if you speak English as a native language, it can be hard for you to really appreciate how hard learning English can be. English second language is one of the hardest things to learn in the world. Unlike many languages, English is highly irregular and has so many different roots and influences that few patterns remain consistent throughout the grammar. The difference between good English language teachers and bad ones is that the good ones recognize the difficulty. If you can see English second language from a student's perspective, you can be a great teacher too.
When I first took a class in teaching English as a second language, I was initially bored by some of the activities we did. One of them key strategies to learning to teach anything is to learn to look at it from a student perspective. By doing English second language activities in class, we were supposed to pick out what worked and what didn't work for a non-native speaker. Nonetheless, it really took me awhile to get into the proper mindset. I would think about English grammar and structure, but not about what it took for students to learn these things. It was the class that I was student teaching that finally showed me the light.
We were doing a unit on English idioms for class that day, and people were getting rather frustrated. Listening to the idioms we were teaching, I could see why. I can't remember exactly, but I think we were talking about idioms like take on, take up, and take out. these superficially similar idioms had completely different meanings that had almost nothing to do with actual words they were composed of. You could know the meaning of take and the meaning of up, and still have no idea what take up was supposed to mean. Hearing an explanation of it can't really make things any clearer. The only solution was to memorize all of these idioms individually.
Thinking about the rest of English, I suddenly realized how difficult English second language learning could be. I had been frustrated from time to time with my students and their slow pace of learning before, but now I got it. Learning a whole new language is difficult for anyone, and certain languages like English were harder than most. Now that I get where my students are coming from, I'm a better teacher and, I think, a more knowledgeable English speaker. It has benefited both me and my students.
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