How many times have you been asked “What do you do for a living”?
If you are an adult, probably hundreds of times and if you are a non-native speaker it’s not always easy to answer this question. The mind sometimes gets stuck and you end up blurting out the first thing you think which might not be necessarily correct.
So here’s some expressions you can use when asked this question.I hope you find it useful!
Eleni
A fellow EFL teacher asked me to make a video on pronunciation and mistakes different speakers of other languages make in English. Since I’m Greek Cypriot I started with a video focusing on the most common mistakes Greek Cypriots make when they speak in English.
This took me longer than expected and lots of editing which I’m no expert on but here it is. I hope you enjoy it!
Any feedback and/or suggestions for future videos are always welcome!
Eleni
According to Oxford dictionary these are the 10 most commonly misspelled English words.
Can you spell them correctly? Get a pen and some paper and play the video. Post your score below!
Any suggestions for future videos are welcome.
Eleni
Since I’m stuck in Cyprus for a while, as the global pandemic and being a non-native speaker combination severely limit my options when it comes to EFL teaching destinations, I decided to start a series of mini educational EFL lessons so I don’t forget what I’ve learned so far and remind myself why I enjoy teaching English so much.
There are million of videos out there, so my unique approach is making learning English fun and engaging.
From the start, even during my CELTA course last year, it was important for me that my students actually enjoy the lesson and it’s a positive experience for them. I want them to love learning English hence the title and the comical element of the videos.
So here’s my first ever post. I thought I’d start with one of my favourite topics, collocations.
Any suggestions for future videos are welcome!
‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ everyone would ask when I was a child, a teenager, a young adult.
The answer differed as I grew up. A doctor, a singer, an actress, a teacher, a psychologist, a travel writer.
And when I grew up, I became none of these. I’m not even sure what I became.
A year ago I quit my office job, I left the UK, got a CELTA, taught English in Italy for a year and now I’m back home to Cyprus after 10 years and I have no clue what to do next. It’s exciting, in theory I can do anything but I’m mostly terrified and worried I’m too old, I’ll run out of money and end up nowhere.
We were brought up to believe that by the time we hit 30 we would have tried a few different jobs and settled on a career and be happy with that one dream job, or at least be happy enough to stay in a job indefinitely.
But a single career path is not for everyone and not always the case. A lot of successful people in pretty much every field changed careers when they were older and wiser or kept changing careers or juggled more than one jobs until they died.
What do I want to be now I grew up?
I’m one of those people. Not a successful one, not yet anyway but there’s so many paths I’d like to follow but it’s impossible to try them all and even harder to stick to one or two.
Some are technically, and by technically I mean financially, not possible. One of the occupations I always wanted to go into was counselling. But I can’t afford another qualification. I can’t even ask for a loan as I’m now back to Cyprus and all the excellent credit score I built up for years in the UK won’t help me much here. Do I even want to have a debt?
Should I continue with EFL teaching? I could but my first year though rewarding, was exhausting and had zero time for myself, my friends or to travel. And should I risk going to another country and end up locked inside teaching online because of this pandemic’s unpredictable course?
I could become a writer. The idea of writing a fantasy/crime novel always excited me or a raw honest non-fiction on how society, social status and let’s face it wealth (or perhaps lack of) can and has for generations embedded a deep fear of failure especially in women. It’s always tougher for a woman, let alone one with no savings or family money to have ambitions and not let disappointment take over.
I sadly not only realised that for myself (after years of deep self-exploration) but I see it in dear friends and family who are better in what they do than others who might have become famous or run their own business but they are too shy or lack the confidence to ask or go for more.
That’s why the majority of politicians, business owners, celebrities and so on come from wealthy or at least upper-middle class families with connections and financial support making it easier to succeed.
I should believe in myself more, but at the moment I am crippled by my own insecurities and fears.
So what do I know about myself when it comes to my next career step now that I’m on those crossroads?
I don’t want to be stuck in an office 9-5, I’d love to travel and most importantly I’d be over the moon if what I do for a living helps others in any way.
Unfortunately volunteering doesn’t pay and living with my parents after 10 years living on my own is tough. I need my own space to keep growing and figure out what to do next.
For now, I’ll keep pushing myself to do more, trust myself and try not to stress about money and work and in the meantime if you have any personal inspirational stories or any piece of advice, please do share!
Namaste
Eleni
It’s been a while since my last post and video but I’ve been busy since I came back to Cyprus.
Travelling from Italy to Cyprus was exhausting and complicated. It took about 34 hours, 3 flights (after an Easyjet cancellation they only offered a replacement flight to Athens and I had to pay for another flight from Athens to Larnaca), an overnight stay in Milan and endless time spent at airports, forms to fill, wearing a face mask for two days, tested for Covid-19 at Larnaca airport.
So travelling in Corona times is not easy. There are still cancellations due to various reasons, most countries require to fill in a form and then email you a pass to enter the country (a document was required to travel to other Italian airports and for Cyprus and Athens a pass was emailed to me after I filled in the forms).
Food/drinks were not sold on Easyjet planes and that’s the case for other airlines as far as I’m aware. Wearing masks were mandatory for the airport and for the whole duration of the flight (except for eating/drinking).
There were delays at different points, during check in and boarding especially. Still, I had missed flying and I can’t wait to be able to fly freely again. I sincerely hope that will be possible soon.
Here’s the video of my little adventure.
Eleni
Wow, I can’t believe this is the last video I’ve made and last post I wrote in Italy. Well, for now. Who knows what the future holds.
But it’s a great one. With wonderful snaps and videos of gorgeous Tropea. If only I had more free time during the year to discover it sooner!
Thank you to my lovely colleagues and friends for an amazing day.
Italy, it’s been a pleasure. Ci vediamo.
Eleni
I’m not quite sure what’s going on or how I feel these last few days. Ever since work finished I’m going through a whirlwind of emotions, happy, sad, anxious, confused, it’s a bizarre rollercoaster I’m not sure how to get out of.
I will take some time to think about it and reflect, but for now I’m trying to enjoy my last week in Italy (for the foreseeable future).
So… last Friday I finally made it to a graphic, gorgeous little village near Reggio where I live, Scilla. And this week’s short and sweet video is all about my daytrip there. Thank you to my fellow teacher friends for an awesome day and special thanks to Fanni for the comic effects!
Eleni
A few months ago I had no clue what a ‘dogme’ lesson was. When I first heard the term I thought it was something related to either dogs or dogma. Very baffling.
It turns out it has nothing to do with either. A dogme lesson is:
So ever since I’ve heard about it, I really wanted to try it. Why? Because it’s one of the scariest experiences but also one of the most empowering for a newly qualified teacher. We heavily rely on lesson plans, carefully and painstakingly prepared activities and coursebooks, especially in the first couple of months, as that’s the only lesson planning we know how to do
But we often don’t have enough time to plan a lesson as well as we would like to and panic that we might finish a lesson earlier than expected and not know what to do with the remainder of the time.
Therefore, as one may expect, walking into a classroom with zero material it’s terrifying. I really enjoy a challenge though and I firmly believe that every newly qualified teacher should try a dogme lesson. Why?
Improvisation and thinking on the spot are critical if not fundamentally essential skills for an ELT teacher, or for any teacher for that matter and a dogme lesson is perfect to practise both.
And that’s why I decided to give it a go. I’ve built great rapport with my B2 plus adult students over the last year and I thought that would be the best group to try it with.
After consulting a senior colleague (thank you James!) for valuable advice and much needed encouragement I was ready to experiment.
You can have a semi-dogme lesson, going into the classroom with some ideas which might be better for new teachers, but I as Jame explained it’s not really a dogme lesson if you already have a structure in mind and I really wanted the students to lead the session. I had prepared a back-up lesson just in case it didn’t work out (which helps a lot to know you have a back up) but other than that I left it to the students to decide what they wanted to focus on.
I find it hard to put into words how it felt to run such a lesson but I’ll try. I was terrified to begin with, but as soon as we started, time flew by and I somehow found ways to facilitate the lesson and provide as much content and language feedback as possible. My students wanted to focus on speaking, so I left it to them to come up with topics. We had 3 pair and group speaking sessions, first each pair or group discussing a separate topic, then focusing on just one. For all the activities I monitored and made notes on good language used as well as language they could improve/express better (which they did) and asked the students to try and use that language on the following activities.
I asked my students to give me feedback at the end of it and every single student enjoyed this lesson more than usual because it was on topics they chose and they were interested in. When asked what they enjoyed and what they learned:
And they all enjoyed the lesson more than usual and would like lessons with combination of both their own material and coursebook.
Needless to say I was super happy with the feedback and they gave me a couple of ideas on what to improve for next time. I would also like to try and incorporate a grammar language point which would be challenging to do during a free flowing lesson such as dogme, but I’d like to try.
I guess the main lesson I learned from using the dogme teaching approach is that a good lesson doesn’t necessarily need a thorough, detailed lesson plan or a coursebook. Students can learn and enjoy with minimal preparation.
And since then I feel more confident about my teaching and my ability to facilitate a lesson if/when there is no plan or time to plan in detail.
Also I didn’t expect to learn so much from my students and their knowledge of rare spiders that can fly to modern history to emotional intelligence!
Eleni
PS If you’d like to learn more about the dogme teaching approach this is a good start.(link)
PS2 Thank you to my colleagues for the advice and encouragement and my wonderful students who I’ll dearly miss!
Wow.
What a week. One of the most stressful of being a teacher. New classes with a small business group, formal observation, trying a dogme lesson, my birthday I couldn’t even celebrate because of work, a conversation club on Friday evening.
I also managed to book a flight back to Cyprus for July, but whether it will materialise it’s anyone’s guess.
To cope with all the stress I’m trying to focus a day at a time and try and enjoy the present as much as possible (sometimes it’s not that possible).
So I thought for my weekly post and video to put this little activity I wrote about a while ago into a little video.
The rest of the details is on the video. Skip to 3:04 for the activity if you wan’t to go straight in.
Eleni
Lessons I learned after I turned 30 