Teaching English as a second language to professional adults

I am a good teacher, but I will never ever be in the echelons of the ‘best ever’. I think my main advantage is that the type of person I am lends itself to the type of teaching I do. I have been teaching for many years, so part of it comes with experience. But the rest of it is my interest in and curiosity about the world around me. I learn just as much from my students as they learn from me. It’s the same with my blog posts and my blog readers.

About a month ago, three teachers were sent to me for further training. They were all qualified, and two had experience of classroom teaching in their home country. None of them spoke Swedish. Despite their stellar qualifications, they were receiving consistently poor reviews.

The main issue I found when I spoke to them was that they were not adapting their lessons to their audience. They wanted to teach grammar from textbooks, give homework, and do tests. They wanted to work from a curriculum and measure progress in levels.

We had a really interesting discussion on what it means to do the type of work they are now doing-

I teach English as a second language to adults who need it for their work. They are often top level politicians, CEOs, EU officials, or Directors-General of government agencies who need to chair and take part in top-level discussions, negotiations and summits. They have in their possession authentic materials in the form of speaking notes, speeches and working documents. They are also time-poor. So textbooks are not necessary and they need to use their lesson hours as effectively as possible.

Swedes are the second-best non-native speakers of English in the world, after the Dutch. In Sweden, no television shows or movies are dubbed into Swedish. Instead, they are left in their original language (usually English) with Swedish subtitles. I think this really helps. Swedish is also such a small language that Swedes are almost forced to learn English. There are so many international companies headquartered in Sweden (Spotify, H&M, IKEA, Klarna etc) that English is often the company language.

Swedes have good English grammar. Their passive skills (reading and listening) are outstanding. They normally just want to practise the active skills (speaking, and sometimes writing). Many of them had bad experiences with draconian teachers at school, and need to work on confidence. This all means that traditional textbook learning does not work.

People who do not speak a language other than English often find it difficult to understand what it feels like to be a successful professional person speaking in another language. You often feel like a different person speaking a rusty second or third language. I know that from bitter personal experience.  These students feel that their language is choppy, their pronunciation is bad, that they lack nuance and vocabulary. They are at the top of their careers but they feel their English makes them sound stupid. The only thing that can fix this is vocabulary work and speaking, speaking, speaking. As the student becomes more fluent they will become more confident. A phone call from the EU will no longer send them into a panic, and their English words will come to them when they need it. Your role is more of a coach than a teacher.

In my meetings with students I often use reading aloud (usually from authentic working materials) to practise pronunciation and spark discussion. We also practise small talk, and diplomatic language. The Swedish culture is not big on small talk, and the language is quite direct. Something like chatting at dinner or around the water cooler sends some of my students into panic.

If I hear the same error twice, I correct and move on. If I hear it four times, I stop and do some grammar work and a grammar exercise on that issue. But I never work on random grammar just for the sake of it because this leads to overcorrection. I have a huge bank of material I have created over the years that I can use if someone has a persistent problem with syntax, but generally it is not necessary.

Instead of teaching a daunting lesson from a textbook on the language of describing processes, I will ask the student or students to explain their favourite recipe or sport. This breaks the ice. I find their passion for the topic overpowers lack of confidence and they use words automatically. If they can’t find the phrases, I give them a list, and once they are comfortable and warmed up from the recipe exercise, we can do the actual describing of processes they need for work.

I don’t give homework unless students ask for it. The students in question are busy, working people with families and who travel a lot. The three teachers above were giving a lot of homework from the textbook, and the students felt overwhelmed, were afraid of falling behind if they did not do it, and were absent from lessons if they could not complete it. Almost all Swedish women work full time, so things can be quite stressful for working couples with young families who also have very demanding jobs. Throwing compulsory homework into the mix is seldom a good idea.

I also try to find interesting articles and facts – very much like my blog in fact – which encourages my clients to read further. There is nothing as nice as hearing a student say at the next lesson After our last lesson I looked more into xxx and I printed some things out for the class. Or, even better I told my son about what we did and now he is crazy about xxx.  People often leave their first lesson with me saying ‘this was fun. I didn’t expect it to be fun’. I think that is a holdover from schooldays were things were not fun but you had to endure them anyway.

The main thing is to just let people talk about their job/conference, correct where necessary, and then formalise their language if needed. So for example if their English has moved up a notch they can learn to say amend instead of change, or comply with instead of follow. 

I am happy to say that said teachers are now doing much better because they are out of their traditional classroom mindset.

 

In my classes, students often talk about how bad teachers and/or struggling with a subject made them afraid of it. I had the same problem with mathematics. I was hopeless at it and I had a bad, impatient and very strict teacher. I often wonder if it would have made a difference if I had had a different teacher, or been taught with a different approach. I would never have been great at mathematics, but perhaps I would not have felt like a failure.

I am good at calculating practical everyday issues. I can mentally work out what a 33% discount is, or an average, or convert pounds to kilograms/feet to metres for example. I was just awful at figuring out the how fast would the train be going if you transported 8 tons of oranges? exercises. Instead of teaching me the laws of physics in an abstract way, I would have probably done better if the teacher had said ‘build a working windmill‘ because then I would figure it out practically and be able to apply the theory afterwards, not vice versa. But then teaching is generally standardised for large groups. What I teach now is tailor made for each client. I see them improving in leaps and bounds. Over several decades I have had a couple of people cry because they realise that they can do it after all. And I think if schools had the resources to do the same, many students would not slip through the cracks.

In South Africa I taught journalism at Rhodes University, where I worked for almost 20 years. I realised then that people can be brilliant in a particular field but not be able to teach it. Teaching takes a certain skill that not everyone has.

Do you think it is true that you never forget a very bad or a very good teacher?