Читать книгу The English Teachers - RF Duncan-Goodwillie - Страница 43

Most experienced language teachers know context is everything when it comes to teaching what things mean. The context of a word determines its meaning and appropriacy, among other aspects. The same is true of the context in which we teach. To an outsider it might all look the same, but in different places, different ways of teaching are practised, attempted, even enforced. By knowing more about different teaching contexts, the challenges they pose and opportunities they afford, we can see how they affect our beliefs, perceptions and ideas… and perhaps how we can affect them.

I started this part of the interview by asking all the participants to describe where they worked and left it open for them to answer. Some of them spoke directly about their schools first. Others chose instead to talk about the countries they worked in (or had worked in) to provide more information before starting to speak about where they worked.

When it came to discussing workplaces, I had a general pattern to the questions, rather than a specific set of categories to divide answers into. It was important for participants to describe their workplaces free of any bias in the question. I wanted to know more about the positive and negative aspects of where they worked, aiming to highlight the various pros and cons of working in different environments. I hoped this would give a complete picture of various EFL working environments.

Some participants’ answers were connected closely with what they said earlier in their interviews when talking about their backgrounds. Rather than waste time repeating myself, or trying in vain to disconnect what they said from its context, I opened this section of the interview with a different question. You will see this where I start with a question as opposed to participants answering the question “Can you describe where you work?”

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