🇬🇧 EFL In The Classroom

We have all been there before, learning a new language, or simply “A” language. We might not remember but we’ve all been learners of at least one language in our lives. We were babies, and even if it might seem easy thinking about it now, back then it must have been a real ordeal for our brain to build our native language in our head. Our passion was born in the exact moment we realised this: we have all been language learners at some point in our lives, and teachers sometimes tend to forget how that feels. Through our studies we realised how little of the academic findings in terms of acquisition, methodologies and psycholinguistics (more about these in future posts!) is brought into the classroom and taken into account when practicing; therefore, we had to do something.

Most of our interests spurred from curiosity: we wanted to know what happened in our heads when we switched from one language to the other, or why we made mistakes in languages we were confident and proficient in. The curiosity turned into pure passion and an insatiable interest, which brought us to today. We realised that when we applied the knowledge acquired throughout our journey into our classrooms or private lessons, the students showed clear improvements and benefitted from it.

The need of guidance for EFL teachers, and especially state teachers abroad, who struggle in their everyday classroom practice, is evident. We noticed how European countries, especially in the south, focus their priorities on the number of qualifications over the quality. For instance, countries like Italy or Spain require an English teacher to hold a BA degree in English Language and Literature. Degree in which, you are expected to take exams in English and know the literature but you are not trained on how to teach or, even worse, how to teach a language (read the next post to know the difference). Thus, in these countries you might find public school teachers who are perfectly capable of speaking fluent English but have no idea on how to pass on that knowledge to their students. In our career we have met many of these professionals who had exceptional language skills but needed help in appropriately channelling this knowledge towards their students.

A common lapse that we language practitioners make is forgetting that our learners, most of the times, approach the language bringing with them a set of previous linguistic knowledge and learning habits developed through their upbringing and heavily influenced by their native language and cultural background. This however could be a point in our favour! Understanding the principles of language learning and learner profiles and knowing how to apply these into the classroom, allows us to predict the learners’ struggle and address them promptly. It might seem hard, but it’s really not. The real problem is that very few people before us have reflected about this and decided to do something to help.

This desire to provide practical support to teachers started forming in our head the moment we “linked the dots” and realised how wide the gap was between broader knowledge and practice. Such connections weren’t only framed within our academic knowledge of course, but rather from our practical nature and experience as teachers who wanted to do right by our students. Experience not only as teachers and linguistics, but also, and more importantly, as learners. Because, to put it in Jesse Jackson’s words “you cannot teach what you don’t know, and you can’t lead where you can’t go”.