On Teaching English

Teaching, in my humble opinion, is the most wonderful job there is. I say that as a teacher who started her professional life working in digital marketing, convinced that Me, going back to middle school? Over my dead body!

School, when I was a child, had been hell on earth. It had felt stifling and overwhelming.
But in the end, when I looked for another job, I started wondering what I could possibly do with my life, and somehow, teaching became an option.
Teaching means transmitting a set of skills to other people. It implies being able to look at the person who wants to learn, understand their need, their wishes, where they come from and what they want to go and to then to find a way to share with them the skills they need.
It is an incredibly gratifying job. My students’ progress and achievements are my pride and my joy. Teaching taught me to appreciate the genuine happiness of participating to someone else’s dreams.

Languages are the physical representation of how a culture perceives the world around it so teaching a foreign language is giving people access to a wider world. It is giving people the opportunity to experience the world in a slightly different way, to build bridges and connections with new people. It is also a tool to discover a new take on history, what happened somewhere else and how shared events can be perceived very differently.
Teaching English as a foreign language has its own peculiarities. It is a language spoken in so many places and by so many people that it can sometimes, from a very western point of view, feel like a universal language. But it isn’t. It conveys, through its vocabulary, its grammar, its cultural references, a specific way to look at the world, and it is important to keep this in mind in order to be as honest as possible with one’s students. English must be taught in its context, with all the widely different cultures that use English as their first language, with its history and this represents a massive challenge in today’s teaching.

English is a specific language in its composition: A Germanic language with hints of Scandinavian words, as well as some loans from Latin languages such as French.
This makes it a rather accessible language for European languages natives. This accessibility is made even stronger by the amount of content available 24/7 thanks to the internet. People all around the world can access music, videos, articles, movies, on every topic imaginable in English. Which makes English a uniquely interesting language. It is today considered as a requirement to find a job, but it is also made incredibly easy to access to anyone who would be interesting.

All in all, English has taken such a central place in the world that it is easy to forget that learning it is not obvious for everyone and teaching English as a foreign language is both challenging and gratifying.