The other pilgrim – my season finale
At the end of each stay in a retreat centre they ask you to think what you’ll be taking back home with you. Pilgrims is a kind of retreat as well, only you don’t get to think about your own personal/spiritual life as much as you are made to think about your teaching. That’s right – made to – as there’s no way escaping it – even if you really tried :) That’s just how Pilgrims works – that’s what Pilgrims is. And even more so, when it’s one’s last visit to Canterbury training centre, as I think it’s for me – time to explore some new grounds.
But, not to get carried away, here’s my final thoughts:
- CHUNKS – they seem to be the answer I was kind of groping for the whole last year. A little word, which covers the essence of teaching English at every level. I realized chunks are what English and fluency in English are about, mainly.
Sometimes obvious things are the hardest ones to notice. And superficial awareness – “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of it” is hardly enough. Knowing does not equal really NOTICING.
- SPOKEN GRAMMAR – a very useful tool of ARC: Authentification/Restricted use/Clarification Hania showed us. Making the students aware of the context, register, patterns in spoken grammar, which do exist and are quite fun to discover in real life :)
- AUTHENTIC MATERIALS / CLIL – obvious fact that truth is always more interesting than the artificial world. And more demanding – that’s for the teachers.
I know, it might not seem all that impressive nor innovative to you, and yet it’s all about how you understand it, how you combine it, what exactly you do with it and how you do it. Again, it’s all very simple – just as life is :) What is hard, is finding the right way for you in this Amazon jungle of ours, that’s all :)
The other pilgrim