Authentic Listening – summary of an ELTABB workshop with Ian Badger

A few weeks ago now (I know, I’ve been neglectful of my poor blog!) I attended a workshop run by the English teachers’ association which I tweet for, ELTABB, on the subject of ‘authentic listening’. The presenter was Ian Badger and the session was very interesting indeed. Unfortunately, even though the workshop took place in the CELTA Training Centre of the Berlin School of English where I work, I still managed to be late as my class upstairs overran. So I’m afraid my summary won’t be the most comprehensive one ever written, but the workshop did raise some points which chimed well with my own experience of teaching so far.

Diary of a Newbie ELT Teacher Part Four: The ELT Interview

I haven’t blogged in a while because I’ve had a lot of lovely visitors, but I have also been busy attending a few other interviews, in order to pick up a few other classes here and there to ensure I comply with German tax laws. Freelancers here are apparently required to earn at least 17% (the number varies according to your source, but it’s less than a quarter I believe) of your income from a second source – otherwise you’re not a freelancer, which I suppose is a fair point. To that end, I accepted some offers for interviews and went along, and I thought it might be helpful for other newbie teachers to record some of the questions I’ve been asked during these experiences. I won’t be naming names of course, but I thought I would categorise the questions to help future ELT job-seekers prepare for their own interviews.

So, here goes a little collection of some of the questions I’ve come up against recently. I’ll use myself as the example, but of course change the specifics based on your own situation!

About you

So, what brought you to Berlin?
For me, this question is easy – I love German, love Germany, have always wanted to live in Berlin, and am contemplating moving into ELT publishing as a future career…but I do have to phrase my answer so that it doesn’t sound like I’m just here to get the bare minimum experience teaching before returning to the UK, so whatever your answer is, just make sure you sell it so that the interviewer knows (or at the very least thinks!) you’re in teaching for the long haul.

How long are you planning to stay here in Berlin?
Language school managers ask this because they don’t want to invest lots of time in you if you’re only backpacking through the city for the summer – I personally am not sure exactly how long I’ll be staying in Berlin, so I have been saying ‘2 years’ to be safe.

Wie gut kannst du Deutsch?
This took me by surprise in one interview – all of a sudden, my interviewer switched into German. I can thankfully speak quite decent German now, so it wasn’t a problem – but when I saw him casually write down ‘B2’ next to the box on his interview sheet for ‘German knowledge’, my outrage distracted me a little! (I would have expected my German to be estimated a little higher after university and so much time in the country, but hey ho!)

How would you describe yourself as a teacher?
I’d pick a few choice adjectives here, and then give corresponding examples. For example, I think I say ‘motivating’ as it’s something that students themselves have said to me, as well as ‘energetic’ and ‘fun’ – for those of you straight off CELTA like I was, have a look through your feedback from students from your Teaching Practices.

About your teaching qualifications

What was your final grade on the CELTA?
Pretty self-explanatory this one! (One of the people who interviewed me left a 3-month gap before replying to me, so when I’d first sent the application, I didn’t know my final grade. In most cases, this will of course be on your CV.)

What did you find hardest about the CELTA?
Just be honest here – my personal struggle was with error correction, as I always tended to correct students at unsuitable moments, so I had to learn how to save my comments for the appropriate time. I would just advise staying away from saying things like ‘the workload’ or ‘the teaching practices,’ as those answers don’t immediately suggest you’d be a great person to employ!

About your teaching experience

What’s your experience teaching business English?
Business English is big…business (!) here in Berlin, so this question also always crops up. Again, I would advise being honest: aside from my time in Berlin, my only real business English experience was teaching civil servants in the Basque government when I lived in Bilbao – but they were total beginners, so I don’t profess that this was extensive business English experience.

What kind of companies have you taught business English in?
This question will obviously not always be asked, depending on your answer to the question above. I mention the companies I teach in, and then subtly remind the interviewer that I used to work in publishing to sow the seed that I could be particularly useful in such companies 🙂

Which course books do you like and why?
As the question itself requires, you need to give a lot of examples here. I will go ahead and say that I always mention the business English classic Market Leader for its case studies, but also Language Leader for its less business-focused ‘scenarios’ and the way it presents grammar. Even after a month of teaching, you’ll have some preferences so just be sure to explain yourself well.

What is your policy on L1 in the classroom?
When answering this question (which seemingly always comes up), it went down well to give some different examples on how my policy with use of German in the classroom changes. That is, that one company class of mine, which comprises 4-5 mid-50s ladies from former East Germany who are complete beginners, asked me explicitly to translate and explain everything in German – so my behaviour in this class is very different to some intermediate classes I teach at the Berlin School of English.

How creative are you in the classroom?
I was instantly filled with fear when I heard this question, as me and creativity are not the best of friends usually… But off the top of my head I was luckily able to recall how I have created lesson plans based on TED Talks I see pop up on Twitter; how I have made templates for business cards, postcards, emails and all sorts to help students use ‘real’ English and my personal highlight, adapting Sandy Millin’s excellent suggested lesson on small talk to help teach higher-level students how to mingle with strangers. (Mentioning that you sometimes use ideas from blogs of other teachers also seems to be well-received!)

A test of your grammar knowledge

I have been given a variety of errors to correct in some of the interviews I have attended, which were more or less like those below:

1. I walked slow to the bank because I was tiring.
2. I have living in Berlin for 5 years.
3. If I won the lottery, I will buy a house in Spain.

It’s likely that the questions you’re asked include common errors from the learners native to the country where you are applying – for example, in Germany, problems with the Present Perfect are common as it looks similar to their own past tense but has very different applications.

In some cases, I just had to talk through the problems, but in another I had to teach the interviewer as if he was a B1 student and help him correct the mistakes – and he was a very petulant student at that! So do be prepared for some spontaneous teaching practice and swot up on your grammar (although I have been assured this is less common…!)

Some practical questions

When are you available?
It creates a good impression if you go into the interview armed with the knowledge of when your fixed classes at other companies/schools are, so you can tell the interview what he/she will have to work around, or to enable you to fill in whichever form you’re presented with. I now have a few company classes at random times, and other one-to-one classes, so my availability isn’t excellent, but the interviewers just want as much information as they can get.

Do you have any questions?
Here is your opportunity to cover any ground which hasn’t been covered in the interview. In my experience, the interviewer often gives a little spiel about the school towards the end (presuming all has gone well) but if anything remains unclear, then now is your time to shoot! Some recommendations of mine include:

• What kind of things do you do to help new teachers in the school? (I’m hoping for workshops, observations, seminars etc.)
• How much do you support your teachers in terms of resources? (I’d like to hear words like ‘library’, ‘photocopier’ and ‘plan.’)
• How much information do teachers receive before teaching a new class? (You’d expect to hear the results of some kind of needs analysis at the very least.)

And all that remains to wish is good luck! Let me know if these tips help 🙂

Diary of a Newbie Teacher Part Three: The dark(er) side of being a freelance English teacher in Berlin

I’ve just got back from a wonderful week back at home in England, where two sets of friends were married, a stunning baby girl was born (not mine!) and an anniversary was celebrated with my boyfriend…and ever since my EasyJet plane landed a predictable 70+ minutes late at 1am this morning, my head has been a bit all over the place.

I have often been criticised by certain people that I am ‘too positive’ and that I am happy about everything, so I thought I would write an honest, personal post about the struggles of being a freelance English teacher in my favourite city, Berlin.

Some Berlin street art with a British touch

Just as a reminder for any new followers, I decided to quit my job in academic publishing and move out here earlier this year because I had always wanted to live in Berlin: it has a special magic that had always drawn me back, exemplified well by the fact that my flight out here just before my CELTA course started was my 10^th visit to the German capital. Teaching English wasn’t my first option for making a living here, though – my absolute dream situation would have been to continue working in publishing, but in a German publishing house because I was, and still am, determined to perfect my German. However, despite applying for a few internships with publishing houses here, I was unsuccessful so I created a Plan B to include the longer-term view of returning to ELT publishing in the UK at some point. I was, if you will, killing two birds with one stone: following my Berlin dream and also trying to advance my publishing career a little bit… (Time will tell if this was a wise move or not!)

Anyway, I have now been teaching in this captivating capital since the beginning of May, and would like to highlight some less positive areas of life as a freelance English teacher – or ‘trainer’ as some teachers here call themselves.

Firstly, I spend a lot of time on public transport. I knew this from having read countless blogs about living in Berlin before I moved here (the most relevant of which was David McFetridge’s Teaching English in Berlin blog, which I first discovered when I realised he’d stolen the blog title I originally wanted!) so I was expecting it, but I recently added up the total amount of hours I spend commuting around the city on an average week and was quite horrified. I do teach the lion’s share of my classes at the Berlin School of English, which is nice as it means I can leave my resources there, but I also teach in companies around the city, which involves a fair amount of travel on the tram, the S-Bahn and the U-Bahn – perhaps exacerbated even further due to the fact that I live northeast of the city. Although we are reimbursed a token amount for the cost of the journey, we are not reimbursed for the time, which lowers our hourly wage considerably, and also sees me traipsing around Berlin complete with lunch in tin foil, a salad for dinner in a Tupperware container and my badminton kit in a tote bag! (Playing badminton is of course my own choice, but there’s never any time to go home between lessons and training, so I have to resort to gypsying around my whole kit and my racket!)

This brings me to point two: lack of ‘me’ time. I know I am new to this whole ELT malarkey, and I am something of a worrier-cum-perfectionist – a terrible combination for a new teacher! This trait unfortunately means that I do spend an awful lot of time planning my lessons; often hunting for extra extra resources, ‘just in case we finish everything really quickly’ – which of course, we never do! I find I spend even more time planning for my company classes than I do for the intensive courses at school, and if you tot up how many hours I spend planning versus how much I earn teaching, it’s a depressingly small pro-rata amount. This makes me really miss working at Routledge, when I started at 8am and would therefore be able to leave at 4pm, sometimes even with a lunchtime gym session or spin class!

Mentioning my old job also links nicely to an experience I had when I was at home last week: I wanted to catch up with my friend Mel, who used to kindly drive me to work with her, so I suggested that she drove me to work like normal, for old time’s sake. We could then have the hour’s drive to catch up, and I would then spend the morning chatting to my former colleagues in various departments around the company. Although it was admittedly a little tragic to go back to work, I had the most wonderful time nattering away to all my old teammates from Digital Publishing, one of whom had even kindly baked a cake for me! I also visited the girls I used to sit with on my first ever ‘pod’ at Routledge when I worked in Editorial, as they are now spread around the three buildings doing various things… Everyone was so willing to spend a long tea break talking to me and asking about Berlin, and although we did of course work very hard, it really made me miss the relaxed atmosphere of publishing and all the super-friendly and interesting people within the industry. I also miss the knowledge that, when you turn off your PC at 4pm, you don’t even need to think about work until 8am the following day. Admittedly, I was a bit of a workaholic and would frequently check my work emails remotely from my phone outside of hours, but I rarely did anything about them and was certainly never ‘on call.’ As a freelance English teacher here in Berlin, I find I am planning lessons on the U-Bahn, reading grammar books over dinner (so my advanced classes don’t catch me out) and dreaming up blog posts as I brush my teeth… Of course, this blog is entirely my decision, but due to my aim of trying to get into ELT publishing further down the line, I wanted to try and develop professionally as a teacher as much as possible in however much time I am in this city, which then does result in me spending yet more of my own time doing work-related things.

Bear pit karaoke, one of the Sunday wonders of life in Berlin

Finally, and most importantly. I miss my English life more than I was expecting. During my compulsory ‘year abroad’ from university 2010-2011, I missed my family and I missed fresh milk and Robinson’s squash, but I knew I had to be abroad in order to pass my degree, so I sort of just got on with it – and did have a fantastic time. Now, the rules are a little different. I am having a fantastic time (when I’m not planning lessons!), I still miss my friends, family, fresh milk and Robinson’s squash but I especially miss the general comings and goings of life in Blighty a lot more than I did back in 2011. A few things are different now, such as my having an insanely patient and supportive boyfriend back home, which make leaving England and coming back to Germany more difficult every time, but somehow I found myself feeling really England-sick this morning. Even the thought of going to my local discount supermarket (Netto) instead of the Tesco I frequented last week was a bit sad. I’m sure it’ll pass once I get more than 4 hours sleep and the temperature drops below 30 degrees here, but I do miss little old England quite a lot.

So, if anyone has any thoughts about ex-pat or freelancer life in Berlin or anywhere else in the world, I’d be very grateful to hear your thoughts!

But for now, it’s time to go and fall back in love with this city I’d always dreamed of living in!

My first Lesson Jam

On Saturday 1^st August I took part in my first ever Lesson Jam, organised by the creator of the concept himself, the lovely Tom Heaven. My first Lesson Jam also happened to be the first ever session that Tom has ever run internationally; some Lesson Jams have taken place in Berlin previously, but a teacher got in touch with Tom after his IATEFL talk on the same topic earlier this year, and asked if they could participate. Of course, Tom said yes, which is why I ended up spending 4 hours on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Tom’s envy-inducing roof apartment here in Berlin Skypeing with a roomful of teachers in Cairo! The teachers in Cairo were from Maha ESL Training, and it was the owner of that school, Maha herself, who was in charge their end.

I was originally going to write about the whole process in my trademark great, waffly detail, but Tom has already done a very comprehensive report on his own website, so please do have a read there for the full low-down. To avoid simply making a poorer second cousin of Tom’s post, I thought I would practice writing concisely, which does not come easily to me at all, and break the afternoon down into bullet points:

• English teachers arrive at Tom’s stunning flat: deposit snacks, admire view from Tom’s amazing balcony, and then settle down on the sofa.
• Tom gets Team Cairo up on Skype and there is a half-hour of general technology twiddling: the rest of us happily make idle teacher chit-chat. We were five teachers including Tom, but Tom didn’t participate, so we were a nice cosy group of four brains, against the larger Cairo contingent of about 9 or 10 teachers.
  

  Team Berlin brainstorming away

• Once everyone is ready, Tom goes into boss mode and gets the show, or Jam, if you will, on the road: we all introduce ourselves briefly and do lots of cringeworthy waving at Tom’s iMac.
• Tom explains how the afternoon is going to work, and then gives us our stimulus: an unidentifiable object with egg-related colours and a vicious pin inside…(see photo)
• Maha, the lead teacher from Team Cairo, gives her group their stimulus: a mobile phone.
• The groups break off for a 20-minute brainstorming session, consisting of 3 minutes of solo thinking about what on earth the object Tom presented us with could be, followed by 17 minutes of sharing said ideas. In this time, Tom thankfully confirmed some of our predictions about the object: it was an Eierpiekser, or ‘egg piercer’ – apparently an essential item in any German kitchen (they do love their hard-boiled eggs!)
• Team Berlin’s brainstorm spirals off into lesson plans based on cooking, processes, unusual objects, and focuses on functional language of explaining a process, using vague language to explain new objects and discourse markers to talk through a process. You can see the results of our multi-coloured madness in the brainstorm photo to the right.
• Both groups reunite on Skype and present their masterpieces to each other on the camera, and talk through them. Each group suggests additional ideas to the other group. This was actually one of my favourite parts of the session, as there was so much creativity flying about!
• Both groups break for lunch: Tom whips up some delicious bread for Team Berlin and we wash it down with Apfelschorle and excellent coffee, and feel re-energised for the main part of the session: writing the actual plan!
• I somehow became the scribe for the group (did I say I liked to write…?) and we began scribbling down our ideas.
  

  Scribbling down our lesson plan

• From the stimulus of our egg-piercer, we ended up taking the route of a recipe-based lesson, focusing on discourse markers such as ‘then’ and ‘after that’ to help students follow a process. So, this is my interpretation of our lesson plan, roughly aimed at an intermediate B1 class:

Our lesson begins with some photos of similarly obscure objects like the Eierpiekser, but from various zoomed-out angles so that students have to use whatever language they have for speculating about what something could be (‘perhaps it’s a…’ or ‘maybe it’s…’ for example.) We then eventually reveal the objects and they have to guess the connection (that they are for a specific recipe, such as the German favourite plum cake, Plaumenkuchen). The ‘official’ recipe is then revealed, and there is language focus on the discourse markers linking each stage of the recipe, with students being asked to find all examples of such linking language. This stage can be elongated or contracted as per time constraints.
Students have to then agree on a new recipe and each group comes up with their own (simple) version thereof, which is hung up around the room at the end of the brainstorming session in a ‘recipe gallery’ for other students to have a look at. (This is the controlled practice.)

For the free practice, students then write their own favourite recipe and are strongly encouraged to bring the results of their recipe in for homework in the next class 😉

• We scribbled for about 45 minutes, and then reunited on Skype one last time with Team Cairo. They presented their excellent ideas around mobile phones and then we told them about our recipe idea. Again, we each had a lot of questions for the other group of teachers and I think both lesson plans were further improved by this feedback and critique session.
• After lots more questions, Tom brought the session to a close. We agreed to keep in touch, and the session ended with lots more waving to the laptop!

Things I really enjoyed about the Lesson Jam

• meeting other teachers, and seeing how creative we can be when we all put our heads together
• coming away from the afternoon with some really good ideas for future lessons I could use – neither of which involve a course book at all! Happy days!
• the cultural exchange with the teachers in Cairo: amidst all our lesson jamming antics, we also exchanged comments on the use of phones in class, on homework and on the additional paperwork beyond the classroom. We learnt, for example, that it is essential for the Egyptian teachers to assess whether or not their students have met their objectives by the end of the lesson. For those of us in Berlin, particularly those of us teaching in a more Business English context, this kind of thing isn’t so integral, so it was interesting to hear how this skewed the focus of the end of their lessons.
• using my brain on a Saturday afternoon, and realising that all of this teaching must have gone to some good use, as I was able to contribute lots of ideas, despite being by far the most inexperienced teacher present.

Slightly less great things about the Lesson Jam, which we can easily improve the next time

• the sound was sometimes a little difficult to hear – it was much better once Tom connected his super-speakers, but then it would have been even better to have a bigger screen to really be able to see what the other teachers in Cairo were presenting
• Team Cairo sometimes talked over each other, making it hard to follow their chain of thoughts – but then again, I’m sure we did that too!

And, the final verdict: Will I Lesson Jam again?

I most certainly will! I thought the joint planning effort was great, and something really different to all my post-CELTA teaching experience so far.

Thank you to Tom for arranging it all, for the food, opening your flat and for the photos I have brazenly stolen in this post, and thanks also to Team Cairo for being the willing participants in the first ever international Lesson Jam!

PS. Apologies for the few absent photos: my phone isn’t playing ball at the moment! They will follow shortly 🙂 In the meantime, thanks to Tom for the 2 photos I have stolen!

An ELTABB-tastic weekend

This weekend was the first weekend in 6 weeks where I haven’t had visitors or been at home celebrating my birthday, and it has been wonderful. In addition to catching up with friends and being treated to belated birthday dinners and breakfasts by some incredibly kind friends, I also participated in two events run by ELTABB, the English Language Teachers’ Association for Berlin-Brandenburg. You may remember that I was asked to become the Social Media Ambassador for the organisation just over a month ago, and I have been doing some #ELT tweeting on behalf of everyone teaching here in Berlin. However, I felt like I didn’t know the organisation itself well enough, so I thought getting involved in some more of the events would be a good idea.

The first was a Web Development workshop. I used to work in a digital publishing team at Routledge (an academic publishing house in Oxfordshire back in England) and often dealt with web designers and developers, but was never able to fully converse with them in their techy language. When I saw that ELTABB was offering a web development course for the steal of €50, I thought it would be rude not to give it a go! So I signed up, paid my fee from my shiny new German bank account, and then promptly forgot all about it for a while. I had a stream of visitors over lots of weekends, and very little time to myself. All of a sudden, it was ten days or so until the main workshop day and I hadn’t really made any progress on the self-study section of the course, so I thought I should probably knuckle down to it!

Our trainer, Kai, had designed the whole pre-course herself, and it was brilliantly clear and easy to follow, even for technologically challenged people like me. The HTML/CSS-focused tutorial was even tailored to suit our exact needs: teaching us how to create our own teaching services websites from scratch, with the aim of helping us attract new clients in Berlin. I did, however, massively underestimate how long it would take me, given that a large proportion of the new terminology had to be Googled alongside the course itself, and that coding from scratch is obviously a totally alien skill to me. I therefore spent the 10 days or so in advance of the course living at the school where I teach from 7/8am when I started teaching, to around 10 o’clock in the evening. I was teaching my four or five classes a day, and then staying at school to use the fast WiFi to try and make as much headway on the pre-course material as possible, in order to be able to get as much out of the final workshop as possible. My colleagues started making jokes about me sleeping at school, and I was having tragic dinners from Tupperware boxes every evening.

On the Wednesday before the course on Saturday, we received a message asking us to have got through as much of the course as possible by Saturday, which I was realising was going to be impossible for me because I was doing everything so slowly. However, I gave it a very good go and had some semblance of my own, purple website, with one functional link and even a photo of my ugly mug on it.

Saturday rolled around and seven of us met in Betahaus in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. It’s a painfully hipster ‘coworking space’ with good coffee and fast WiFi (once we managed to get it to work!) so it was the ideal location for some group coding.

Our super hipster coworking space

After lots of initial teething problems with technology, we were all online and Kai showed us how to upload our files to an FTP site to actually get them online, which was rather exciting! They’re on such an obscure URL that nobody would ever really find them, but it still felt like quite an accomplishment, even for a website as rudimentary as mine!

I felt bad for Kai, as she had asked that we all try to finish the tutorial for Saturday, so we could work through her second part together. However, we had all ended up at totally different points, so in the end, we just spent the workshop working on our own websites and then receiving one-to-one help from Kai the expert, who would whizz our code into shape in no time at all on her MacBook! I didn’t achieve loads in the five hours we were together, as it ended up being a very interesting forum for talking about our various teaching experiences as much as a coding workshop (again, I felt sorry for Kai with all our chitter chat as well!) but I was quite happy with the small changes I made to my site by the end of the workshop.

English teachers coding their socks off!

It was a fantastic experience: seeing how creative everyone else had been, and how we had all interpreted the same set of instructions so differently. Being seven teachers, we are all slightly perfectionist in our wishes for how our websites should look, I think, so it’s very hard to let go of those objectives in the light of our minimal knowledge of HTML and CSS. Kai was inordinately patient, though, particularly with some of our slightly more ‘special’ questions, some of which are below as collated in our secret Facebook discussion group:

“Is there a plugin to create a child?”

“How do I pad my divs?”

“It’s the body stuff…”

“I’ll just have to create a child the old-fashioned way…”

How my page looked by the end of the workshop...no more random black boxes, at least!

Some of the comparisons we made were that learning HTML and CSS is like learning German: you think it’s OK until you get to the German cases, and you think coding isn’t too bad until you get to CSS classes and IDs…

After five hours, my brain was still pretty frazzled, even with our delicious pizza break at 2pm. My laptop was also concerningly warm, so Katerina and I called it a day and I went off to my birthday surprise dinner with my brain full of and dots and hashtags and IDs and classes…

Feeding time at the zoo...Ahem, lunch!

I’m hoping I can find the time and motivation to keep going with the rest of the tutorial and achieve as much with my website as one of the other teachers, Sherri, achieved with hers by persevering with the tutorial until 2am on the morning of the course! We have already arranged to attend a MeetUp group in just over a week where experienced front-end developers help no-hopers like us with their questions…so I guess I had better get coding!

Then, today I enjoyed my second dose of ELTABBers for the weekend, and attended the annual Pot Luck picnic. The wonderful ELTABB Events Coordinator Mandy had arranged for us to meet in the new Park Gleisdreieck in Kreuzberg so I toddled along with my accidentally large cous cous salad and joined Mandy on her blanket. After a while, our numbers had grown to seven, and so had our food spread. We had quite a feast and enjoyed it over some amusing conversations ranging from the America/Canada differences; to things we love and hate about Germany (a classic) and back to the delicious food we were enjoying and how it was all created.

Our spread!

The morning had started rather grey and overcast, so we were very grateful that the sun appeared and graced us with its presence. It ended up being quite a lovely afternoon, and I really enjoyed whiling away a few hours in the sun with other language teachers.

ELTABB teachers

I really don’t understand why more people don’t come along to these fantastic events, though  – we reckon there must be more than 500 English teachers in Berlin, between those who teach in schools, for agencies and directly in companies. Over two hundred of them are ELTABB members, but yet I have yet to see more than 30 people at any given ELTABB event. With my annoying Tweeting, I am determined to encourage more of them out of the Berlin woodwork! Watch this space…

The very fancy new Park Gleisdreieck

Diary of a Newbie Teacher Part Two: Teaching beginners

At the end of last week I was asked to take on a class in place of another teacher at 8am on Monday morning. Aside from being slightly offended by the ungodly hour, I asked for more information about the company and was told it’s a property company. I was also told it’s a good opportunity as we are taking on more and more classes in the same company. Our School Manager explained to me that the class comprised five ‘lovely middle-aged East German ladies’ who had had five lessons with their previous teacher and otherwise no English classes since school.

The previous teacher was kind enough to prepare some materials for me beforehand, on the topic of prepositions of place and ‘There is/There are.’ He had, however, left their class file at home so I was unsure of what they had done with him in the five previous lessons, which concerned me a little as I had never taught beginners before.

I looked over all the materials he had prepared, and looked at some Internet resources on the same topic for the same level (A1.1) but I still had a bit of a panic on Sunday night before the 8am class on Monday. I’d never taught below A2 before, and we hadn’t done much work on teaching beginners on the CELTA so I felt quite underprepared, particularly since I was using someone else’s materials. It also didn’t help that I had a very good friend visiting, because it meant I couldn’t devote the time I’d have liked to preparing the night before.

I therefore put out a plea for help under the hashtags #ELTchat and #ELT on Twitter, and a few lovely people very kindly offered the following advice:

– Tom Flaherty (@tom_Flaherty) advised me to not go near a coursebook and just be as animated as I could manage, over-exaggerating CCQs for comic effect (which I knew would require some serious caffeine doses beforehand!)

– Anthony Ash (@ashowski) suggested the visual idea of taking an object to locate around the room for ‘on’ and ‘next to’ etc.

– Naomi Epstein (@naomishema) spoke of her experience teaching low-level adults and recommended using silly sentences like ‘the book is in the freezer’ as well as getting students to move themselves according to instructions using the new prepositions. She also suggested having my students vote on silly sentences versus logical sentences, which I will definitely use once they’ve come a bit further!

– finally, Marisa Constantinides (@Marisa_c) proposed I hide sweets around the room!

All these fantastic tips reassured me a little, as I had already packed my little wooden owl, who I decided to call Oliver, in order to visually demonstrate prepositions of place.

Oliver the Owl, my visual aid

I also had a few exercises from textbooks, but not whole pages so I didn’t overwhelm my new class. So far, so good, thanks to the wonderful online ELT community 🙂

Anyway, Monday morning rolled around and I was up and out of bed by 5.30am, in my usual paranoia to be late for the class due to not being able to find the building. A few other teachers at school have classes there and had given me good instructions, but I was of course over 45 minutes early in the end!
The building was outrageously secure, so it took me a while to get to the room, but thankfully I’d left myself more than enough time!

I also thankfully beat my students to the room, so I sorted my things out, opened the windows (I get very flustered when I’m nervous!) and assessed the paper flipchart situation – also a first for me.

Four of the supposed five ladies arrived in excellent German timing just before 8, and the description had been quite accurate: they were lovely, jovial ladies who seemed bizarrely awake for a Monday morning! I opened with a few very slow lines of English, but then on seeing their faces, realised that German was required urgently. I asked them to tell me if they needed anything explained or clarified in German and they replied that their previous teacher had actually done almost everything in German. This was my first surprise because nobody had warned me just how much German would be needed – luckily my German is good enough to be able to explain everything I wanted to, but nobody had double-checked that it was, and I think I’d really have struggled otherwise.

This is what interested me, though: I’ve read enough ELT blog posts and literature to know that it’s very common to teach beginners whose first language is unknown to the teacher – we had a whole lesson on the CELTA immersed in Polish to prove this exact point – but even still, I’m not sure I could do it!

The ladies were really clinging onto German as their safety blanket, although I was delighted that they were getting the answers right and seemed to be following what I was saying.

It was a really eye-opening experience, actually, and one which I enjoyed far more than I expected to. We worked through all the prepositions with the help of Oliver the Owl, which they liked, and then learnt some new vocabulary for rooms and objects in the house so they could explain where things were in some textbook pictures. We did an exercise to practice and then somehow it was 9.30! I couldn’t believe how quickly the time went.

At the end, I felt like something of an artist as they all took pictures of my board scribbles on their smart phones, and then ripped off the sheet of flipchart I’d written on to take back to their desks!

I’m actually looking forward to my next class with them: I only got through half of the material I had with me, so I know to take everything very slowly and give the class lots of practice, but it’s a brand new experience in my very short ELT career so far and I look forward to honing my skills working with such beginners.

So, if anyone reading this has any tips for teaching beginners, I’d be incredibly grateful of them! I’ve since learnt that they’ve learnt the conjugation of ‘to be’, some times and dates and some basic verbs, but that’s all!

Diary of a newbie teacher: Part One

Some tips for surviving the first month

I’ve now been teaching in my school in Berlin for just over a month, which is still rather unbelievable to me! Although I’ve not been teaching for long, I have already taught a lot of different classes at different levels, both within the school and in companies. In this short time, I feel I have picked up a few tricks and tactics to make the life of a newbie teacher a little easier, so I’d like to share them in the hope that they might help others in a similar situation.

NB: For some reason, the paragraph tabs between each point keep disappearing each time I press ‘Save’, so unless some HTML guru can help me rectify this situation shortly, I apologise for the blocky text!

1. At the very beginning (especially if you came straight off a CELTA into a full-time job like I did!), try to veer towards using textbooks with teacher’s guides – not exclusively, of course, but the following is an excellent post-CELTA test of your understanding of the different important components of a lesson and a coursebook: look at the textbook pages yourself and decide how you would introduce, adapt and teach those specific pages. Then compare with the publishers’ suggestions and see how they would do it differently. Use any good ideas from your original plan and incorporate the publishers’ alternative suggestions, as the plan you devised yourself will always ‘come off the page’ more in a lesson than simply following the publishers’ instructions blow-by-blow!
2. On a related note, try to assess a few different coursebook options for whichever grammar or functional item you are interested in, and practise rejecting inappropriate options critically. For example, my classes of adults won’t be at all interested in topics about school, so if a Contents Page tells me that’s how my desired grammar item is introduced or practiced, then I reject that particular book for that lesson. Of course, this is much easier if you are graced with a huge bank of resources but even with a few books you can learn to be productively picky.
3. Keep a note of all tricky questions your students ask, and be sure to understand them afterwards – ask for help if Google or books aren’t clear. I’ve already come up against questions about incredibly intricate grammatical points in my first four weeks, and ‘it’s just right because it sounds right to me as a native speaker’ doesn’t really cut it as an explanation.
4. In my current school, we have fortnightly plans for our intensive courses, which change regularly. We also have to document which materials we used for every lesson, so they’re not repeated for students who stay on the intensive courses for a long time. These folders then become the perfect place to look for suggestions for similar lessons because you can see how other teachers taught the same lesson to another group. Logs like this aren’t just time-consuming admin!
5. If you teach a lesson that your students seem to enjoy, teach it a few times to perfect it. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise I could simply recycle my successful lessons from intensive courses with my company classes – and of course vice versa.
6. If you are asked to cover someone else’s class, it’s very common they’re happy for you to do a random lesson until they come back from holiday/visiting family etc. I recommend you use these opportunities to try out something new, like a video lesson or a fun idea with something functional like small talk. I tried out a video lesson I found on a blog when I covered for a colleague, and thankfully it went down a storm, so it’s now become part of my ’emergency lesson bank’ in case I’m needed for spontaneous cover lessons.
7. Always print the transcripts and answers to any worksheets you want to use, if they’re available and, regardless of whether there are answer sheets or not, always complete the questions yourself before your class. It’s the perfect way to anticipate any problems. Having the transcript and answers in class also prepares you well for any random question a student might ask!
8. Keep copies of good lessons and file them neatly into sections in a big lever arch file. I had a great time doing this about a month into my new job [as seen in the photo!]. It’s particularly useful to keep the copies you’ve doodled on during class, or written additional questions on – these are the most valuable additional notes for the next time you teach the same lesson.
9. Similarly, if you have the facility to do so, try to scan and email any good lessons to yourself, including the book references on the bottom. This will allow you to build up your own resource bank on your computer, which you can categorise in similar folders to the paper lever arch file you’ve just set up.
10. Buy plastic wallets, folders or any other exciting new stationery item for separating your material for different lessons – in my first week team-teaching across multiple intensive course classes, I was utterly overwhelmed by paper!
11. Use a bookmark collection tool like Diigo to save and tag websites you find with good resources or ideas on them. You can use as many tags as you like and search across them, and it’s so helpful when you need a quick filler or news article.
12. Read ‘About Language’ by Scott Thornbury. Rather than simply telling you about language, as the name would suggest, it makes you think about it yourself, with lots of step-by-step guided discovery of grammar points to increase teachers’ awareness of the intricacies of the English language.

And, of course, we teach our students to ask questions if they are confused, so being a teacher is no different! If you are lucky, like I believe I have been, then you’ll have a central staff room where all the teachers prepare lessons, eat their lunch and of course, talk about their classes. This is the ideal place to ask for help and inspiration from more knowledgeable teachers and, in my experience, they’re only too happy to test their extensive knowledge of resources and ideas by helping you!

10 things I have learnt about Berlin

It’s now coming up for three months since I moved to this captivating city, and considering I named my blog Berlingo to be able to write about both language (‘lingo’) things and about the city itself, I thought it was high time I did some of the latter! So here are ten observations I have made about the German capital since landing back in April. None are intended as criticisms; they are all merely things I have noticed as I go about my day as a newbie English teacher here:

1. There are only trams in the former east of Berlin: the Allies got rid of the trams when they split the city between them, but the Communists kept them in the eastern part of the city, which is why my lovely flat out in the north east is so wonderfully connected to the tramways. (I’ve even impressed Berlin locals with this fact, as they just don’t think about it!) The trams are great, but you must remember to press the Stop button if you want to disembark, or the doors near you just won’t open and you’ll be left frantically running to another door, only to find you’re too late. (Can you tell this has happened to me more than once…?!)

2. Germans don’t usually wait around for people to disembark a train once it’s stopped before getting on themselves, which is wildly infuriating. They are also generally a little impatient and inconsiderate in the public sphere, which is in direct opposition to their nature when you know them well, in my opinion. It’s therefore a national idiosyncrasy which perplexes me greatly!

3. Germans like to read proper books (not eBooks), of which I of course approve as a former publishing person. They also like to read the paper but, rather curiously, they tend to take out one section at a time and fold it beautifully to read section-by-section.

4. Germans seem to suffer from a special, collective brand of Seasonal Affective Disorder. Never have I heard so many complaints about how much the weather affects their mood, and particularly their circulation, as I do from Germans in class – I find it ends up affecting my mood then, too!

5. To counter what could have been perceived as a negative point in #4, I would like to assert that, against the common stereotype, Germans are the warmest, most caring and loyal people you could ever hope to meet. I will forever be grateful to my friends from my year abroad, who continue to help me with proofreading German job applications or wading their way through my tax forms with me!

6. They are excellent with replacement transport when there are roadworks in trams and trains. My poor boyfriend has had the misfortune to visit me on two weekends when my local trams weren’t running, but we are always amazed that the replacement buses run exactly to the same timetable.

7. The Germans love a good street party, and they are normally raucous in a wonderfully peaceful kind of way. Since living in Berlin, I’ve experienced the Karneval der Kulturen, or Carnival of Cultures, the Fête de la Musique and in Dresden the Bunte Republik Neutstadt, or Colourful Republic Neustadt. Both of course involved an awful lot of daytime drinking, as only the Germans can do, but I always imagine the same situation in London and picture much more trouble and police intervention required.

8. Bakeries just aren’t the same anywhere other than Germany. My particular favourite is, at the luxury end, Lindner, and at the cheap and cheerful end, Backwerk, where you help yourself from endless glass counters with tongs and pay even less than in other chain bakeries. There’s nothing better than a freshly baked pretzel when you’re hangry (so hungry you’re angry) and in a rush!

9. Germans are frustratingly particular about postboxes: I have had all sorts of trouble with receiving official forms and packages because I’m not allowed my name on the postbox as I’m subletting.

10. And last but by no means least, every single new German person I meet is highly amused by how much I love their country and, even more bizarre for them is my desire to master the German language!

It was a huge leap of faith to quit my job in a wonderful publishing company and follow my dream of moving to this entrancing city, but I’m so glad I did it, and would encourage anyone else contemplating it to throw caution to the wind and give it a go, too!

The power of the PLN…and how it can bring exciting opportunities!

I haven’t blogged in a while, because my new job at a big language school here in Berlin has been taking it out of me this week, as I also packed in two interviews, a visit from two friends and even some eating and sleeping, too.

But I wanted to write something about my realisation this week that our PLN, or personal learning network, is often far more important than we think. I realised this after two particular experiences this week:

The first stemmed from a misunderstanding with my two friends from my old job at Routledge who were visiting. I thought they were going to bring my keys, but I confused them so they didn’t bring them to school as I had expected. I live in a flat with two girls, and as my excellent luck would have it, one of them was in Frankfurt for the evening, which meant she couldn’t help me. The other was on a date down in the south of the city, and I didn’t want to disturb her to steal her key, so we arranged to meet in the district just before our own district in the north of the city, where she was due to meet some other friends after her date.

However, that wasn’t to be until later in the evening, and I had left school around 5pm to meet someone for a coffee at 6pm. (More on that later.) Our lovely chat lasted for about an hour, so at 7pm I was left contemplating how to kill some time with minimal phone battery, a dead laptop and approximately €3 in my purse (more bad luck that I hadn’t topped up my purse from the stash of cash in my room!) The lack of money was a problem, as I know German cafes aren’t often keen on people invading to use the toilet or charge their phones (!) and my need for both was becoming gradually more acute…

My longest-standing and closest friend in Berlin, Sabrina, was out of the city until 8.30pm, so I couldn’t go and invade her house. A friend from the CELTA was another possibility, but she was having dinner and didn’t answer her phone until later (when she was incredibly apologetic, bless her.) I contemplated going home and knocking on my neighbours’ door and asking to hang out there until my flatmate was done (we bonded a few weeks ago when they kindly lent me their WiFi password to Skype my boyfriend and give an English lesson online when our internet was misbehaving!), but I was aware my flatmate could take a while and I wouldn’t want to outstay my welcome in a flat with a young baby in it.

I had a very tragic gap life moment around 7pm: sat on a wall around the corner from a cafe, eating the Tupperware of emergency pesto pasta I had made in the morning because I had thought I would be at school late doing lesson planning!

But then I had a bit of a brainwave: on Sunday afternoon, as I was in my beloved Mauerpark in the glorious Berlin sunshine with my friends, someone had come up to me and said ‘Rachel!’ with a big smile on her face. It took me about 3 seconds to process who it was, and then I realised I was standing in front of a lovely girl with whom I’d been chatting on Twitter for months beforehand – Gemma Lunn : ) She had seen me Tweeting about Berlin and mentioned she was coming in June for a language course, so I had offered to show her round. I’d told her I was busy at the weekend with my friends, but somehow she recognised me amidst the throngs of people in the park and we spent an hour or so together in the park and its adjoining flea market, which was great!

At the weekend, Gemma had mentioned she wasn’t living far from the Mauerpark, which happened to be the same area where I had had my coffee, so I connected to a random café’s free WiFi and messaged her to see if she was home. She was, so I explained my temporary homeless predicament and cheekily asked if I could go round and say hello. She was kind enough to accept, so I went round to the very nice and very Berlin-esque flat she was Air BnB’ing in for the duration of her course. She made me the best cup of tea I’ve had since I moved to Germany, let me steal her WiFi password and her electricity for my laptop – a real hero! Before Sunday, we had been total strangers except for our communication on Twitter, and afterwards I realised how nice it was that we have so much in common and that she was willing to save me : )

(If you are interested in how my homelessness situation ended, I left Gemma’s when she had to go to a conversation class and went to meet my friend Sabrina. We went on a long walk around my beloved Prenzlauer Berg together, then went back to her flat for what felt like a much-needed beer before my flatmate text me to say she was on her way home – then I was finally able to head home and crash out in my bed around 11.30…a long day!)

The second PLN experience is related to my blog and, without wanting to sound too much like the Digital Product Manager I once was, highlights the power of having an ‘online presence’ – however small and insignificant, like my little blog here. I had communicated a little bit about Berlin and teaching in general with the very talented Dale Coulter in advance of coming to Germany, and he had told me to send my CV to the language school where he was HR Manager once I finished my CELTA, which I dutifully did. He has now left that role, but as part of his handover, he kindly suggested interview times for me, and even advised me to accept the later slot on Thursday, so that we could meet to discuss the school on Tuesday.

In addition to that, he had also seen me talking to the IATEFL Materials Writing Special Interest Group on Twitter about my disappointment that I wouldn’t be able to make a really interesting-sounding event that they are co-hosting with the Munich Association of English Language Teachers on a Thursday evening this month. This exchange turned into a conversation about the possibility of doing a similar event in Berlin, which might now be happening and in which I might be able to get involved!

But, most exciting of all the conversation topics that came up during mine and Dale’s very pleasant coffee chat on Tuesday evening was a little job offer he made me! I have now attended two separate events run by the English Language Teachers’ Association here in Berlin (ELTABB), which you will hopefully soon be able to read about on this fair blog. At the second one, I was talking to the lovely Events Coordinator about the defunct Twitter that belongs to ELTABB and wondering who was in charge of it. The last Tweet came in 2009 and the handle only has three followers, so it is desperately in need of some loving.

I think Mandy, our über-organised Events Coordinator, then mentioned my remarks about the ELTABB Twitter to Dale because, as we drunk our coffees in the sun, he pulled out a piece of paper with ‘ELTABB Social Media Ambassador’ written on the top of it and handed it to me. We discussed what the role would entail: working with the Communications Coordinator to plan social media strategy; picking events in conjunction with the Events Coordinator to tweet and promote; selecting relevant and engaging content to share from the account, taking part in Twitter events on behalf of ELTABB and, of course, enhancing the brand awareness of ELTABB online.

It was all very exciting, and not at all what I expected! I have done similar things before, though – for example, being in charge of the social media channels of the language school I interned at in Bilbao on my year abroad, so the responsibility of this extra role didn’t scare me, and I was really honoured to be offered this new role for the Association as a newbie to Berlin.

I of course accepted, so I am very happy to say that I am now the Social Media Ambassador for the wonderful organisation that is ELTABB 🙂

I could probably written all of the above in the space of two paragraphs, but if you’ve been kind enough to persevere with my blog for a while, you’ll know that’s not exactly my style! I wanted to write it all out to highlight just how important an online presence is: I started this blog because I like writing, because I knew I’d want to remember my CELTA experience and because I thought it might possibly help me in the future when I leave Berlin and want to move back into publishing…

But I really didn’t anticipate how much more it would bring me: this post proves why it’s worth scribbling about your English Language Teaching experience. It’s brought me into contact with so many fascinating people, who continue to amaze me with their kindness and helpfulness. It’s brought me two job interviews, a new job as a Social Media Ambassador – and it even indirectly led me to the best cup of tea I’ve had in two months. (Huge thanks again to Gemma for that special treat!) The motto of ELTABB is ‘teachers helping teachers,’ and I really do think that sums it up rather nicely!

So, this is my ‘takeaway’ message from this post, if I may: get writing! Even if you think nobody will read it, apparently they do! If you’re honest, you write about your experiences and try to make suggestions to others doing the same sort of thing, then I can guarantee people will start to notice you and read what you would otherwise perceive to be just idle chitter-chatter. I have been bowled over by the response to my blog – I only have 33 followers, but when I only started writing it to entertain my parents and boyfriend, I think that’s already quite amazing.

So thank you to my readers, to my saviours this Tuesday, and to anyone and everyone who has welcomed me into this wonderful ELT world online! I really hope I get to meet some of you at IATEFL next year!

What makes a good language school?

I have admittedly not been in this ELT game for very long, but since I passed my CELTA, I have now taught in two very different private language schools here in Berlin, as well as having attended a few in the past as a student myself. Without naming any names or specifics, I therefore would like to share my thoughts on what I believe makes a good language school, based on this experience and my reflections on being a teacher or student within these establishments:

A good language school…

…gives its staff a good induction; showing them where the books are, where the class files are kept and even how the coffee is made!

…gives its staff appropriate notice of their teaching hours for the coming weeks/months, and makes sure that the staff are happy to teach each class.

…has adequate stationery and photocopying facilities.

….invests in resources such as new textbooks, as well as teacher’s books, and makes an effort to order and preserve them.

…provides extra facilities, such a televisions, projectors and laptops, to allow staff to keep their lessons interesting.

…shows an interest in the personal development of its staff, offering workshops, observations and an open-door policy with the Director of Studies.

…offers free tea, coffee and other caffeine-containing products for its staff who have likely never slept enough!

…keeps its staff up-to-date with any changes, relevant notices and new arrivals of materials and resources.

And, most importantly, I think, a good language school employs people who enjoy teaching English – whether they are British or American, native or non-native and new teachers or experienced teachers. There should be a place for everyone and, something which our Cambridge Assessor remarked when he spoke to my whole class on the CELTA, there should be some sort of sense of community – a place where people actually want to come to work! I’m really enjoying the wonderful world of ELT, and I look forward to settling into my current place of work more over the  next few weeks 🙂