Stella, Argentina
My name is Stella Maris Saubidet Oyhamburu and I am a teacher trainer in a state-run teacher training college in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, Argentina. My subject is, ‘Discursive Practices in Written Communication’. In 2020 and 2021, due to the pandemic, lessons were delivered online. One of the biggest challenges during these two academic years was to have ‘presence’ in our students’ lives. Classes were carefully planned, and lessons were divided into different sections so that students would become familiar with their structure. In order to focus on language and improve writing skills I included micro lessons every Wednesday. On a weekly basis during the first semester, each lesson consisted of a grammatical item, e.g. irregular plurals. After a short explanation, students were invited to produce a short written piece (a caption, a meme, etc) to practise this language focus. During the second semester I wanted them to revise some language learnt with the coursebook. So I gave them different videos and instructions to write narrative texts based on lessons they had already learnt. Needless to say, careful planning is key at every educational level, and especially in remote teaching. Teachers need to provide students with a predictable structure, well developed tasks and instances of revision.
Holly, Hong Kong
A student is speaking in front of the class. His hand that holds the cue cards is noticeably trembling; he splutters up to almost 200 words a minute, and scampers off to his seat as his voice fades out. Does that sound familiar? In an English language classroom, students often feel nervous, or worse, terrified, when asked to express their opinion, give a response, or deliver a speech in front of their peers.
However, communicative competence in English is an essential requirement that all Hong Kong students need to master. English language is a core subject in schools and speaking is tested in the local public examination. Without a pass grade in English, students will not be able to study in local universities.
As an English teacher who teaches mostly senior form students aged 16 to 18 in a local secondary school, I notice that students may be hesitant to embrace the rewarding, yet vulnerable, experience of speaking in front of the class because of their fear of judgment or fear of failure. With my experience in public speaking, I’m thrilled to share the good news that this pivotal communication skill is a learnable one. With sufficient practice both inside and outside the classroom, students can harness the power of speech to persuade, to connect and to empower.
From my experience, a quick one-minute impromptu speech session with three lucky speakers of the day is guaranteed to keep students on the edge of their seats. Speech topics can be related to the learning theme of the week, recent social issues or a more personal topic. To ensure success, teachers should build rapport with the class and teach them to be a supportive audience before beginning the exercise.
The session can also be adapted to a collaborative storytelling game where three speakers work together to form a coherent story while incorporating random prompts chosen from a bag. At the end of each session, students can get individual feedback from the teacher and multiple encouraging messages from classmates. While it is possible that students do not initially ‘enjoy’ this exercise, more often than not they are grateful for their ‘daily heart attack’ moments in the English lessons. Practice makes progress.
Outside the classroom, I founded an English Public Speaking Club to personally mentor students who are interested in sharpening their leadership and communication skills. They attend regular workshops on overcoming stage fright, verbal and non-verbal delivery techniques, speech evaluation skills and so on. I am thankful that universities and numerous organisations in the city make consistent efforts to organise various contests every year. Motivated to embrace new challenges, students who do join such contests gradually grow to become even more confident and effective communicators.
Communication is one of the 21st century skills that prepare our students for the unknown future. The English language classroom might just be the best place for them to overcome their fears, develop their confidence, and reconnect themselves with the community in the post pandemic world.
Sergei, Latvia
Hi, my name is Sergei, and I’m a beginner EFL/ESL teacher in an Upper-secondary school in Latvia. I would like to offer you a glimpse into the first steps of an English teacher’s journey and why it’s OK to stutter on your first day of teaching.
By a turn of fate that I haven’t yet made sense of, I happened to do my first English lessons that were a part of my supervised teaching practice right in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. I was thrown in at the deep end.
The pandemic was reshaping our known and comfortable ways of life. In quite an unexpected way, Covid-19 has proven the idea that we, as teachers, must prepare our students for the future in a way that connectivists urged us to. Since the world is ever-changing, shifting, interconnected, reactive, the content and skills we teach can never be ‘frozen in time’, or boiled down to one-size-fits-all information transfer and ‘mechanised’ reproduction. I got to taste this approach practically when I waved hello to my first students during Covid-19.
They were digital. I never got to meet my first students in person. We met via ‘MS Teams’, I listened to the voices and smiled at the faces of most of them – for the others, the sign of presence was just a profile picture and a nickname (which comes as no surprise but, fortunately, I managed to engage them too). When teaching, I supplemented our school’s paper-based textbooks that the students had at hand when studying from home with my own online presentations, games, and digital tools, such as blogging platforms and podcast recorders. I taught like that for two semesters until I graduated, and I’m grateful for the whole experience.
The next stage of my journey kicked off with momentum when my home country ushered in the ‘covexit’ and we were back to live classes.
It’s OK to stutter on your first day of teaching. Yes, literal stuttering was an issue I dealt with when I entered the classroom and taught face-to-face for the first time to several groups of teens ranging from 15- to 18-year-olds. These students were either yearning to learn the language or dismissing it is an irrelevant subject. Looking back on those first days of teaching, I would say that the reasons for my stuttering were twofold: the excitement brought along by the new role, and the genuine fear of failing: failing my students, both the motivated and fluent ones who needed to have their language bar kept high and the ‘lazy’ and ‘spaced-out’ ones who, as it turned out, only needed to be poked and pushed in the right manner.
September 2021, that’s when I was given my first students as a fully-fledged beginner teacher. That was when I stuttered. Teaching is exciting and scary enough, after all.
Teaching face to face is more literal now that we have stopped wearing masks and can see each other’s faces. As for the learning environment, the classrooms in our school are refurbished, equipped with projectors, interactive whiteboards, wi-fi and movable desks and chairs. The last allows me to play around with the seating arrangement to find out which way works best for my students in terms of cooperation and learning. The materials I’m using in class are not rocket science: Oxford textbooks and a good range of free online tools.
An important thing I must point out is that I’m working with classes of students with a great deal of gender diversity. Some of my students don’t feel like they’re either a ‘boy’ or a ‘girl’, and on the first day they asked me to refer to them in a gender-neutral way. Other students broke my assumptions of their identity, based on appearance and outfit, by revealing to me which gender they truly feel like. Attending to the needs of the non-binary and transgender students, adopting my language, on the one hand, and helping those students feel safe and be treated fairly, on the other hand, are a few new teaching points that I unexpectedly but eagerly included in my agenda.
Another thing worth pointing out in the light of recent dramatic events in the world is the ethnic diversity of my students. Most of my students are ethnic Latvians, but, in fact, I teach a fair number of young people of Russian descent and with Russian as their mother tongue. To cut a long story short, I observe with satisfaction that my Latvian-speaking students understand how pointless and unfair it is and how stigmatising it could be to ‘shame’ the Russian speakers who have nothing to do with the atrocities committed by a political regime. I see how crucial it is to be sober-minded, especially when it comes to teaching the up-and-coming generation, especially now.
At the end of the day, ‘orchestrating’ such classrooms and caring for every individual make me feel privileged and grateful because the bar is high, and things that keep one on their toes improve your skills.
I have so much to say already, but even more to ask from the fellow teachers in the community of MET. And this notion is so driving.
James, Spain
Hello, My name is James Santana Heal. I am half Spanish and half British and I am currently teaching in Spain. When I was younger, I was much more adventurous and I lived and worked in Poland and Indonesia. Those were the good old days!
I have been in sunny Spain, in Seville, for the last 20 years where I have been working at the same school. It is a very interesting set-up because we teach on site in our own centres and we also offer our services to mainstream schools where we offer English as an extracurricular activity. It’s interesting because I feel I have to wear two hats at all times.
Our centres and the other schools have different protocols and standards and very different settings. A good example of this is that in our centres we have the latest technology at our disposal whereas most of the offsite classrooms I teach in only have the traditional blackboard with chalk!
Some teachers hate not having an IWB or internet access but I feel that not having these luxuries has made me a better teacher. It has made me more resourceful, more inventive and less dependent on resources.
When teachers complain about the photocopier not working or the internet being unavailable, I just smile and think, ‘all in a day’s work for me’. I have no access to these wonders and we just make do with whatever we have.
When I am back on-site I am amazed at all the things I can do with the click of a button! But I am happy with these two very different worlds as I can confirm that students learn in both contexts and that it is up to the teacher to ensure that learning takes place and that students are motivated and keen to learn.
I love my job and one of the major changes I have noticed is that we have started teaching younger and younger children. We now teach 4-year-olds, which I have to say I have not done so far but I have taught 5-year-olds and my goodness, these students are very different to those adult students we had on our initial teacher training courses like CELTA. Still fun though, and certainly a challenge.
Apart from teaching children, teenagers and adults I help out with the teacher training programme at school. We are extremely lucky that our school takes teacher training extremely seriously and weekly sessions are organised to cater to our teacher’s needs. I have learnt so much as a teacher trainer and have had to look into a wide range of areas to ensure I am informed and able to deliver useful sessions. I have noticed that as teachers we have many skills that are transferable to teacher training, such as empathy, the desire to work as a team and inquisitiveness.
The hours can be long and a higher salary would be desirable but I love that feeling of achievement when a student can express themself in a second language accurately.
