Month: April 2013

IATEFL Plenary – Susan Barduhn

Prof. Barduhn, who gave a talk about expatriate teachers, once said, ‘If English were a drug, expatriate teachers would be the dealers…’ In her talk entitled Language Dealing, she starts by looking into the definition of ‘the drug’. Are dealers necessarily drug takers themselves? Drugs can serve to imprison but are drugs necessarily bad? Could they not be medicine, which could serve as an anti-exploitation tool?

 

In Hawkins (1974) ‘I-thou’it’ triangle as spreaders of this drug, Prof Barduhn states that ‘I’ refers to the expatriate teacher, the ‘thou’ the students and other expat teachers, and explaining the ‘it’ as the fishing rod in the metaphor ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he can fish and you feed him for a lifetime’.

 

Quoting Johnston (1999) talking about the Expatriate Teacher as Postmodern Paladin, these teachers are fighters of a noble cause, not unlike the errant of the medieval knights. He suggest that ELT as a whole is a marginal occupation, expanding on the idea of postmodernity.

 

The original Paladins crossed the seas for adventures with spiritual (self-realisation) and earthly (material gain and acquisition of a good reputation) goals.

The knight errant are those who choose to work outside their own country and the wish to educate, to share knowledge, expertise and skils. It’s also characterised by the ‘restless traveller’, wandering the earth and never settling.

The knights knew what they believed in and why they were venturing forward, and knew that eventually they would go home.

 

So why do ELT teachers keep going to other countries and new ones too?

Are we cultural marginals and do we have an identity group?

Differentially perceptual groups and identity group, Prof Barduhn talks about perceptual groups as how others see you versus the identities given to you, before explaining cultural marginality and highlighting the fact that ELT teachers are often the non-dominant community in a dominant community.

The definition of an encapsulated marginal is one where there is no revognised reference group, conscious of self, troubled by ambiguity and never ‘at home’. The definition of a constructive marginal is one of a marginal reference group, conscious of choice, intrigued by complexity and never not ‘at home’.

Stated by respondent teachers in her research as reasons and motivation for going to live in each country, ‘travel’ , ‘love of teaching’ and ‘career advancement’ occurred frequently, but professional development was highlighted as one of the more common answers.

This challenges the theory that most ELT teachers living overseas are of the back packer variety.

Family was stated at the number one reason why people move back to their own country.

 

When examining the changes in attitude amongst the teachers living overseas, it was clear that most became most tolerant and understanding of their country of origin (and its culture), got involved in more teaching fields e.g. ESP, saw themselves as ambassadors for their own country, thought of the new culture as gradually becoming part of them, and saw their job as important (‘We teach future leaders, We make English more attainable for the masses’) and are happy living abroad.

 

But as Chinese becomes more in the globalising world, would those involved in teaching of Mandarin have the same attitudes and motivation? Are they also on medieval knights’ errants?

Going through her results, here are some findings regarding Chinese expat teachers:

‘I’m more critical of my country but love it more’

‘I have no power to change methodologies’, ‘I’ve become more student-centred, teacher as a guide instead of dictator, to guide learners to see the fun in Chinese and understand the similarities between English and Chinese.’

Growing towards an acceptance of Western values like tolerance, quality orientation, etc.

‘As long as China’s economy keeps growing, it’ll become important as a world language’

Very few non-native Chinese teach Chinese in the UK.

Expat teachers are the only way people can access Chinese culture.

Expat teachers might not have an influence on trends in teacher training but conversely teacher training trends would have an influence on expat teachers.

Belonging to teaching associations and getting conference updates were a common path towards professional development.

 

So what is the drug?

Could the phenomenon of expat teachers be considered a historical and cultural movement?

TESOl culture is seen to equate ‘diversity’, ‘cooperation’ and ‘respect’.

Could these also stand for Chinese language teaching culture?

 

So what are we dealing?

The answer might not be the same for everyone but teacher training needs to delve further in social and economic theory so that we are doing it with more awareness.

IATEFL Part 6 – Shelly Terrell on BYOT

In a talk entitled ‘Transforming Trends – a journey into the work of BYOT’, Shelly starts talking about the importance of allowing teachers and students to bring in their own tools so as to overcome the economic obstacles that might be faced by the school and the students.

Taking an audience poll, it was clear to everyone that the majority of us type, take and edit pictures, take videos, download apps, post things on the web, all using either their mobile devices or their computers/laptops and are familiar with using our own tools and devices.

Through a video, she exemplifies how she uses technology and mobile devices (smart phones, ipads, etc) to create stories, conduct a show and tell, make app commercials, and publish the students’ work.

‘Mobile Monday’ signifies a special day of the week that the students can bring in their own devices and use them in class. But beforehand, it is important to teach the students digital citizenship and learn about how they should act online. If students do not pass their digital citizenship, they do not get ‘Mobile Monday’.

At this point, Shelly gets the audience to take out their own devices and choose a picture to show and talk about in pairs/groups. With such activities, students get to know each other better and all this can lower the possibility of cyber bullying.

As an example of an individual activity, Shelly gets the students to start a Flickr account on which they would post a picture under themes like ‘In a Restaurant’ or ‘This is Art’. Students then add tags or a paragraph of a comment to their pictures.

In a version of ‘I Spy’ ,we then took super-closeup photos of objects around us and in a mingle activity, we walked around the room asking people to guess what shapes our objects were and what the photos were were of. Bruno Andrade showed me his photo of a glowing blue cylindrical shaped object, which turned out to be a close-up picture of his pen. In class, we could use the app ‘I Know Quiz’ to put up the photos students have taken.

In another group activity, Shelly uses Twiddla.com to pull up an online whiteboard to brainstorm to lists problems and solutions that teenagers face. In groups, students then picked one of the problems and create an imaginary app to solve the problem. They then go on to create a video advertisement for the app they have created.

You can also get students to download a particular app at home ahead of time and bring it to class with them. Ideas Sketch for mind mapping, Google drive and Evernote for sharing information amongst the class, and Twiddla for recordable whiteboard.

Shelly ends the talk with an inspirational quote by Jean Piaget saying,
‘The principal goal of education in schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.’

Well said.

IATEFL Plenary – Deniz Kurtolu Eken

Greeted by PowerPoint slides featuring moving animation of dancing flowers and rainy islands, The audience were treated to other novelties like a strategically placed umbrella right next to the podium and a pair of pink-petal led shaped sunglasses worn by Dr Eken herself as she started her talk with the metaphoric title ‘The ELT Weather Forecast: Perceptions on Effectiveness and Teacher Motivation’.

Dr Eken then goes on to invite someone who’s having a birthday (Beyza), someone who got married in March (okay, that was us), and someone who is going to have a baby onto the stage and gave us all presents. (Great motivation to listen to the rent of the talk now!)

Quoting Humphreys (1996) on the power of the emotions that infuse the people, and not thoughts alone, Dr Eken emphasises that rainy wealthy could be seen as a welcomed blessing by the farmer but an unwelcomed disaster by holidaymakers.

After introducing us to her research framework and detailing the breakdown of her research respondents, Deniz shared some of the metaphors her respondents gave for their roles.
Here are some examples:
A plate spinner, a glorified secretary, a turtle in a race against the hare, a caged bird, one who’s trying to pluck an apple from a very high tree and never being able to, a kangaroo (which can never jump backwards, only forwards), slaves with no faces, an unused anchor on a lifeboat that is floating aimlessly in a vast ocean of ideas and theories, etc.

Moving on to perceptions of effectiveness,it was interesting to note that people felt that those in their context were doing better across the board than those at an average national level.

Rated lowest in terms of effectiveness in both ‘context’ and ‘country’ categories were ‘Academic Management’ and ‘Teacher Motivation’. Among seen as effective managers are those who are highly qualified and adaptable who can manage talent and different types of personality and those chosen because of their qualifications and not tenure.

The feedback given to managers are as follows:
Be there in need so that they are loyal employees.
Treat teachers as professionals not as skilled workers in need of constant supervision
Trust teachers more and interfere less. realise that teaching is a creative act, the results of which are not always quantifiable.
Please don’t let technology become the be all and end all of ELT because it is not. Language is firstly communication, but using technology all the time is making the students passive and uncomfortable.
Help teachers to develop and grow personally and professionally.
Communicate more and better. Smiling does not harm; be responsive and constructive; your positive attitude matters to us.
Do some normal teaching yourselves and not just cherry-picked courses.

Commonly mentioned teacher training and development opportunities appreciated by teachers are as follows:
In-service training an staff development
TT courses eg Celta or Delta
Opportunities to attend conferences and seminars
Post-Delta/Post-MA opportunities
SIGs, teacher forums
Collaborative research, action research
Developmental observations and feedback, peer observations
Educational/teacher exchange
English language development opportunities
Hosting a conference or an academic event
Sample lessons from teacher trainers

Ending her talk with another metaphor by Dr Eken’s sister: she sees herself as a partly cloudy sky with the sun shining from behind, suggesting an optimism when looking at her personal and professional life.

IATEFL Part 5 – Willy Cardoso on a dynamic ELT Curriculum

An introduction to Willy and his blog was followed by Willy taking us through the two types of lessons he has come across – the book lesson and the conversation lesson. He questions the falseness of the accuracy-fluency dichotomy that has been created, and might be even considered offensive due to the complexity of language and language learning.

Beginning his criticism of a ‘grammar mac nugget’ approach to a grammar syllabus, research has shown that language learning is non-linear and not unidirectional. When talking about curriculum, we tend focus on syllabus and scope of the content, but it is perhaps also important to look at the different views of language, including theories on comply systems and sociocultural theories.

Curriculum is often seen as a noun, and the focus thus on the product. Perhaps we could see it as a verb and a process.

‘While every course ends, the consequences of study are ongoing as they are social and subjective as well as intellectual’ (Pnar, 2011)

‘Educational institutions and the manner in which they are organised and controlled are integrally related to the ways in which specific people get access to economic and cultural resources and power’ (Apple, 2004)

But many coursebooks do not see the curriculum as an ongoing process. Here is perhaps an example of a global coursebook that exemplifies how language learning is often viewed.
They often claim:

‘The perfect balance of grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation , and skills to get your students speaking English with confidence’ (New English File Intermediate)
How have the coursebooks found this supposed balance? And how have they made it ‘perfect’?

At other buzzword used in coursebooks to promote their curriculum is the word ‘motivating’ and ‘confidence’.
But does the things that motivate one student necessarily be the sAme that motivates another?
Does a confine Japanese English speaker display the same behaviour as a confident Brazilian English speaker?

Using an example text from a coursebook using the context of family but in fact focusing on a particular language point, sacrificing in-depth discussions on culture in favour of minute language point. The texts we bring to our classroom are a reflection of a reality, and are inevitably value-laden. Yet, many books choose to use language activities that generated unreal sentences and discussions e.g. Find someone who is meeting their brother/sister this weekend. Find someone who isn’t going on a family holiday this year.
Real life conversations flow from topic to topic, with one generating talk of another.
Real life conversations deal with taboo topics and global issues – things that sorts coursebooks do not deal with.

The teacher and coursebook often define and transmit the concept, the students then study and reproduce the desired concept. But we could consider a framework where teachers and students create concepts together, exploring the origin and nature of knowledge. But the curse of the negotiated syllabus is that students come up with topics that are the same as ones in the coursebooks, as that is what they are used to.

Instead, Willy suggests asking complex questions and allowing students to discuss them, allowing for the space for Open Space Technology. As a result, students start to create their own questions and formulate complex opinions.

‘In general, the way we structure the curriculum – the experiences that are included and the relationships that are or can be established among them – will shape the kinds of knowledge-in-action that students ddeavelop. At the beginning, their understanding of the conversational domain may be partial and incomplete, but it will grow as the conversation continues.’ (Arthur Applebee’s, 1996)

Willy ends his talk about trying to see language and language use/learning simplified into the four skills (reading, writing, speaking and listening) and systems (lexis, grammar, phonology, discourse), but as a complex system to be explored.

IATEFL Part 4 – Luke Prodroumou on self-esteem

Luke Prodromou has Aretha Franklin’s Respect playing as the audience filters in.

He then asks what each of letters mean.
R for respect and rapport.
E is for esteem and evaluate (positive evaluation).
S is for self, special.
P for principles and practice, patience.
E is for empathy and emotion -feeling that you deserve the respect.
C is for competence and building the feeling in the learner that they can do it.
T is for technique and how the teacher does things in the classroom.

Prodromou then goes on to read excerpts from Robert Frost’s the Road Not Taken before starting to examine the turning points in our professional lives – our self-esteem moments.

After sharing with our partners moments that changed our lives, moments that made us feel good, and emphasises the fact that one of the things that make us (and our students feel good) is when our names are remembered.

What is self-esteem?
A basic definition is a high regard for oneself, a good opinion of oneself.
But more appropriately, self-esteem is
A feeling that you are as important as other people and that you deserve respect and to be treated well.

Self-esteem can be seen on the levels of competence and worthiness.

On the level of worthiness, he gives the example of Hamlet, one who had issues with self-esteem and beliefs that he is not worthy. ‘I could accuse me of such things that it were better that my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious…what should such fellows as I do, crawling between earth and heaven?’

In contrast, ‘Yet today, many years later, for my living I sweep the streets or clean out the toilets of the fat hotels. why? Because I constantly failed my exams’ – Brian Patten shows a low self-esteem to do with competence.

The audience then watches a scene from Kes directed by Ken Loach where Kespar tells the story about his hawk, and we identify self-esteem moments in the lesson.

With personal examples, Prodroumou talks about how he used cards to nominate students so they don’t feel intimidated by the forest of hands (of their other classmates) going up and about how he paired the best student with the difficult student (the flower and the bud).

Group work and collaborative production of tasks and written work could make less confident students feel included and proud of the being part of the end product.

Emphasising that labelling (students) is more suitable for jam jars, Prodroumou encourages us not to judge students but to offer them opportunities to participate and to learn.

IATEFL Part 3 – Isil Boy on MLearning

Isil Boy’s session starts with her asking the basic question – what is Mobile Learning? We can learn anywhere anytime…even in the toilet!

Showing us a slide of early men using slates to carve on, Isil asks us what the difference is between a slate and an iPad. Aside from the price (laughter from audience), connectivism is what makes a difference.

She goes on to highlight the illusion of mobile learning: e.g. Using tablets only in the classroom. Are schools using tablets because other schools are using it, or is it to truly enable mobile learning? Are iPads merely a substitute for a paper dictionary? Are we using tablets for the sake of using them?

The apps as classified by the SAMR model (substitution, augmentation, modification, redefinition) could transform education. But remember that the tablets are not transforming education, you are.
Does this mean that we teachers become the performers and the magicians with the help of technology? Or should we be handing over to students and letting them perform the magic instead?

How then can we integrate mLearning into teaching?
Dropping hardware into a classroom and dipping teachers into training does not work.
So, if you have a principal who says to you ‘I’ve bought the tablets! What should we do now?’, what would you do?

5 Tips for integrating tablets into your classroom
1. Define our objectives
2. Provide on-going training
3. Teach kids how to stay safe online
4. Establish a protocol for parents
5. Set some rules to switch tablets off

Isil then moves on to asking the audience what their dream app might be.
Do we know how to search for apps?
There are search engines for apps e.g. Quixey and App Crawl which we can use.

As a framework for teaching with apps, one can categorise apps into Searching, Bookmarking, Organising, Creating, and Sharing.
An example of an app that helps with Organising is U-Pad lite that helps the user to complete and sign forms.
Educreations help turn your iPad into a recordable whiteboard with voice recording.
Isil also recommends Edmodo for Organising information and sharing them with students.
Storykit is another free app that allows us to add text, voice and create digital stories with our students.

But why are we using these apps? According to the affective context model, if we can learn things whenever we need it, it becomes more effective. With the help of mLearning, we can learn anytime and anywhere we want. We don’t need to convince students to use the iPads and push the information on them. We are instead pulling the information that they have found out from them.

The conclusion Isil the draws is that schools should develop a technology plan, create a policy for tablet use, and have primary control over the downloading and syncing of apps. Teachers should be involved in the decision-making process and students should be allowed to keep the tablets and take them home, otherwise it defeats the purpose of having tablets in the classroom.

Isil ends the presentation to the packed room with a useful link to her blog isilboy.com.

IATEFL Part 2 – Jim Scrivener on Demand High

Jim’s talk started by looking at a quick definition of demand high teaching.

Demand High is a meme, an idea that gets passed from person to person. It is not a new methodology. The question asked is ‘Am I engaging the full human learning potential of the students in my class?’

 

Modern language teaching seems not to push students to achieve and focuses more on being fun and entertaining.

Starting with the following questions:

 

  • Are my learners capable of more?
    Am I under-challenging my students?
  • Would my students learn more if I demnded more of them? How could I do that?
  • Have the tasks and techniques I use in lass become rituals and ends in themselves?
  • How can I stop ‘covering material’ and start focusing on the potential for deeper learning?
    What small shifts can I make?

 

The evolving manifesto of Demand High

It is okay to ‘teach’.

The word ‘teach’ seems to have got a bad rep over the last few years and learning is expected to emerge. There is value in explicit teaching, which is not equivalent to the teaching ‘yapping’ in front of the classroom.

We need to focus on where the learning is

You have permission to be active interventionist teacher

Learn the classroom management techniques that make a difference

Work at everyone’s pace – not just the fastest few

Risk working hands-on with language

Don’t expect the book to do the teaching for you.

Expect more – Demand High

 

One way of being more ‘demand high’ is by looking at one common stage in many lessons:

When students have done an exercise  (individually and in pairs) and the teacher leads a feedback stage to check answers.

 

What are some things that one could do to extend this stage to last 60 minutes.

 

Here, Jim suggests

  • probing and expanding on the students’ answers e.g. ‘Do you agree with her answer? What do you think?’ and playing devil’s advocate (this blogger likes this!) rather than simply rubber-stamping the students’ answers;
  • exploring what’s behind the answer e.g. ‘Why is that the answer?’ and ‘Why do you think the person said that?’;
  • getting students to listen to you or the speaker is saying it and replay the voice in their heads and ‘Can you hear that voice saying it in your head? Can you change that to a different voice? Maybe a voice of a relative?’;
  • thinking about the paralinguistic features that go with phrases/sentences; working on the pronunciation e.g. stress patterns, speed, intonation etc;
  • practising the target language through drilling and playing around with the phrases;
  • remembering the target language by promoting recall;
  • raising awareness of mistakes;
  • playing with the grammar and lexis e.g. can you change the verb, can you drop a word, change the formality, context, relationship, etc.
  • ensuring that you keep the whole class engaged and pitching the challenges to the individual’s needs, yet avoiding ‘yap’ mode but intervening with authority, etc.

After lots of fun practicing some of these practical techniques with the audience, Jim emphasizes that the presentation stage of a lesson might not really be the most important part, but it is in fact that practice stage that allows students to really internalize the new language.

 

Communicative and fluency activities are fine and good but we should also not forget structured grammatical practice.

 

Fixing mistakes does not lead to insight and awareness. It merely puts paper on a crack. It should not just about collecting the right answers, but we need to start looking further.

IATEFL Opening Plenary – David Crystal

David Crystal officially opens IATEFL Liverpool by first warning us not to trust Wikipedia, which has knighted him for a few days and stated that he has had different numbers of children and wives. He moves on to tell us about he went to school in Liverpool and proudly tells us to listen out to the Liverpudlian influences in his accent.

Introducing us to some popular songs and then focusing our attention on a well-known song by Paul McCartney and Wings, ‘Live and Let Die’, and the much-discussed lyrics ‘But if this ever changing world in which we live in’.

The tune needs two prepositions for it to work and when music calls, grammar blends.

Lexical blends like ‘brunch‘ become part of our everyday language quickly but syntactic blends do not get into our language as easily.

It is however important to note that blends are very common in speech

Here are some examples:

I don’t know to which hotel I’m going to.

For which party will you be voting for in the March 9th Election?

Mentors are for business people, mentors can help you and be your role models, couples to which we look up to.

From which country does a Lexus come from?

Syntactic blends arise when people are unsure of which to use and so they use both.

It raises because of the clash and choice that could come from formal and informal usage.

In the prescriptive tradition that dominated schools, teachers tend to try and eliminate the informal forms and therefore enforcing rules such as ‘Never end a sentence with a preposition’. Yet, Shakespeare uses end-place prepositions all the time. But the rule appealed to classically-inclined pedants. Winston Churchill even had rules ‘up with which he would not put‘.

So those who try to follow the rules taught to us and place the preposition at the beginning… but the natural pattern of the language takes over and the preposition is put after the verb where it feels most natural, forgetting that they’ve used a preposition already.

The further away the two prepositions, the more likely this is to happen.

e.g. For which of the five candidates in the forthcoming by-election will the people of Eastleigh be voting for?

But double prepositions aren’t the only Syntactic Blend that happens.

Here, Professor Crystal introduces another Beatles song with the lyrics

‘He won’t do nothing right just in sitting down and look so good‘ (as opposed to ‘looking so good’)

and

‘I been told when a boy kiss a girl‘ (as opposed to ‘a boy kisses a girl’)

When we leave music behind and listen to spoken English, such blends all the time.

We start sentences, change our minds and end sentences differently from how we intended when we started.

We usually do not notice this though, as we are paying attention to what is being said rather than how it is being said.

Prof. Crystal uses his own lectures as examples of the non-grammatical statements in spoken English:

‘Within how long did it take for an American English start to grow?‘

which is a blend of ‘Within what period of time did it take for an American English to start to grow?‘

and

‘How long did it take for an American English to start to grow?‘

Here’s an example embedded in a dialogue:

‘Well, we don’t speak it?’

‘Why don’t we speak it?’

‘Well, cos I was never taught it.’

‘Well, why weren’t I taught it?’

As a result of the constant use of the pronoun ‘we’ at the beginning, the last statement is a blend of ‘Well why weren’t we/you taught it?’ and ‘Why wasn’t I taught it?‘

These blends of course appear a lot less in written material due to gatekeeping by editors and publishers. Thus, a lot of what is considered ‘standard English’ corresponds to what is published. Yet, with the advent of the internet, these gatekeepers might not be there and most people do not revise and re-read what they write in emails and blogs (especially if they’re blogging simultaneously during a conference plenary).

Here, Prof David Crystal uses examples from the most popular blogs in the UK with blended constructions.

Comprehension is governed by the distribution of weight in a sentence. English is governed by end weight, and speakers tend to put the  most important information at the end, after the main verb, rather than in the beginning. Most sentences use a single pronoun and verb followed by a concentration of content after the verb. One can of course use long adverbials at the beginning of the sentence, but this makes comprehension more difficult and the sentence is more difficult to process…therefore naturally, in spoken English, this does not happen as often.

Note these two sentences:

It was nice of John and Mary to visit us the other day.

versus

For John and Mary to visit us the other day was nice.

We tend to get irritated with the second sentence, thinking ‘Where’s the verb? Get on with it!”

Here, Prof. Crystal uses a random ELT coursebook to make a point.

In a chapter on relative clauses, long noun phrases are featured:

e.g. Salesman who sell books at your door are a  nuisance. The books they sell are often expensive’

A lot of information needs to be processed before getting to the verb, while trying to learn a new piece of English grammar.

This could make it more difficult for students and perhaps coursebooks should use relative clauses with shorter subjects when introducing the grammar point, and leave such long noun phrases for more advanced levels.

e.g I don’t like salesmen who sells books at the door.

It’s often expensive to buy the books they sell.

In ELT, we come across blends often in students’ writing.

e.g. ‘Does it not worry you that the man to whom you will marry might be cruel to you?‘

It is important to realise that errors such as these blends are signs of growth and not be condemned.

Teachers should try to understand the origin and source of the blend. To condemn them as mistakes would result in students not daring to try out new constructions in the future.

Blends tend to occur more often when the speaker/writer is under pressure and has to complete the sentence quickly, and the grammar finds it harder to keep pace with the thought  e.g. football commentaries, family rows, etc.

Blends are nothing to feel guilty. In writing, we try to eliminate them for being labelled as careless and sloppy by readers who have more time to examine our sentences.

Here, Prof. Crystal clarifies that he is not advocating that we teach blends, but more that we not condemn blends in speech when we are likely to use them ourselves.

Ending his plenary with a piece of titbit about his days as a saxophone player, he muses that Paul MacCartney may have earned much more than him, Paul MacCartney never quite had the honour of ending up as the patron of IATEFL.

IATEFL Part 1 – Mike Hogan on How to be a successful freelancer

Mike Hogan starts this year’s IATEFL with one of the three ‘How-to’ sessions just before David Crystal’s opening plenary with the very useful topic – ‘How to be a successful freelancer’.

He first looks at ‘Organisation’. Many of the talks and workshops tends to be about what happens in the classroom and ‘in-training’ ideas, but sometimes there’s less focus on the organisational side of being a freelancer. Essentially, as a freelancer, you are a one-person business, and so it’s important to think about the way you budget your finances. Consider the lifestyle you have now and the lifestyle you want to have and how much that would cost you per month/year, bearing in mind that as a freelancer, you don’t get paid for holidays or sick days. Mike recommends that the freelance teacher learns basic accountancy and the use of Excel so as to reduce the stress levels when dealing with taxes and year-end accounting.

Balancing out when and where the income is coming from also means looking at alternative sources of income, e.g. teaching online, writing, etc. It’s important to know where your most stable income is coming from and to guarantee this ‘bread & butter’ income before scheduling the unlimited holidays that you might think freelancers get. Think of yourself as a company and plan your annual budget and do not just live from day to day/month to month.

When getting work, one must not forget the marketing strategy one employs or intends to employ. Know your product and know what you are selling. Be clear about why clients should choose you over other competitors.Consider how you can get the contract by either offering a lower price or adding value to your product. Find out what your competitors are doing and what the going market rate of what you are trying to sell. And where can your clients find out about you?

At this point, Mike emphasises the importance of CPD (Continual Professional Development) and how the CELTA is merely the beginning of one’s career development. If you are trying to get work, ensure that you professionalise yourself first by looking the part. Find out what everyone else in the company wears and try not to overdress or underdress. Practise the skills that you are teaching. If you are teaching students to present, get as much experience presenting yourself so that you can add value to what you offer. If you are teaching students to negotiate, go out there and try and get some negotiating practice in the shops or with your mobile phone service provider.

When talking to your client, be aware of possible unrealistic expectations and clients who try and treat language training like any other commodity, e.g. wanting the same results with fewer contact hours. You therefore need to be creative when putting together your training packages. Also remember that different people have different needs and so it is important to carry out a needs analysis to tailor the course to suit the individuals and not simply roll out a ‘one-size-fits-all’ course.

Be realistic and do not try to take on every kind of course. Know your specialisation and know how your product differs from the other competitors. Do not be afraid to say no to a client that wants something you can’t offer and do not hesitate to recommend someone else who can do the job. As they say, pay it forward!

This summer, the European Profiling Grid is to be published. A tool for mapping and assessing language teaching competencies internationally might change the way clients buy language training and so it is important to keep up to date with what the industry is implementing.

Finally, Mike finishes off with the importance of reflecting on the relationship between quality and reputation. If someone mentions your name at the coffee machine at work, how will that conversation run? What will they say about you?

 

 

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