Everyone has their own story – their experience of the world, and ways of communicating it. I start this book by telling of four ‘waves’ in my own story of teaching English and working with English teachers.

ESL in Australia: The First Wave

This lasted a good five years, and started in the 1980s when I taught English as a Second Language (ESL) to immigrants and refugees in Sydney, Australia. As well as the rich impact of this work upon my heart, there are two aspects of the teaching which stand out in my mind. First, our students had left their homelands, perhaps forever, in search of a better life. We saw often sadness at this loss, as well as hope for the future and a deep investment in learning English. Second, each class was composed of students from many countries who spoke a range of languages – at that time, these students were principally from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, but also from China, Korea and the Middle East.

It was my first teaching job, and I was assigned to teach the ‘most beginner’ classes. (Are beginner classes ‘easier’ for a novice, as is often assumed? Beginners, for me, have always been the most difficult to teach well; and, by the same token, the most rewarding.) Friends were often curious about this kind of work, and I would be asked questions such as: ‘How can you be teaching in English when your students cannot yet speak English?’ My answer, as you might expect, was that teachers made use of classroom actions, real objects, pictures, drawing and so on; that is, we drew upon semiotic systems other than language. But at the earliest opportunity, in the summer vacation, I did undertake a crash course in Vietnamese.

Looking back, it is hard to believe that at that time I had never set foot on the continent of Asia. Consequently, it was in the classrooms of a Sydney school that I first heard communication in languages such as Vietnamese, Khmer, Chinese and Korean.