Chapter
1
Turning
Point in the Career of an EFL Teacher
I
was just starting to wash up the dishes after our Christmas
turkey and my wife offered to do them for me. I answered
"No thank you." and she said with some surprise
"You mean you like to do the dishes?" I
replied "Maybe I like to do them because I'm a language
teacher: Doing the dishes gives me a sense of completion;
unlike teaching, it's a job with a beginning, a middle and
an end." (I guess you had to be there.) Looking back
on my years as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language
(EFL), I can see that since my first class at a university
in 1979, my knowledge and attitudes towards EFL have changed
very much. At that time, I had no idea what I was doing;
I just needed the visa. Anyway, EFL as a field hardly existed
then. On my own I was able to learn enough basic classroom
techniques to keep my job. "Teaching" EFL was
just a temporary expedient and "next year" I was
definitely going "back". So I stuck to the half-dozen
items in my bag of tricks which had proven effective, and
made little effort to learn about teaching. Well, like so
many others, I didn't "go back" the next year,
or the next year either. And after half-a-dozen years all
I had were the same half-dozen classroom procedures. Not
surprisingly, I got pretty fed up with EFL - "prostitution
with your clothes on" was how I cynically summed it
up at the time. In those years, my teaching situation had
been confined to universities, senmongakko (tertiary
technical or commercial training schools), company classes
and adult private students. For me, they were the "same
old thing." But in 1988 I was hired by the Tokyo Metropolitan
Goverment as an Assistant English Teacher, as we were called
then, in three public high schools. This was new! I had
no idea how to teach high school students. My half-dozen
tricks weren't enough. I was forced to find new ways of
teaching. I had to learn. This was a major turning point
in my life. Somewhere during my first year as an AET I began
to want to be a teacher. Contempt was replaced by concern
and curiosity. EFL classes, like doing the dishes, have
a beginning, a middle and an end. But the process of learning
has no end. Our students come to us in "mid-course"
so to speak. We are neither their first English teacher
nor likely to be their last. Their progress in our classes
is hardly noticeable from one week to the next; it is incremental.
For us as teachers of English, the same may hold true: it
is usually only in retrospect that we can see the "milestones"
which mark the stages of growth in our lives. I doubt if
my story is unusual. There may be other EFL teachers who
"fell into" EFL for reasons unrelated to teaching
- such as otaining a visa - and later felt unhappy with
their situation. For me, being an AET triggered a positive
change in attitude - others will have different experiences.
Those of us who are not already qualified teachers will
eventually reach the "mid-carrer" point where
we will have to decide whether to stay in EFL and become
professional or get out while we're still young enough to
do something else. Of course, many of us are now taking
advantage of many opportunities available to become professional
teachers of EFL. New Year's is a time for reviewing the
past and preparing for the future.
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