[EDLING:250] EducationGuardian.co.uk: Trainee teachers get a helping hand in Hungary

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Trainee teachers get a helping hand in Hungary
Postgraduate students find practice is perfect in far-flung places
Max de Lotbinière
Friday June 22 2007
The Guardian


For most students seeking to develop their English teaching skills, the north coast of Ireland is an exotic enough location, but for those who enrol on the University of Ulster's Postgraduate Diploma in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (Tesol) the adventure is only just beginning.

For more than a decade students on the year-long course have taken part in a six-week practical teaching placement in the Hungarian city of Gyor, located between Budapest and Vienna. Earlier this year, 20 trainee teachers from all over the world switched their Coleraine campus for this historic provincial city and an opportunity to put course theory into practice and gain a new perspective on being a teacher and learner.

Among the group was Richard Mitchell, a teacher of English literature in an Irish secondary school training to work in Esol. "Although the teaching practice in Hungary seemed a bit daunting at first," he says, "there was a lot of support from staff and within the class, and student teachers' confidence improved dramatically by the end of the placement."

While many Tesol students at postgraduate level are keen to gain teaching practice as part of their studies, the University of Ulster's course remains one of very few MA programmes to provide real-class experience, and the only one to offer the chance to teach in a non-English speaking country.

But the scarcity of courses that include practical teaching skills is starting to be addressed as MA providers wake up to changing demand.

According to Glenn Fulcher, senior lecturer at the University of Leicester's Centre for English Language Teacher Education, there has been a shift in the kind of training teachers are seeking.

"A number of UK universities are relaxing the two-year experience requirement for entry to an MA. This is because the market for people who are just starting their career, rather than people taking a career break to do an MA, is growing. The latter is contracting. Some universities are introducing a practical component for inexperienced students," says Fulcher.

Leicester is addressing the issue of access for "limited-experience" teachers to its MA Tesol courses by designing a 30-credit practical module that will be compulsory for candidates with no teaching experience. This will be available in 2008. Other British universities that currently offer courses that do not require previous teaching experience include Warwick, Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle.

Warwick's MA in English Language Studies and Methods is described as providing "a strong professional foundation for developing practical teaching skills and undertaking relevant research", but as admissions tutor Shelagh Rixon says, the focus is still on theory not practical teaching.

"What we offer is observation of other people teaching, micro teaching and peer teaching and reflection on that. But for practical reasons we can't put students into schools and we don't have large numbers of language students on whom they could practice. We offer something that gives students more insights for when they go back into the classroom in their own countries," says Rixon.

According to Professor Rosalind Pritchard, head of the University of Ulster Tesol course, the reason for including the placement in Hungary remains something of an anomaly. Up until the early 1980s many British universities offered teacher training courses that included a Tesol component and practical teaching experience, but a change to the national curriculum killed off most of these. As a result, universities shifted their Tesol offering to providing more theory and research-based courses for qualified teachers. Ulster is the only university to have maintained its course. 

Today the course leads to a diploma qualification at the end of the third term with the option converting to a full masters by completing a dissertation over the summer months.

For Nanae Kitagawa, who qualified as a secondary school English language teacher in Japan four years ago, the course has been a chance to get authoritative feedback on her teaching skills. "I also wanted to experience teaching English as a foreign language in another country - not an English-speaking country."

By the time the students go into class in Hungary they have completed most of their taught course, which includes teaching methodology. The placement itself is assessed and students must present a file of lesson plans on their return to Coleraine.

However, a major factor in the success of any teaching placement is how well the receiving school is managed and resourced. According to Pritchard, the length of the collaboration is testament to the high standards of the schools in Gyor. "To accept a trainee teacher does take time and trouble, but the schools are well organised," she says. "I also think that the trainees bring their own cultural enrichment to schools."

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