Don't Leave Home Without It

A few months ago, I posted a blog about the terminology of teaching English to non-English speakers around the world. One thing I noted in that post is that the terms TESL (English as a Second Language) and TEFL (English as a Foreign Language) are both used within the profession, the former term for teaching the language to foreigners in an English-speaker country, the latter term for teaching in a country where English is not the predominant language. I wrote about these terms in a mocking tone, largely to make fun of what I saw as needless jargon and bureaucratese.

Now that I have actually taught abroad, and am heading back abroad shortly, I can say that ESL and EFL really are different professions in many ways--the chief one being the level of resources teachers in a non-Anglophone country have available to them. In America or Britain, it is much easier to bring real-life examples of language into the classroom; English is as close as your local newsstand and your local bookstore. This is not the case outside the Anglophone world, where English-language resources can be few and far between.

So a teacher venturing abroad has to think carefully about what to bring with him on his travels. My prior experience tells me a few things are essentials:

1) A world map and a map of your home country. World maps can often (though not always) be found abroad, but a map of the good ol' U.S. of A. is hard to come by. When your students start asking you where your hometown is, you can show them. A world map is handy for explaining terms like "Latin America", which many English Language Learners have heard in a business context but don't know the meaning of.

2) A good grammar book. Even a teacher who considers himself an expert in English grammar (as I do) or got excellent grades when he took English in school (as I did) will occasionally find himself flummoxed to explain a particular feature of English to which English classes for native speakers gives scant attention. Before I set out for Taiwan, for instance, I had never had any formal study of the conditionals, of the use of the present progressive tense to express the future, or of the differences between can, may, and might. These are all aspects of English not taught in English class, because native speakers can manipulate them without even thinking about them. English Language Learners have a harder time with them.

3) An iPod or other MP3 player. These are invaluable for storing music for listening exercises. They can also be handy for learning the language of your host country, as there are a plethora of podcasts and other materials for learning Russian, Chinese, or any other language spoken anywhere under the sun.

4) A camera. This can be valuable for snapping pictures of different objects or environments in your host country, for use in class. It's a cliché to say that a picture is worth 1000 words, but this is never so true as when those 1000 words are unknown to the people whom you are endeavoring to teach.

5) Family photographs. These can be invaluable for doing family tree exercises as students are often eager to learn more about the teacher.

6) The address of your local U.S. embassy or consulate. Many consulates sponsor English classes or at least provide resources for English teachers abroad. I've already discovered that the American Embassy in Moscow has a wealth of materials for EFL teachers, and I plan to take as much advantage of them as I can.