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A BLOG ABOUT LANGUAGES


HOW BEING BILINGUAL LED ME TO TEACHING BY SUSAN BRODAR

Posted on May 1, 2015

Re-posted from
Gallery Languages's Blog
Sharing teaching and English language ideas and resources with EFL/ESL teachers 
  

Image Credit: Eric Andresen via Flickr (creative commons)
On this first day of May, I’m delighted to introduce our new post written by
Susan Brodar, an English teacher based in Italy. Susan encompasses the true
spirit of bilingualism. In this post she shows how growing up bilingual opened
many doors for her and led her to the rewarding world of teaching.

❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖

Susan Brodar

Growing up bilingual in a multi lingual family made me appreciate the advantages
of communicating in various languages and the nuances that cannot always be
translated from one language to the other. I have since grown to fluently speak
and teach five languages at varying levels. I actually started teaching at the
age of 17 when I had to substitute my mother at evening classes. I really enjoy
reading all the blogs on the various methods of teaching as I myself have never
actually had any formal teacher training but I have developed my own successful
methods over 38 years.

I teach all ages ranging from nursery to adults as well as Special Needs
children, also preparing students for various English certifications – each
method being appropriate to the age-group, class or person I’m teaching. In fact
I was really relieved to discover that the apparently new unplugged method,
which I have been implementing for years despite wondering whether it was an
appropriate method to use, is considered to be an effective way of teaching. In
reality my one-to-one lessons seem to be really appreciated because they are
highly personalized as I try homing in on people’s interests.

My methods range from setting phrases to music and singing them with young
children, acting, reading, playing games for all ages and recently incorporating
a lot of modern technology, be it on the IWB, on mobile devices and using
Dropbox for homework (mainly listening to my/our recordings for consolidation.)

My aim is to engage students as much as possible because capturing their
interest is the only way to learn and retain. I live in Italy where school is
still taught in a very traditional frontal manner where students seem to show
relative interest in the grammatical exercises and the information they have to
regurgitate therefore I prefer to dedicate more time to oral work as students
tend not to be able to speak fluently but only to recite the rules. To this aim
I have really enjoyed implementing many of the wonderful new ideas I’ve read
about on blogs like Larissa’s technological ideas to those of Tim, Sandy, Jack,
Sylvia, Jason, Vicki or Shanthi’s vocabulary and idioms, as well as many others
like Film-English, Allatc and similar. You may notice I feel I do not need to
mention their surnames as they must be familiar to most ESL teachers. My
students and classes have really enjoyed this new dynamic approach I’ve added to
my methods.

Personally I feel that, to interiorize the nuances of a language when one
doesn’t have the possibility to live in the country, the best method is to
absorb the language by reading, listening and repeating as much as possible.
Translating is also counter-productive from my point of view and should be left
for the more advanced students to find out the subtleties of a language. I
prefer explaining the meanings directly in the target language or giving them
images to associate the words with – a completely different process for the
brain – association is the key, not translation! Rather than learning so many
rules, as one does here in Italy, one needs to get a feel for the language, feel
if the expression is right or wrong by literally absorbing it – this I’ve done
and experienced in my own language learning very successfully.

My latest endeavour entails setting up online lessons as I would like to be more
mobile with my teaching when I’m away and on the go. To this effect I am
creating a website which will hopefully be interesting and attractive. At the
moment I do not feel I can contribute to the world of teaching with any more
exciting methods than I’ve read about but I do have some very interesting
tragi-comic excerpts from the diaries of my globetrotting days that I would like
to share with you. I sometimes use them in my upper intermediate or advanced
classes and they make for fun reading.

Having said that, I would like to make you aware of a new online teaching
resource I collaborated in the beta phase with and which I feel is an exciting
and innovative way of teaching online as well as off. Once you have registered
to the website you have one month’s free trial

So if you’d like to join me on my new website, you can find out a little more
about me and if you have anyone interested in online lessons that you can’t take
on yourselves I would be very willing to take over or collaborate. Thank you
very much for reading and I hope to hear from some of you.

                                            ❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖

About Susan Brodar

I was born in London into a multilingual family and brought up bilingual English
/ Italian. I went to school in London until 15 when we moved to Germany where I
finished my British education at Munich International School. I started teaching
Italian at evening classes aged only 17 and studied Mass Communications and
Journalism at Munich University.

I continued teaching parallel to interpreting at trade fairs and business
meetings as well doing translations. After working at the Italian Institute for
Foreign Trade for a year I married my Italian globetrotting companion in 1983
and we set up our home near Venice, Italy where we continue to live with our two
teenaged children.

Having taken my British High School-leaving ‘A’ Level exams in English, Italian,
French & German I am completely fluent in all four languages and am taking a
DELE certification in Spanish to complement them.

To find out more about Susan, take a look at her website.

If you liked this post please share it. And don’t forget to subscribe to our
blog if you don’t want to miss out on our posts.

Ciao for now

Shanthi


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