Recommended Reading
It all started in Paris, in a bookshop. This is quite a famous bookshop, actually: Shakespeare and Company, on the Left Bank. The shop not only sells books in English, it actually has English authors, who come and read their works. I was there one evening, listening to such a talk, and I got talking to one of my neighbours in the audience. "What do you do?" I asked. "I teach English," she replied.
It suddenly occurred to me that this was what I had wanted to do for a long time. My career to date had been more concerned with writing English. I'd been a journalist and an advertising copywriter, but I'd always wanted to teach. When I got back to England, I started to investigate the possibilities. I learned that there were courses for learning how to teach English as a Foreign Language. I settled on one of them that looked better than the others, run by a company based near Oxford. They had a course starting at London University, and going on for some weeks with written and practical training. (But I never guessed I'd end up teaching in Australia and Mongolia, which is what did happen!)
