Emma, Thailand
My name is Emma, and I am a 25 year-old English teacher from Italy. After completing my studies I had the opportunity to become a teacher in a little private school for kids aged 3 to 16, in Trat, Thailand. Teaching in such a close knit, friendly, yet professional environment, was a real fortune for a beginner teacher like me. It allowed me to pay closer attention to the needs of the students, as well as providing an extremely useful professional training.
In the last couple of years, due to the global pandemic, all classes at the school had to be split between online and face-to-face. In particular, group lessons – around 10-15 kids per class – were temporarily moved online, while one-to-one classes were kept on site. The school provided teachers with a wide range of materials to make the lessons as varied and entertaining as possible, i.e. worksheets, toys, flashcards, a big library of books for all levels, as well as a personal computer and several online platforms. A lot of attention was paid to the lesson planning process, according to a previously arranged schedule, making sure to effectively use all the available materials and then reflect back on the lessons to constantly improve the students’ experience.
Despite all the challenges the school was faced with due to the pandemic, this past year has been the most enriching teaching experience for me so far. One thing I will definitely bring with me in my future career will be the attention dedicated to the phonics system, to help young students learn how to read. Not only do I believe it is a very effective teaching method, but seeing the kids quickly become able to read words and then sentences and up to entire short books, it’s also a huge confidence boost for them and extremely gratifying for the teachers. The phonic system is structured to be taught through games, songs and interactive activities. As a matter of fact, I believe the future of EFL teaching lies in a communicative, fun approach to the subject that keeps up with the evolution and widening of the English language and culture, as well as of the technologies, both for children and adults.
David, Austria
I’m an English and Spanish teacher, teaching primarily English in an Austrian upper-secondary school. The students I teach are aged from 14–19. The older ones aged 18 and 19 are studying for their Matura (which is the school leaving certificate here in Austria). I teach them four times a week in both languages. At the moment, the typical problems that arise are to do with motivation and motivating the students to want to learn English and continue learning English outside the classroom. The materials we use centre around exercise books, listening, reading and grammar worksheets, and previous exam papers to practise for the final exam. Looking towards 2022, the challenges we face tend to lie in how we can best prepare our students for the final English exam. With Covid being rather dominant in the education field at the moment, the issues we have tend to be not knowing if we have covered enough material, whether the lockdowns and distant learning have had a larger effect on our students that we perhaps realise. The solutions come on a sort of week-by-week basis, constant communication is key to solving such issues and keeping an eye on what is going on worldwide. Keeping students and teachers informed is crucial and maintaining a level of English spoken and written throughout is also significant. I enjoy a lot about teaching, but the main thing I enjoy is being in the classroom, talking with students and seeing their improvements. Personally, I find the grammar of the tasks used for the final exam in Austria quite tricky to teach so I am always looking for ways to improve my teaching in this area. They are quite similar to the Cambridge Certificate First B2/C1 English in Use items, so if anyone has any ideas…
Andy, Japan
Hi, my name is Andy Boon, and I am originally from England. I am a professor in the faculty of Global Communications at Toyo Gakuen University, Tokyo, Japan. I have been teaching English in Japan since 1997. In Japan, an undergraduate degree takes four years of study. At my institution, English is a mandatory subject for first- and second-year students. In their first year of study, students take four koma of English each week (koma is a 90-minute class). At the beginning of their university education, our students can range from A2 to B1 level and are streamed in the first year according to the results of a placement test. Class sizes for core classes tend to be around 25 students. Elective courses can range from between 10 to 50 students. I currently teach several different courses including a listening skills course, two conversation skills courses, two presentation and debate courses, two academic skills courses, and a business English seminar. When I am given a new course to teach, I have two options: I have the freedom to choose an existing coursebook on the market that matches the aims of the course I am going to teach, or I can choose to create my own materials. If you would like to know more about my particular teaching context, please take a look at some of the past articles I have written for Modern English Teacher (Boon, 2019, 2020, 2021).
Mario, Belgium
My name is Mario Lecluyze, I live in Flanders, the northern part of Belgium, and have been involved in teaching since 1985. I taught Dutch, our L1, and English in the first and second stages of secondary education (ages 12–15), but for the last decade I have only been teaching English. I also worked as a teacher trainer for English and CLIL, and from 2015 till 2020 I supported teachers and schools as an educational adviser for English and CLIL.
Just like all around the globe, the pandemic has had a huge impact on our teaching jobs in Flanders. We had to switch from face-to-face teaching to online or hybrid lessons. It struck me how quickly educators all over the world adapted their teaching in such a flexible way, using online tools and technology to do their job.
In Flanders, we are also in the process of transforming our secondary education. The government has decreed innovative attainment targets for every school subject. They are now being turned into new curricula. I was fortunate to be a member of the English curriculum commission for the first and second stages. Communication is still key in these curricula, but we were able to enrich them with creativity and literature. These items were really missing in our previous curricula.
Finally, a major challenge for English teachers in Flanders is coping with mixed ability classes. A lot of our youngsters already master quite a lot of English before even being taught. They learn it from games, songs, series on Netflix, YouTube clips, etc. But, at the other end of the scale, we also have students in the same class without any affinity at all for the English language. Oddly enough, at starter’s level, there is no group in the middle. Therefore, teachers really have to find ways to cope with this. But this keeps our job challenging and fun. After all those years, I still love teaching English to these teenagers.
Silvia, Italy
Nice to meet you, teachers and educators from all around the globe!
One of the latest Pavilion vlogs caught my eye and so … Here I am, giving it a try and seizing this new opportunity :-)!
My name is Silvia Pizzola and I’m an Italian teacher of English language and culture and I’ve just moved from a catering school to a lyceum and technical institute. I was actually looking for some new challenges and I’ve been as happy as a clam about my choice to date.
I’ve been teaching face-to-face classes since the start of the school year and my classes are held on a regular basis for a total amount of three hours per week. On average I have about twenty students of mixed nationalities and their level of English is pretty tiered. As a matter of fact, they’re supposed to achieve a B2-level by the end of high school but it’s not so easy to make it for everyone. As for the tools, I usually employ the textbooks my school provides along with the PC and TV screen each classroom is equipped with. However, I really enjoy supplementing coursebooks with my own material, such as a few handouts or digital exercises to be done for extra practice.
I’m really passionate about my job and so I always follow teacher-training webinars and keep updated. Moreover, I’m into new educational platforms, like Padlet or Mentimeter, and I make the most of it any time I can.
As I reckon I still have a lot to work on, I’d like to improve my skills more and more: what’s better than sharing and learning from each other? That’s why my favourite motto is ‘teaching is learning twice over’! So … let’s keep teaching, let’s keep experimenting!
