Monday 22 December 2008

Kate's CELTA blog

Personally, I've always found speaking English very easy. Being English tends to give a useful head-start and I did grow up in the UK with English-speaking parents, so I admit I've had some natural advantages in this area. I remember doing the occasional English grammar lesson at school - indeed, I have an O' level in English Language, which just goes to show how old I am. But most of the rules I learned about the building blocks of language were derived from French, German and Latin lessons. Especially Latin, god bless Mr Eddy.

So, while I was able to conjugate the latin verb, "amare", I was hazy at best when it came to explaining the things I do instinctively to someone who grew up speaking Spanish. Or any other language, for that matter. Enter the CELTA. Despite many years spent as a professional communicator in English, both written and spoken (I was a BBC broadcast journalist for more than a decade), until November this year (2008) I would have struggled to explain when and why you use the present perfect tense and what rules govern its formation.

Now, after four weeks spent learning-to-teach and learning-about-the-language-itself-so-I-can-attempt-to-teach-it at International House, Barcelona, I can make a fair crack at helping students of English through the maze of tenses, shwas and phrasal verbs that make up our wonderful and frustrating tongue.

Actually, one of the most important things I learned during my CELTA course was that we're not actually teaching at all. We are guiding discovery. Our worshipful tutor, Gerard McLoughlin was keen for us to take to heart the following quotation by a seventeenth century man called Von Humbolt: "You cannot teach a language, only create the conditions under which it might be learnt."

Thankfully, nowadays those conditions can include pop music, Youtube clips, lonely hearts adverts and celebrity gossip. Then, there are the old faithful grammar gap-fill exercises and True or False quizzes. Of course, you can teach English - sorry, guide the discovery of English - in more serious ways as well, but the point is, it doesn't have to be a load of dusty old writing exercises, translation tasks and verb-drills. In fact, the most important exercise at all involves the tongue, teeth, lips and jaw. It's called talking. The more your students do - and the less you do - the better. Probably the most important thing I learned doing my CELTA.

So - was gaining my CELTA hard work? Yes. Was it rewarding? Thrice, yes. Was it fun? Oh, yes. What was the best bit? For me, the teaching practice. The satisfaction of realising your students have gained some extra understanding of the English language and are successfully putting it into practice thanks to something you did is hard to equal.

When I began the CELTA course one thing I worried about was that I had misjudged my vocation and teaching was not actually for me - or that the course would kill off any enthusiasm I had for teaching. In fact, Gerard, Susannah, IH Barcelona and all our students have achieved the opposite - I can't wait to get myself in front of more students and start flying the flag for the English language. Now, I just need to elicit myself some paid employment (noun, uncountable).

Tuesday 16 December 2008

Is there something wrong with this blog?

Apparently Facebook and Yahoo both think this blog is malicious - we're not that mean are we? What the hell is going on?

Friday 12 December 2008

I take it all back...

They offered us a job! Not actually the one we were being interviewed for but a very similar one. They offered it to both of us and asked us to choose - so now I'm working for them!

Ha!

Kate was promptly offered another job, but she ended up turning it down as the hours meant we would never have seen each other. Not to worry as she has a couple of interviews arranged for when we get back.

Monday 8 December 2008

Job Hunting

It's been 5 years since I last went job hunting - I thought that was a long time until I realised that Kate hasn't had to look for work for 15 years! Sure there have been internal applications and interviews - I had to apply for my own job not that long ago - but it is still a very alien process for us. As a result we're probably going about it all wrong. Scratch that, we're definitely going about it all wrong! Here we are in France sending off applications for English Teaching jobs in Madrid and being consequently unavailable for interview when potential employers get back to us wondering when we can come by the office!

However, after finding a useful agency's email on a notice board, we did manage to squeeze in one interview before we left Spain. Boy was that strange! It was a bit of a pain in the first place, being scheduled for 6pm on the last day of Vaughan Town at Barco de Avila - we had planned to head straight for France, but instead we frantically changed plans and scrambled to find somewhere to stay on a holiday weekend when most Madrilenos were heading out of town. Thank goodness for lovely Olga and Fernando, whose hospitality frankly made the whole escapade worthwhile. The interview did not go well. Firstly driving in Madrid is not a lot of fun, especially after a late night and a long drive. In the end we accepted we were lost, parked, and jumped on the underground to get to where we were meant to be. Or not, as it turned out; we walked in the office to be greeted with "Ah! You've come to the wrong place!" The Director of Studies of the School in question was meant to have sent us an email with details of the interview; she didn't and consequently I had to find the address for the school on the internet (which I sent to her for confirmation) and which turned out to be the other end of town from where the interviews were actually being held. Still we did at least get interviewed - together! Bit strange, seeing as we were technically competing for the same job. Hmmmm.

Funnily enough we've yet to hear anything back from that school. Back to the job pages!

Wednesday 3 December 2008

Barco de Avila

Surrounded by snowy mountains and living in a four-star hotel where every room has an en suite whirlpool bath...well, I can think of far worse places to be spending the first week of December. I didn't expect to feel Christmasy in Spain, but the hotel's habit of playing gentle choral music at breakfast time and the white-dusted hill-sides around us are putting me in a distinctly Yuletide mood.
The other participants on this English immersion programme are friendly and fun and I fully expect Theo and I to have added more people to our swelling collection of good friends and acquaintances, not only in Spain, but around the world. Here, we have people from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland and Wales - as well as the English and Spanish people.
It's also giving us a lot of opportunities to find out about the ways our Spanish friends have been learning English - what methods they've been exposed to and what they think of them. One thing they all share is a hunger to truly get to grips with the language, in all its irregular, absurdly-spelled splendour. The other common feeling they have is frustration. Frustration with their own education system, which left them so incapable of speaking or making sense of English, despite so many years of learning the language at school. And frustration with the English language itself. Why are the vowel-sounds so difficult to hear and to pronounce? Why do so many verbs change their meaning so radically when you add tiny words like to, up, at or in to them? Why is it so difficult to predict how to say an English word out loud when you have only seen it written down? Why do the stressed and unstressed sounds change in a sentence?
I have a lot of sympathy for them. Since learning to be a teacher of English, I often wonder myself.

Tuesday 2 December 2008