Teaching

Why teaching English is a real job

As some of you may know, I’ve been working as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) for over three years now and on the whole, I really enjoy what I do. There are obviously quite a few downsides, but none as irritating as the surprisingly common and incredibly condescending statement that teaching EFL ‘isn’t a real job’. Here are some of the comments I’ve heard over the last year or so.

It’s not a real job because you don’t need any qualifications

A lot of people seem to think that being a native English speaker is all you need to walk into any language school, anywhere in the world and start teaching a class. There might be a few places where this is indeed the case, but it’s far from being the norm. Even in countries like Korea, where native speakers with little to no teaching experience are hired to teach short conversation classes to groups of children, a university degree is required. If you want to work in a reputable language school, you need a degree and a CELTA certificate (or equivalent) at the very least. For the more prestigious jobs, such as university positions, you’re expected to have the DELTA or equivalent and several years of relevant experience. Many of the teachers at my current school are educated to Master’s degree level and have studied linguistics, phonetics and second language acquisition in depth. The stereotype of the EFL teacher as an unqualified crusty backpacker is certainly not the reality I’ve encountered.

It’s not a real job because you have no responsibility – you can go to work hungover or late and it doesn’t matter

The vast majority of my students are not here for a holiday. They are adults who are spending a lot of time and money on learning English to further their career or get into university. A large proportion of the students are taking exam preparation classes and their future success depends on the results of the exam. They expect and deserve a teacher who cares enough to deliver quality classes without making excuses. I’ve done many different jobs over the past eight years and out of all of them, this is the one where it’s absolutely essential to be lively, energetic and focused at all times. There’s no downtime, no opportunity to put your head down on the desk or stick your headphones in or have a mug of Lemsip if you’re feeling under the weather, things that the majority of office workers seem to take for granted. No matter what’s going on in your personal life, you have to be professional in class. Seems like quite a lot of responsibility to me!

It’s not like being a real teacher because you don’t need to prepare – you just walk in and chat

I have no idea why so many people, especially the so-called ‘real’ teachers who work in secondary and primary schools, see to think that EFL teaching is wandering into a class with a newspaper and chatting about it. Most classes in most language schools are three hours long. Asking the students what they think of the story on the front page of the Metro isn’t going to cut it. Not that discussions and newspapers can’t be useful in class, but it’s all in the preparation. Students need to practise a variety of skills and teachers need to make sure they are absorbing useful knowledge from each and every class. For every three hours I teach, I generally spend at least an hour compiling the materials and I also spend quite a bit of time correcting written work. Essays for exam courses such as the Cambridge FCE have to be carefully marked and graded with constructive comments and suggestions for improvement. I often get home in the evening and spend several hours preparing and correcting for the next day. I don’t think the students, never mind the Director of Studies, would appreciate it if I walked in and pulled a class from thin air every single day.

It’s not a real job because nobody ever dreams of becoming an EFL teacher. It’s what musicians/actors/translators/artists do to pay the bills.

OK, I’ll admit that there are a lot of musicians/actors/translators/artists who teach English and have another career on the side (I’m one of them!), but why is that a big deal? It doesn’t mean that they don’t take their day job seriously. I prepare and teach my classes to the same high standard I did when I was teaching English as a full-time job. If anything, my classes are better because I’m not burned out from doing 40 contact hours a week in the classroom. I also disagree with the sentiment that EFL teaching is for people who couldn’t make it in other fields. I have always intended to teach English and to combine it with a freelance translation career. Even while I was studying for my BA in French and Spanish, I went out of my way to choose courses relating to language acquisition and I wrote my dissertation on the difficulties faced by Spanish-speaking learners of English. This isn’t some crappy back-up career I’ve chosen because I can’t find anything else. Many of my colleagues have also done undergraduate degrees in language-related areas and postgraduate courses in TESOL. This is a dream job for a lot of people and it is pretty rude to dismiss all the hard work and years of study most teachers have put in with a comment like “so…you’re teaching English…I suppose you’re still jobhunting, then?”

How can students practice pronunciation outside class?

Lately, my  students have been asking me for suggestions on how to improve their English pronunciation.  I always stress the importance of good pronunciation in class by using a phonemic chart, putting phonemic symbols on the board as much as possible, drawing the students’ attention to stress patterns and using exercises and games, but how can the students practise when they’re outside the classroom, on their own? Here are a few ideas…

1) Recording themselves reading aloud

This is what we were advised to do by our French teacher at university and nobody did it because a) we felt stupid b) it seemed like way too much effort (no iPhones back then), but I tried it later on and it really does seem to work. You think you can hear yourself while you’re speaking, but is often not until you listen back that you can objectively judge your pronunciation and intonation. If you’re brave enough, you can also get your classmates to listen and give constructive feedback.

2) Working on individual sounds they’ve identified as problematic

While reading aloud can improve general pronunciation and intonation, it is helpful for students to identify their own pronunciation difficulties and work on those few sounds until they get them right. As most classes in the UK are made up of many different nationalities, this involves some one-on-one time with the students during class to help them work out where their difficulties lie and show them how to articulate the correct sounds, using drawings of the mouth/lips/tongue positions where necessary to help them remember how to make the sounds outside class. With some conscious effort, students can often correct their most problematic errors quickly.

3) Listening to natives and modelling pronunciation

I think it is really helpful for students to consciously listen to how words are pronounced and then copy the pronunciation. While watching films and listening to the radio/podcasts is useful for intonation as well as vocabulary building, the students are generally too focused on the what is being said to really pay attention to the sounds of the language.  I advise the students to listen to short bursts of speech (a few sentences at most) and then play them back several times, first repeating every word and then repeating the entire sentence.

4) Paying attention to the phonemic symbols in the dictionary

It sounds obvious, but very few students seem to do it.  I think it’s worth spending some time teaching phonemic symbols at the beginning of the course, so that the students easily recognise them and can use them to sound out new words.  Of course, there are also many online dictionaries which let you click on a word to hear it pronounced by a native, making things even easier!

These are just a few ideas I’ve had about helping students to practise pronunciation outside the classroom environment. If you have any suggestions or other ideas, please feel free to comment below.