Company Profile: Golden Voice English
June 15th, 2017
Teaching English Online with Golden Voice English
Golden Voice English Online Education (GVEOE) is a Toronto based company that teaches online English lessons to Chinese elementary and middle school students across grades one to nine. GVE offers a range of packages for students to meet online with a regular tutor between one and five times per week. We have created engaging and interactive lessons that are based on the Chinese government mandated English curriculum. Using innovative support from Cenveo, all curriculum, including Powerpoint presentations and lesson plans, are created in GVE’s Toronto office by a talented team of Chinese and Canadian education experts.
GVE is part of a growing industry of online English education programs that are available to Chinese students. Three important factors make GVE a particularly unique and desirable company for ESL teachers seeking new employment opportunities:
1) The goal of GVE’s lessons is for students to practice speaking and listening with native speaking tutors. GVE pairs students and tutors together so that students meet weekly with the same tutor and this consistency creates a supportive environment for students to become more confident speakers. Tutors have the opportunity to develop strong working relationships with students and feel a sense of accomplishment as students’ English fluency continually grows.
Unlike most other language programs, GVE’s focus is on speaking and listening. This focus is based in the curriculum of our online classroom, which invites students and tutors into active and creative conversation. TESOL certified instructors will recognize this as the communicative approach to language learning, which is the theoretical platform upon which GVE curriculum is built.
More recently, GVE has begun to include other teaching approaches into our lesson plans. This summer, our lessons include guided conversations that are delivered using topic based learning. Students enter authentic life scenarios and use targeted language in order to accomplish a clear task. In addition, our summer story lessons are taught using coordinated language along with physical movement, what TESOL teachers will recognize as the total physical response (TPR) approach to language learning. Language experts from the around the world continue to endorse TPR as a preferred teaching method for young learners.
2) GVE hires North American tutors and offers orientation and teaching support for our tutors out of our Toronto office. This is a significant departure from other online ESL tutoring companies and is important because it means that our tutors can rely on a team of dedicated online ESL teaching experts that are instantly accessible and located in the Eastern Standard time zone. Although we hire qualified tutors with ESL teaching certifications and experiences, we know that learning to deliver language instruction in the online classroom is new territory for many people. GVE has developed extensive orientation materials that are aimed at familiarizing ESL teachers with how to use our online teaching platform effectively.
3) GVE offers a unique learning experience for students by gamifying the curriculum. A talented team of GVE content developers create educational games aimed at motivating students to practice speaking English while having fun.
Example: This game features our popular green dragon named “Lingo.” Lingo jumps up to hit a mystery box and a question pops up. The tutor asks the student to fill in the blank and the student answers correctly, “What’s your name.” Lingo reacts to this correct answer by gaining a mushroom and growing bigger. In this way, the student is rewarded for selecting the correct answer. While this game is simple, it allows a student with a low level of English to enter conversation with a tutor. The student can feel a sense of accomplishment for arriving at a correct answer and the tutor can extend this exercise by using it as a tool to “get to know” things about the student that move beyond identifying an English name. Students and tutors both enjoy our games and our games offer an exciting place where language learning moves into exciting and unpredictable new places.
GVE is currently hiring ESL tutors. For more information and to apply online, please visit: http://www.gveoe.com/