First things first

So, you left me last time sitting at a desk in a room a few doors down from where I spend my working day and feeling the trepidation of a new chapter of my life opening up. I had insider knowledge that we were expecting three others and I couldn't help being the hostess and offering each person a cup of tea or coffee when they arrived. Nerves got the better of me, though, and I ended up getting a couple of the orders wrong. I think the others were confused when I finally joined the lesson; with the way I met them at the door and made sure they were comfortable, they probably thought I was just there to make the tea and sweep up at the end!


The first TESOL lesson was taught by Sue, a teacher who trained with our director, and it was about the history of English language teaching in the UK. I couldn't help feeling that it could have been subtitled "This is what we used to do.... we've moved on now," but apparently it's a requirement for a Trinity teacher qualification that we know the various historical methodologies. I have to say that "The Silent Way" using cuisenaire rods sounds fascinating, if perhaps not very practical for me. It's the theory that you can teach language without speaking yourself, which sounds bizarre, but bear with me. You use coloured rods to symbolise different sounds and a chart is provided so students can see which sounds are to be made. There are also word charts so the rods can be used to form sentences and letter charts for spelling. It focusses on autonomous learning by the student so that the knowledge is more readily assimilated. Amazing stuff. I'd love to see a class taught like that one day but I'm not sure it's ever been very widely used so I might be waiting a long time.

Sue moved on to word classes, the building blocks of language. I've never studied grammar before, so I found this very dense, to say the least. Well, I have a vague memory of chanting, "a verb is a doing word," so I think the last time I had anything to do with a word class was at junior school. After this lesson, I can proudly say that I know what a gerund is - but maybe not loudly, or to too many people, you tend to get funny looks.