Spanish ELE teaching course: an opportunity to reorientate my career<

Spanish ELE teaching course: an opportunity to reorientate my career

After this course, the moment has arrived where I have to write my report and it is an occasion to look back and ask myself, from today, why did I undertake this course, what I learned and which paths I have in front of me.

I graduated in Psychology several years ago. But, it never left me, naturally, with a personal and long-lasting inclination towards literature and languages. Seen as a retrospective, I think that, it went downward for the fact that I chose to study Psychology has been a decision made more for personal reasons rather than a vocation. I never felt a strong motivation for practicing a psychological profession further than the knowledge and the structure of the studies.

After leaving University, I kept on studying for some masters as well as doing more professional internships. Later, I went to London for a while and I kept on doing Internships there, while I studied English. And I think it has been when , living the experience of finding myself as a student learning a foreign language in another country, the necessity came to reflect on the meaning that it would have had on my professional and personal life what I've studied and in what I was giving all my efforts and my time. Once, I was visiting the Instituto Cervantes, and I got interested to the 'ELE teachers course'. Up to this moment it seemed like something very appealing and interesting and it excited me in some way like seeing an open door to my doubts. I had the thrill of undertaking this course some day and in this way focusing on trying to become a teacher of my own language, like others would have been for theirs.

I couldn't undertake the ELE teachers course in London, but when I came back in Spain I started looking for an option that could guarantee me to train to teach Spanish . Finally through Internet I discovered the Instituto Hemingway and its courses. And moreover long-distance ones! Perfect to follow it day by day.

What I discovered and learned throughout this course sums up, especially when focusing on the education:the communicational method as an educational attitude when teaching and learning a language. And this ended up being very original and interesting, because it widened up, enriched and deepened the limited early traditional conception that I had on what it is supposed to be 'teaching' and the 'learning of a language'. Thanks to the contents and the exercices of each section, to the methodology and the structure of the course and, of course, to the close support and the brilliant guide of Alfredo, I managed to understand that the teaching experience and learn a language is much more than a simple linguistic education, that implies a rich and deep dinamic between cultural, social, educational, personal and practical aspects.

The Instituto Hemingway gave me the opportunity of focusing again on my vocation opening in front of me a new and enriching professional and personal path.

The report is only the start of this path!

Good luck to everyone.

Darío Barro