Teaching English as a foreign language overseas is a great opportunity to learn a bit of another language, especially if you are in a place with a rarer language that would be difficult or impossible to learn at home. If you’re lucky, your contract will include some free language classes by a native speaker teacher at your school, or the school will give you a discount on lessons. Here’s how to make the most of it all:
1. Take lessons if at all possible. It’s too easy to slack off when you are just learning at home. Being in a class compels you to regularly practice…plus it’s usually fun.
2. Learn some phrases as “chunks” rather than as individual words – you don’t need grammatical explanations for “Can I have..?”, “I like it” and “Where is the..?” in order to use them. If you focus on being able to communicate, rather than on total grammatical accuracy (which you are unlikely to attain anyway with simply a year or two), you will have a much more realistic standard to gage your progress.
3. Practice! You may worry about sounding silly but just try not to think about that. You have to practice to get better. Almost everywhere throughout the world, if you are a beginner at the local language, someone will speak more English than you speak of that language…so it is up to you to try to start and continue the conversation in the local language. Locals, especially if their language is not so common, will be pleased that you are trying.
4. Do language exchange. This is where you “trade” English lessons for local language lessons – you meet with a student and half the time speak in English, half the time in the language you are learning. As a teacher, you’ll have access to English language books and teaching materials, but your local language teacher may not -–so bring some beginner English materials (pictures, vocabulary exercises) and do them in the local language. Check out ESL Base’s Language Exchange or My Language Exchange dot com.
5. If you watch English-language dvds, watch them with local language subtitles. I did something like this in Sarajevo and hugely increased my local language vocabulary, though I cheated a bit by studying the language for a year at university before I started teaching.
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I found that once my students knew that I could speak their language a bit they were more likely to not speak English in the classroom. At the same time they also were afraid I could understand them when they were whispering to one another behind my back. How do you deal with kids trying to speak their native language in the classroom?
Yikes. Some kids’ teachers have elaborate point systems with rewards like chocolate for the team that wins. This is too complicated for me! There are good reasons not to let on if you know some of their language, but for my one main kids class, here’s what I did: I implied that I knew more than I did and of course (since really I knew next to nothing of it) I never spoke to them in their language. BUT I was fortunate to right away learn some really bad words they might be saying…so I could give them admonishing looks if I ever heard those.
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