About

A little bit of personal background…

I was born in Madrid, where I lived until the age of 6, brought up in a bilingual home, culturally diverse environment. After that, I lived in the United Arab Emirates for about 10 years and back to Spain.

Having attended about 8 different schools, 3 different Universities, following Spanish, British and American curriculums, with all the travelling in between, has made me come to realise that my experience as a student, as a learner, has really influenced my views on education, languages, teaching, learning and the human factors involved in the marvellous field.

The English language has always been present in my life. It has been that one constant element that has allowed me to discover so much and accomplish many of my goals. I am quite sure I was subconsciously driven to become an English language teacher.

 As a teacher … 

I like to think that my first student was my own mother 🙂 At the age of 10, I attempted to teach her some English so that she could communicate in a foreign country. Looking back, it was a raw and unstructured communicative approach for most of it, trying to help out with what was practical and useful in real life situations she would encounter. I still remember also drilling words for proper pronunciation and trying to figure out some grammar rules in order to explain it to her in Spanish.

My official training started many years later, of course.

I studied my B.Ed for Primary Education – EFL at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. While I was going through college, I worked as an English language teacher at various companies, doing mostly intermediate and pre-intermediate general English classes and one-to-one exam preparations, both to adults and young learners.

A year after I finished my degree I started working at Primary schools, all of which followed bilingual curriculums. Being a school teacher has given me the opportunity to work with great professionals and to learn loads about classroom management, academic teaching, motivation, classroom techniques, planning and much more.

Nevertheless, I still had a great interest in teaching adults, so I took the CELTA course in order to maintain that other path open. Somehow I knew I would  be going back to it and CELTA was the first step I had to take.

And here I am now, planning on some really exciting professional development courses starting this next September which will help me plunge into ELT with all its challenges and endless areas of interest to me.

THIS BLOG….

I have recently been following various blogs of ELT professionals whom I really admire and was really looking forward to finding the right time to start my own.

Here I plan to reflect on my teaching, post to share my own ideas and activities for the classroom, gather interesting links, resources, articles and try my best to contribute to the ELT community and blogosphere.

I am interested in various areas within ELT, so this blog will probably reflect that wide spectrum of topics.

In particular: Blended learning, technology for educational purposes, motivation, learner autonomy, vocabulary, pronunciation, audiovisuals in learning, and CPD.

I love the idea that this is going to be a virtual open space to learn, to keep growing, to share and to connect with other fellow teachers. I hope this will be of interest to anyone who is interested in the field of ELT or education in general.

Please, feel most welcome to ask, comment or question any of the ideas posted on the blog.

It is only through authentic reflection and reconstruction that progress is possible.

Ready… steady.. go!