My experience as an English student (I)

When I was around 8 or 9 years old my mother enrolled me in an English course and in singing lessons.

A year leater, I quitted the singing lessons because I did not like it whereas I continued with the English lessons until I came to live and to study in València when I was 18 years old.

My passion for the English language and for teaching comes from my English teacher, N.

I used to enjoy her lessons very very much. In only an hour we used to do a lot of grammar, listening and oral exercises. I always had the feeling that I was learning and improving my English, which I think it was crucial for my interest in it.

The skills I was not good at were pronunciation, speaking fluency and listening. However, thanks to a scholarship I got when I was 17 years old, I spend a whole month in Ireland. It was one of the best experiences in my life. Not only because of the fact of being abroad, travelling, meeting new people, etc, but also because I improved significantly my speaking fluency and my listening skill. This encouraged me to continue studying it.

Besides, N. also became a model to me. She has, from my point of view, the characteristics the best teacher have: she used to be kind and motivating. And most of all, she seemed to enjoy teaching and being proud of our progress.

All in all, this mixture of passion for English and my admiration for N is what brought me to be willing to become English teacher.

From my point of view, those who have devoted a huge amount of time throughout our lives to study a foreign language and then we want to be teachers of it have the advantage of being able to do it knowing from fisrt hand in which areas we have to insist more.

In my opinion, communicative language should be devoted more attention in class. It is very important to allow the students to take risks with the language and to produce output in order to know which mistakes do they make and correct them. By communicative language I mean speaking, but also listening (a skills which is barely worked throughout the secondary education).

Summing up, my experience as an English student has been very positive even though some skills, as I mentioned above, were weaker than others. And this fact will definitely influence my approach to the teaching of English as a foreign language.

Ana Rodrigo.

To blog or not to blog?

This question rises more and more among those teachers worried about interaction, motviations and introduction of the new technologies in the classroom.

From our point of view, to have a blog is a good tool to keep in touch with your students in an immediate way: it allows you to recommend videos, to encourage them to read determined articles or to visit webpages you find, among many many other activities you can do.

However, we are also aware of the fear or hesitation this can produce to some teachers.

For this reason we strongly recommend to visit this link and read the information published there. It talks about blogs in an easy and frankly way. Let's a have a look ;)