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UPCOMING FREE ACTIVITIES
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Course for Spanish as a Foreign Language teachers
January 07, 2018
Manuel Custodio Herrero

The paradox of being a native Spanish teacher

I am called Manuel, I am Spanish born and raised in Madrid. Due to the big economic crisis that the whole world went through and especially Spanish from 2008, in 2012 I finalised my Audiovisual Communication studies and I went to find a job in Shanghai, China.

From there, I was looking for a job in order to find something related to my studies but, for different reasons, mainly for visa problems, I started to work in the teaching sector. At this point I was an English teacher where I gave classes to children between 6 and 12 years of age.

I was surprised when they accepted me to work there, as the advert asked for a native teacher. And as I have explained earlier, I am not from an English speaking country. A CV and a short phone call was enough for them, where they basically asked me for my nationality and that I needed to give a demonstration class as a test of validity.

I think that my level of English is high and I did not have any problems in giving classes to my students, even though I did not have any qualification that accredited my level.

Throughout my experience in this job I got to know the other teachers, they majority American, English, Canadian, Australian and some from other places such as French and Russian.

One conversation really sticks out that I had with one of them. He is called Kevin, he is American, born and raised in New York, and it was his first time in China. He knew basically nothing about China but he had a peculiarity that made him different from the other teachers and he this was at the bottom of all his problems: he had inherited the physical traits such as the hair and the eyes.
And the answer as to why this was the source of all the problems was very simple: although he was American, and he was native, and that he had never had any contact with the Chinese culture and language, he seemed physically Chinese ; and the parents of the students did not want to pay as much money to have a native teacher that looked Chinese. To resolve the unease in some of his classes, they came to me, and all of his problems stopped.
I must say that I have never had to lie to anyone, both the parents and the students knew very well that I was Spanish and I did not hide anything. Basically it is the first thing that the students ask on their first day of class.

I knew that Kevin could speak the best English and it all seemed like nonsense to me, to the extent that I thought of the inverse situation. If I were in Spanish and I wanted to receive Chinese classes and they told me to chose between someone with a Chinese appearance and another with Western characteristics, the choice would not always be the same? Perhaps you would have to consider the experience of the teachers in the teaching environment. If the choice were between a Chinese person without teaching experience and a French person with a Chinese degree and a lot of experience in teaching Chinese, the choice would not always be the first one?

Personally, I think that native people are the ideal people to give language classes in the eyes of the students. It is not only about the language, but also comes with a culture of the language and of the country that the native can provide. But this does not mean that anyone can give classes in their mother tongue. What is more, it is normal that the people than have learnt a language as a second language know more about the grammatical rules, for example, a native, can deduce the rules by intuition but maybe they are difficult to teach without strict rules.

It is for this reason that I decided to do this course. I know that the most important thing is to be a native if you want to teach Spanish, but also I know that is not easy to give Spanish classes without being prepared for it. I hope that all that I have learnt here will help me to follow this working journey that I discovered in a place so far away like China.

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