How much English does a teacher need to know?

I am responding to the findings of a research by Uganda National Examinations Board and National Assessment of Progress in Education regarding the language competence for primary school teachers.

The issue of competence is always at the forefront for English language teachers in particular. As English language teachers, we need a certain level of competence in the language to teach it so we can serve as models to our students, and provide them with the valuable language input that can help them learn.

However, there is still no agreed upon level of competence that an English language teacher needs to attain in order to teach effectively, and there may never be.

In other areas, for example, medicine or engineering, there has long been the realisation that these fields have specialised language that professionals will need to learn. Thus, when someone in medicine needs to learn English, this focus on medical English in the classroom can help them learn the language they need to succeed in their professional lives. English-for-teaching is essentially the same thing, but for English teachers.

While medical English has a highly specific vocabulary that many speakers will never need to know, the words English teachers use in the classroom are much more common.

English-for-teaching serves as a smaller subset of language that is much more achievable for teachers to learn and allows them to manage their classrooms in English and still provide their students with valuable language input.

Stephen Siima,
[email protected]