Dear Sir/Madam,
Chinmin Institute of Technology is closing down its AFL Department, and I am now looking for another job, so I wish to apply for a position at your school. I think I would be an asset to your English department.
For the seven years I have been in Taiwan at Chinmin, I have been working with lower-level, unmotivated students. For these students, I developed a number of innovative teaching activities, for example, pair dictation, where partners read a dialog, but at the same time write it down.
Whether I was successful in a lot of my work at Chinmin is debatable, but overall I think I did an excellent job of creating favorable attitudes to English and to school work among these students. I certainly seem to have gained their respect.
The problems of my students, and Taiwanese learners of English in general, are a lack of confidence, stress and other forms of discomfort, and a lack of adventurousness. These are the result of unenjoyable experiences in school learning English, the lack of contact with users of the language, and their experiments with using the language being disappointing.
With the next step in my career, I want to have an effect on this situation, by developing my teaching repertoire and helping students grow as learners of English. I am confident the future is bright. If your school is also of such a view, I would enjoy working with you, developing confident, relaxed, adventurous and superior speakers of the English language.
Yours sincerely,
Greg Matheson, Full-time Lecturer, Applied Foreign Languages Department, Chin Min Institute of Technology (E-mail: lang@ms.chinmin.edu.tw)
