Lessons from the Other Side of the Teacher's Desk: Discovering Insights to Help Language Learners.

In my experience, most language teachers become teachers because they are fascinated by language. We like the way languages work, we are intrigued by differences between our native tongues and other languages, and we enjoy the process of helping our students learn. And I believe that most language teachers have had positive experiences as language students themselves somewhere along the paths to their own classrooms. Positive experiences learning a foreign language certainly contribute greatly to the attraction of teaching one. Most language teachers have learned a language in a classroom setting (and many of us have also learned a second language in more nontraditional settings, such as immersion in a new language either because of travel or while living in foreign countries). I am an English language teacher who fits most of the categories above. I have been teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) for many years. However, until recently, it had been many years since I had learned a foreign language in a classroom setting. And that is what I did for six focused months. As a requirement for a job, I studied in an intensive language training program. It was a fascinating and often difficult experience that gave me a renewed understanding of language learning: there will always be a distance, however subtle, between teacher and student, even in the most studentcentered classroom. That experience of once again being a student in a language classroom caused me to reexamine my beliefs about classroom practice. Some of my beliefs were confirmed, and some were challenged. In this article I examine those beliefs. The language that I studied was Russian, but I believe that my experience as a language learner can be generalized across most language learning experiences.