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| English Language Services |
It took me a
good couple of weeks to get my bearings back, when I returned to the UK from Paraguay; in the
southern hemisphere, when you look at the night sky, you see a completely
different set of stars and the sun appears to go the ‘wrong way’.
When I came
back to my senses, I still found that I was living in Rotherham and so I had to
look further afield again. Having obtained an internationally recognised
English teaching qualification that would probably get me a job at a private
language academy anywhere in the world, it was easy enough to find work with A+ English in Sheffield.
I was taken
on without any kind of contract, as a self employed teacher, joining a small
pool of English teachers who supplemented a couple of permanent members of
staff. Initially, I just taught a few lessons a week but, before long, I was teaching
for over 20 hours a week, with students of different levels. The students were
mainly Saudi Arabians and Libyans, but there were Swiss, Italians and Japanese too.
During the
mornings, the classes were rotated between different teachers, to give the
students an opportunity to have variety in their lessons. A syllabus of sorts
was maintained by using a standard textbook and related audio cassettes and, at
the end of the day, the teachers would swap notes to ensure that the
grammar etc. would not be repeated in the next lesson with the students.
When sitting
in on the lesson in Paraguay, where the teacher relied solely on a standard
textbook and a whiteboard, I observed that both the teacher and the teenaged students
seemed to be very bored with this methodology and, being in this position at A+ English with adult students, I felt exactly the same myself.
In the
afternoons, however, the teachers were allowed much more freedom of choice and,
although I don’t profess to have had any formal training or knowledge of this,
I did my best to help my students with the IELTS – and these lessons were much
more productive for everyone involved.
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| English Language Services |
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