About Jo Gakonga

and ELT-Training

My name's Jo Gakonga, and I'm from Birmingham, in the UK. I've been teaching since 1989, and training teachers since 2000. Like many English teachers, though, my life didn't start off along that path....

I originally studied Agriculture and was interested in development projects, but some work at the University of the South Pacific as a crop researcher quickly persuaded me that this wasn't for me. After a couple of year backpacking around New Zealand and Australia, I ended up on the hippy trail through South East Asia and absolutely fell in love with it. I was so bowled over by the culture, the people, the food (!) and the 'otherness' of it all and didn't want to leave, so when I ran out of money, I got a plane to Taiwan, where I had been advised I could get a job teaching English, just because I could 'speak it'

Early Work

I quickly found work, and luckily in a very supportive school, and it was such fun, I couldn't quite believe I was getting paid for it! I was very green, and I'm sure I made lots of mistakes. Looking back on it now, the material we used was very much in the tradition of the worst excesses of meaningless grammar paradigms and substitution drilling (although the course book we used 'Side by Side', I note is still for sale over 20 years later in its third edition). We knew it was silly at the time - we'd regale each other in the bars later with the conversations:

A: Why are you washing your dishes in the bathtub? Do you usually wash your dishes

in the bathtub?

B: No, I don't usually wash my dishes in the bathtub, but I'm washing my dishes in

the bathtub today because my sink is broken.

and other such nonsense. Over the next few years, I used teaching to take me to all manner of places including Spain (very briefly - horrid school!), Australia, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Kenya, picked up a Cert TESOL, a DTEFLA (pre-DELTA - shows how old I am!) and a PGCE along the way, dabbled with primary school teaching for a couple of years and ran screaming back to Adult Ed, and finally met my husband in Kenya in 1998 and came back to the UK when our first child was born.

Next Stages

Having never stayed in one place for more than a couple of years since I was 18 and despite many years of living abroad, suddenly with a family, my life has become very stable! I now live in the same road that I grew up in - I put it down to hormones; as soon as I had children it was like a salmon coming back to the spawning ground...

When I came back to the UK, I worked at Solihull College, a large college of Further Education for 14 years and I really enjoyed the work there and my colleagues' company. The job changed every year and there were lots of opportunities. I taught all levels and prepared learners for all sorts of exams, seeing the student population change from largely Chinese students hoping to study in the UK, to a large influx of Eastern Europeans when the EU expanded, to a much higher proportion of migrants and asylum seekers, and especially young people fleeing conflict zones. All of this involved learning new ways of teaching, especially where basic literacy was an issue. I also had the opportunity to become a teacher trainer and have been involved over the past 14 years in CELTA, Module 2, PTLLS and DTLLS training. I am an assessor for CELTA and so get to visit a lot of other centres and I've collaborated with two colleagues to write an IELTS Foundation, a preparation coursebook, published by Macmillan. I was also involved in writing and editing Cambridge English's CELT-S, an on-line teacher training programme for English teachers in secondary schools worldwide.

In 2010, I did an MA in ELT at Warwick University (which inspired elt-training.com) and in 2014, I was appointed Senior Teaching Fellow there, teaching on the MA programme. Along the way, just to fill in my spare time (!) I've had three gorgeous children, done a lot of speaking at conferences and in other colleges and acquired a cat.

About ELT-Training.com

ELT-Training arose from a problem. This was that on the CELTA course we frequently interview trainees who have great potential as teachers, but whose knowledge of grammar isn't strong enough to allow us to give them a place on the course. We also find that trainees who we have taken on and who have some knowledge of grammar often find that (not) knowing the nomenclature and the systems of their native language is a major stumbling block in their training. If you have learnt a foreign language to an advanced level, you probably have a good grasp of how languages hang together. If you are over 80 years old (as my parents are), you may have parsed sentences into their constituent elements and learnt Latin. However, if you do not fall into one of these categories (as I didn't), you probably don't know much about English grammar, despite the fact that you can speak the language eloquently and write it fluently!

There are lots of great grammar books out there, and you can learn it this way, but sometimes it's hard to know where to start. I wanted to develop a pre-course that would give trainees a basic grounding and the tools to go away, reflect on it and study further themselves and discovering a lot more about technology in my MA course with Russell Stannard at Warwick, I decided that this provided a possible space to run such a course. And here we are! I've had some very positive feedback from trainees so far, and I really hope that you find it helpful.

About Jo Gakonga

and ELT-Training

Registro y Pago

Registro

Producto

There are no free, paid or coming soon courses in your school yet.
Why don't you create one?

Oops, your school's owner is working hard preparing the courses for you.

Oops, you haven't created any courses yet.

About Jo Gakonga

and ELT-Training

Registro y Pago

Registro

Producto

There are no free, paid or coming soon courses in your school yet.Why don't you create one?

Oops, your school's owner is working hard preparing the courses for you.

Oops, you haven't created any courses yet.

There are no free, paid or coming soon courses in your school yet.
Why don't you create one?