visiting an adult school in Da Lat

Two days ago in Da Lat, in the evening I went to visit an adult school and managed to observe a couple of English classes. The school is called "New Century", and the night classes are held in an elementary school with a picture of Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese flag in front of each classroom. The students, who pay for these classes, range in age from about 15 to 25 years old. Many of them work during the day.

The first class I observed was taught by the Dean of English at Da Lat University, whom I had met in the morning when I requested to observe classes there. He told us that at the university the teachers would need advance notice to be observed, but suggested that we visit the "New Century" school in the evening. He explained that his class was a TOEFL preparation class.

The first class I observed (taught by the Dean himself), was a vocabulary class and very teacher-centered. All the students had a workbook that said "New Century" on the cover. The teacher said the words (inform - information; invite - invitation; educate - education, etc.) but the students did not repeat the words for pronunciation practice. After a few minutes, the teacher would break this routine up by explaining in Vietnamese briefly the meaning of certain words. After about 15 minutes of this, the teacher asked the students to work in their workbook and left the classroom to smoke a cigarette outside.

Since the teacher seemed uncomfortable with my presence, I politely said goodbye and walked past several other classrooms. I poked my head inside one of them and asked the teacher, a woman about 30 years old, if it would be OK for me to observe her class. She smiled and welcomed me into her class. I introduced myself, explaining that I was an English teacher from California and that I wished to observe some classes. There were only about 15 students in this class. After spending a couple of minutes with me in front of the class in which I gave a quick presentation, she had me sit in the back and continued with her grammar - conversation lesson. In this class, the teacher, working with the text, which all the students had in front of them, introduced an exercise where the students were given several words in random order and had to put them together to form the correct syntax for questions. Then, the teacher would ask the students these questions and try to get a response. For example, the teacher used the question "did he have a happy childhood" (based on a biography of the writer Tolkien) to talk a bit about childhood and asked the students if they had had a happy childhood. Although the students didn't respond much to her questions, I think it made for a more interesting class. This teacher was energetic and dynamic and tried hard to communicate in English. She spoke English well enough for me to understand most of what she said. After this exercise was completed, she played a tape in which the students had to listen to some information about the life of the writer Tolkien and then had the students work in pairs to answer questions based on the listening activity.

This teacher told me she taught in a high school during the day and also taught this class three nights a week. She said it was very tiring but that she really enjoyed her job which was evident in her demeaner.