English With Kit Podcast Episode 1: How I Got Started Teaching English

Episode 1: How I Got Started Teaching

Vocabulary from this episode:

• brush up on (something): To improve a skill. Example: "I want to brush up on my English."

• to go into (something): To enter a field/area of work. Example: "I've always wanted to go into medicine and become a doctor."

• come about: To happen. Example "My first teaching job came about in 2012."

• snap a photo of (something): To take a photo. Example "She snapped a photo of the poster and sent it to me."

• to get through something in one piece: To not be hurt/damaged by something/to survive something. Example "I got through my first lesson in one piece."

• "Have a good one": A phrase used when wishing someone goodbye, a common synonym of "have a good day/time".

• handy (adjective): a synonym of "useful"

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to the English with Kit podcast. I'm Kit, an independent English teacher from the U.K., but I have been living in northwestern France for the past five years.

Since living in France, French learning podcasts have really helped me improve my French language skills, and this inspired me to start my own English learning podcast in the hope that it will help other language learners brush up on their English.

This is my first ever podcast episode and I'm really looking forward to connecting with English learners all around the world.

At the end of the episode, I'll go through some common expressions from the episode that you can start using today to sound more natural when speaking English. In addition, you'll find the link to the transcript of this episode in the description box below.

So without further ado, grab a cup of your favourite beverage, whether that be tea, coffee, juice or even something stronger, and settle in with this episode. In today's episode, I'll be taking you on a journey to the U.K. as I talk about how I got started teaching English back in 2012.

In early 2012, I was in my third and final year of university in Birmingham in the U.K. My bachelors degree in English & creative writing was soon coming to an end, and I was pretty stressed out as I had no idea what I was going to do afterwards. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to go into writing, editing, teaching or something else.

I had absolutely no idea. Perhaps some of you can relate to that feeling of studying and not being sure what to do afterwards, and if you have been in that position you know it can be quite scary -- at least it was for me.

I can't exactly remember how I got the idea to teach English as a second language or teaching English as a foreign language, but one thing I knew is that I'd always been interested in other cultures, and this is something I really wanted to experience for myself.

So, I decided to do a TEFL qualification. If you're not familiar with a TEFL qualification, it's "teaching English as a foreign language" -- TEFL -- "teaching English as a foreign language." This is a course for anyone who wants to learn how to teach English to people for whom English is not their first language. So I decided to do this while I was finishing up my degree.

Now, I know that some people might think it's a little strange or a little crazy, even, that I took the TEFL course at the same time as I was working on my final dissertation. This was the most important assignment of my university life, but luckily I'm pretty organized person and managed to balance my TEFL course and my final dissertation without losing my mind.

I managed to do this by doing part of the qualification online and part of it in an actual, physical classroom. So that was how I managed… if it had been entirely in person, I don't think I would have managed to balance everything.

Ok, so… yeah, in 2012 I am doing my TEFL course and, strangely enough, around that time, my first teaching opportunity came about very unexpectedly.

One of my friends at the university, she saw a job offer poster in the library and it turned out that the university was looking for students to teach English to Spanish visitors to the university, for around three to four weeks. I don't remember exactly but it was quite a short period of time.

My friend knew I was thinking about going into teaching English after finishing my degree, so she snapped a photo of the poster and sent it to me. I'm very grateful to her for that because this is what got me started.

I immediately applied for the job, I was very excited, and I was very lucky and a little surprised when I actually got the job. It might have helped that at the time I was also doing a TEFL course. I guess it showed to the course manager that this was something that I really wanted, so I think this is what helped in my case.

They assigned me to teach a group of adults -- so the visitors were both adults and children -- while two or three other students at the university were assigned to teach the children.

My group was made up of five young people from Spain -- they were about 20 years old, if I remember correctly, and were there to help the course leader because they had brought a lot of kids from Spain to the U.K. The course leader needed help, so they were there to help with the children. So these young people were joined by the course leader and I became their teacher.

I remember heading to university on the first day of these classes and being so, so nervous. My stomach was doing somersaults for the entire bus ride to the university that morning, as you can imagine.

However, when I got there, when I arrived at the university and met the students for the first time, I was relieved to find that they were absolutely lovely.

They were very kind and very eager to participate, and they really seemed to enjoy the various activities I'd prepared with the help of my brand-new TEFL lesson planning course book. I was really relieved that they seemed to enjoy themselves.

All of these young people spoke English already, some were around B1 level and some were a little more advanced at B2 level, but they were all happy to have the opportunity to brush up on their English skills. We had a lot of fun and interesting conversations, and I really, really enjoyed learning about their lives in Spain.

So, the adult course was going along nicely; I was getting on really well with them and we were enjoying discussing the cultural differences between Spain and the U.K., and everything was going great… until one day, I got a message from the course leader. She said that they needed a teacher for that day to cover one of the children's classes.

this was completely new ground for me. By that point, obviously, I'd had a little experience teaching adults but I had never taught children before, and to be honest the thought terrified me!

There were around 15-20 children. I was completely inexperienced, and though I found the children to be very nice, they were also very noisy and very overexcited. I didn't really know how to handle that as I was so inexperienced, so I just did the best I could.

Fortunately, I got through the morning in one piece and was so glad to get back to my adult students the next day. This is qkind of ironic, as I went on to teach children English as a foreign language a few months later, but we'll talk about that in another episode.

At the end of the course, the students gave me a lovely "thank you" card that they each signed with a lovely, kind message. You might notice that I'm using the word "lovely" a lot, and this is a very British thing, ok? It's very common to use the adjective "lovely" to describe nice situations or nice people. So if you hear me saying it alot, don't be surprised -- that's just my "Britishness" coming through.

So they gave me this card with some lovely, kind messages and I remember feeling touched by this gesture. I believe they gave me some flowers, too, if I remember right. And yeah, I was just really happy that morning, also because I had completed my first-ever English course and the students had enjoyed themselves which was my goal at the beginning.

And there we are: the story of how I got started teaching English oh so many years ago now; it feels like a lifetime ago. So, a few months later, after I'd graduated from university, I was offered my first full-time teaching job in Wuhan, China, and I decided to accept this job.

I was also offered a position in Turkey and it was a difficult choice for me because I wanted to go to both countries, but in the end I decided to take a big leap and head to China to teach English. But that's a story for another episode.

I hope you have enjoyed this episode and have picked up some handy words, phrases and expressions you can start using today. Please stick around because in a moment I'm going to introduce you to some of the words and phrases I used in this episode, some common expressions, some phrasal verbs and so forth that you can use.

So, you may have already guessed the meaning of some of these phrases from the context of this episode but if there are some that you're still not sure about, stay tuned and I'll explain them to you. Thank you so much for listening to my first-ever podcast, and I hope you have a good one.