From now on I’ll be writing from Milton Keynes, where I’ve just started my Masters of Research at the Open University.  This the first stage leading , hopefully, to a PhD degree. I have to admit that MK is not the prettiest place in England if you consider the city itself.  However, becasue of the city plan, it is actually a bit like living in the countyside and… well, the English countryside is beautiful and special in its own way…  even if the Midlands lack the serene, deep beauty of Devon.

The Open is a quite peculiar place because the only sudents here are the  research and doctoral students since the undergrads are all in online courses. The whole structure of this huge campus is here just for us and the administrative staff.

Issues for me at the moment revolve very much around educational research, its forms and applicability and also the philsophical underpinnings of different approaches to it. What I have to reflect now is where I stand in these big picture and what implications my positioning and views have for my practice in ELT.   Moreover,  how my ELT experience influences the way I see educational research.

Back on the road for a new journey into the unknown…

The Study Skills course is over and I’m back to Plymouth. It was a great experience, especially because my students were all fantastic people, we had a great time together and I hope I have helped them in the process of adapting to academic life in the UK , at least a little bit.

Thanks a lot for the wonderful time Un, Witt, Michelle, Rachel, Tomoko, Rieko, Christian, Abi, Kira, Betty, Soo, Laura and Quim. Thanks a bunch too Zack, Insia, Charlene, Adeline, Yvetty, Li, Sun, Kim, Karen, Rox, Ellen and Nanae!

I hope you all enjoy your time in England and your courses at Leicester

Now I know what my tutors has been through…when we are students we think that the most difficult thing in the world is to write an essay and we tend to think that the tutor’s job is just a piece of cake compared to it. It isn’t.

I got the first draft of my students’s essays and finding the energy to read many pieces in a short period of time is not always easy. I spent hours and hours over the weekend trying to find ways of helping them to express themselves better while conforming with academic writing standards. This is not an easy task because sometimes the academic style in their own cultures is quite different from ours. Moreover, sometimes there are  language problems but  we cannot really work on grammar and vocab in a short course like this.

Apart from that, it is a fascinating task because I am learning a lot with them about other fields of knowledge that are completely different from mine. Also seeing how people express their ideas in so many diverse ways is always extremely instructive

Writing this from the library at the University of Leicester where I’m now teaching the listening/speaking module to a group of students starting their university programmes this term. The Study Skills course is designed to help international students to get acquainted with academic work in the UK,  thus in the following fours weeks I’ll be trying to help them to cope with academic presentations, active participation in seminars and essay writing.

I am quite excited about this because I believe my experience can be of some help and also because I think this is an important aspect in helping people to cope with the demands of academic studies in a foreign country. If I can help them to make this cultural and professional transition, I’ll consider myself happy.

I just met them yesterday and it seems it is going to be an interesting multi-cultural experience since I have people in the groups coming from China, South Korea, Thailand, Japan, Portugal, Spain and  France.

This was the title of the BritLit event I attended in London last Thursday. I’m really thankful to the BC for having sponsored my participation because it was really worth going to London for that. Basically Fitch presented about the BritLit project but he also had Louise Cooper and Romesh Gunesekera reading for us. It was really cool!

I was really excited about meeting Romesh because his stories have been the top ones in the ELT e-Reading Groups and he has been very supportive and approachable. It was fantastic to be able to talk to him personally and see what a nice person he is. I also had the priviledge to talk quite a lot with Louise and I also had dinner with her and Fitch after the event. She is such a lovely person!

On the whole, it was a really nice experience – pity that London is so literary invaded by tourists now that it’s summer. Oh dear, I know this is great for the city and the country, but it really blows your mind to hear so many languages at the same time and to go along the streets so flooded with people of all sorts. Even though I love London with a passion, it was quite a relief to take the train back to Plymouth and to our more quiet way of life in the country.

Yesterday it was my last day in the summer course.

As for the teachers, it was good to have the experience of team work, especially with Alan. If he had more experience with ELT he would be superb teacher.And he also helped and supported me a lot. The bad times with my junior teacher didn’t stop with the last story I posted here . There were other instances but I simply do not think it is important to write about them in detail. The bottom line is that  ELT providers should be more respossible when hiring teachers for summer courses. I do understand that the demand for teachers is higher than the the supply but I do pity the poor people who have to face a group of students without being prepared for that, the poor students who waste their time and leave without any improvement on their English and the parents who spend quite a lot of money in these course s for nothing.

Now the good part: my main group. They were really good. These last few days they have been working a lot and speaking much more English than at the begining. I even realised that because of their strong accent many times they were speaking English and I took it for French   My bad!

We had an activity about creative writing when they wrote really funny stories with quite good language and also a pair work activity involving drems and their interpretation that was a blast! We all had a lot of fun with it. Or perhaps I had more fun then anybody else because I was really happy to see them really engaged on it.

Yesterday we had a final test and, instead of following the instructions and having a short & sweet multiple choice question test,  I asked them 6 questions and they had to write a lot. They did a brilliant job! Some still have a quite intermediate level of English but you cannot expect more from an 8-day course. The important thing is that considering their initial individual performances, they all made some progress and this is the best I could wish for. Job done!

I’ll miss some of them!

I suppose that if you are an NNS EFL teacher you have already heard a lot about these horror stories of schools employing NS’s for summer courses and delivering really poor quality lessons. We all talk about these horror stories but it is the first time I can see it unfolding before my very eyes. Today when I checked my junior teacher’s group in the first period – just to see that was going on – I saw she had put on a film and they were watching it. I called her aside and asked what film is was and she said it was the one she had found in the classroom (!!) Then I told her she could not simply do that, but as it was already happening I told her she had to do some language follow-up work with it. When I arrived in the classroom for my third period with her group I saw some quite complex comprehension questions on the board  – remember they are elementary – and then she told me they could not really do much with it.

Oh dear, I do pity her!! She was thrown into the classroom probably because she also needed some extra cash for the summer. No doubt who is to be blamed for this situation…

The school I’m working for has a very interesting system to work with the groups: for the first two lessons of the day we keep our main groups and them we take over each others’ groups for the third period in order to develop what the call ‘a project’. We started swaping groups yesterday and I took over my junior teacher’s elementary group. This is becoming really a concern – some of the boys misbehaved seriously and I had to call them outside the class for a ‘friendly talk’.  But the problem is not only the students: they have a very low level of English and my colleague simply has no conditions to access what they need and no idea of what do to with them in the first two periods. I can see that they are bored to death, they have no idea what is going on in class – since their teacher has none either –  and they just want to get out of it. I could see through my own classroom window that she usually lets them leave the classroom during the lesson and also finishes it earlier.

I’ve talked to the school manager on the phone today, but I can see her problems and there isn’t much either of us can do about it – just try to survive till Friday. Poor kids

Overcoming teenagers’ self-consciousness, shyness and defensiveness is not an easy task. We have had three lessons so far but I suppose I have already broken the ice with most of them. I do like them –  to start with – they are nice kids, some a bit lost, some fed up with our marvellous summer weather and they host families but I can see they respect me and, even with a bit of French blasé attitude, they haven’t failed to do everything I have been resquesting from them.

As a mini-project and follow-up of a vocabulary and speaking activity on tourist brochures, I asked them to prepare a  tourist poster about a place they knew well and liked. I gave them an example on the board of a poster I created myself for London. They worked on that for two days and presented it yesterday. They had to go to the front of the class and convince us to visit their chosen place.

I let them use their imagination and draw at will. Some presentend quite  expected posters about Italy, France and Germany and were able to talk quite fluently – for their level- about they production. Others came up with completely unexpected choices: one drew his ideal holiday house, other his own seaside resort and one girl drew her idea of *Paradise*. That was an impressive display of imagination, it was a pity her English didn’t allow her to speak much about it, but I was fascinated because it has a lot to do with the topic of my dissertation.

I asked them to keep their work with me as a souvenir of our lessons and they seemed really pleased with it (!) I suppose in a certain way they are still just kids

In the summer Britain is literally invaded by thousands of foreign students coming for short English language courses. They range from teenagers to adults and EFL teachers coming from all over Europe.

As I’m on dissertation time, without a fixed timetable, and in need of some extra cash, I decided to get a summer job in one of these courses. It started last Wednesday and will last till next Friday. I’m the senior teacher of a group of 36 French teenagers. It means that I teach myself a group of 12 of them, who are between intermediate and upper-intermediate level, and also support the two other teachers who have lower level groups.

It’s the first time I have this kind of experience and it is quite interesting to be back into the classroom and also do some kind of teacher support, which is directly related to my studies at the moment.

My group is just fine, they are all intelligent and interesting young people but their problem is to be in a monolingual group - naturally they resort to French all the time to communicate and help each other with translation. Since their level of English is just above intermediate, they lack quite a lot of vocabulary to express their ideas.

One of my teachers is a supply teacher and has some experience with teenagers but he does have not much experience teaching ELT, the other has no experience of either. She used to work with some people with dislexia, as I understood. I suppose the school got her because they were short of teachers and that’s it.

Let’s see how things evolve.