Ok, for as much as I've been talking about learning Japanese (which I have) I've also decided to do some community service in our local area by joining a local group who teaches english to Japanese workers and their families who are over here from Japan working at several local Japanese owned factories in the area. Right now I'm sitting in on the beginners classes on Monday's and Tuesdays just to get an idea of how the classes are taught, who's attending, and how to handle them. After my 3-4 week "break in" period is over I'm either going to be taking over teaching one of the level one basic conversational english classes, or taking over a brand new level 2 intermedicate conversational english class for the same kinds of people. I will also be doing some private tutoring of the men (men tutor men and women tutor women in this program per the rules) if they ask for it. My perk of course is I get to have them help me with learning my Japanese.
Now, my question would be this. What suggestions, pointers, ideas, or other helpful information might you suggest for someone who's taught other classes before, but never an english class. I'm well experienced at teaching technicall classes like networking, routers, firewalls, programming, or other tech related topics. However I've never actually taught an english class, and never to someone from another country. From what I've seen just in the first two days it seems easy enough. But I'm one who believes in getting it right on the first try, so I want to go in prepared as much as I can.
Thanks in advance for any pointers. And if you've never done one of these kind of classes, as far as teaching one goes, I think they're really neat because it's fun watching each person learn sentance structure, verbs, nouns, proper use, etc.
It's even fun when you can walk up to them and talk to them in Japanese if even just on a basic level.