THE CHALLENGE OF BEING AN ENGLISH TEACHER

Prof. Andreea-Roxana Ciobanu

Liceul Tehnologic „Grigore Antipa”, Bacău

Teaching is, undoubtedly, one of the most daunting yet, at the same time, rewarding
professions in the world. It requires lengthy preparation and study, energy and effort, empathy
and patience as well as flexibility and determination. Still, the satisfaction that it brings about in
the long term makes all of the challenges and endeavours worth the struggle it triggers along the
way.
It is also pervaded with dichotomies; thus, while having the opportunity to share your
knowledge with your students may be perceived as an exhilarating experience, your enthusiasm
may sometimes be overshadowed by the difficulty of not getting your message across effectively
enough. It is, therefore, the teacher’s mission to reminisce the feedback received from his
learners and establish both the good points and the drawbacks of the pedagogical strategies
employed in each and every one of his lessons. This may resemble the ‘reflective’ model of
teacher learner that Penny Ur opts for in her book, A Course in Language Teaching, the teacher
who “recalls past experience [and] reflects, alone or in discussion with others, in order to work
out theories about teaching; then tries these out again in practice”1.
To my view, the teacher is the lifelong apprentice involved in a never-ending process of
learning. He is the perpetual trainee, constantly pondering upon the success or failure of his
lessons, permanently reshaping his teaching methods, repositioning himself in relation to his
students, reconsidering his role, perfecting his strategies and imaginatively re-enacting his
techniques.
In the light of the aforementioned convictions, it will suffice to mention a question I
receive from my students every school year: “Why should the present be so intricate?”. A basic
answer would reside in the evident difference between the two languages at stake: Romanian is a
Latin or Romance language whereas English is a Germanic one, hence the lack of perfect
analogies as far as various structures are concerned. Apparently, out of these, the tenses of the

1
Penny Ur: A Course in Language Teaching. Practice and Theory (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991),
p. 5.
present are among the hardest to comprehend by Romanian learners primarily due to the fact that
their native language only has one form of the present tense, one and the same that they use to
express an action in various situations: an action that they do regularly, an action that they are
doing right now and an action that they have done for a long time. In English, each of these
instances would be expressed by the present simple, the present continuous and the present
perfect, respectively.
A verb in the English language may be a single word – such as find / give / make – or a
phrase – such as find out / give in / make up. It expresses either a state (feel) or an action (run)
and it may be a personal / finite form or a non-personal / non-finite form.
As opposed to Romance languages, English has very little inflection which means that it
relies solely on auxiliary verbs and word order to convey a certain tense, aspect, voice or to make
up interrogative and negative constructions. There are two tenses in English (where ‘tense’
should not be mistaken for ‘time’): the present tense and the past tense. As far as the expression
of the future is concerned, “some grammarians believe that tense must always be shown by the
actual form of the verb, and in many languages present, past and future are indicated by changes
in the verb form. On this reckoning, English really has just two tenses, the present and the past,
since those are the only two cases where the form of the basic verb varies”.2
As for the grammatical category of aspect, it is divided into indefinite (also called
common or simple), progressive (also called continuous) and perfect (also called complete); it
should be noted that there is the possibility of combining the last two as in the case of the present
perfect continuous or of the past perfect continuous. Whereas tense may provide us with some
information regarding ‘time’, the aspect we choose to deploy marks our perspective upon the
action we are describing, whether it is a continuing event or just an isolated moment in time,
whether it is a permanent situation or a temporary one. The progressive aspect is always marked
by the use of the auxiliary verb be followed by a lexical verb in the present participle form, while
the perfect aspect is rendered through the use of the auxiliary verb have followed by a verb in the
past participle form.
The tenses of the present are all part of the indicative mood and are finite or personal
verb forms which means that they also reflect the grammatical categories of person and number.

2
L.G. Alexander: Longman English Grammar (Pearson Education Limited, Essex, 2003), p. 169
 Another aspect worth mentioning is the fact that, as opposed to Romanian, whose
alphabet is largely phonemic, the English phonetics represents a huge challenge to students, to
the way they perceive words and sounds, hence their fear of not reading a text accurately enough.
Nowadays, in the context created by the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers and students
alike face the difficulty of changing the learning environment completely, of adapting
themselves to the new restrictions, of dealing with lessons solely via the Internet through video
meetings, webinars or online platforms.
Paradoxically enough, the technological gadgets that used to be regarded with scepticism
by teachers have now become indispensable tools of getting their message across whereas
students have started to notice the social and emotional limitations that these devices impose on
them. Yet, the teachers’ most important quality is their flexibility while the youngsters’ biggest
asset is their ability to cope with whatever challenge that they may encounter. Consequently,
with a little effort, with will and imagination, no obstacle is ever insurmountable.

Bibliography:
1. ALEXANDER, L.G.: Longman English Grammar, Pearson Education Limited, Essex,
2003;
2. BIBER, Douglas; JOHANSSON, Stig; LEECH, Geoffrey; CONRAD, Susan; FINEGAN,
Edward: Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, Pearson Education ESL,
1999;
3. CARTER, Ronald; McCARTHY, Michael: Cambridge Grammar of English, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 2006;
4. DECLERCK, Renaat; REED, Susan; CAPPELLE, Bert: The Grammar of the English
Verb Phrase, Mouton de Gruyter, 2006;
5. DOWNING, Angela; LOCKE, Philip: English Grammar: A University Course, 2nd
Edition, Routledge, 2006;
6. GREENBAUM, Sidney: Oxford English Grammar, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
1996;
7. HUDDLESTON, Rodney; PULLUM, Geoffrey, K.: The Cambridge Grammar of the
English Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002;
8. LEECH, Geoffrey N.: Meaning and the English Verb, 3rd Edition, Routledge, 2004;
9. UR, Penny: A Course in Language Teaching. Practice and Theory, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1991.