Iria's information
As you can verify, after graduating as an English philologist in Vigo and working as an ESL teacher in a private language school in Spain, I have acquired some working experience as a Spanish teacher both in Germany and in the USA. Since 2004 I have been living and working in Germany for several state institutions, where I have had the chance to teach Spanish and English in a multicultural context, which I find really fascinating. In between, I was awarded with the Fulbright scholarship for teachers, which gave me the chance to participate in an educational project, collaborating during one year with the Spanish department at Montclair State University, teaching Spanish, contributing to the promotion of the Spanish language by organizing several workshops and cultural activities and taking some graduate courses in the field of second language methodology.
I have had therefore, during time spent abroad, the opportunity of developing my teaching skills; at the same time, I have got used to different working environments and students and colleagues from different backgrounds and cultures. Being a foreign language teacher, the experience of teaching and living abroad is indispensable, especially if one wishes to improve language abilities and also in order to know the culture and traditions that exist outside textbooks: the reality and characteristics of each country! Moreover, I had the chance of experiencing the whole complexity of the language learning process, both in a classroom and real environment, being able now to understand more clearly my student’s problems and also being able of making their learning process as meaningful and vivid as possible, in order to prepare them to the different communicative situations they are going to confront. Learning a language is a very demanding task very difficult to perform with the same spontaneity as in our mother tongue. Most of the students need a lot of time to complete a sentence, and this will be translated into a feeling of frustration that may have an effect upon their language ‘ego’.
Our role as teachers will be to motivate them to talk as much as possible without forgetting the formal aspects of the language and sacrificing the grammar. We should try to find a balance between teaching teenager learners rules due to their cognitive development and abstraction capacity, and at the same time, carrying over a communicative approach that will help them to reach a better grade of automaticity, so that at some point they will be able to talk and feel more native-like. It is not an easy task, since we don’t want to make them feel overwhelmed while talking, but we want to help them in their progress. We just need to remember in how many of our past language classes we just talked about the language but never talked in it and how we felt when being faced with a real communicative situation. We should avoid that in our students.
Therefore, these experiences I had until now have been important cornerstones in developing my career and teaching philosophy: not just giving me the chance of profiting living in both Germany and the USA, but also having the opportunity of working in outstanding schools and universities while taking part in excellent exchange programs. There, I found highly skilled and committed supervisors who supported me at any moment and from whom I could develop my teaching skills.
That’s why I would love to continue teaching abroad. But this is not my only motivation: since I was a child I have always dreamt of working and living in the UK. I have always found it an attractive captivating country due its landscape, history and cultural variety. I consider the UK the exclusive sample of a European country in which countless cultures live together. Besides, the English pedagogy and methodology are well-known in the education field all over the world and I really wish to have the privilege to enter into this branch in order to improve my professional skills. It is interesting the offered opportunity to interchange and merge or compare cultures and ideals, and meeting new contacts too.
Considering all these aspects, I can just imagine my life moving this step forward. After all my experiences, I know that it will not be easy, but I also know that my dream is to continue teaching and enjoying foreign language methodology, especially in multicultural contexts like the ones which the UK offers.
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