). \u00a0We had to call on the students by their student number as we didn’t know their names to come to the front of the classroom for the presentations (\u4e0a\u6765\u8868\u6f14 – sh\u00e0ngsh\u01ceng l\u00e1i bi\u01ceo y\u01cen). \u00a0Once that exercise was done, we had English names to match Chinese faces as well as a baseline measure of each student’s English ability.<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\nMy course, being a content course, required the students to do homework (\u4f5c\u4e1a – zu\u00f2 y\u00e8), basic text reading and questions for comprehension, so that class time would be used for “talking” about the content. \u00a0When I presented the first homework assignment, I got the usual groans that I was used to hearing from my students in Canada. \u00a0Hearing their groans and complaints, I smiled because the students had just communicated that they were, indeed, just like students in other parts of the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This was Maureen’s first class, the first day of a new term in September, 2006. \u00a0 Luckily, I didn’t have a course to teach at that time, so I was able to take a few photos of this special event. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23,28,33,38,41,49,52,55,74,75,95,100,103,121,123,141,205,209,215,217,238],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-c-i-t","tag-changzhou","tag-china","tag-chinese","tag-chinese-language","tag-communicate","tag-content-classes","tag-conversation-classes","tag-esl","tag-esl-blog","tag-first-day-of-class","tag-foreign-teacher","tag-ft","tag-interactive-lessons","tag-jiangsu","tag-mandarin","tag-stereotypes","tag-students","tag-teachers","tag-teaching-esl","tag-xinbei"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rglongpre.ca\/pilgrim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rglongpre.ca\/pilgrim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rglongpre.ca\/pilgrim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rglongpre.ca\/pilgrim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rglongpre.ca\/pilgrim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rglongpre.ca\/pilgrim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rglongpre.ca\/pilgrim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rglongpre.ca\/pilgrim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rglongpre.ca\/pilgrim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/laowaiteacher.wordpress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/2006-september-058.jpg\" "\\"2006")
<\/a><\/p>\n![<\/a>Thankfully, our first lessons required students to do some basic presentations so that we would have a reasonable understanding of their level of English ability. \u00a0 Of course, having teaching experience also helped. \u00a0It became evident to the students that we were real teachers, not just English-speaking foreigners who got hired to provide and authentic English voice. \u00a0Both Maureen and I used pair work (\u4e24\u4eba\u4e00\u7ec4 – li\u01ceng r\u00e9n y\u012b z\u01d4) having the students introduce each other to the new teacher (\u8001\u5e08\u00a0–<\/p>\n](\"http:\/\/laowaiteacher.wordpress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/2006-september-039.jpg\"){kind=link}