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I must admit that having had the opportunity to get the tefl course along my teaching career made me more aware on how I do my job. First, I realized that my classes were a bit stiff sometimes, somehow regular if not classical. Exploring the TEFL methodology while working gave me the opportunity the check out its tenets. Every school day I have tried to apply the ESA template method, and the more I used it, the more I became aware of the moment in which one stage rather than another came into play. Consequently, my class management skill acquired a sounder theoretical base upon which my mind quickly referred in case I ran out of ideas. Although I have been teaching for almost seven years now, I have acknowledged that experience can be enhanced and open up to a new level. Secondly, even if in the beginning I struggled a bit to understand the difference between Engage and Activate phase, their purpose cleared up as I put them into work trying them out in order to distinguish the two. Since I became able to see them developing along my lessons, suddenly my teaching ideas become more effective and workable: thinking time shortened, and the lesson flow stopped to slow down. Consequently, my presence in the classroom became more reliable. In other words, I have acquired major awareness that the role of an english teacher is not only the one of whom which knows how the language works, but that there is one more: the english teacher is also a mediator between english and the students. In my personal opinion, an english teacher should be in a mid-position between the goal of an EFL course and students? will to achieve it. Figuratively, I imagine the teacher standing by the student rather than in front, as he/she was pointing at the world and voice it in english; in so doing, the student turns into a listener having been taken off the hide of the classical learner. In conclusion, the TEFL course set me free from a series of prejudices as it puts on top of the list the fact anything can come into play when teaching english. Although it does not appear so evident in the beginning, it is actually so strikingly correct that when I realized such sense of freedom, I eventually saw the bondage of my experience missing of a proper method. One more thing is that now I know a lot of resource materials exist and can be used extensively. In hindsight, such a sense of liberty the TEFL methodology rewarded me with, comes from my previous (and first) teaching experience. Although instructive under many aspects, it was defective under many others as well: there were no resource materials, consequently the lessons were inescapably boring and repetitive, mainly for the teacher who was imposed to use the same course book series for all the students. On balance, I am really happy to have gained much more room in my mind where expertise and method blend for leading to a much more rewarding teaching experience for both me and my students.
