From training adults to training teenagers: An interview with English teacher trainer Catriona Duff

Last week IH London teacher and trainer Catriona swapped her normal adult classes to train a group of local teenagers from St Marylebone School in English Language Teaching (ELT).

First of all, why is IH London working with a secondary school?
IH London’s partnership with St Marylebone School is facilitated by the International House Trust, as part of its work in the community.

This particular project came about when a former IH London teacher moved to St Marylebone School to teach English. He found that a lot of the pupils spoke more than one language, but didn’t really understand why this was an advantage. He set up the Interpreters Club to empower these students and show them what a valuable skill being bilingual is!

Why is language teacher training important for the pupils?
Bilingual pupils at St Marylebone School can participate in two voluntary English teaching projects. Some teach primary school children who are learning English as an additional language, and others help Marylebone School’s adult teachers to teach English to parents who need help with their English.

The ELT training day at IH London is a really important preparation for the pupils – to show them useful classroom techniques and build their teaching confidence.

Why did you want to get involved with teaching adolescents?
I’ve worked with teenagers in the past and really enjoyed working with 16-18 age group. I also enjoy designing training sessions for specific groups of people. Designing a course for teenage learners was particularly rewarding because it couldn’t be a straightforward CELTA course – I had to adapt the input sessions to meet the teenagers’ needs instead. It was particularly challenging giving the pupils an introduction to teaching adults AND teaching younger learners in one day!

What was it like training teenagers to teach English?
I noticed that the students were really quick to pick things up and had wonderful ideas about classroom management techniques – probably because they’re in class every day and can draw on experiences with their own teachers.

They knew what doesn’t work in terms of classroom management – for example shouting or being too serious. They were very prepared to experiment with new ideas and were brilliant at using all the techniques effectively and appropriately.

When we looked at ways to correct students I gave them lots of different mistakes and asked them to role play being teacher and student and practise correcting each other.