Life as an English Teacher in Taiwan

A Homogeneous Class I'm accustomed to teaching multicultural views in a class, and guiding discussions so that students are free to share their own cultural experiences, to give a voice to students from minority or less-heard groups. In my teaching experience, there's usually a main cultural norm (generally white, Euro-American), and a plethora of other norms competing with and coming to conflict with it. A good deal of my background as a literature teacher has therefore been to bring light to these conflicts, to help students become open-minded and experience each other's cultures, and to resolve differences amicably, respectfully, and with open-mindedness. This shows itself in the books I choose, where I try to choose novels written from Asian, African, Native cultures, rather than the usual classics. It shows itself in the lengthy efforts I take to prime students with background understanding prior to reading books. I often ask students to share what their cultural p...

Students Requiring Differentiation My school is made up of students who all speak English as a foreign language, as they are living in a country where Chinese is the main spoken tongue, but attend an English medium school. As my school is a private school and does not have the resources to support students with disabilities, it officially does not accept any. While I and other teachers are fairly certain that there are a few students with undiagonosed disabilities, such as dyslexia and ADHD, we are unable to officially provide students with accommodations. Because of this, there are two main areas where I need to differentiate. English level and ability: Students read, write, and speak at varying levels in my class. A student who is an excellent writer may be a poor speaker, and vice versa. When it comes to communication, I therefore have the students practice the areas where they require improvement, but may also have a student use their strongest area to communicate their ideas...

SMART Assessments With the Standard and objectives decided upon, it is time now determine the type of assessment I will be using to show that students have managed to achieve the skill indicated in the standard. To recap, I teach 6th grade English Literature at an international school in Taiwan. The students are all of Taiwanese descent, and speak English as a second language. Their only English input comes from the classroom. The standard I have chosen to focus on comes from Common Core Language Arts Grade 6: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.1 Cite textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text. I had created a total of six objectives I wanted the students to be able to complete as a part of achieving this standard. These are: Define what textual evidence is. Identify lines of text that serves as textual evidence. Explain with detail why the textual evidence supports their answer. Refer to textual evidence to sup...