Thank you very much Cinzia Guerriero for posting your thoughts in this website. Let the world know that she has recently received a CELTA (Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) qualification, which has given one more value to her ongoing English teacher's carrier. Ms. Guerriero is Italian and holds some anxieties of how the market views her while she is a non-native speaker of English.
Good news is it is not ethnical background but professionalism that counts as a good instructor (Lia Kamhi-Stein, 2007, p. 20) and it is already easy to see that she is a dedicated teacher of English.
Source: Kamhi-Stein. L.D. (2007). Learning and teaching from experience (4th ed.). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press
My story with CELTA starts on a rainy day
in May, riding a train for Kobe to attend an interview with the manager of the
Cambridge Examinations center.
The interview lasted an hour and a half,
and it ended with me smiling when I was accepted to the course. The manager
told me that from September I would be a CELTEE for about 4 months.
Already during the interview I had an idea
of what it would mean to attend the course, to have the chance to work and
study in an environment supporting my teaching method and style.
I was surprised, glad and honored that I
could gain that opportunity. As an Italian native speaker my curiosity led me
to ask how many non-native English teachers had previously passed the course. They
told me that there had been some Japanese, French and a couple of Spanish, but
no Italians so far. I was even more delighted. What a mission it would be for
me to represent my nationality, non-native English (Italian) teacher! I even
asked about the scoring system and they explained it: “Pass A almost never
happens, Pass B is very rare, almost all teachers get a Pass and that doesn’t
mean you’re not a brilliant teacher”.
My ambition grew even more. I was already
fantasizing about how proud all my family and friends would be, once I
completed the course with more than just a Pass!
Daydreaming was a lot of fun and a good
incentive until the course started. The real challenge presented itself very
clearly and quite soon, in fact after the first couple of Saturdays I took some
steps back and told myself, “Aim for the Pass and you will be more than happy
and satisfied!”
Many told me that CELTA is a hard path to
go through, it requires commitment, precision, dedication and time. All of us
were struggling with trying to manage time, jobs, families and our own real
lives. The reality in the end was that for almost 4 months CELTA was my life.
Putting CELTA first meant other things had to come after my studies. My family
was very supportive and the Pass B I received is indeed the result of my
commitment and their help. Family and friends played an important role during
CELTA, they believed in me and I succeeded brilliantly.
The
greatest novelty: observing your peers
CELTA is a stage and I was always on, each
week, every Saturday, even when I wasn’t teaching. I was always engaged with an
assignment, a TP to teach, a TP to observe, feedback to give to my peers,
feedback to receive from my tutors.
During the course we were often asked: “how
are you coping with the observations? Don’t you feel a little bit under
pressure? Peers’ feedback, tutors’ feedback?
In reality I thought it was a good chance
that we celtees were given to improve even more, through observing and being
observed, but overall to receive feedback on our lessons and our planning was
unique. It’s a luck that not all the teachers can afford. Through that process
not only could I foresee or recall my mistakes during past lessons, but if I
worked hard during the planning I could simply overcome those mistakes, and
replace them with some solid language awareness while teaching. I could observe
the students’ reactions and their faces and expressions, understand what they
liked, what they knew, what they might ask me in the next lesson and so be
prepared to satisfy their thirst of knowledge.
Peer observation is an element that, so
far, only CELTA can offer, and it appears to be one of the keys for completing
the course successfully.
Observing my peers meant that I was on
stage with them, actively taking part in their choices while they taught and in
their planning. I had the chance to look at their lesson plans and watch them
in action during the teaching practice.
How
about the times they observe you?
Sometimes I would hear my colleagues
telling me “Your teaching techniques and principles go back to zero.” “For me,
it would have been better if I didn’t know anything about teaching… Instead I
had to reset everything”.
For me it wasn’t so much about resetting,
but adding, integrating, enriching my professional assets and skills,
discovering authors, techniques, giving names to methods that I had previously
adopted but never known exactly how and why. The fact that I am Italian never
represented a problem with my peers and tutors during the whole course. Actually
it was always an element of admiration and praise from them. “Wow, how do you
know this stuff?” was the most common comment.
My background knowledge actually ended up
being an advantage in some moments. I had studied English as a foreign language
since I was 10, so I knew what it meant to struggle with pronunciation,
phonetics, grammar rules, connected speech and weak forms. Because of my
Latin-Greek background knowledge I knew and used some lexis that wasn’t so
common in an everyday speech between friends! So sometimes my peers would
genuinely laugh at me, hearing words like ergo or vice versa with a strong
Italian accent. At the end of the day my peers were starting to speak English
with my accent!
Not even my students ever seemed
uncomfortable with an Italian national teaching them English and again, even
from them, I had a lot of support, respect and appreciation. One of my
strengths was planning and anticipating possible problems in class. I myself
had already been in a class with the same questions, the same doubts and I knew
all about the expectations that students can put in their teacher’s
clarifications. So I did my best all the time. Each lesson I worked hard to
give my students the right amount of material to work on, constant but gradual
challenges and fun too.
Only one month after the end of CELTA, I
could get my certificate and with great surprise and satisfaction I could see
that I got a Pass B. Although this great accomplishment, at almost each
interview I have attended so far, I have been told that students usually prefer
a native English speaker and because of this “the company’s hands are tied”. I
don’t give up though, I know that out there are other people like me who will
believe in what I do and who I am without associating it with my nationality.
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