This Monday I was trying to arrange a meeting with our designers because we are transferring some of the content on the Teen Grid to our new Main Grid islands. The two new islands are now ready, but I need to move the existing island (note to all you Lost fans, that might sound familiar) so it is right next to the new ones. Monday usually finishes with another meeting, this time with my colleague Frank Spearmann (Kyle Mawer), responsible for many of the learning quests on our island, and who will be starting to teach a First Certificate Speaking Skills course in Second Life next week. On the agenda will also be future events that we’d like to run for teachers and learners on the British Council Isles.

Tuesday

The Business English course is loosely based on the TV programme Dragon’s Den, and takes students through an imaginary process of setting up their own company and developing a business idea. This is basically an excuse to practice lots of business English skills such as interviewing, negotiating, presenting, etc. I’ll be team-teaching this course with my colleague Creed Juran (Joe Pereira) and we will be making quite a few changes to the course.

Although the course has now been planned, Joe and I will meet to discuss any last minute details and send reminders to the students. This time round we have students registered from Italy, Austria, Sweden, Spain and Portugal among other countries. For some of these students the course will be the first time they have ever used Second Life, so we need to be particularly careful to gently integrate Second Life skills into the planning of each session to help the newbies. The classes are usually filmed / recorded so we can learn from what we do well (and not so well!) and it’s likely that after the class we’ll talk about how it went and make notes about it to help us when we come to write the report. This information (including course and lesson plans) will be made public through the Avalon project to help other teachers who would like to do something similar. It is hoped that in this way we will be able to share best practice for any other language (not just English) teacher  who wants to run a similar course in SL.

Wednesday

As today sees the start of another course (the FCE Speaking Skills course), I’ll be meeting Frank to discuss what we need to do with any students who may have sound problems. As there’ll be learners without much experience of SL, we expect there’ll be those who’ll need help setting up their voice controls so they can fully take part in the course. This is one of the striking differences between being a teacher in SL and in RL. In order to be able to be comfortable with teaching online you need to have a certain degree of confidence and technical know-how. Fortunately, the SL platform is now far more stable than it used to be, and the new interface means it is also easier to teach people how to use it.

The other exciting development since the last courses we ran in SL is the ability to show any website in-world. This means as teachers we can now use text and images in a much more dynamic and flexible way than before.

Thursday

First thing on Thursday morning we have an Avalon project meeting. With so many partners and so much activity going on, these meetings are vital in order for us to be able to co-ordinate activity and make sure everything is on track.

Friday

Friday is a great day for catching up with things and for meeting people. There are also lots of social events going on in Second Life. I haven’t had time to go in a long time now, but Friday night is when the SLExperiments group meets. They are a great bunch of (mainly) language teachers who meet every week to share ideas about teaching in Second Life. It’s a great place for new teachers to start finding out what can be done. Maybe see some of you at one of the get-togethers sometime?

Baldric Commons usually calls himself Graham Stanley outside of Second Life, and when he’s not working there he is a social media consultant for the British Council and also works as a teacher of young learners at the British Council in Barcelona, Spain.

He has been teaching English since 1995 and even before studying for the M.Ed in ELT & Educational technology (University of Manchester), he had developed an interest in emerging technologies for language learning and teaching. He has recently become coordinator of the IATEFL Learning Technologies Special Interest Group and frequently speaks about this field at conferences both nationally and internationally.

As he’s not a big fan of TV (especially now that Lost has finished) and doesn’t like football, he can be frequently found on Twitter, and blogs at http://blog-efl.blogspot.com and  http://www.digitalplay.info/blog.

Brazil is a wonderful country, well known for its hospitable inhabitants, samba, its amazing football squad, and a couple of other traits which make it a great place to spend your vacations in. Most foreigners I’ve talked to would like to visit Rio de Janeiro or the Northeast of the country, famous for its beaches. I’m not fortunate to teach in any of these cities, or anywhere near the beach. I live in Brasília, the capital of Brazil, which is located in the centre of the country. Just so you know, if I want to go to the beach, I need to travel more than 1.000 kilometres. It’s a country with continental dimensions, and being a language teacher in such a place can be difficult at times. But, what do I mean by that?

Before I get to that point, I should tell you about the two mainstream ways of English language teaching in Brasília: in regular schools and in language institutes. In a Brazilian regular school, teachers face 45 – 50 students sitting in orderly rows waiting for your lecture. Not very communicative, huh?! As a matter of fact, many English teachers in regular schools here can’t speak the language they teach. The language is taught in Brazilian Portuguese, and the focus is on grammar and superficial reading comprehension. In addition to that, many of the students study English at language institutes, so the teacher ends up having students from all different levels in the same classroom, from those who have never studied English in the classroom to those who are proficient speakers, and this teacher has to teach them “all” about the verb BE. Been there, done that.

Language institutes abound in Brasília. You can find a language institute everywhere you look, and the fact that language institutes fall under the same classification of knitting lessons, or craftsmanship courses means that they are not considered education – at least not by the Ministry of Education. Consequently, you can find language institutes that claim to teach all there’s to be taught in as few as 8 months, and others that say it’ll take you 8 years to finish your studies. Hence, an English language teacher can pretty much pick and choose where and with what methodology he or she wants to work. I’d rather tell you a bit about my current situation.

I’ve taught in regular schools and in quite a few language institutes, and I currently run my own language institute. Just like many other language institutes in Brasília, our classrooms are much smaller – about 15 students per class, and the goal of the course is to enable learners to effectively function in English. All skills are integrated, and students are encouraged to use the language productively rather than just being able to understand it. In terms of professional development, teachers from many of the language institutes are usually interested in professional growth, and even though Brasília isn’t usually the venue for major conferences, few seminars are held from time to time. Some publishers also fly in some important people from the world of ELT, but that doesn’t happen as often as it does in São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. But this is enough about the context, I suppose.

Coming back to the question I asked in the introduction, teaching English in a country as big as Brazil, and one in which you can travel for more than 2.000 kilometres without having to speak another language has its drawbacks, and the one of these is showing people the real importance of learning at least one foreign language (perhaps the hardest thing teachers have to do). Even after the advent of the Internet and everything that globalization has brought about, many students still fail to see the usefulness of English in their lives (and being able to drive for two days without having to speak another language seems to make a strong case for those who think learning a foreign language is irrelevant). It’s not uncommon for parents to talk to teachers and ask for help in convincing their kids that learning English is important to their future. However, many of these parents are not truly convinced of its importance either.

To our advantage, most well-off teenagers are online all the time, and because of that they are in touch with English all the time. This means you can try to show them the reality of English as a lingua franca by making use of their own reality. You can show them that they’ll need English to play the latest videogame, to read an online article or to get in touch with their friends from abroad. Lots and lots of arguments, but isn’t this the same thing that our parents used to tell us? Have we forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager and all you want is being part of your own tribe. A student of mine once told me he wouldn’t even care about learning how to use twitter, or how to blog, for instance, simply because his friends were not into it. As for the videogames, it seems they’d rather talk to one another and get to the next level through trial and error than try to understand what is written on the screen. It actually reminds me a bit of what adults do with manuals.

I’m sure the situation I described isn’t unique to my teaching situation. And even though there are difficulties, this is what teachers do: we overcome difficulties, we try to find innovative ways to engage our learners and to make sure we’re trying our best to prepare them for life. Teaching English in Brazil, in most cases, requires a good deal of creativity and willpower. But it’s all worth it when you see your students progressing and telling you they can now understand what the people in movies and songs are saying – their main sources of “interaction” with the target language.

Henrick Oprea is a teacher, teacher trainer and Director of studies at Atlantic Idiomas, Brasília, Brazil. He’s been teaching English for about 13 years and is currently taking his MA in TEFL/TESL from the University of Birmingham. As any good Brazilian, he’s a football fan and supports Vasco da Gama, the best football team in the world (or so he thinks). He’s also a blogger and you can read his thoughts on his blog. You can also find him on twitter.

* A million thanks to Barbara, for inviting me to write this guest post. It is my very first one.

Earlier this month, I awoke to a lovely message telling me that Teaching Village was the TEFL Site of the Month. While always thrilled to get an award of any kind, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t sure what this award was for (I’m still sort of new to this blogging business). So, I went over to TEFL.net and learned Teaching Village was being recognized for having developed “a rich community of English teachers from around the world.”

Since I’m extremely proud of the teachers who are part of this community, and since they’re the reason Teaching Village received this award, it seems only fair that I brag on them a bit

So far, 30 teachers representing 16 countries have contributed posts to this blog. They are very different teachers working in a variety of environments. Some are technowizards and some work in schools where a CD player is considered high tech. Most, but not all, are EFL teachers of young learners. For some, English is a first language; for others it’s a second or third language. What they have in common is a passion for their students, and for teaching, and for learning. They’re written about their own classes so we can better understand how EFL looks in different corners of the world. They’ve written about things they think other EFL teachers should know. They’ve written about the things their students have taught them. They’ve been generous with the knowledge they’ve learned through experience, and I’ve learned from each of them.

Thank you!

The countries in parentheses refer to the countries the teachers live in or have written about, not necessarily the country on the cover of their passports. If you’ve missed some of their posts, I encourage you to explore the “Guest Bloggers” section in the sidebar. If you find a post that moves you or teaches you something new, please let the writer know in comments. Many of these teachers are beginning bloggers and for some this was their first foray into the blogosphere. They all enjoy hearing from other teachers!

If you’d like to read more about our TEFL Site award, and see which other blogs have been recognized, you can read more about it on TEFL.net.

If you’d like to become part of The Village, please consider writing a guest post. We’d love to learn from you, too!

Now, if I can just figure out how to insert the award logo into the sidebar…..

I have been trying to enhance my teaching with the new technologies since 1997 when I created my first web page while attending a seminar on New Technologies in Modern Language Teaching in Finland. But everything I did over those twelve years was nothing compared to what I have been doing since I joined Twitter and built my PLN in April 2009.

Today my students and I use technology to connect with students and teachers from all over the world. We tweet, we ning, we skype, we glog, we wiki, we blog … we learn, we understand, we respect.

While at my school there might not be many teachers who pursue new technologies, there certainly are many who lead a wide range of after school activities and dedicate a considerable amount of their free time to their students. Our principal likes to say that we are an extra-curriculum school, but she strongly encourages the teachers to connect with the students outside the classroom.

So on the one side we have these enthusiastic teachers who do extra work for no extra pay, and on the other there are students who participate in these activities not because of grades, but because they want to make a difference. What we get are excellent results in sports competitions, creative achievements and voluntary work.

The school’s basketball team has been Croatia’s school champion for years, handball and football teams boast excellent results, tennis and badminton players are on the way to the top and our swimmers have won lots of medals. The dance group “Big Deal” (their PE teacher is called Mrs Diel, hence the name) is invited to all the major competitions in Croatia. The Girls’ Choir has a long tradition of participating in different European competitions and last year they won silver medal at the Bratislava Cantat Festival. The members of the Debate Club regularly participate in teenage panel discussions. The Film Club won the first prize in the Croatian Teen Festival last year. We’ve organized a number of exchange projects with schools from Europe and the US. Our students go on field trips to different parts of Croatia as part of the project “Travel & Learn” on a monthly basis. Fundraisers are a common practice at my school. Last year we bought a mini kitchen for an orphanage, the year before it was a washing machine. The members of the School Volunteer Club play with toddlers in the orphanage and help out in a homeless shelter every week. Students learn French and Croatian sign language together with their teachers. Once a week they gather in the school’s basement to make wheel thrown pottery. In December, students show their creativity in decorating the school’s corridors and on Mardi Gras, a little bit of silliness in the classroom is a welcome break from hard work and seriousness.

The positive connections between students and teachers that we managed to establish contribute to students’ better classroom achievement and their personal growth. The students, provided with support and encouragement from their teachers, feel empowered to make a difference.

I feel greatly honored to be a guest blogger on this blog, especially because Barbara and her textbook series Let’s Go made my sons fall in love with the English language. Thank you, Barbara!

My name is Arjana Blazic and I’m an English and German teacher from Zagreb, Croatia. I’m committed to lifelong learning and I do it with great joy. I’m an avid user of new technologies and one of my major goals is to teach my students how to take advantage of all the possibilities that technology-enhanced learning can offer. I blog in English and in Croatian. You can find me on twitter and join me in my award-winning wiki Greetings from the world.

I wanted to try something that would stretch me as a teacher and remind me what it felt like to be a beginner. I certainly got what I was hoping for, and more!

As the 2010 EVO workshops are set to begin, I thought this would be a good time for me to look at how things have changed for me over this past year.

One of the biggest changes is that I’m blogging. In my first blog post I set out my goal:

This blog is one small part of my effort to be part of the teaching “We.” I’m definitely a work in progress, and I hope that you’ll help me grow by connecting and sharing your knowledge, too.

In addition to the larger teaching community I’ve discovered online, I’m also part of a smaller, blogging community. Karenne Sylvester saw enough potential in my early efforts to take me under her generous wing at Bloggers in ELT. Being part of a community of bloggers has been an ongoing education for me. I’m still not all that good at the tech side of blogging, but I’m better than I was. (Thanks, BELTers!)

I’ve met wonderful teachers through the Stories from the Front Lines of EFL series. It’s been fascinating to hear about teaching contexts around the world, and there are still more stories in the pipeline. It’s been so much fun that I’ve got another series in the works–Stuff Every EFL Teacher Should Know. (If you might be interested in writing a guest post for either series, please let me know!)

I’m still vaguely surprised to find that people actually read my posts, so was astonished when Education International asked permission to reprint one of my blog posts (Why I Love Teachers) in their magazine Worlds Of Education (I’m on page 6!).

I wrote, and presented, and taught before I did the EVO sessions, but what I write and present about, and how I teach, has changed.

In the 1990s, I wrote a column for the JALT Teaching Children SIG newsletter called The Teacher’s File. It was a column about teaching resources. I’m going to resurrect it in 2010, to explore ways teachers can use the internet for professional development. It kicks off with a two-part feature called The Teacher’s File for the 21st Century (part two is coming soon).

My presentations have changed, as well. At JALT 2009, I made my first ever techie-type presentation–Can Twitter Make You a Better Children’s Teacher? My February workshops for the Oxford Teaching Workshop Series will also be tech-related for the first time–Interactive Ideas for keeping your English classes relevant in the 21st Century (or, how to include technology in your lessons even if you haven’t got any technology in your classroom).

VWLL introduced me to virtual conferences, and this year I attended more conferences online than I did in person. I still love being at conferences in person, but the logistics of attending very many from Asia are pretty daunting (besides being quite spendy). Being able to boot up my laptop and sit in on a workshop in Second Life is a very decent substitution. One of the nicest things about online workshops is that they generally run on a 24 hour clock (since presenters and attendees are from various time zones) and sessions are usually recorded (so I can view workshops that happen in inconvenient–for me–time zones). Here’s a presentation from SLanguages 2009 about the TESOL EVO on Virtual Worlds and Language Learning.

I’ve also enjoyed following summaries of workshops on Twitter, and on blogs. Not as good as being there, but way, way easier, and much better than nothing.

I still provide handouts for my own workshops, but now include electronic versions as well as paper handouts (another thing I never imagined doing). BAW introduced me to wikis, and now I have my own. For the moment, it’s a nice place to keep electronic versions of my presentations, so teachers who can’t attend my workshops can still get the handouts.

I still teach in classrooms where the highest tech item is the CD player. The challenge has been to find ways to use technology, and engage my students with technology, when we don’t actually have access to it during lessons. After six months, almost all of my adult students have finally tracked down their email addresses, and about half have actually sent me an email message. Most of them access the internet with their cell phones, and had never sent nor received an email message. I’ve started a blog for my students (and anyone else interested), and have even posted a couple of entries created by my adult classes. After I’d posted a video my students made demonstrating origami, I got an email message from one of my students:

When I looked for “Shinfujin paper Balloon” on NET, I was very surprised. Because I thought that was so small article. But I could see it and other people, too. I understood our small world links global world.

Both the sentiment (and the fact that it arrived by email) warmed my teacher’s heart! Not to be outdone, my bilingual children’s class uses the internet for reading, and they blog for writing.

My newest student doesn’t live anywhere near me–she’s in Second Life. Yes, a year after the EVO VWLL, I’m a Second Life resident approaching her first Rez Day (like a birthday, but for my avatar) and a firm believer in the promise of virtual worlds for language learning. In fact, I’ll be back as a mentor for this year’s EVO, Teaching Languages in a Virtual World, and wishing that I could sit in on ALL the TESOL sessions offered this year.

So, if you’ve signed up for one of the Electronic Village Online sessions, my advice to you is to jump into the deep end and embrace the experience. It’s six weeks of sleep deprivation, but totally worth the cost. Thanks to generosity of TESOL and the Webheads (who organize the sessions), these free workshops are some of the best professional development you will find.

They might even change your life

I have been speaking in English to my daughter since she was born. She understands the language and feels very confident. Children at school even thought she came from “Disnelyland” because she was fluent in English.

As a Web 2.0 fan I felt that something was missing in my daughter’s education. She had to be able to learn the language as a game. Therefore I created her first blog when she was only 4 years old: Vicky’s Learning English.  It was just unbelievable to see how she naturally incorporated the mouse and learned very quickly how to go to favourites and open the link to her blog.

Amazingly she taught me that she was able to navigate when she was only 4 years old because she knew all the YouTube videos linked to the one I uploaded in her blog.

How did I add the content to the blog? This was really very easy because I followed her teacher’s syllabus and added funny activities for her to play at home. Her blog became a finalist earlier this year in III Espiral Edublogs 09. You can read about it here.

You must be asking yourself how she was able to use her blog if she couldn’t  read nor write. She knew that there was a clickable orange link that took her to a webpage. Some webpages were in Chinese and she was really engaged because for her everything was unreadable.

She was learning and having fun at the same time. This experience has allowed me to start the most rewarding professional experience I have ever had. Nowadays in a very small school in the Northern Area of Buenos Aires I am in charge of the Kinder blog: St. Matthew’s College. This blog offers extra activities for kindergarden students.

Digital natives take technology for granted. Do you know of any other story on how teachers are engaging this new tech-savvy generation?

Jennifer  Verschoor holds degrees as English University Professor, Bachelor in Educational Management, English Public Translator and ICT in the Classroom validated by Trinity College London. Her emphasis in training teachers to integrate technology into the classroom started several years ago. Since then has given numerous workshops on the integration of New Technologies in Education. Currently she is an ICT Teacher Trainer at ESSARP. She is proud WEBHEAD and President of ARCALL Argentine Computer Assisted Language Learning. For more information about her please visit her blog.

Abraham Lincoln

I started blogging to explore a belief that “we are stronger, better teachers when we work together, share our knowledge, and connect with others.” I’m only marginally better at the tech stuff now than I was at the start, but I’ve learned a lot about the power of the internet to create a community of teachers.

I’m thrilled to be nominated for an Edublog award for best new blog. However, in the six months I’ve been blogging, nearly half of my posts have been written by other teachers. It feels a bit strange to be up for an individual award for something that isn’t really an individual effort. Much of the success this blog has had is a result of great teachers sharing their personal stories as part of the Front Lines of EFL series. They told their stories without expectation of being recognized, and often not believing that other people would even be interested in what they had to say. In some cases, their guest post was their first foray onto a cyber stage and took a fair bit of courage. So, for me, the best part about this nomination is that it gives me an opportunity to give these teachers the recognition they deserve.

First, there was Özge Karaoğlu, an amazing educator in Turkey. Her own blog and wiki have earned a number of well-deserved awards of their own. Shelly Terrell was just as quick to offer her support and a guest post. In addition to having an amazing blog (which has also been nominated for best new blog in addition to several other awards), Shelly does more online than just about anyone else I know. Both she and Ozge do what they do really, really well.

The fact that they were willing to contribute to the Front Lines project without actually knowing anything about it, on a beginner’s blog, speaks highly of their generous natures.

Steven Herder and Dayle Major were also brave souls who said “Sure!” when I first contacted them with the idea of sharing individual teacher’s stories. I met Steven at the recent JALT national conference, and was thrilled to discover that he’s just as nice in person as he is serious about his research. In his plenary, Paul Nation recognized Steven’s extensive writing work with young learners as a fluency model for other teachers. Steven doesn’t have time to post on his own blog and website as often as he’d like, but he took time to write two posts for me, AND helped encourage another teacher to take a chance. Dayle doesn’t (yet) have a blog, but if you follow him on Twitter, you’ll discover that he’s the kind of teacher everyone wants to have in a personal learning network. He’s a great resource if you’re interested in learning about teaching English in South Korea, but even more importantly (in my mind) Dayle engages in conversations. I’ve had some of my best Twitter-talks with Dayle.

Troy Nahumko wasn’t sure that his story would fit with the theme because it wasn’t a very optimistic view of teaching young learners. However, his honest account of his own experience in Spain has received more comments than just about any other post in the series so far. He pointed his spotlight at inequities in our profession that we all recognize but too seldom address. He shines the same clear light on a variety of topics regularly on his blog. He also persuaded another fabulous Spanish teacher, Conchi Martínez de Tejada, to share her story. Conchi is proof that great teachers recognize that they remain perpetual students. She has also recently entered the blogosphere, and her blog, Ken and Karen, is turning into a great resource for EFL teachers of very young learners.

Christina Markoulaki blew me out of the water when I saw what she was doing with young learners in Greece. Between Ozge and Christina, I’m envious of young learners studying English in Turkey and Greece. Christina’s Students’ Page is a fun peek into her classroom window. Recent activities include global warming and geocaching–what great ways to connect language to the global community!

Rob Newberry teaches both technology and English at an international school in Thailand. Rob doesn’t have a blog (yet!) but he’s a great Twitter friend to have. He frequently shares messages from class, and provides a great real-life model for his students of ways they can use technology (and English!) to connect to a larger world. He also organized the first TED.com event in Thailand.

Tomo Wakui is an incredible high school English teacher in Japan. Steven Herder persuaded her that others would enjoy her story. She mentioned in her post that she was a student at International University. What she failed to mention was that she’s at the tail end of her masters, as in trying to finish her thesis (in her second language) while teaching full time. Tomo gave us a look into a teaching environment few of us get to see. At one point in the process of posting her story, I asked Tomo why she decided to become a teacher. Her response was so wonderful that I’m planning to share that as it’s own post in the future.

The most recent contributor to the series is Anita Kwiatkowski. Anita just emailed me her story–I didn’t even have to ask! Her story about her days teaching in Poland is proof that teachers don’t need gadgets or gimmicks to inspire. Good teachers thrive in whatever circumstances they find themselves. Anita’s blog is one I guarantee you’ll enjoy. I always appreciate her insights and sense of humor.

Every one of these teachers is worthy of recognition. So, in the spirit of the Edublog awards, I’d like to ask you to visit their blogs, or visit their posts on this blog, and let them know that you appreciate their efforts, and their stories.

And I’ll strive to continue to be worthy as well.

P.S. The project isn’t over. I’ll continue running the Front Lines of EFL as long as I receive stories to share. So, if you teach EFL to young learners, please consider joining the project. The more we share, the more we all learn!

In September 2003 I got a phone call from my former primary school teacher offering me a part time job in the old primary school I started my education in. I felt extremely excited!

It was my first real job offer and I was supposed to work with teachers who had taught me the alphabet as colleagues! At that time, I was still a student at a university but as I had already completed my pedagogy and methodology courses, I was more than welcome in Szkola Podstawowa in Tuchom, Poland.

Tuchom is a small village in the north of Poland and the school there provides education for kindergarten and early years students from grades 1 to 3. There are around 10 students in each grade so the total number of children attending is around 40. There were many attempts to close the place down due to economic reasons and to send the kids to bigger schools but so far, luckily, these attempts were unsuccessful.

Teaching in a very small school like the one in Tuchom and bearing in mind the fact that it was the school I attended was an amazing experience. Teachers knew every child by name, they were familiar with their situations at home and had plenty of time to focus their attention on the kids’ individual development. The atmosphere in the school reminded me of home and students felt at home being there.

My students showed extreme willingness to learn English. A vast majority, if not all, of them had never been abroad or heard anyone speak the language before. They came from frequently large, poor or broken families. Their knowledge of the world outside the village was scarily scarce. I remember bringing toys from McDonald’s Happy Meals into the classroom and having the kids ask, ‘What is McDonald’s, teacher?’

The beginning of every school year was a torture test. I had to collect money for the course books from the students, order the books from the bookshops and then carry them on my own from the nearest city. As we were ordering an insufficient number of books, the bookshops did not want to provide free transport. The same story happened when I requested Teacher’s Books and audio CDs from the publishing houses. ‘Sorry, you need to order at least 20 books from each level to get them,’ I was always told.  Fortunately, after calling the representatives repeatedly, explaining my situation and begging, I finally succeeded.

Still, half of the students could not afford the books, there was no computer and no VCD/DVD players to use in the classroom and no copying machine either. The only thing we had was an old cassette player that kept breaking down.

Yet looking back I cannot help smiling. All the effort and money I put into helping these kids was not for nothing. They loved learning English. With the help of ‘Songs for Very Young Learners’ and the forever breaking cassette player, my students had the chance to learn songs and sing in English. We spent a lot of time doing crafts work and sold what we created during the Christmas fair to raise money for the school. During a Spring Fair my students sang ‘Head and Shoulders’, ‘The Wheels of the Bus’ and ‘Wind the bobbin up’ for the whole village community and the ovation they got was worth a million! They managed to get everyone involved in singing the songs and doing the actions and I felt really proud of being their teacher!

At the moment I teach English to Young Learners at Istek Belde, a primary school in Istanbul, Turkey. It’s a private school that provides education for the more affluent members of society. Needless to say, I no longer face difficulties like the ones I faced in Tuchom. The classrooms are well equipped. Most children learned English in kindergarten. They all have their books and are eager to learn.

There is only one thing I am not sure of. Will they still say ‘Hello’ to me in English every time they see me even after years have passed like the students from Tuchom in Poland?

Anita Kwiatkowski holds a M.A. in English Philology from the University of Gdansk, Poland. She has been teaching kids and adults in Poland since 2001 and in 2007 she moved to Turkey. During the week she does her best teaching young learners. At the weekends she performs her duties as a Cambridge ESOL oral examiner, runs workshops for teachers or travels. She is a huge fan of Pedro Almodovar, loves face painting and sometimes indulges in Indian cuisine.

You can follow Anita’s adventures on her blog and on Twitter.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the precise moment when you become a professional in your area. Some will say it’s when you start your degree, others when you finish it still others will say it’s when you start working. Even more people feel that they need years of experience in order to consider themselves a so-called professional.

In my case, I don’t know when I became a teacher. Maybe it was when my parents hung a blackboard behind my bedroom door. Maybe when I first arranged all my teddy bears and my little cousins as my first students. It might have started many years later when I wanted to drop out from my dreary Economics degree and I bought books about teaching, but I didn’t have the courage to actually follow through on my instinct (fate, desire, willingness) at that time. Maybe it happened when I left my bank job, went to Yemen and by chance ended up in front of 20 Yemeni men teaching them English. It might also have been when I came back to Spain from living in Laos and I studied Education. Or maybe it started a month and a half ago when I got my position to work in a primary school in a village in my home region of Extremadura, Spain.

Whatever the case is, whether or not my first students were my teddy bears, the Yemeni men or my current 7 year old students, I feel that my teaching career has evolved and been shaped by the countries and different kinds of students that I have had the pleasure to teach.

I started teaching adults in Yemen speaking rusty English and I found myself turning the pages of a coursebook and following word by word the instructions of the teaching guide. I took tips from other more experienced teachers and filled a bag full of activities that were ready-to-use at any time when I was in front of a class.

Years later I found myself in Laos teaching English to children. Again with a coursebook in my hands and my bag full of activities and now with even some years of experience, but all the same, I found myself helpless. Many will say that if you are a teacher you can teach both adults and young learners, but I disagree.

My first month or two in Laos I simply couldn’t understand why children couldn’t remember a word we had just learned. They could repeat it very accurately, better than adults, but forget asking them about that word five minutes later because they were not going to remember it. I learned that children need to experience learning, they need to see things a million times in a million different ways and they need to use all their senses. I was suddenly a master at singing, dancing, craftmaking and so on, not out of talent, but of necessity. At that point I decided that I wanted to come back to Spain and take an Education degree to actually know what I was doing instead of experimenting with (or better said on) children. My trial, test and mostly error was wasting their time and their parent’s money.

Most of my teachers in university during my Education degree taught me, probably without knowing, not what I should do, but what I shouldn’t do in a class. To be fair, I did have some teachers who opened my eyes to different learning styles, intelligences, the cognitive developmental stages of children and also how to deal with children with special needs. Teaching a foreign language to children is a completely different story than teaching adults. They learn in completely different ways. It is true that you can use some of the same techniques with children as you do with adults, but that doesn’t mean that you are doing a good job.

On the 23^rd of September I started as a Year 2 teacher in a public school in a small town in Extremadura. I teach English (two hours a week) as well as other subjects to the Year 2 students and also 2 English classes of half an hour a week to students of 4 years old. My new challenge was set.

If approaches should be different between adults and young learners, there is also something to say about the learning differences between young learners and very young learners. In my case, I have a coursebook for my Year 2 class but I don’t have one for the preschool students. With my Year 2 students, the fancy coursebook with stickers included almost does the job on its own. Every unit is designed around one topic, and they make a picture dictionary with stickers of pictures of the main vocabulary. On top of that there are card games, spinners, puppets and board games. The book also includes a CD with all the listenings and a CD Rom for the students to use at home or in the computer room at the school (every class has an assigned time to use it and in it we also have access to an Interactive White Board). A third of my students received these books for free from the school through scholarships (the rest pay for all their books). This ensures that everybody is equipped with brand new stickers and unused activity books.

These all-in-one books are designed for everyone. From experienced teachers to novices, native teachers or for teachers whose mother tongue is not English and among the later with those fluent in English and with those with little English, the one size fits all model seems to work. This is the beauty of these coursebooks but the beast is that the same topics are SEEN every year but not in depth to be meaningful and connect to students’ experiences and interests.

Without a coursebook to follow for the 4 year old students, there is space for experimenting. The school could have suggested that we use a book for them too, but in general parents find the expensive preschool English books full of colourful pictures and empty otherwise. Many Spanish parents hold the view that learning is only accomplished through writing and loads of homework. I asked for advice from the teachers of the 3 year old students and also of the 5 year olds, and I saw that they were also hitting their heads on the wall, because (as had happened with me in Laos) they were trying to teach the little ones with activities more suitable for older children or even adults. If young learners are dealing with learning how to write and read in their own language, very young learners are dealing with motor skills.

I took the long way to finally become a teacher and now I am in front of 22 little ones who look at me and hopefully trust me with their learning. With no coursebook available for the 4 year olds, I have started to explore another ancient tradition, the storyteller. In Jamaa El Fna Square in Marrakech you find hundreds of people wandering around and listening to stories, something so ancient and vital to humanity that it receives special consideration by UNESCO. You find the entertainment industry selling millions of copies of DVD stories and tales for children. I wanted to explore the magic of stories with the little ones so I bought a big book version of Bill Martin’s “Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?” I read it the first day and didn’t get such an enthusiastic response, but I couldn’t understand why. Not having many other options available the next day I told the story again and again and again. Later, things became clear. Look at a child choosing a book to be read to them or a movie to watch and you will realize that they always choose the one that they have heard or seen a million times, much to the desperation of their parents.

Then yet more was about to be discovered. Day after day I walked into my Year 2 class with my huge version of “Brown bear” and the students’ curiosity grew until one day when they asked me to read it to them, too. Now, by popular demand, every single English class has to start with our friend the brown bear and even the fancy stickers don’t seem to be as appealing as our dear bear friend.

It’s all a learning process, not only for the students but for the teachers too! (maybe more so) It’s been a long journey just to get to this point, and surely I will learn a lot more, but for right now I’m happy just wandering around the school and hearing “Brown bear, brown bear” sung by the students in classes and on the playground.

Life put more than one obstacle in Conchi’s way before granting her her dream to become a teacher. Law and Economic degrees to satisfy her parents weren’t enough to dissuade her from getting her hands dirty at the blackboard. It took a twist of fate on the South-Western corner of the Arabian peninsula that ended up putting her in front of real, live students (as opposed to the stuffed animals and reluctant cousins she used to teach as a child). From there she taught in Azerbaijan and the smiling classrooms of Laos before ending up against her current and biggest challenge…the analog-age  Spanish Education system. A fearsome and unrelenting foe for some, but for this teacher, a piece of chalk.

Visit Conchi on her growing blog Ken and Karen

Or follow her tweets on Twitter Azulaza

 My teaching History

Hello. My name is Tomoe Wakui. Please call me Tomo. I am a high school English teacher in Niigata, Japan. I am very happy to have this opportunity to introduce myself here in Teaching Village.

Let me explain my teaching history briefly. I became an English teacher in 1989. I worked at a Girls High School. Except for only having female students, it was just a normal high school.

After three years, I moved to a kind of vocational high school. The curriculum included textile, domestic science, commercial and general education courses.  There were many mischievous students at this school. They caused a lot of problems, but they were always energetic and bright. I loved them very much. The problem with teaching English in both of these high schools was that most of the students didn’t have a concrete purpose to learn English. Even term examinations weren’t enough to provide a purpose to learn. In order to motivate students and have them experience a sense of achievement and enjoyment, I tried to focus on 5 points in teaching. First, I always set goals for the whole year, the whole lesson, each class and each activity. Second, I spent enough time at the pre-reading stage. In this section, students were encouraged or motivated to read a text by looking at the pictures, title or diagrams, and guessing the content of the text. Thirdly, I chose materials carefully. I tried to find texts that were inherently interesting to the students. Fourth, I tried to adopt a communicative approach with my lessons as much as possible. I used classroom English. I made my own conversation textbook and used it in every class. This book consisted of questions and answers because they are the most basic elements of communication. To teach how to ask and answer promotes student communication. Lastly, I did many kinds of pair and group activities in my class and created an atmosphere in which students could talk freely and comfortably.

In 1998, I moved to a credit-system high school. Many students there had various kinds of problems. Some of them needed mental support. Both very fragile and sensitive students and rebellious students were mixed together in one school. It was really tough for teachers to take care of each student. Since many different students were absent from class one after another, it was very difficult to accumulate knowledge. I worked for this school for nine years. While teaching there, I learned a lot about counseling, mental health, class organization and so on. I used a cooperative learning style in my classes. I divided students into groups in which all members had roles. I also used this group system both inside and outside of the class to encourage students to take care of each other. Students did really well. I was very proud of them.  They stuck together like a family and enjoyed learning English together. My students made me realize how wonderful it is to learn together! They managed to do well because they did not learn alone; they motivated and stimulated each other because they worked as a team.

Now, I am working for an academic high school. I was just transferred last year. Working in an academic school is hard because teachers are always busy and face a huge amount of pressure to cram students full of as much knowledge as we can, and then worry about the result of their exams. In my former schools students caused a lot of trouble and did not have specific reasons to learn English. But I could teach anything I wanted to suit the students’ levels and preferences. I didn’t have to reach a certain fixed standard. I just set each attainable goals and got there moderately. When I first started teaching at an academic high school, I didn’t feel like I had enough experience or skill because teachers were required to follow a rigid syllabus in order to help students attain a level high enough to pass very difficult college entrance exams, irrespective of their abilities, motivation or interests. So, in order improve my teaching ability, I observed most of the other teachers’ classes and I also visited classes at other academic high schools. Even so, I felt like my efforts were not enough. I needed to know more about many kinds of effective teaching skills. Finally, I made up my mind to learn at International University in Japan. That is where I am now studying.                                               

Present conditions at a Japanese academic high school

Since I became a teacher, I have explored specific methods in which students learn and help each other in pair and group activities. However, in a typical class at an academic high school, there is no time to do any “extra” communicative activities. I found that some teachers still teach English in almost the same way we were taught when we were high school students. Nowadays, there are a lot of new English teaching methods. Especially, the communicative way of teaching has become popular. However, the truth is that the majority of teachers at academic high schools still follow a passive, teacher-centered, lecture style of teaching.

The main reason is college entrance examinations. Students believe that studying at an academic high school will help them pass the exam to get into a good university. Teachers face a lot of pressure to finish the lessons which will prepare students for the exams. I really want to do something fun in class, such as communicative team-teaching lessons, but this puts me in conflict with the reality that we have to cram as much knowledge for the entrance exams as we can, and finish each lesson as fast as we can.

 If we teach students more communicatively, they will enjoy interacting with each other. The problem is simply time limitations and teaching skills.

However, I still believe that student-centered communicative teaching methods don’t necessarily have to disturb students in their studies for entrance exams. Instead, this style of teaching has beneficial effects on language acquisition. So, I would really like to develop more interactive, student-centered ways to teach, using existing textbooks. I would like to prove that even at an academic school, we can teach communicatively, involving students with the text and with each other as well as giving them enough knowledge for entrance exams. I believe that if students learn more interactively, it will not only make them feel motivated, but also have a great combined effect on their examination results.

Tomo’s Tips for pair and group activities

Here are nine tips for my pair and group activities. This might be a little bit different from typical pair and group activites. I believe that student-centered pair/group activities encourage students to work independently. Iwill be glad if these might be of some help for other teachers.

1. Each group consists of four members. All students must have their own roles. 

(a) They should choose a leader to represent them as the “Chairman” of the group

(b) Then they choose a “Secretary” who will correct the assignments and take notes during discussion.

(c) The other two members will be “Spokespeople” who present the activity to the whole class. In case these two members fail to do their task, it is the Chairman’s responsibility to carry it out.

2. All the group members should cooperate and work together to practice using English language–in reading, writing and speaking, both inside and outside the classroom.

3. The secretary must ensure that every member of the group submits assignments or activities. He/She only submits assignments to the teacher once all of the members have completed the tasks.

4. Usually, the teacher can’t finish most activities during class. Thus, students have the liberty to choose any method to accomplish the reading and listening activities (e.g., Shadowing, Fill-in-the-Blanks, Read-and-Look-Up, Reproduction activity) according to their English level and preferences and should be encouraged to continue doing their preferred activities even outside the classroom.

5. Every day, the first 10 minutes of the class is utilized for a group reading test. Each member of the group must do well on the test; otherwise, the group takes the test again until every member passes.  The group is encouraged to help each other to improve their English reading skills so they can pass the test with flying colors.

6. If a student is absent, their partner or group members update the absentee before the next class. It is very important for them to help the returning absentee to catch up.

7. Each member of the group must respect their co-members, especially during discussion activities.  They must give each other a chance to express their opinions on the topic and should show their interest by listening carefully and interacting with each other. All members of the group must learn how to become good listeners in order to foster good communication within the group, thus improving their communication skills. Showing positive peer attitude and being an audience of good listeners encourages the speaker to gain more confidence and be motivated to present strong arguments.

8. Students are responsible to look out for each other. If one member of the group is tasked to do a presentation in front of the class, the rest of the group is obliged to support that member.

9. Members share ideas, exchange information, set goals and encourage each other to improve their English skills. If one of the members has higher English skills than the rest of the group, that member should share knowledge, be a role model and foster peer support to his/her co-members.