Global Voices – Cristina Nicolaou

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Cristina, Lebanon

Growing up in London, I had my career path cut out: after a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology, I went into headhunting and recruiting specialising in e-commerce which was just taking off at the time. Just by writing this sentence, I feel ancient! Yet, notwithstanding all these plans, I landed in Lebanon where I have been living on and off since 2005 and am a freelance educator, as well as a speaking examiner for a wide range of Cambridge exams, a CELTA trainer and a teacher trainer.

I do spend most of my time on CELTAS, as well as designing and delivering teacher training courses on literacy, teaching teenagers and business English, to name a few. I have trained teachers, both online and face to face, in private and public institutions all over the world, having had the privilege of working in different countries such as Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Turkey and many others. No matter how much I enjoyed all these experiences, I have to admit, though, that clicking on that Zoom icon to start a training session can never rival the adrenaline rush I still get stepping into a face-to-face classroom.

My current field of interest arose from the reading of Mike Long’s (2014) seminal work on TBL Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching (I know, I am a bit late to the party but better late than never), and my simultaneous deep dive into the synthetic vs analytical syllabi debate and how best to apply second language acquisition (SLA) research to the classroom. I have grown intrigued by the emergent acceptance of some SLA findings that run counter to established teaching routines and yet there seems to be no corresponding changes in the philosophy guiding teacher training courses or in the material being mass produced for students. ‘That’s all fair and good but what are you doing about it?’ I hear you ask. Frankly, not much, I have to admit. I try to keep up with research through reading books on evidenced-based teaching and by brainstorming with like-minded individuals, possible ways to maybe bring about some changes to certain aspects of the industry. Progress is slow; after living in this part of the world for nearly 20 years, I have grown accustomed to it but remain hopeful.

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