. It took some time after trying many different strategies to get the use of L1 reduced, thanks to my colleagues’ suggestions.   However, I have concluded it is only natural for the students to converse in their mother tongue when appropriate. I still strongly believe that the use of L1 does impact on their rate of progress, so it is an issue that has to be controlled tightly so the students do achieve. On the other hand, the biggest benefit of teaching a monolingual class is that they all have very similar linguistic problems which can be dealt with as a whole class – yes! Nevertheless, I have personally found the students continually keep committing the same errors in syntax, semantics, morphology, pronunciation, and spelling etc. Is this because of the lack of the target language exposure outside the college, their preference towards using Arabic in the classroom rather than English, the lack of their personal motivation or purely fossilized errors?mobile phone Answers via Snapchat, please.

Digital learning

Being in the classroom was an enormous learning curve. Although I was pedagogically confident in my area, I had to learn very fast how to incorporate digital learning into my lessons. Initially I could not  work out how you could teach communicatively – get the students to interact with each other, be a facilitator and develop learner autonomy, all at the same time – with the students and teacher using an ipad. After observing peers, discussing with colleagues and attending PDs, my lessons soon became learner centered and productive with the use of an ipad. Although I had used smart boards before, the platform Bb Learn was also a new experience for me. Managing and building courses to suit the students soon became achievable (thanks to the Level course materials which obviously have been built and added to over the years). Then the next step was to integrate different apps and websites intobuzz words my lessons. Since I have joined HCT, the world of apps and websites has added a new dimension to my teaching dynamics. This academic year, I have tried most of the apps I have been exposed to through PDs and colleagues. Next year I would like to gauge which apps really do focus the students on developing the target language, rather than simply recycling it.

I could not have adapted my teaching style to encompass a technological, e-learning environment without the support of my Team Leader, team colleagues, the IT guru in our department, my mentor and all the other experts in the Foundations department. Everyone has truly been so supportive, patient and willing to help me make my first year’s journey at HCT run with ease. Thanks.

 

 

June 10, 2015
Faculty Lounge