Berlitz

I am officially working as a team member of the Berlitz Language Centre in Düsseldorf!

Last week, I had my first 1-on-1 class with an elderly gentleman and this week I have worked with a group of 7 business people and another individual. Sure, I am continually learning the curriculum and interesting ways of introducing the material, but I am ABSOLUTELY loving this job! The clients (students) are very enthusiastic to learn English and are constantly teaching me how complicated language learning is. At the end of a group-work session, I had asked the students to "wrap-up" what they were doing. The response I got was, "Sorry, I don't understand.". Ah! Wrap-up!!! I had used an idiom. Oops. So I had to explain what wrap-up means. Which is good, because that is why Berlitz hires only native language speakers...so we can pass on information that a student wouldn't get from a "regular" classroom teacher.

At times, explaining can be quite difficult, for example:
How do you explain what jealousy is? (only describing it using examples and words)
How do you explain the difference between the verb tenses, "I read a book in the evening." and "I am reading a book."?
Or, "I've got to hand it to you Peter, you've done a great job!".

When we are native speakers of a language, we take for granted the verb tenses, the synonyms, the idioms that we know. It is very interesting to me!