Teacher Cultural Biography: KNOW THY EDUCATOR 1

Teacher Cultural Biography: Know Thy Educator

Rachel Neff

Penn State University

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English as a second language teaching has been Linda Gehles career for the majority of

her life. She is an older woman, in her seventies now, and has taught in both ESL and EFL

contexts, so it is not surprising she has been shaped heavily by the job she chose. As a young girl

she grew up in a blue collared family of eastern European descent, with a mother who was forced

to quit going to school after the eighth grade, and help out on the family farm, and a father who

became a mechanic immediately following his own high school education. Lindas mother in

particular had a strong desire to continue her education, and paired with Lindas own

acknowledgement of how undereducated her parents where, Lindas desire to seek out higher

education became a huge motivating factor in her early life, and helped to start her down the path

of becoming a lifelong language learner.

In her life, Linda has studied several languages including Japanese, Spanish, and

currently Czech, but the first language that Linda took interest in was French. As a young girl

Linda was a voracious reader, and many of the novels she read had French phrases scattered

throughout them. Unfortunately for Linda, French was not in the cards for her high school

career. She took secretarial classes instead, so that right outside of high school she could have a

job that she could use to pay her way through college. It was in college that she had her first

experience with structured language learning, and what a disappointing experience it turned out

to be. Her French teacher spoke entirely in English during the class session, and had his students

translate passages from French to English. The class was, according to her, incredibly academic

in the worst sense of the word, and did not teach her how to communicate in French at all.

Despite this fact, Linda did finish up college with a degree in French.

The next language she tackled was Japanese, because her husband at the time

worked with the CIA, and was stationed in Okinawa for four and a half years. In Japan Linda
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found herself immersed in the language, but did not always have the ideal learning situation even

when inundated with Japanese. Many of the teachers she had were more interested in using her

to practice their English than they were in teaching her Japanese, and were largely useless to her

learning. There was one fantastic teacher that she did have, however, who taught in ways that

really struck a cord with Linda. This teacher carried out all instructions in Japanese, corralling

the class with a simple mina san, before launching into a lesson with a lot of audio-lingual

learning and big gestures. Much of the Japanese Linda focused on learning on her own was

survival Japanese. She learned how to ask directions, and important phrases such as what is in

this? so she could avoid prevalent foods she did not like, like red bean paste.

It was in Japan that Linda had her first taste of teaching as well. Being an

outsider in a new country, and living on an American base, Linda joined an informal foreign

wives club, made up of women from Russia, Korea, China, and Vietnam who shared a common

link of American husbands, and a desire to improve their English. Linda, being the native

speaker among them, became the designated teacher, and began holding informal classes in her

kitchen. At the time Linda was also a new mother, and many of the techniques that she used to

help teach her young children first language acquisition were repeated in her informal English

classes.

It was after moving back to the United States that a friend recommended that

Linda continue as an English teacher, so Linda began observing adult English education classes

in northern Virginia. The teachers around her also used a lot of audio-lingual style teaching,

much the same way that her favorite Japanese teacher had, and varied their activities to keep

their students interested. When a position opened up at last, Linda took the job and began

teaching an intermediate class. Armed with a teachers guide, and tips and tricks from the teacher
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across the hall, Linda set a course into the career she would maintain for the rest of her working

life.

The teachers before Linda have shaped how she teaches English now. Despite

educators having a frequent back and forth on the usefulness of audio-lingual learning

approaches throughout the years, Linda swears by this system. It is the system that she learned

from the best as a student, and the system she has seen work the most effectively as a teacher.

Her classes vary in activities as well to keep students from growing bored, and while they focus

largely on oral language the written word is also worked into each class session. Linda is also of

the firm belief that language needs to happen in context, and often in class I have observed her

turning accidents or incidents into small lessons. If a student spills water, or if a student comes

to class late, then these moments are used for language teaching. Having a meaningful context

helps a lot of the students commit certain language aspects to memory, especially useful with the

beginner level classes that Linda now teaches. Although Linda prefers intermediate students for

their ability to be more creatively with language, and learn slightly more advanced concepts,

Linda works well with beginners, and is excellent at the repetition and pacing her class needs to

be able to keep up. She has admitted that after all these years she is beginning to feel burnt out

in teaching, but seeing her students, especially the very low level ones, start to understand

language can be incredibly rewarding.

As a teacher Linda likes to see herself as a cheerleader, who provides a supportive

and safe environment for her students to learn. While she often uses American holidays and

local traditions and features for class lessons, Linda also makes a point of asking students to

share information about their own country, as well as asking how to say words and phrases in
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their native languages. The class is incredibly inclusive, and Linda sticks by the idea that

everyone can learn a second language given enough time and attention.