Twenty Years in EFL-Part 3

I began the third part of my EFL career in the first full week of July 2005. The week London was granted the 2012 Olympics. Tragically, the following day London was subject to a bombing campaign that injured and killed many people. People I’d worked with previously were trying to contact me to see if I was safe. Unfortunately, mobile communications had been suspended so there was no way of contacting me. Once communications were restored I could confirm my safety.

I had just completed my DELTA and had been hired by the business English department of a renowned language school. At first, my teaching was just a few hours a week, but then progressed to more hours as time went on. After a couple of months, the Director of Studies (DoS) thought I could cover for her when she went on holiday in September. My main duties would be supporting the other teachers, timetabling, other admin and a little of bit of teaching too. My teaching hours were reduced as I would be the acting DoS. I wouldn’t have to worry about payroll as that would be attended to when the DoS returned from her break. I was quite looking forward to this area of responsibility. However, it was going to be a little busier than I’d anticipated.

One of the teachers who taught thirty or so lessons a week was a bit of a joker and liked to say things with a straight face when having fun with the others. On my first day as acting DoS, the teacher phoned up and told me that his brother had died suddenly, so he had to take care of affairs. I didn’t believe him at first, because he was in the habit of jesting with people. Sadly, this time it was true. I now had thirty lessons to be covered, run the department, take care of all the admin and proofread student reports plus a million other things (well, not a million but you know what I mean). I actually covered a lot of the lessons myself, but they were very long days. Then one day, the principal asked for the payroll (earlier than he usually did). Because it wasn’t expected I had no idea where the information for the teachers’ pay was kept and tried to compile the salaries from going back over timetables for the previous month. Holiday pay had to be added to salaries and I attempted to calculate that. Some of the teachers would have had some very generous holiday pay if the principal hadn’t checked my calculations. I managed to get through the two weeks with help from other academic managers who were sympathetic to my plight. It did take both the DoS and I at least a week to catch up on the admin afterwards.

In 2006, I was appointed to the permanent staff as a senior teacher. In 2009 after completing my ‘Diploma in English Teaching Management’ (DELTM), I was appointed deputy director of the department. Further acting DoS duties weren’t like the baptism of fire I first encountered.

Not only were we the business department, but also we dealt with one-to-one lessons and English for Specific Purposes (ESP). A lot of our clientele were very famous in their own countries. There were actors, politicians (mayors, prime ministers and presidents) and chairmen of football associations. We were very diplomatic and didn’t advertise that certain clients were developing their English language skills.

Some students had a very high opinion of their fame. One actor claimed he was so famous, that nobody should know of his presence. He insisted he would only arrive and leave the school outside the normal school hours, so he wouldn’t be mobbed by fans. I looked him up on the internet as I was a little cynical of his claimed fame. He’d been in a few things in his own country and was quite famous in his part of the world. One day, a young lady entered our department wanting to enrol on a course. It soon became clear, that was not her intention. She was a fan of the actor and wanted a selfie or an autograph. From that day on, another teacher and I used to smuggle the actor down the back fire escape and through another exit, so he could avoid his adoring fans.

After almost nine years at this school, it was time for me to move on. Next, I would be a Director of Studies in a school in the noisiest and most polluted part of London. In the meantime, here’s a Slideshare presentation of some of the historical buildings I visited during my time in the school (2005-2014).

Twenty Years in EFL-Part 2

September 2001 is probably best remembered for a tragic world event. In that same September I started a new job teaching English to adults in a London language school. It had two branches, one near the BBC and the other branch about twenty minutes walk away and not far from the river. Apparently Gustav Holst the composer lived upstairs in one of the pubs on the riverfront. This part of London had a very large Polish population and this was reflected in the large number of Polish students in the school and in the classes. One class I took had twelve Polish students, and eight of them were called Agnieszka. They were all very different, but to indicate which student I was addressing, I referred to the students as Agnieszka B or Agnieszka J, depending on their family names. For our Christmas parties, we would go to local Polish restaurants. Not the best choice for me, as I don’t like cabbage and it seemed to be a staple food in the restaurants. I did learn some Polish words though. ‘Kapusta’ meant ‘cabbage’ and ‘czesc’ for ‘Hello’.

For the first year or so, I taught afternoon and evenings in the school, so had to realign my body clock to deal with my new working day compared to when I’d been working in a bank and getting up very early. One of my evening class students (not Polish) used to turn up for lessons and always fell asleep. I thought perhaps it was because he’d been working all day and was very tired. Then one night another student asked if I knew why the ‘tired’ student smelt of alcohol. I hadn’t noticed, but one evening he decided to involve me in a face-to-face conversation. That evening I received aromatic proof that he’d been to the pub before my lesson. I’m pleased to say that not many students have ever needed alcohol to get through one of my lessons. Not to the best of my knowledge anyway. I made many friends at this school of both teachers and students. I’m still in touch with some of them fifteen to twenty years later. It was probably my favourite school to work in. However, I had decided on English language teaching as a career and as much as I liked working at the school, there seemed to be little opportunity for progress. In my last year at the school and because I was considered an ‘old timer’, I used to get the Cambridge exams classes (then called FCE, Advanced and Proficiency). Some teachers I knew (in all schools) used to coast lessons, but you couldn’t do that with the exam classes. There was a lot of preparation, but I found teaching them enjoyable. Some of my students received an ‘A’ grade for their proficiency exam which is all the more impressive considering these exams would be difficult for some native English speakers. I left this school in early July 2005 and started my next school the following week.

Twenty Years in EFL-Part 1

I have a Twitter account @lennetenglish, an Instagram account (the QR code at the end of this post will take you there), I made some podcasts for my Japanese students (https://www.podbean.com/ei/pb-nf85r-bcade0) and a blog (which hopefully you are reading at the moment). I decided I wasn’t using them to their full potential, so last month decided to tweet every day for a month. I wasn’t too keen at first, but then quite enjoyed the activity. This month I’ve decided to blog every day for a month or at least reach 31 posts before the end of the month. In April, I hope to do the same with Instagram.

So, as the heading of this post says, this year celebrates my twentieth year in EFL teaching. During those twenty years I have worked in six different educational establishments. Before teaching, I had been working in the ‘overseas’ departments of different London banks for over twenty years. I didn’t actually work overseas, but in the non-domestic parts of banking, that were connected with international travel or finance (such as import and export business). By 2000, I had become disillusioned with the lack of progress in banking, despite my many years of experience and the constant repetition of the same process every day. Not every one who works in a bank earns great salaries as you might read in the media. In some places I worked, it appeared that the awarding of positions may have been quite nepotistic. I decided that I couldn’t work in that sort of environment until retirement (which in those day was a long way off).

A friend who was moving to Denmark told me she was thinking of taking a Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) course. She explained that knowledge of a foreign language was not a requirement for the course. However, we had been studying Danish at the same night school class, so that might be helpful to understand how adults would feel trying to learn a second language after a full day’s work. At the time, the British government provided a grant of about £100-£120 for further and higher education purposes, so that went towards the cost of the course. The grant was eventually withdrawn from the public as some people had abused it, by taking the money and not enrolling on a course.

Following the completion of my training course, my first ‘big class’ teaching experience was of Italian children about 12-16 years old in a summer school. The summer school was based in the campus of a well-known university a short bus ride away from where I live. The summer school was one of a number of offshoots of a highly established EFL school. The school has had to change its name in the past few years to avoid confusion with a more nefarious organisation. Think of how the river Thames is referred to in Oxford.

The summer school classes consisted of a maximum of fifteen students of boys and girls. From Monday to Friday, the mornings were language classes. For a novice, there were plenty of resources to assist in planning a lesson, but you were also encouraged to design your own activities. I appreciated this encouragement of creativity and enjoyed preparing my own worksheets. However, when I look at them now they seem quite basic (other teachers used to borrow them, so they couldn’t have been that bad). The afternoons and weekends were dedicated to leisure activities and educational activities. There was at least one visit to the British Museum every week, where the main focus for the children was the Egyptology department, main items of interested being the mummified corpses. We had to work at least one Saturday or Sunday at the weekend. These would involve the longer coach trips to St Albans or Cambridge. My favourite part of the coach trip was sitting at the front and using the microphone to point out all the famous buildings and monuments. Being a Londoner was quite useful here. Sometimes there were visits to Roman ruins. The children never really seemed interested in these (perhaps because they were Italian and may have seen enough of them in their own country). Cathedral visits were very interesting to observe. Even the most troublesome or noisy child paid respect to the statue of the Madonna at the entrance and seemed to undergo some kind of transformation.

If you’ve ever been sitting peacefully on a bus or train on your way home from work, then suddenly about fifty noisy teenagers board, accompanied by weary adults, it’s probably an EFL school trip. So, my first few weeks of teaching were spent with noisy, excitable Italian children. I thought, ‘Well, if I can gain their attention, perhaps I can teach anyone’. That’s not always the case. You expect children to behave like children. I’ve taught adult classes where the behaviour of the adults has been rather petulant and childish. After my first teaching experience, I had a little break then started in an adult EFL school where I would spend the next four years.

Over the Moon

The phrase ‘Over the Moon’ probably owes its present usage to sporting personalities who describe a win or a magnificent victory as making them feel ‘over the moon’. The origin of this phrase dates back to sometime in the 17th/18th centuries. Fictional characters would be so happy they would have the energy to jump over the moon. The phrase became known to young children through the nursery rhyme ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’, where a cow jumps over the moon.

The opposite of ‘over the moon’ is ‘as sick as a parrot’ which means ‘really disappointed’ about a result, generally after a sporting competition. The etymology of this phrase is uncertain. Some accounts say it originated in the mid-1970s, others say it originates in the late 17th century.

Using Cuisenaire Rods

I quite like using Cuisenaire Rods in EFL, whereas some of my colleagues observe the use as childish. I think the shape and colour of the rods appeals to the eye and to the willingness of the students to use them. Originally used to teach maths to young learners, they were adopted for language teaching. There are a variety of different uses, some of which I will discuss in a later post. One of my favourite activities is spelling out colours using the rods and getting students used to the different shapes of words and recognising which letters have tails. In the photograph below, the rods represent the colours blue, red, green, black and pink. The rods have been spaced out slightly for photographic purposes.

Improvising in EFL

My first EFL teaching job was at a summer school for Italian children 12-16 years of age. I think after that I was ready to teach anyone. It was quite an interesting experience considering that I’d previously spent over twenty-three years in banking, most of those years in the ‘foreign’ departments. On my second day of teaching the Italian children, I realised I’d left my board pens in the staff room on the other side of the campus. I couldn’t leave the classroom unattended due to the children’s age. I didn’t have anything to write on the board with and this was in the time before IWBs or YouTube or music streaming.

I therefore had to rely on my repertoire of songs, puzzles and tongue twisters that I had tried out on younger relatives. Luckily the children were very responsive and enjoyed the lesson, but it was a very long seventy-five minutes. Another time I wrote on the whiteboard with indelible marker pens and didn’t realise until it was time to wipe the board at the end of the lesson. It was very hard work removing all my writing from the whiteboard. The children found it hilarious. I wish I could have said the same for the Director of Studies.

Use of Puppets

When demonstrating the ‘Silent Way’ to my Japanese TEYL trainees, I often use a glove puppet to make the session a little more interesting. I’m not that fond of this methodology and think it’s better off as part of a lesson rather than a base for a whole lesson. However, it does give me the opportunity to demonstrate the use of puppets with young learners (YL). It’s quite good to tell the YL that they can speak to the puppet, but it will only speak the target language. Eventually, the YL acknowledge the puppet more than the teacher. It’s quite fascinating to watch. Below is a photo of Harry the Hedgehog that I sometimes use in class.

Kakizome

One of my main teaching aims is to train Japanese students to teach English to young Japanese learners. At the start of January young Japanese learners have calligraphy lessons for practising kanji characters. The adults in my school also participated. It was called ‘Kakizome’. I’m left-handed, so I found it quite difficult sometimes. I still train/teach but it’s all online now. There’s a picture of my efforts below.

Happy 2021-Online English Services

Hello everyone,

Happy New Year to you all. I hope that 2021 is better for all of us and that you all stay safe and well. I look forward to working with you all this year. Whether you would like to improve your English skills or if you need someone to proofread your work if English is not your first language, I would like to help you. Please contact me and I would happy to hear from you. Have a good week. Steve.