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This course has been a great help to me, and I feel I need to bring you up to date on my journey to get to this point. My wife and I are retiring on May 1st of this year and will be going to Vietnam to help university students improve their English-speaking skills. We will be teaching at the local university or perhaps the nearest coffee shop. We have a love for the Vietnamese people and want them to be very successful in their English. They have many English-speaking workplaces and good English is very valuable for them. Another thing I need to mention is that I have spent the last 40 years in the Systems Engineering profession which mostly deals in coding and logic. Starting to learn how to teach English thru this course has caused me to use the other side of my brain which I have enjoyed immensely. Which brings me to “Things I wish I’d known before starting this course.” The first thing I wish had known about before starting this class is Pronunciation and Phonology. Coming from a technical background I had no idea how important these are. I have found that most or all of English learners use the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) to sound out words. I had seen the IPA used in most dictionaries but did not know the use. Also, the use of Intonation and Articulation I am sorry to say has never been a concern for me. The use of the tongue, larynx and the glottis which are speech organs was very interesting. Unit 13 was very eye opening for me and I hope to learn all I can as my teaching career continues. Now I am taking a pronunciation class from a speech therapist and hope to use this to help my new students. As a side note, the more I know about pronunciation for English the better I hear sounds and tones for learning the Vietnamese language. The second thing I wish I’d known before starting the course is the different verb tenses that were presented in Unit 4, Present Tense, Unit 6, Past Tense, and Unit 8, Future Tense. I struggled mightily with these units. I knew some of the proper ways to use tenses but had no understanding of how many and types of tenses there were. I had to do a lot of background reading and studying to start to understand what I was learning. This was not necessarily a bad thing. The last thing I wish I’d known before starting the course is how much this could have helped me if I had started working on this TEFL course earlier in my career. I could have been helping my Vietnamese students more over the last few years. Because of this course I am working with one of my best friends, who is a Superintendent of a local school system, to let me help with their ESL classes. My hope and desire as I start the next phase in my life is to be the best teacher I can be.
