1 Improving your English

Mrs Chakrakodi teaches English at a rural government secondary school. As a student, she enjoyed English and did well in exams. Now she reads and writes English confidently but is less confident with speaking and listening to English. She wants to develop these skills, but has found it difficult because she does not live and work in an English-speaking environment.

In a recent training session at our local DIET, I asked our trainer about how we secondary English teachers could improve our English. Our trainer told us about a radio show [TeachingEnglish, 2012]. In it, teachers talked about what they did to improve their English skills. One of them started an English club in order to practise speaking and listening.

Our trainer from the DIET thought that starting an English club was a very good idea, and we did too. She organised for teachers from neighbouring schools to get together once a week to talk only in English about whatever subject we like, or even about an article or something that everyone has read in advance.

The idea appealed to me as I live in a rural area where it is difficult to practise English. I always thought that I needed to practise speaking English with people who spoke it fluently, but after listening to the show, I realised that I just needed to practise – and that there were other teachers in the same position as me. So I started to go to this group regularly for an hour each week.

The first time we met, I felt a little embarrassed about speaking English, and I was worried that I would make mistakes. But as we have continued, I have become more confident, and I have learned not to worry about mistakes. What is important is that we all practise speaking – and listening to each other, of course!

At first we tried to prepare topics to talk about, but we found that we didn’t have much time for this. But we realised that we needed something to speak about, so now we take it in turns to choose a topic. Last week, for example, we talked about food. We swapped recipes, and talked about good and bad dishes that we had eaten. It was fun, and I got some good ideas for cooking too!

Sometimes I can’t go to the club because I am just too busy – and that’s true for all of us. But we decided that the club would take place no matter how many people are there. It’s helped me to become more confident at speaking English, and that means I am more confident in my classes too.