Canadian English teachers: Volunteering to teach their mother tongue in a foreign country

In order to increase English language proficiency in Chile, native English speakers are recruited to work as volunteer teachers. This qualitative study explores the ESL teaching experiences of 10 Canadian volunteers who worked in Chilean public schools. Data was collected through closedand open-ended surveys applied before teaching and one-on-one interviews after eight months. This study is situated within the literature on volunteering and English language teaching (ELT); in addition, socioconstructivist and experiential lenses were adopted, based on Vygotsky and Dewey respectively. The results showed that when volunteer teachers recalled their experiences teaching English abroad, they acknowledged the importance of student motivation, use of the mother tongue, the feeling of frustration, interaction with EFL students, previous experiences, teaching strategies, and views about English language teaching.


Introduction and context
Globalization and the status of English around the world (Crystal, 2005) have increased the need of governments to provide its citizens with opportunities to learn this foreign language.Some of the main reasons for the increased necessity of counting on volunteer teachers are a shortage of qualified English teachers (Zhou and Shang, 2011), the need to improve the level of English of public school students who do not have many opportunities to interact with a native speaker (NCV, 2012), or the disparity of opportunities in education that does not allow students to have equal access to English instruction (Matear, 2008).
Each year thousands of English-speaking volunteers decide to travel abroad and experience the teaching of English in foreign countries (Ian Birbeck, personal communication, April 2, 2012).Volunteer teaching opportunities are vast.Searches through Google show around 67 million entries offering this type of teaching experience in underdeveloped and developing countries.Chile is not behind in this teaching trend.The Chilean Ministry of Education with the support of the United Nations created the National Volunteer Centre.Since 2004, volunteer teachers have worked in public schools helping local English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teachers and students to develop oral proficiency and to engage in extracurricular activities through the use of games, music and drama.This provides public school students with opportunities for real life interaction, the possibility to improve their speaking and interacting skills, and the chance to learn about another culture (Matear, 2008;Mineduc [Chile, Ministerio de Educación], 2012).

Purpose and research question
Working for the NCV in Ottawa promoting the volunteer teaching program opened a window for me to explore this field.Given the massive development of this teaching alternative, it was surprising to see that very little has been written about volunteering and English language teaching (Rod Ellis and Marc Musick, personal communication, April 3, 2012).This motivated me to study volunteer teaching in Chile.
The purpose of this qualitative research is to report on the EFL language teaching experiences of a group of 10 Canadian volunteer teachers in Chilean public schools.The research question that served as the basis of this study is: How do volunteer teachers experience the teaching of the English language abroad?Given the aim is to explore the experiences of volunteer teachers, socio-constructivist and experiential theoretical frameworks were used.

Theoretical framework
The socio-constructivist paradigm shares Vygotsky's belief of knowledge construction as "co-construction that takes place in a shared cultural space" (as cited in Brodova, 2003, p. 31) and the belief that the context of social interactions forms the base of the human condition (Glassman, 2001).Under this paradigm, "individuals seek understanding of the world in which they live and work" (Creswell, 2007, p. 20) and develop numerous meanings of their experiences through interaction with others.From a Vygotskian perspective, the social interaction and collaboration occurring between a child, his/her environment and the adults in his/her world provide a source for the development of behaviour, thought and cognition (Vygotsky, 1978;Tryphon and Voneche, 1996).According to Vygotsky, the environment is social; hence, learning begins first on an interpersonal plane, i.e. through the interactions with others and by participating in social life, then moves to an intrapersonal plane once concepts are internalized by the individual (Gredler and Shields, 2008;Lake, 2012).
Vygotsky's view of interaction as a social process is also shared by Dewey (1938), who advocated for a new progressive education that considered personal experience one of its main goals.According to him, "experience is a moving force" that does not evolve inside a person alone as it "influences the formation of attitudes of desire and purpose" (p.39).It makes use of physical and social surroundings and extracts what can help us to contribute to the construction of new worthwhile experiences.He posed that individuals coordinate their behaviour within the world they live in and he saw culture as a means to inform learning and to preserve forms of human thought (Garrison, 1998;Mayer, 2008).According to Dewey, living in a world means that human beings live in a series of situations where individuals, objects and other persons interact.Situations and interaction are inseparable terms because participation and sharing of experiences always take place among individuals in a given social situation.Dewey develops the concept of experience by establishing its organic connection to education and adds that any educative lived experience is framed by two principles: continuity and interaction.As Dewey explains, "the principle of continuity of experience means that every experience both takes up something from those which have gone before and modifies in some way the quality of those which come after" (p.35), meaning that new experience is shaped by previous lived experience setting up the conditions for subsequent learning.The principle of interaction is a condition for interpreting and assigning value to experience.Individuals form a community group to intercommunicate and to share lived experiences in which past experiences interact with current events, shaping a person's individual new experience (Dewey, 1938).
The application of socio-constructivism and experience have been used in the field of ESL/EFL as a medium to explore the identities of non-native English teachers (Reis, 2011), to examine the influence of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) in language teachers' professional development and the language classroom (Choul Turuk, 2008), to determine the role of teacher perceptions and expectations of classroom interaction strategies (Allahyar and Nazari, 2012), or to look at language learning from an experiential point of view (Kohonen, 1996).
These two paradigms fit the purpose of this study.Very few volunteers who decide to enrol in various teaching programs abroad have any sort of teaching experience.Most of them are university or college students who volunteer for the first time and teach their mother tongue for the first time too (Yip, 2010;Eastman, 2011;CLAIR, 2012).As a result of being immersed in a specific social, educational context and the interaction they have with local students, host teachers, the school communities, and their families, the volunteers undergo diverse experiences and start developing their own ideas of what teaching their mother tongue is like.On the other hand, for many volunteer teachers, travelling abroad, living in a different cultural community and teaching their mother tongue is a new experience that allows them to think, make decisions on how to deal with traditional local teaching practices and to modify them to make the most of English teaching, and learn what teaching is like (Burnley, 1997).Each volunteer in Chile is placed in a public school in different regions of the country to assist local teachers and students at different grades.Volunteers' experiences are shaped by each school context and situation and the interactions occurring in those places.These experiences affect their future teaching experiences and shape their understanding of the teaching act.
English language teaching in English-as-a-foreign-language contexts English language teaching (ELT) is characterized by the context in which the learners learn the language.In EFL settings, speakers of the local language find themselves learning the target language far away from the native speaking communities of that language; thus, the main contact with the target language happens inside the classroom walls (Block, 2003;Littlewood, 2006).Therefore, ELT in EFL contexts is characterized by the following: a. EFL status: The expansion and growth of English as an international language (EIL) has increased the number of people around the world studying this language in different contexts such as second or foreign language settings (ESL/EFL).Even though global migration and new developments in technology and communications have narrowed the gap be-tween the two, opportunities for language interaction still differ (Brown, 2007;Block, 2003).Block affirms that "the foreign context is the context of millions of primary school, secondary school, university and further education students around the world who rely on their time in classrooms to learn a language that is not the typical language of communication in their community" (p.48); whereas the second language learner has many more opportunities of contact with the target language outside the school and needs the language in order to survive and thrive in that community (Harmer, 2007).
b. Second language acquisition (SLA) and second language learning (SLL): Second language acquisition resembles the process in which children acquire their mother tongue.Krashen's (1988) natural approach theory suggests that SLA occurs naturally if it proceeds like first language learning in a stress-free environment where learners develop basic communicative skills by being exposed to meaningful comprehensible input.Furthermore, Krashen coined the terms language acquisition and language learning to illustrate second language learning contexts.On the one hand, language acquisition correlates with the process lived by children when learning their first language.For second language learners, natural communication and meaningful interaction are required as the speakers are more concerned with understanding the messages being conveyed than with the forms of the language (Krashen, 1988).On the other hand, language learning is characterized by conscious learning and by the strong attention paid to error correction and explicit rules of grammar.
c. Formal or informal language learning environments: These directly affect second language proficiency (Krashen, 1988).Formal or artificial settings are typically related to classroom contexts, to the explicit presentation of rules and to the presence of error correction, whereas informal environments are natural and there is more exposure to the language (Krashen, 1988).The formality of the settings provided in foreign language contexts (Block, 2003) does not offer foreign language learners enough opportunities for language learning because of the environment which, in the end, affects motivation to learn a language (Littlewood, 2006).
d. Influence of the first language: This is an indicator of low second language acquisition especially when the language learner uses L1 to substitute the production of utterances in the target language due to the lack of enough L2 input (Krashen, 1988).It is often found in foreign language situations, as opposed to second language ones, where opportunities for real communication are fewer.e. Motivation to learn a second language: For Ellis (2008), "there can be little doubt that motivation is a powerful factor in SLA" (p.119).Moreover, foreign language classrooms have not always been the best place for meaningful learning due to the lack of importance given to learning English and the target language by foreign language learners (Brown, 2007).Dörnyei's work on language learning and motivation (Dörnyei and Csizer, 1998;Cheng and Dörnyei, 2007;Dörnyei, 2007Dörnyei, , 2008) ) shows that motivation is a central part in achieving second language proficiency, which is framed by the language learners' context for learning, students' attitudes, and teachers' use of strategies.

Volunteerism and ELT
Due to globalization and the spread of the English language, a new perspective has been given to volunteerism.For Crystal ( 2005), learning a foreign language today is not the privilege of a small group of people who can afford to study it.However, in third world countries and developing countries, learning English is still a benefit for those who are able to pay (Kenning, 2009).Volunteer English teaching has become a trend that "takes a variety of forms, from supporting teachers in the classroom, through providing general assistance outside class by producing handouts, having informal conversations with students, and taking part in sport and/or extracurricular activities" (p.38).No matter the form this trend takes, no matter the teaching experience they have, volunteers will find themselves teaching in a variety of foreign language contexts where various levels of proficiency will be encountered (Kenning, 2009).
In the mid-sixties, Deutchman (1966) described in an article the problems volunteers had to cope with when teaching abroad as Peace Corps participants.These problems included the different expectations volunteers had about teaching and what was expected of them by the Peace Corps; novice teachers' lack of teaching experience and their feeling of not being qualified enough to teach led to experiencing cross cultural barriers; and lastly, classroom discipline overwhelmed the majority of teachers as their pre-conceived ideas of teaching did not match their former experiences in America.
Similarly, Burnley (1997), who volunteered in Russia, states his frustrations were mainly related to how different it is to teach English in a traditional EFL context compared to the training he received as an ESL instructor.He also explained he had to find ways of moving from a traditional grammar-based approach to a contextualized grammar, one that proved to be successful among students and his Russian colleagues.In her doctoral dissertation, Myers (2001) examined the Peace Corps volunteers' teaching experiences abroad and the influence these experiences had on the teachers' current teaching practices when they went back to teach in the USA.She found that cross-cultural teaching experiences changed teachers' views on teaching and improved their work in the classroom.
More recently, Kenning (2009) states that globalization, the spread of the English language, the need of people to learn English to obtain better job opportunities and access to information, the development of technology and communication, as well as the inequities between those who can afford learning English and those who cannot have increased volunteer recruitment around the world.Based on her experience helping to teach English in a rural school in Cambodia, she states that volunteer teachers who decide to work in rural areas come across difficult working conditions such as poor lighting, poor sound proofing, the lack of facilities in the classroom, little availability of teaching resources, and students' exposure to the written language mainly provided by the teacher and the course book.
Likewise, Myers (2001) examined the environmental constraints faced by returned volunteer teachers from the Peace Corps.She demonstrates that "many educational environments for Peace Corps volunteers involve adapting to a new culture, a new location, different disciplinary practices, harsh climate, and the ability to cope with a lack of resources including everything from electricity to textbooks, chalkboards, desks, writing utensils, and other tools and materials for learning" (p.10).This implies that volunteer teachers must develop pedagogical resourcefulness rapidly.Former JET program volunteers recall working with school children in Japan and highlight the importance of participating in extracurricular activities and how communication can bring people together (CLAIR, 2012).They also state the importance of cross-cultural understanding and the use of nonverbal forms to communicate in the community (Eastman, 2011).

Participants and recruitment
The volunteer teachers reported on in this qualitative study are 10 Canadian university students who enrolled through the NVC (National Volunteer Center) to work in Chilean public schools for eight months.They were recruited through the NVC during an orientation week about EFL before going to the schools.On that occasion, volunteers answered a closed-and open-ended questionnaire to obtain some demographic data and information about their previous language teaching experiences and were also invited to participate in the interview phase.The NVC sent an email inviting them to be interviewed after the teaching experience and they were given my contact email.

Data collection and analysis
The data was collected in two stages: through a closed-and open-ended survey applied before teaching and through one-on-one interviews done after eight months working in public schools.Vygotsky's and Dewey's constructs of social interaction and experience informed the selection of instruments and the questions designed.The data collected through the survey provided demographic information, data about their expectations about language teaching, and data about previous language teaching experiences.The questionnaires took the respondents approximately 45 minutes and they were given a numeric code to respect confidentiality.
The interviews carried out after teaching provided data about their English teaching experience in public schools, the types of teaching activities they engaged in with students and local teachers, the teaching strategies applied, etc.The interviews lasted between 45 minutes and 1 hour and they took place in the youth hostel that was paid by the Chilean government or in an internationally known café in Santiago.Participants were given a consent form to be signed before the interviews began.For the interviews, I used a digital audio recorder and took notes.Once the data was collected, the interviews were transcribed and a native English speaker assisted in the proofreading process.
The data obtained through the survey was used to characterize the participants and to determine their previous teaching experiences and their expectations about teaching the language in a foreign context.All volunteer teachers are Caucasian university students pursuing a degree in social sciences (Sociology, International Relations, Psychology).Seven of them are female, three are male, and their ages range between 22 and 25 years old.The volunteers' first language is English or French and their second language is English, French or Spanish.Concerning their previous teaching experience, 70 percent indicate having no previous teaching experience and 30 percent say they have some kind of teaching experience, such as working as a sports coach, substitute teacher, summer camp tutor, or high school teacher assistant.In relation to their expectations about teaching, they indicate they expect to find motivated learners with a good level of English and they anticipate teaching conversational skills.When asked about what they know about English language teaching, all respondents said: "nothing" or "very little".
The interview data was analysed using the NVivo software (Bassett, 2010) and a thematic approach was followed.The following elements of the literature reviewed for this study on ELT and EFL and on volunteerism and ELT influenced the definition of the themes: the status of the English language in EFL contexts and formal language learning environments affect motivation (Block, 2003;Littlewood, 2006;Dörnyei, 2008); the influence of the use of the students' mother tongue (Krashen, 1998); volunteers' feeling of frustration when teaching English in formal contexts (Burnley, 1997); and cross-cultural teaching experiences change volunteers' views about teaching English (Myers, 2001).Considering the epistemological lenses adopted in this study, the data was analysed from the following perspectives: (a) social interaction serves as a tool to understand English teaching and (b) previous language experiences impact the development of new teaching experiences.My list of themes is based on my theoretical framework and on the literature on ELT/EFL and volunteerism and ELT.

Findings
From the experiences reported by the participants when teaching English abroad, seven themes were identified: student motivation, use of the mother tongue, feeling of frustration, interaction with EFL students, previous experiences, teaching strategies, and views about English language teaching.

Student motivation
Learner motivation is reflected in two ways.First, most teachers complain of unmotivated students who misbehave in class and make them feel frustrated due to the lack of real need to use the language in the Chilean social context.Maintaining students' interest and attention is arduous as they face resistance to learning on the part of the students.Second, even though lack of motivation is a challenge for volunteers, they try to find ways to increase learner motivation.One participant reported: "I used competitive games that implied getting a prize to increase motivation or we watched movie trailers from the Internet to make them speak."

Use of the mother tongue
The use of the mother tongue when teaching English can be seen from two perspectives as well.When recalling the teaching experience, volunteers are able to reflect on their knowledge of their own mother tongue.Some of them believed that being native speakers of English would make teaching the language easier.However some of them discovered that this is no guarantee of knowledgeability.One volunteer made this comment: Once, the English teacher in the school asked me to review countable and uncountable nouns with the students through interactive activities and I was like "what is that?"I had no idea that nouns were countable or uncountable!So the first thing I did was study that.
The learners' mother tongue (Spanish) was an influential factor at the moment of teaching English.Some teachers who acknowledged not knowing Spanish found it difficult to express themselves, to interact with students and to teach lexical items.The participants with some knowledge of the learners' L1 reported having fewer communication issues but realized they needed Spanish to teach English.This made them feel bad because they had enrolled in the program to teach English and to teach communication skills to Chilean students.

Feeling of frustration
Discovering public school students' low motivation and low proficiency in English made participants feel frustrated because it affected the learning outcomes they expected to achieve.Below is an extract reflecting that frustration: I think I got more frustrated with the 8th graders because at times I felt the 4th graders knew way more than they did, and they've been at the school for four more years.Whereas the 4th graders, like, you had to go a bit slower with them of course, but they wanted to learn more.
Another participant indicated that: "If students aren't engaged, then you feel, you don't really feel like you're getting any results."

Interaction with EFL teachers and students
Working with local teachers is invaluable for volunteers when the EFL teachers are used to working with volunteers and design a co-teaching working plan where the native speaker is given similar responsibilities in the classroom.The interactions between them allowed the participants to learn about lesson planning, the English language and teaching.Through the interactions with students, volunteers shaped their understanding of English language teaching by realizing that interaction is more relevant than learning about grammar and that different students have different needs.

Previous experiences
Due to their lack of experience when teaching their mother tongue for the first time, volunteers relied on their previous experiences as language learners in Canada.One participant indicated that he used contrastive analysis to teach English and verb conjugation because that was the way he learned Spanish in high school.This extract illustrates this point: I used different strategies to explain different things but what I tried to do most was try to establish parallels to Spanish so they can try some sort of analogy from what they know already to something they are learning.For example, verb conjugations and how I learned Spanish.So you have to write out and make a little grid with six cells: yo soy; tu eres.
As some teachers kept in mind the way they learned a second language at school and how they behaved in class, they had an idealistic view of teaching English.One participant said: "I thought that teaching my own mother tongue would be easy, fun and challenging because teaching to communicate is simple."Another one said: I was shocked at first.I felt very uncomfortable when students continuously talked, used their cell phones and texted in class or they hardly ever raised their hands to take turns.That did not happen in my school.I never did that!

Teaching strategies
Volunteers report that the orientation week they attended before teaching was helpful for some and absolutely useless for others.Teachers who think it was useful used the manual they received with teaching strategies about how to deal with classroom management, development of the listening and speaking skills, etc.Other participants acknowledged becoming very creative and resourceful and complemented the manual with authentic material, worksheets from the Internet, games, songs, karaoke, conversation cards, realia, slang and idioms, video clips, acting, etc.

Views about English language teaching
After teaching for eight months in public schools, participants became more aware and conscious of what teaching English means.One of them states that: "The best way to learn a language is to teach it but no matter how stressed the situation, it's best if you just remain calm."Another volunteer reflects on the importance of creativity and passion to teach.Below is an extract from this comment: I enjoy myself being creative and inventive, so in that sense just teaching a language kind of gave me an avenue to utilize my creativity . . .but in order to teach . . .you need passion.I don't know if I can call it passion but just be there, the desire to teach.
Volunteers agree that being a teacher in not easy.One teacher indicates that teaching implies having a well-balanced relationship with the students plus dealing with the duality of being a teacher.She also says: "You're not their friend, you are their teacher . . .you don't have to be super strict.You can have fun!" Teachers also need to be energetic and active in order to capture the students' attention.One volunteer states: I have a lot more respect now for the teacher, the profession . . .because it's a judgmental act.So especially, just teaching a subject that many of the students are not interested in makes it more difficult.

Discussion
The purpose of this study was to explore how volunteer teachers of English experience teaching their own mother tongue abroad.Native speakers of English who volunteer to teach in foreign countries have very little teaching experience (Yip, 2010;Eastman, 2011;CLAIR, 2012).However, in this study it is possible to see that volunteer teachers, after eight months working in Chilean public schools, are able to reflect on this new teaching trend (Kenning, 2009).As part of their teaching experience, volunteers recall the importance of student motivation, the use of the learners' mother tongue, feeling of frustration, the interaction with local teachers and students, the relevance of previous experiences, the application of teaching strategies, and their new views about language teaching.
As it has been described by Deutchman (1966) and Burnley (1997), volunteer teachers' experiences are shaped by the cross-cultural exchange they engage in.English speakers find classroom management and local students' behaviour a challenge because the preconceived ideas they have about teaching abroad do not match their experiences back in their home countries.In this study, volunteers had idealized views of teaching in Chile that were modified after experiencing the lack of motivation of the learners and after realizing teaching is not that simple.
Concerning language, participants' previous language learning experiences from high school and new experiences from working in public schools were helpful.They were able to develop strategies to deal with language instruction, to become aware of their own mother tongue, and to value knowing the mother tongue of the students in order to deal with the teaching of lexis and to avoid language barriers.Burnley (1997) relates this to how different English teaching occurs in foreign language contexts.Myers (2001) indicates that the challenges experienced by volunteer teachers (hard climate, lack of resources and facilities, student demotivation, etc.) help them to develop resourcefulness in a short time.In this study, participants reported becoming creative and finding extra resources to increase interest in English.However, lack of student engagement in language learning was one of the reasons for feeling frustrated when teaching abroad.Myers also states that, as a result of living in another culture and teaching English, volunteer teachers change their views about teaching.Volunteers who taught in Chile reported having more appreciation and respect for teachers and for teaching after working in public schools.
The experiences described by the participants in this study are closely connected to what the literature on ELT and EFL reports.In foreign countries, the status given to the English language affects learners' need to learn a foreign language and the level of proficiency is affected because the language is being learned formally in a classroom where the influence of the mother tongue is strong (Krashen, 1998;Littlewood, 2006;Harmer, 2007).
Finally, through the socio-constructivist and experiential approaches adopted, it was possible to see how a group of Canadian university students pursuing careers in the social sciences and with no previous teaching experience were able to recall their experience and verbalize it with teaching terms.This was achieved after interacting and participating actively as teachers of English in a school community.Volunteers moved from knowing nothing or very little about English language teaching to reflecting about language learning activities, teaching strategies, classroom management, and language skills development.Therefore, volunteers' understanding of English teaching was developed in the contexts where they lived and worked and through interaction with EFL teachers and students (Vygotsky, 1978).Dewey's (1938) principles of continuity and interaction were present though the interaction between the volunteer teachers' previous language learning experiences and their new experiences developed while immersed in the school environment.

Conclusions
Volunteering to teach abroad is an international trend.Volunteers from Englishspeaking countries embark without much preparation and teaching experience.However, teaching in a foreign country allows them to reflect on their own language learning experiences and to understand English teaching from the inside.In this study, Canadian volunteer teachers were able to recall and reflect on their experiences and see that teaching their mother tongue goes beyond merely knowing one's first language, that language barriers occur if they know little about the mother tongue of the learners, and that teaching is a profession to be respected.
The contribution of this study to theory is that it adds to the knowledge base in an area that has not been widely studied.It can also serve institutions that organize volunteer teaching abroad, the thousands of university students who wish to help and become part of this trend, and the trainers who provide volunteers with quick theoretical introductions to teaching a foreign language.This study provides new volunteers with real testimonials about the experience of teaching English abroad.