Classroom updates - Alex

The ETA experience has presented a range of rewarding experiences in the classroom here at the Universidade de Caxias do Sul (UCS). Beyond the mere fact of teaching in another country, the actual classes I assist are significantly different one from the other, each consisting of not only new content, but new groups of students with different reasons for learning English. Each class has allowed me the opportunity to adapt formal language lessons and methods to each group’s goals while leaving time for students to practice their English fluency informally by teaching me about subjects that interest them.

My first class of the week is an intermediate Business English course with Professor Maria Valésia. The students in this course are all part of the International Business (Comércio Internacional) major at UCS. Given this focus in their studies, many of them are seeking to learn English for their business careers. Some of them also currently work in firms with international clients, requiring them to speak English regularly. With these interests in mind, I have sought to focus our activities on topics or methods that will help them achieve relevant goals, such as seeking to find jobs in the English-speaking world or communicating with English-speaking clients.

With students’ international business-related goals in mind, I designed an activity to begin learning both of these skills, by designing a framework to write emails in English focusing on goals and audience that they could apply to any situation. Part of this entailed exploring cultural differences in email writing, given certain differences I have noticed when writing emails in Brazil, such as ending emails with abraço or beijos. Then, I gave students a hypothetical scenario that they were reaching out to a mutual contact to learn more about a job opening and asked them to write an email reaching out to this contact. My goal was to provide students with a template that they could refer to when writing any email in English as well as an opportunity to practice writing job recruiting-related emails in case one day they decide to pursue a job in the English-speaking world.

Another one of my classes, however, is completely different. It is a course designed for current English teachers that teaches presentation and writing skills in English. My co-ETA Adam and I have collaborated with Professor Maria Valésia to structure the class like a workshop where we teach different presentation types (e.g., informative, persuasive) and then have students each give a speech in the style of the week. Then, we coach the students on general presentation-giving tips, such as body language and using tone to engage the audience. Similarly, we teach the students certain basic concepts in academic paper writing (e.g., research strategies, thesis selection) and then coach students one-on-one as they write an academic paper, the final project for the class. In a sense, it is similar to the Business English course in that we are teaching a formal application of English, but for a completely different focus and objective.

While the organized activities in class have been a great experience for me (and hopefully the students), just as important have been the informal conversations I have had with students. As in some classes many of our activities are discussion-based, we get the opportunity to share opinions about many topics, from history to food and, of course, perception of similarities and differences of the US and Brazil. These moments are not only fun, but they’re a great opportunity for students to practice speaking freely and spontaneously (thus developing fluency in speech) as well as for both sides to discuss new ideas.

As an ETA (or really, as a person working in a new country), outside of the classroom is a different classroom, except there’s no one to tell you exactly what you are learning. At some point, you realize that you have learned a lot, without knowing exactly how or why. For me, being a teacher in a classroom has been a classroom in itself, and hopefully for my students as well. I am excited to keep having different experiences and learning new ways to engage my students during the rest of the year.

Classroom updates - Justine

On Tuesday nights I am the assistant for Professor Elsa Monica English VII class. It is a large class of active and engaged students who are nearly fluent English speakers. I spent the first couple weeks mainly trying to get to know my students in order to determine how I could best serve them. Quickly I learned that nearly all of them are already teachers and most of them have more teaching experience than me. So I decided that, in addition to my language skills as a native speaker, I could offer my students more by introducing them to a topical current event in the US that they otherwise may not have encountered rather than instructing them on teaching strategies.

I decided to plan a series of activities that are both related to the grammar points taught by Professor Monica, and also connected to the theme of teacher organizing. I chose this topic because it is relevant since all the students share the common experience of being teachers. It gives them the opportunity to use authentic language that is applicable to their lives.

The first activity was a mind map to get students thinking about their experience as teachers and elicit the vocabulary they already know surrounding this topic. Second, I planned a reading using the “jigsaw method,” in which the class was split into groups and each group was assigned a segment of the reading for which they were responsible to read, summarize, and then present this information to the rest of the class. I chose a reading about the recent wave of teachers’ strikes in the US.

As each group presented, we made a chart that compared problems faced by teachers in the US to problems they face as teachers in Brazil. Then we discussed the differences and similarities between problems teachers in their respective countries. We also discussed their respectives routes to make change, and compared the extent of their successes. At the end of class, students completed a survey about their experience as teachers which I had prepared. Questions addressed topics such as their favorite and least favorite parts of teaching, and what they consider to be the biggest problems in the education system in Brazil. I used their answers to create a Jeopardy game activity for the following class. During this activity, students had to guess what they thought were their peers’ most common responses to the questions. Students learned a new classroom activity, and also reviewed the vocabulary we had previously discussed. The students got really into the game and I learned that they were very competitive.

All these activities led to a culminating class project. I gave students an imaginary (but realistic) scenario in which they pretend they are a group of teachers competing to win a bid from CAPES for funding for a special project intended to improve education in their community. They were given two choices for the project: they could either use the funding to pay for a native English speaker to work 40 hours a week in Brazil (similar to the Fulbright ETA program), or they could use the equivalent amount of money for any other project that they designed themselves. If they chose the first option, they needed to provide a schedule for the native speaker, specifying how they would spend their time and justifying how this would serve Brazilian students. If they chose the second option, they needed to create a budget outlining how they would spend the money and justify their cause.

On the day the students were to deliver their presentations class was cancelled due to the truck drivers’ strike. I am very excited to see their presentations in the following class, as well as to make connections between the topic and this very exciting moment in Brazil right now.

In addition to students improving their English language skills, my goal for the project is to foster some critical thinking for both myself and my students as to the role of American ETAs in Brazil. Perhaps due to the United States’ role as a global superpower, I often feel that I am deferred to as an assumed expert in all things. I hope this project can help students develop language that will aid them in finding an active voice through which they can speak confidently about their own experience and make demands for themselves and their students. I believe it is the necessary first step for teachers to develop this voice themselves if they ever hope for it to be passed on to their students who may one day be able to negotiate for themselves on an international scale.

Classroom updates - Barbara

My time as an English Teaching Assistant at UCS has mainly been spent teaching business English courses. I have worked primarily with three professors: Professors Elsa Mónica, Maria Valésia, and Magda. The students that I work with have varied levels of English, which range from basic to high intermediate. Consequently, the lessons that I create for these students have to accommodate a range of English abilities. What each class has in common, however, is that I attempt to introduce the students to new topics (franchises in the US, email writing in English, formal and informal language), while still incorporating their existing knowledge, both of business and Brazilian customs and culture.

One of my teaching tactics with my students has been introducing a “theme,” or a set of lessons that all connect to one another. I find that the students enjoy building upon knowledge as lessons progress. In my Business V class, Professor Maria Valésia allowed me to design the speaking portion of the midterm exam. I used one of the many business journals that I brought from the United States, specifically on franchises, to design the assessment. I assigned students randomly to groups and a business from the 10 mentioned in the magazine. Students were required to give basic knowledge about the business, assess the franchise, bring new knowledge into their presentation after reading an outside article, and discus why they would or would not want to invest in the franchise.

While the presentations varied, such as the skill with which they were delivered, not one group failed to prepare a presentation. Students were also made aware of clear guidelines used to grade their presentations. Earlier that week Professor Maria Valésia and I met to design a rubric with which to assess the students. After the students presented, Professor Maria Valésia and I averaged our individual scores to input that part of the grade.

What I enjoyed most about this class assessment in particular was that it allowed for an exchange of knowledge, between myself and Professor Maria Valésia, as well as between me and the students. I discussed expectations with my supervising professor, and what makes businesses successful and able to evolve instead of stagnant with my students. I make an effort to discuss businesses that the students are familiar with or may encounter in their day to day lives in Brazil as well.

As always with my business students, I attempt to expose them to a more “liberal arts” form of education. I studied International Business in college myself, and I find that this discipline in particular has a tendency to think in terms of the bottom line (only). I try to insert consideration towards human issues. For example, I tell my students that the loss of jobs and a subsequent increase in productivity may seem like an overall win for a company, but there are still people’s lives to be taken into consideration. At times, supply and demand or costs and benefits are a too simplified perspective. I feel that these views offer rationality, but not always a clear view of the human perspective.

Another goal that I have as an English Teaching Assistant is to bring disciplines together. I find myself bringing up topics from one class into another, and trying to expose my students to discussions beyond grammar or rigid vocabulary.

Most recently, I’ve had the pleasure to work with high school students (Cetec UCS) and Professors Cristina Pescador, Morgana, and Victoria, as well as letras professor Samira Dall Agnol. I’m only begun to introduce myself to the high school students that I started working with, but I had the pleasure of learning about gaucho and Brazilian culture from presentations that they prepared for my visit.

My work with Professor Samira involves monthly presentations in which I discuss a more complex topic with students preparing to be English teachers themselves. I hope to contribute our discussions and my preparation for these internship courses towards future research about how language instructors approach teaching a non-native language. These presentations also challenge me to think constantly about my own role at UCS. Though my title as an English Teaching Assistant implies that I spend my days teaching English and assisting language professors, my personal (and main) goal to motivate both my students and colleagues. Though they may not be native English speakers, they have many advantages in learning and speaking the English language that a monolingual native English speaker would lack. I find that my greatest strength as a language instructor is the empathy that I have for my students, just because I have studied other languages, and understand the difficulties that come with that process. I try to bring that mindset into all the classes that I help instruct at UCS, both business and letras courses.

Classroom updates - Adam

Here are some of the classes I've been helping teach. You can read more at my personal blog.

Oral and Written Expression Skills in English 

My co-ETA Alex and I have been co-leading a public speaking series. Each week, we introduce a new type of public speaking and give an example of what that type of speech might look like. Then the following week, students give their own speeches in English. So far, we’ve covered informational, persuasive, and demonstrative speaking.

Oral and Written Skills for Teachers 
As far as I understand it, UCS’s curriculum is changing so that this class will replace Oral and Written Expression Skills in English. My students in this class are more beginners, which I think makes sense—speaking and writing are good skills to practice throughout the entire curriculum. It’s also a helpful class for me, as the lessons are specifically geared around using these skills in the classroom.

When we were talking about teacher voice, for example, I led an activity where I randomly gave my students roles (e.g. doctor and patient), and told them to improvise a dialogue using only one word at a time. I thought this would be super useful—throwing out a word at a time and trying to convey context through tone and pantomime is how I communicate half the time I’m abroad—but I think my students were still a little shy. 


English V
This month we’ve been talking about the past tense (simple past v. past continuous, e.g.) and storytelling, so I created two activities to practice.

The first was a brief murder mystery exercise: I said we were all on a cruise ship together when there was an announcement over the loudspeaker that the captain had died. I gave each student a slip of paper with a location written on it, and everyone needed to come up to the front of the class, testify to what they were doing in that location when the captain died, and explain why they were innocent.

What unfolded was this whole improvised story about how there was an affair between the captain and the cleaning lady, but the captain’s wife actually killed him so she could be with the cleaning lady instead. I was really impressed with their creativity. 

The second exercise was one of those write-a-sentence-and-pass-the-paper-to-the-next-person deals. Before class, I prepared a Powerpoint with instructions for each of the sentences. For example, the first sentence needed to start with “once upon a time” and include a noun I had randomly assigned to each student; the second sentence needed to include a randomly assigned verb in the past continuous tense; the third sentence needed to include the word suddenly; and so on. At the end, we read the finished stories. 

Functional Grammar and Discourse Analysis 
In this class, I got to give my magnum opus: a presentation that used the language of functional grammar (a branch of linguistics that categorizes language based on function and, notably, context) to explore what makes memes funny. I chose three different memes and had my students discuss what makes them different and how their humor works.

(Thesis, for any functional grammar buffs: memes work because the mode remains the same even as the field changes, which is what makes them funny. Despite their similarities, these memes are functionally distinct because each one has different tenor.)

On a completely different level, a few weeks later, I led a different discussion about how context influences word choice in different situations. I provided examples of how I’d ask a friend out to lunch versus a coworker, for instance. I thought it’d be a superficial presentation, but it actually led to a great discussion about how cultural context influences communication styles and norms.

Welcome

We are four college graduates from the United States currently living in Caxias do Sul and working as English Teaching Assistants (ETAs) at UCS. We arrived in March and will stay until the middle of November.

We're here through the Fulbright program—an international exchange program run by the State Department meant to increase mutual understanding between people in the United States and other countries. It was the brainchild of Arkansas senator William J. Fulbright, who in 1945 proposed that the US use excess war funds to fund international exchange.

Since President Truman signed the program into law in 1946, approximately 370,000 Fulbrighters—students, scholars, teachers, professionals, artists, and scientists from both the US and abroad—have participated in it. Among these Fulbrighters are hundreds of Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, MacArthur Fellows, and heads of state.

Needless to say, we're super proud to be participate in the program and excited to learn more about Caxias do Sul and the rest of the Brazil. 

Adam Vincent is from Morristown, New Jersey. He studied communication and humanities at Villanova University.

Alex Aronovich is from Plymouth, Minnesota. He studied economics and cinema studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Barbara Pajor is from Oak Lawn, Illinois. She studied International Business and Spanish at Monmouth College.

Justine Scattarelli is from Minnneapolis, Minnesota. She studied English and International Studies at the University of Iowa.