by Lucas, English language teaching volunteer
Starting in February this year, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect teaching the beginner English class at SDCAS. I hadn’t taught (in any sort of official setting) for the best part of a year at that point and my previous experience was in a markedly different context. With this in mind, however, I couldn’t help feeling relieved prior to my first class at SDCAS as I repeatedly reminded myself; I would be helping teach a class of up to 15 adults who genuinely wanted to be there as opposed to 40-50 Vietnamese 16-year-olds who definitely didn’t. The adjustment, from teaching in a school to a less formal adult setting, would prove an interesting one and, as I began to find out, the inherent limitations of this setting would be (paradoxically) its greatest strength.
Making sense of my claim first requires a bit of exploration into what a language actually is. What is it for and what is its nature as a collective tool we engage with? From my understanding at least, a language has no intrinsic essence or character as something distinct from its use. In other words, language is a medium or a vehicle through which concepts, ideas and feelings are shared. This feels slightly like stating the obvious but actually, as I found in my past engagements with a rigid school curriculum, this quintessence of language is often lost somewhere in the repetition of conjugation tables and vocab tests. At SDCAS, the beginner class runs for 1 hour twice a week and is open to anyone who wants to turn up. The fluidity of this approach makes such a regimented approach to language learning impossible. To the dismay of many of my old colleagues, it would be farcical to try and assign lengthy pieces of grammar learning in the class as that presupposes an academic structure not possible in the context. As such, we teachers have to think on our feet, adapt, improvise and formulate lesson plans that are not only engaging and dynamic but are also accessible for a student who may turn up (20 minutes late) for the first time.
This might seem like a hindrance to our goals of productive language teaching though I’ve found that this couldn’t be further from the case. Adapting to these limitations necessitates distilling the learning process down to the fundamentals of what language actually is. In essence, if language is a vehicle upon which meaning is constructed, then in teaching language you can kind of talk about whatever you want. This really opens up the possibilities for planning lessons around any sort of topic both you and the students find interesting, engaging and fun. So paradoxically, the inescapable constraints of TESOL at SDCAS, I find at least, opens up far more than it closes off. It frees both teacher and student to treat language as a living means of genuine connection rather than a memory test.