Lecturing English. Yes, it can be fun!

It’s a bit of a challenge, lecturing English to first year Dutch Journalism students. Most walk in thinking it will be 2 hours of listening to boring present-tense and past-tense rules, maybe like it used to be in High School. Well, I have set myself a challenge.

During the first class we had to discuss the contents and structure of the course, which is obviously not very exciting, unless you start with some fun news videos from the BBC website. In the next class I’ll be using video from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, why not laugh out loud during class?

Besides videos it’s also fun to challenge each other and speak English in front of your class mates. To try and formulate answers, hear your own mistakes, to try a true English-accent.

We also practice our reading skills with articles from different magazines. I personally like NewAfrican, but they made loads of factual mistakes in an article about immigration in Holland (‘Holland – Blaming everything bad on immigrants’, June ‘08), even confusing the murder of politician Pim Fortuyn with that of movie director Theo van Gogh. Great for Journalism students to read how correspondents make mistakes and to still be able to find and understand the mistakes while its written in English.

It’s the first time I taught English but the two hours passed very quickly. Monday is the second class and I’m preparing another fun two hours, hoping to also get some feedback from the students. Hope they think this challenge is successful.