Lucy visits Valparaiso in Chile and gets some teaching tips

After getting to know Santiago for a week I was ready to move onto Valparasío. I had already heard a whole lot about it as a place - it sounded like a cool, slightly edgy beach city. Something I was really looking forward to after a week in a busy capital. As a city Valparaíso certainly possesses something special. Much of it is on a hill, blessing the city with breathtaking, captivating views. With a similar climate to Santiago - hot in the sun and cold everywhere else - I spent an idyllic few days exploring the city and admiring its street art, quirky streets, it’s famous port, and its neighbouring sister city, Viña del Mar. ‘Viña’, as the locals call it, is just a 15-minute bus ride, visible across the sea from Valparaiso. This is where most of the English schools are located.

I had a fantastic time in Valparaíso. I loved the flair it exuded, incredible street art on every corner, more street musicians than people, with good weather and intensely beautiful scenery. Even the name, ‘Valparaíso’, rolled off the tongue luxuriously. I spent my days travelling to Viña to visit teachers in the English schools and my evenings dining in restaurants that held the whole of the city in one glance. It was mesmerising. I can I only write from personal experience, and I felt like I was constantly missing something. I never felt a hundred percent satisfied that I had seen what I was supposed to see that made Valparaíso, Valparaíso. By chance, I found out that a friend whom I had gone to school with was living in the city, and so I ate lunch at the restaurant he was working at. He told me it was a city of hidden gems. And I realised that was what I liked about it. I couldn’t find what I was looking for because I was looking through the eyes of a tourist. Of course! I had actually stumbled across one of these hidden gems a few hours earlier myself. If you walk almost to the top of the city, there is a mirador type church - which I later found out is called ‘Diego Portales’ - where you can soak up the view. I stumbled upon it by accident, and was using it as a break from climbing the seemingly endless stairs. Groups of friends dangled their legs over the sides of the wall, couples were selfie-ing away, dogs were laying with their chubby bellies to the sun. It was perfect.

When people often talk to me about the UK, telling me what they know (or think they know) about it I feel a certain loyalty towards it. I want to defend the food, the weather, the expense, the people and their lack of ability to learn languages (or so the stereotype goes), and so on. To some people, Britain is a grey, cold, wet, expensive, monolingual place - which of course couldn’t be further from the truth. Concepción, on the other hand, can be described in this way. I arrived on a Sunday (never a good day to arrive anywhere in South America, it makes the busiest of places looks like an apocalypse has hit), and witnessed my first bout of rain. On first impressions it was a grey, graffitied, unaesthetic city. I never knew much about it before other than it is Chile’s ‘other’ capital, the student capital, and Chile’s rock capital (a city of capitals it seemed!). I didn’t dislike it, I find it hard to dislike anywhere completely, but it didn’t strike me as a particularly nice place. Which was fine, I would go to the schools I needed to go to and leave for somewhere nicer.

The weather never improved in Concepción - until, of course, as I got on my bus to leave, by which time it was absolutely gorgeous outside - but it grew on me. I was lucky. I met some really nice people, some I was staying with, a lot started talking to me in the street (I don’t think tourists go to Concepción), and again I was blessed with incredibly kind and helpful teachers to interview. All of them pushed me to get in touch with them should I get lonely or need some advice in the city. Most Chilean (and I have found, in fact, South American, Latin or Spanish speaking) people usually are extremely proud of where they come from, no matter where it is, and the people in Concepción (and ones I have met since who are also from the city) are no different. It was hard to strike a conversation without someone bad mouthing Santiago and denying its place as the capital. In most cities in South America the main square is called Plaza de Armas. The Chilean independence was actually declared here in Concepción, hence the square being named Plaza de la Independencia instead. I liked that.

Other than the remarkably evident perks of this job, something that is bowling me over again and again is the teachers’ willingness to participate and help me as much as possible. They have all expressed a passionate motivation to want to help new teachers (and me do my job) in any way they can. Teachers have given up some of their planning time, Saturday’s and break times in between lessons to talk to me. And that’s not because they have to, because they don’t. They are just incredible people!

This week I was asking the teachers to give me some tips on lesson activities and game ideas. Something that cropped up a few times and also something that I discussed last week with a number of teachers was the use of role-play in lessons. It is a great way to build confidence with grammatical structures and vocabulary and bring an element of fun to the class. One of the teachers, Andrea Lopriore from the International Centre in Viña del Mar has taken some of her adult students out for dinner as a group on multiple occasions where they have practised using English in a real-life scenario. Another, simpler idea was incorporating music into lessons. This works nicely either playing music whilst students are carrying out a task, or finding material relevant to the students’ interest and creating listening activities. There is also an online game which I like to use if I have five minutes spare at the end of a lesson – lyricstraining.com. You choose a song, your level of English, and have to race to fill in the lyrics the same time they are being sung in the song. It’s an excellent game for all levels and ages and especially good when it’s a song the rest of the class can sing along to!

Claudia Millafilo Antilef from Berlitz English in Concepción had made personalised maps and board games similar to monopoly but to scale for the city of Concepción. She has used these to help the students’ language in a number of ways - practising directions, game language (your turn, roll the dice, pick up a card, miss a go), situational lexis (down the road, over there, on the corner, past the shop, it’s on your left). Something I also admired was her technique for correction. With her beginners she shows them the letter or sound they are missing, as opposed to delivering the correction orally. I can really see this developing the student’s confidence and speaking ability and it will definitely be something I take into my own classes in the future.

Numerous other activities and game ideas along with their explanations from the teachers who gave them to me are in this week’s video. Nicole Rodríguez Cisternas, from Instituto Chilean Británico de Cultura struck a chord with something she said during our interview - “As teachers, we really need to know, how can we get the best out of our students?”. It dawned on me that you can bring any activity to the class, and use some of the fantastic ideas these teachers have shared with me, but in the end, it is our job as teachers to decide how we can use the tools and advice given to us. After a week at different ends of the spectrum, after meeting and learning from the teachers, I feel like a more balanced, well informed teacher myself.