Nowadays with all the technological tools that we have around us, it is hard to imagine how English language teaching (ELT) used to be back in the 80s – when I was a teenager. I actually started teaching in the early 90s and saw all the changes taking place. Lots of things were very different back then. In this blog post I intend to give a brief overview of some of the changes I have seen going through along my ELT career and discuss some of the best qualities language teachers ideally can have.

I remember that the very first book I used was “Interchange”. It was supposed to be a  modern book with interactive activities and lots of roleplays. Nowadays when I browse through its pages (I still have it!), I see how limited and naive some of the activities were. I am not trying to say that textbooks have changed much, in fact I think they haven’t. Of course today we have textbooks with multimedia content, the audio files come in a CD, but still, the way the contents are organized and the contents themselves are pretty much the same.

On the other hand, one thing I think that has changed a lot is how we deal with learners and their needs. Back when I started teaching, this idea of learner-centered approach was no more than a sketch or an idealized fabrication of what would be the best scenario for learners. People talked about that, but all you could see was a standardized practice in the classroom. Presentation, practice, production. Certainly I have to consider the fact that I was a newbie in the teaching profession and perhaps I had nothing but a very shallow perception of how the teaching, or yet, the learning process takes place. However, I still hold true that learner-centered approaches were no more than an idealized conception of the best teaching/learning scenario. » Read more..