What’s on next week?

Get ready. [LAUGHING] Ready, set, go. It’s very intense, and you learn a lot. But it’s very rushed. And the rhythm of it, you have to pick up a lot of stuff quite quickly. You have to be versatile, and so be prepared. But also be prepared for the reward that you’ll get, because it’s very rewarding to see students get better and better at their English and start communicating. After you’ve given them a lot of opportunity to practise a certain language point, for them to actually be using it naturally is such a rewarding moment. I would say that the grammar lessons have been the most valuable part, because when you go into English language teaching you think that it’s your native language.

Therefore, you know everything about English. But actually you’ve never learned it as a foreign language student does from their eyes. So having the grammar be taught to you as you would teach it to the students has been so helpful when passing it on to your students. I think that for me the teaching practice has to be the most valuable part, because you actually get to do it with real students. Every so often you come up with something from the way you demonstrated it, for instance, or the way you ran a game or an exercise. And suddenly someone will go ahhhh. Those light bulb moments for me were probably the most rewarding.