About Jo Gakonga 

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 but I ended up in South East Asia and absolutely fell in love with it 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' and that's where my English teaching journey began.

 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, but 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

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 for trainees  (not) knowing the nomenclature and the systems of their native language is a major stumbling block on CELTA. If you have learnt a foreign language to an advanced level, you probably have a good grasp of how languages hang together. However, if you haven't (and maybe even if you have) you probably don't know much about English grammar, despite the fact that you can speak the language eloquently and write it fluently!