What if...?

[metal56]

Do you think you would teach languages the way you do if you had not been trained as a language teacher?

[lolwhites]

Probably not, but I doubt I'd be very good at it. There are already too many untrained people out there calling themselves language teachers who don't know what they're doing. My salsa teacher had obviously had no teacher training and it showed; I quit the class after a month.

[metal56]

My salsa teacher had obviously had no teacher training and it showed; I quit the class after a month.

Do you think the majority of people who dance salsa learned it from a trained teacher?

[revel]

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[lolwhites]

I'm not saying that training is essential, after all, people were teaching long before the CELTA was ever dreamed up. Some people are just great communicators who are good at putting themselves in the position of the learner and seem to know what has to be done. Others, unfortunately, think that just because they're native speakers they can walk into a class and blag it (I received plenty of CVs from people like that).

My salsa teacher was neither trained, not was he a great communicator. He would get the class to form a circle around him, then demonstrate something with his back to half of us, then say "Off you go." I actually had to ask "Could you turn round and show us again so those of us on this side of the room can see what you're doing?" No teacher worth his or her salt should need to be told this sort of thing.

Even experienced teachers benefit from training, even if it's just because it gives them the chance to meet other professionals and share ideas. And I also think everyone should observe (and be observed) regularly, albeit informally.

[metal56]

I fought hard for them not to take my backpack, as within it were all my notes and thoughts on linguistics that I had spent two years accumulating at the New York Public Library. That was a treasure I was not about to lose to these thugs.

They may have benefited from that theft - linguistically I mean.

Not knowing what to do, but wanting to do the right thing, I began studying linguistics at the Library.

Sorry, did you begin studying linguistics at the library before or after the second mugging?

So, I suppose, since I consider myself an informant, I was somehow trained as a teacher and I use that training a lot in class.

My question was more to those who had formal training, but thanks for your fascinating story.

[metal56]

Even experienced teachers benefit from training, even if it's just because it gives them the chance to meet other professionals and share ideas. And I also think everyone should observe (and be observed) regularly, albeit informally.

So you feel that without such training you would have made a poor teacher, right?

[lolwhites]

I think I would have made a pretty poor teacher at first if I'd just walked into a class without ever having done any theory, linguistics or observed teaching practice. Maybe later on my experience might have carried me through, but that would hardly have been fair on the paying students at the start of my career.

Then again, when I did my Cert I was 22 and fresh out of uni, so I would have been pretty poor at most jobs unless they involved reading Cervantes, commenting on Chomsky or rolling joints. Maybe it would be different for someone with a wider experience of life.

What about you?

[Miss Elenious]

Do you think you would teach languages the way you do if you had not been trained as a language teacher?

I don't think so. I'm sure I could not even teach Greek, which is my mother tongue. I have not been trained for that and I would be at a loss.

However, apart from training and seminars and studying, teaching in practice offers a lot of help

[revel]

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[metal56]

Had I been trained as an ESL teacher I might just have not taken the trouble to do the personal, independent study I did, simply apply the theories and thoughts of my favorite professors of the training program. I would have developed as a teacher, I'm sure, just as I have developed in theatre, but I am sure that I would have different points of view about texts, grammar, even pronunciation and structure, I may never have come into contact with Grant Taylor and have been doomed to Oxford and Cambridge type teaching for the past quarter of a century.

And that's exactly what I'm going on about. Are there things in the training of ESL/EFL teachers that just jar when it comes to having to put them into practice?

Back soon.

[revel]

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[metal56]

b) Use of translation (for me, a separate art in language work) to test and develop language use.

There'a session on just that at the British Council in Bilbao this very weekend:

Teaching English Through Translation. Fulvia Seales, BC Bilbao.

[Machjo]

To the OP, interesting question.


No. At least not at first, anyway. But I suppose I would have learnt through practice eventually.