Sutthima Wanpeng and Tanuttha Agasvipart
Faculty of Liberal Arts
TESOL at ICTE was such a great program for me. After studying ESP: TESOL at ICTE, the University of Queensland (UQ), I’ve gained a lot of benefits that can help improve my teaching career in these ways. Initially, I understand more about learner styles which help me identify and analyze the learners’ differences. Moreover, it is a good chance to enhance vocabulary knowledge and lexical items through learning with plenty of lessons and with many qualified teachers. Indeed, I truly know about applied linguistics, language pedagogy, and teaching techniques that I can make use of them to teach students effectively. To apply teaching techniques and tips, peer teaching is the most useful and practical method to get feedback immediately from classmates and from a teacher as well. Then I can adapt some of them along with essential suggestions to use for my real classrooms. Regarding classroom teaching, I really like songs, board games, asking questions, dictogloss, storytelling and other communicative activities. Most of them are quite interesting, dynamic, and funny that I am able to apply for using in my real classrooms. However, I have to simplify or adapt some activities appropriate for the students in different fields.
Apart from that, one of the most important aspects for me was that I spent the time with my lovely host family cooking traditional Australian dishes at the porch in the dim light of the sky and dancing crazily together with a Chinese friend and an honest dog. I have never felt that I was being surrounded with such genial and lovely people. I could say that I had a very relaxing moment even though I studied extremely really hard out there. Besides, a school visit at John Paul College Daisy Hill was also extremely interesting since it was an international school with various nationalities consisted of a kindergarten, a primary school, a middle school, and a secondary school. There I observed three classes which were completely different: a science class and two English classes. I’ve got a couple of teaching techniques practical to my students. Overall the five-week learning sessions at UQ gave me worthwhile knowledge and I had a lifetime memorable experience that I’ve never received from anywhere else. I enjoyed everything I did. I also believe that every student should have one chance to take part in this program since TESOL at ICTE had almost everything that I think a student could want from a program.