Back in Australia

Dear blog readers
This idea never really took off for me in Vietnam... ever so sorry to disappoint!

After 10 months in Asia I'm now back in Sydney. I'm still teaching English though, at ACE Bondi Junction (where I began just over a year ago). I'm not sure how long I'm going to keep teaching but we'll see how it goes.

A few observations about learners here compared with Vietnamese:

Here my students are mostly Europeans, with a good dose of Brazilians in the mix. It is quite different teaching a multi-lingual group, rather than the mono-lingual Vietnamese. With my Vietnamese students, after a while I got to predict what their pronunciation and grammar problems would be, because they all spoke the same language. I would know in advance that they would forget to put plural "s" on nouns, have problems with final consonant sounds and at even high levels would still say "He go"!

With a multi-lingual class I can't predict the problems so readily because in any one class I might have five different languages spoken, so they will all have different issues. But given that most of my students speak Latin-based languages, it is so much easier for them to learn English. And their accents are just so much closer to native speakers! Sometimes I don't want to correct a French speaker when they say "zis" for "this" because it sounds so, well, French!

The main thing that makes it easier teaching Western students is that they "get" references to Western culture. All the text books make a lot of assumptions about what students know, and invariably my Vietnamese students would have very, very limited knowledge about Western history and popular culture prior to 2009. It is great to start a class when all my students already know who Paul McCartney, Elvis, Nelson Mandela and Madonna are!

Teaching English is consistently fascinating. Maybe I'll keep this up now I'm back.

Happy new year!