Welcome, readers!

Welcome readers throughout the globe. Welcome to my blog on teaching English as a second or other language.

By way of introduction, I am a 37-year old teacher. My route into TESOL was via teaching GCSE and A-level mathematics initially. Whilst a secondary mathematics teacher in the West Midlands of England, I chanced upon one Don Jorge Farias, Rector of Colegio La Misión, a private Roman Catholic High School in Region Metropolitana of Chile. 2 years after being subjected to a prolonged recruitment campaign spearheaded by Don Farias I agreed to travel to South America and work as a teacher in the English Department of his school. There I taught classes of 15-20 pupils who were 15/16 years old.

In addition I was involved in setting up and managing a self-access language lab for the whole school, a unique room since it had 5 corners…

I returned to Europe in late 2002 to gain my first qualification in teaching English, the Cambridge RSA CELTA and found myself teaching, in my first European TEFL job, at the Paul Sprake School in Saragossa, Aragon, Spain, in early 2003.  There I taught groups of adults general English, classes of adults on the Cambridge First Certificate course, children aged 7 to 11 and “business English” in the HIAB plant on the outskirts of Saragossa.

I progressed from there to Servicios Idiomas Burgalesas, in the neighbouring northern Spanish city of Burgos. There I first encountered CALL on a large scale in TEFL. I taught smaller groups of general English, a group of unemployed people on the INEM project and business classes at a Panaderia, a local machining firm and a car components firm.

Following that I had my first experience of TESOL in the UK. That was with Stafford House in Edinburgh at one of their summer schools. There I taught classes of 12 students from 12 to 20 years. It was also my first experience of multilingual classes and I found it a little bewildering initially, however not so much as to put me off working in Edinburgh again in 2005 and 2006.

In late 2004 I made the decision,soon after the enlargement of the EU to 25 countries, to head east. I had been offered a job in the “Trojmiasto” (”Tri-city”) of Gdansk, Sopot and Gdynia and made contact via a church in Belfast, with a young pastor who had just moved to the outskirts of Gdansk. I started teaching in the Tri-city and during my first year in Poland taught various groups including :

-general English classes of up to 14 adult students

-first certificate classes of up to 14

-classes of up to 14 teenagers

-weekend classes of adults in Sopot

-business classes in MOLEX and ELE

-individuals

-young children as part of a community/church project

I returned to Poland in 2005 and worked briefly in Katowice teaching business people and general English with Profi-Lingua before being sent to Krakow where I worked until early 2006 and I continued with business English groups however this time with Motorola.

I moved to Warsaw in February 2006 where I worked teaching children again in a specialist English school for children, in an accountancy firm called TMF and with Matura English students.  In September of that year I began work on the MA Applied Linguistics and TESOL and am still working on that.

In 2007 I taught groups of office workers at a contruction firm called WAR-BUD and started free-lance teaching for a wide range of individuals from nurses and banking officials to foreign children living in Warsaw. Whilst I cntinued to teach groups until May 2007, after this I concentrated on individuals (including in businesses such as Tesco Polska)and doing some research for the MA.

In 2008 I began using new technologies such as Skype to teach people in Poland and England whilst based in Ireland. I am to return to classroom teaching in June this year.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.