The graduates of our Spanish as a Foreign Language teacher training course set off on their adventures

The Spanish as a Foreign Language teacher training course is designed so that by the time they have completed it, participants will have a solid grounding in teaching theories and a good idea of the practice of teaching a Spanish class to foreigners. For those of the participants that already have some teaching experience, the course represents a good opportunity to update their ideas and revise certain concepts. For the majority however, the course represents their first foray into teaching. And they’ve loved it. However, since finishing the course, the graduates have taken very different routes.

Although the course is based around Spanish language education, many of its key concepts and practical classroom techniques are very applicable to teaching other languages. Some of the course participants originally worked teaching English, German, Basque, etc. and so have resumed their work in these fields. Some signed up for the corse with the intention of finding a possible new career, or simply to find out what it was all about, and whether teaching could be a possibility for the future. To my mind, the majority of the people who contact us about the course and end up signing up fall into two categories: those who are genuinely interested in the language, and those who want to go abroad to find a job, and think that becoming a Spanish teacher will help them in this, even if they only pursue teaching until they find “their true calling”. In many cases, the students are a bit of both. And I´m sure that some of them end up on our course after watching too many travel shows!

And at the end of the course, there are as many different routes as there are students. Many of them have gone abroad, one to Japan, some to the US, one to Norway, one to Algeria, some to Ireland, Germany and the UK. Others have stayed in Spain and found work in various places such as adult education centres, schools and private academies. Another discovered a great interest in teaching and is pursuing further didactic education, whilst others are studying for a Master in teaching.

One student tells us that he won a grant to go to the US as a teaching assistant, whilst another is teaching in a private school in England. We’ve also had foreign students who’ve taken their new training back to teach Spanish in their own countries: from Turkey (a Spanish Philology graduate), from France (English Phil.), from Russia, Poland, Morroco and Greece. This last actually opened his own Spanish school in Athens. Two South American students, Spanish teachers in an American university, loved the new methods so much that they changed all their lesson plans in one afternoon.
From the latest “batch”, there are plans to go to the US, Thailand, Brazil, Germany…