In this post, our committee member Elizabeth S. Coleman shares how teaching pre-service educators reignited her passion for ELT.
After years of conducting CPD and training with established teachers in university preparatory programmes and ELT departments, I found myself stepping into a different classroom this year: an undergraduate ELT programme filled with pre-service teachers preparing to enter the profession themselves. I expected the transition to be interesting; I did not expect it to completely reignite my relationship with teaching English language teaching.
Like many people who stay in education for a long time, I think there are periods where the work risks becoming procedural. Even when we care deeply about teaching, institutional pressures, administrative responsibilities, curriculum demands, and the sheer pace of academic life can slowly distance us from the reasons we entered the profession in the first place. For me, teaching new courses to future teachers became a way back to those reasons.
This year, I taught Oral Communication and Sociolinguistics to undergraduate ELT students. On paper, these were simply new teaching assignments. In practice, they became something far more meaningful.
Teaching Oral Communication reminded me how transformative confidence-building can be in the language classroom. Working with students on presentation skills, conflict resolution, and multilingual communication practices brought me back to something fundamental about ELT: language teaching is never only about grammar or vocabulary. It is about identity, participation, confidence, and human connection. Watching students begin to find their voices, not only in English but also as future educators, was deeply rewarding.
At the same time, teaching Sociolinguistics brought about conversations that energized me in ways I had not anticipated. Talking with young teachers about language, power, identity, gender, dialect prejudice, and linguistic discrimination reminded me why I fell in love with language in the first place. These are the topics that speak to the heart of who I am as an educator. They were not abstract theoretical discussions detached from reality; they were conversations connected to students’ own lives, experiences, and futures as teachers working in increasingly multilingual and culturally complex classrooms.
One of the most powerful aspects of the experience was the energy of the students themselves. There is something profoundly hopeful about teaching people who are still forming their professional identities. Pre-service teachers often ask difficult questions, challenge assumptions, and approach educational ideas with a kind of openness that can sometimes become muted later in institutional life. Their curiosity was contagious.
What surprised me most was how empowering it felt to witness the next generation of teachers emerging into the profession. In ELT, it is easy to become focused on systems, policies, accreditation requirements, assessment frameworks, or institutional constraints. Spending time with future teachers reminded me that the profession is also built on people: thoughtful, passionate, creative individuals who genuinely want to make a difference in learners’ lives.
I found myself leaving lessons feeling intellectually stimulated rather than depleted. I was reading more widely again, revisiting theories I had not engaged with in years, and thinking more critically about my own teaching philosophy. Teaching new content forced me out of professional autopilot. It required me to rethink how I explained concepts, how I structured learning, and what I believed mattered most in teacher education.
Perhaps most importantly, the experience reminded me that professional development does not only happen through conferences, certifications, or formal training programmes. Sometimes it happens because we place ourselves in unfamiliar teaching contexts that demand growth. Sometimes the most meaningful development comes from being made curious again.
For me, teaching these courses did more than diversify my workload. It reconnected me with the intellectual, emotional, and human dimensions of ELT that first drew me to the field. In a profession where burnout and exhaustion are increasingly common, that reconnection felt genuinely important.
And unexpectedly, wonderfully, it made me fall in love with ELT all over again.
About Elizabeth S. Coleman:
Elizabeth S. Coleman is a lecturer and CPD specialist at a private university in Istanbul. She took an unusual route into language teaching, arriving in ELT with a background in gender and environmental activism. She has a special interest in diversifying classroom practice and views education as a socially transformative tool. Elizabeth engages in research around social constructions, gender, and minority representation. Her recent work has focused on trauma-informed practice and queer inclusivity. Her work often focuses on such issues in Türkiye, and she is currently working on a book chapter on queer precarity in Turkish academia. A keen believer in development and knowledge sharing, she is a member of the IATEFL Teacher Development SIG committee, where she focuses on events and publications.