With thanks to Alex, Iryna and Maria Montague.
 

1In response to the call for papers for this issue, it seemed important and fitting to engage with educators whose day-to-day life involves teaching people who have been affected by global crisis. To this end, I engaged in dialogue with two teachers working at the Ukrainian Institute London who are currently teaching English to Ukrainian people displaced due to the Russian invasion.

2Appropriately, the Ukrainian Institute London was founded in 1979 by Josyf Slipyj, head of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, following his release from a Soviet gulag, so there is inevitably an inherent sense of responding to crisis within the bones of the organisation itself.

3These interviews were conducted online by the author, Martin Parsons (MP), on the 23rd (Iryna Shutova – IS) and 27th of June 2023 (Alex Fynn – AF). Their honest and open responses cannot help but draw our attention to the disruptive effect these dreadful situations have on those involved, yet also demonstrate the remarkable resilience of displaced persons and the power of language teaching to help in reconstructing lives that have been affected by global crises.

MP. — Could you tell me about yourselves, your career trajectories and what brought you to work here?

IS. — I relocated here to the United Kingdom, to London, to stay with my very kind and generous friend. She has been our host lady for the past year and a half. Before that, back in Ukraine, I worked as an interpreter and as a teacher, so it’s not something brand new that I’m doing. I had an experience of working as an English teacher in secondary school, then in an academy where I taught business English. Also, I worked in a private language school, teaching online and offline, and that was mainly secondary school students.

I was unlucky enough to be made and born in the USSR. I was really interested in languages, but as soon as you wanted to do something with languages, you just had two options, either to become an English teacher or an English translator. The thing is that the only university that provided education for translators was in Kyiv. It was too far. My parents said, “no way, a bit closer”. One was a pedagogical university, and I entered that, and it was a very good experience. I’m really happy I had those unforgettable five years with them, so I’m actually a trained teacher.

AF. — I came into it because I’d lived in Ukraine for a while, I speak Russian and I speak decent Ukrainian as well. Before this, I had tutored English and also Russian to different people at different stages. When I was in Ukraine, I had tutored Russian to expats, Americans and Brits mostly, as just a bit of a side job. I had also tutored English to Ukrainians whilst there, but on a slightly more ad hoc basis. That’s my background teaching-wise. Before that, I’d done bits and pieces, but I have no TEFL qualification at all. The only sort of formal teaching I’ve had was the initial training that they’d given me when I was about 15 working for Kumon, which is a children’s maths and English tutoring thing, but I studied linguistics and language at university and so I have probably a slightly stronger grasp than the average Brit about understanding concepts in foreign languages and then being able to communicate that.

My degree was Russian and Czech Literature (with Slovak), and I heavily specialized in linguistics in my final year. Coming from the perspective of having studied the language academically, you then at least have an understanding of the pitfalls that you’ve gone through trying to learn the language and the differences, at least in the grammar. To explain them to people going the other way was a bit strange at first, but you kind of get used to it. It made sense for me to go into a lower-level group where I’d be able to answer their questions about grammar, about basic concepts and be able to explain things to them in both Russian or Ukrainian, whatever suited them.

My first group I started teaching, which was early this year, I think it was February. They were pretty much all, I think, bar one student, in their late 50s, 60s and 70s. I think we even had one student in their 80s. They were all at the A2‑level of English. So not a great grasp, they hadn’t really ever spoken any English at all until they’d come to the UK. So, this presented specific challenges.

4It’s more of a casual role for me, alongside other volunteering at the Ukrainian Institute, but I have found it really, really interesting and it’s been worthwhile to do. I feel like you could be a very, very qualified teacher and if you don’t speak the language of the people you’re trying to teach, you’d probably struggle a lot more.

MP. — Could you give a bit more information about the way that the classes are structured?

IS. — They are divided due to their language knowledge, and one of the groups that I have, they are starters, like brand new. When we started working with them in January, we started with the alphabet, with the sounds, with pronouns—a very, very basic level. Another group that I have, they are intermediate, perhaps A1, A2. Then, the 3rd group is at a B2‑level, and they’re very good. The ages really are different. The youngest student that I have, he’s 23, and he’s in starters, and the oldest, he’s 69, and he’s in starters as well, and the rest are within this range.

The starters were self-identified—it was something that they declared and we believed! For A2 and B2, they passed a test. I wasn’t involved, because I became a teacher when they already had the second term, so I wasn’t there for the first term. These students were with the Ukrainian Institute, starting from the very first term, and I know that they were tested and interviewed. Some of them even had the interviews recorded, and hopefully we’ll find those recordings for them to see the progress that they have made.

MP. — How many students are there per class?

AF. — The first class I had was a class of 14 learner with a standard average attendance of about 12. I think it was one of the bigger, if not the biggest, classes for the Institute. My second group, which I’ve now had for this term, so since Easter, is in total eight, but because this is a slightly higher level, this is now B1+, attendance isn’t as good. Also, a lot of members of the class have been going to and from Ukraine for a lot of this term, so we’ve had way lower attendance, at some stages averaging about three or four a week.

MP. — Alex, having mainly done one-on-one tutoring in the past, did the class size pose any difficulties for you?

AF. — Yeah, and it sounds a bit strange, but it wasn’t just the fact that it was larger groups, it was that it was larger groups of people who were maybe of a different generation. This was something that was really interesting. For the first group of people I taught, it became immediately apparent that the way that they’d been taught at school—and they explained this to me themselves—was slightly more disciplinarian than the sort of teaching I was used to. So, it took a bit of mutual getting used to each other’s styles. I was much more like, “Oh, can I have a volunteer for this question?” and they were slightly reticent. They were, I feel, more comfortable with me telling them to do something rather than asking them to do something, which is slightly bizarre, especially because you don’t always feel so comfortable telling people to do things rather than asking them when they’re significantly older than you. That was one of the things that I needed getting used to. I think one of the things, probably, about teaching that size of group was that it requires you to explain to people that only one person can really be talking at a time and if people are all talking over one another, then it just doesn’t really work. “Please be quiet now”, again, is sort of strange to be saying to a group of 60- or 70‑year-old Ukrainian ladies… and that’s one of the things I’m not sure I touched on as well. The gender split because of the conflict is very heavily towards women. Men between 18 and 60 legally can’t leave Ukraine without extenuating circumstances and obviously, as is probably only understandable and expected, the extenuating circumstances which allow people to leave are becoming tighter and tighter as the conflict goes on, and they’re really cracking down on the bribery at the border as well, so there’s not as many informal routes of leaving the country as there were. I think in my first group of 14 or so, there was maybe one or two men, and in this group that I’m currently teaching, there’s one of the eight who is male, which also creates a bit of a dynamic, but again, nothing too difficult to overcome, just something to be aware of more than anything.

MP. — When you’re talking about trying to ask people to be quiet and things, but do you mostly find that students are enjoying the experience? The tendency to chat, it’s not that they’re getting bored and not wanting to be there, it’s sort of an enthusiasm that’s coming through?

AF. — Especially with my first group, I feel like there was a real enthusiasm for the lessons. Also, I mean anecdotally, and I don’t know whether this is true, I feel like there is a greater excitement for when there’s an English teacher than when there’s a Ukrainian teacher who is helping teach them English. I think it’s probably just an element of novelty, but it always struck me as quite a marked difference. Ukrainian teachers and volunteer teachers at the Institute would comment on this too. The same group would be much… not ruder, but muc blunter at stages, and harder to control when there was a Ukrainian teacher as opposed to when there was an English teacher, which I thought was an interesting dynamic. I guess it’s probably just because they’re less expectant that an English person would ever really want to help, so they’re much more gracious in a way… Very beneficial for me when I was teaching them! But on the whole, they are very excited to be there and yeah, it’s been a really pleasant experience teaching a class who are so motivated and always did their homework and stuff like that.

MP. — In terms of the actual syllabus, I’m interested to know, kind of in as much detail as possible, in terms of what you’ve chosen to teach them, maybe in terms of grammar versus culture versus useful practical vocabulary, how do you decide on the syllabus?

IS. — Well, we have a core, which is a course book, Roadmap, which is honestly quite good. I’d never worked with that textbook before, but it’s really helpful, well-structured. So that’s kind of like a base, a backbone for everything that is going on. There are lots of texts, videos, audio materials. It’s very useful and helps to do everything quite efficiently.

But very often students would bring different phrases, everyday reality, the cultural things, to the class. One-third of the class is always divided for our discussion of how was our week, how was the weekend, was there anything new that they saw, or they experienced? Very often, as they would be talking, I’d just pick up on things that we discuss later. Then, you know, they’re highly motivated. They’re grownups, and they live in an English-speaking environment, and they bring all the problems that they have with the language or with understanding. We just try to solve them straight away during the lesson. That part is not planned, so that, very often, is just a response to the issues that they had.

AF. — I’ve had a group jointly with another teacher and just in order to save us over-complicating things and going over the same material, we’ve mostly stuck to the script of the book, using the framework of each lesson in the book, then we decided to do things that are slightly different. So, for example, the lesson I taught on Sunday, we had the big topic of ‘great sporting moments’ and then there was a grammar exercise, a reading exercise. Then, as we approached the end of that, I asked the people in the class, “is there something that you all would like to particularly focus on? Is there a grammatical thing that we’ve done recently?”

They’ve particularly been keen to do the conditional and the second conditional in more depth. So, then we’ve gone specifically to exercises from the book or I’ve gone up to the board and written out in pen a few different examples explaining the differences, then their literal translations into Russian or Ukrainian, just to sort of help them get it into their heads, the situations which merit the use of one or the other and how to understand it.

There’ve been specific times when they’ve been a little bit confused around contractions and what contractions could mean. It’s obvious to native English speakers what “could’ve” would mean in a spoken context, and “should’ve”, and all these sorts of contractions. We’ve gone through “would have” and “could have” and all these sorts of things that often are mumbled in English. And we’ve done speaking and listening comprehension of things which are much more informal, not through the book, just me saying a sentence and asking them to say it back to me or write it down and then show me that they’ve got it right.

The majority of it is using the framework of the book and then basically if something comes up that they’re less comfortable with from our lesson, then we’ll do a little bit extra on that, usually at the end of the lesson or at the beginning of the next one.

MP. — Is there a kind of, let me think of the right word for this, a sort of support network within the institute? If things come up that are about, for example, administrative issues, can you then pass the students on to other people who can help them deal with it, to other people within the Institute, beyond the teaching side of things?

IS. — I don’t know how this situation was treated during the first term, but as soon as I joined I know we had safeguarding officers. These are separate people whose function is to conduct the safeguarding, but usually the students bring certain problems to our discussions like, “I need a new flat”, “I need to book tickets”, or “What’s the amount of money I can bring in through the border?” So, there are all these questions, but very often they are discussed and solved within the group.

Each group have their WhatsApp chat, which is not very professional! It’s more like a family discussion there all the time. There are all these problems that are solved within the group. Usually they’re not brought to the administration of the Ukrainian Institute, because I know that they’re overwhelmed with tasks of their own. So far, we have not faced any situations that need more involvement.

MP. — So, are there teachers in the WhatsApp group as well?

IS. — Yes. Very often, students watch videos they come across on Instagram, for example like, “Oh. See this word can have different shades of meaning”, or “Quid is another way to say pound!” They would share all that information in WhatsApp. Then, they share messages that they received in case they do not understand anything, or I remember that we were studying, with one of the groups, we studied tag questions. When we were discussing that, they were like, “It just doesn’t sound right”, because in Ukrainian we do not have all these different types of tags, we just say “or not”, or “yes”, or “really”. We do not bother with all these auxiliaries, so it’s just, to Ukrainians, something difficult to process, especially the tag part. I remember, as soon as we finished that, the next day, one of the ladies, she texted, “Oh. I was invited to the park, and my friend kept saying those tag questions!” This effect of the blue car—as soon as you know it exists, you keep noticing that it happens. So that’s the type of information they share very often in the WhatsApp.

MP. — In terms of structuring the teaching around practicalities, the needs of the students. From the beginning, were you always asking the students if there were specific things they needed, if there were specific things they felt maybe they were weaker with and needed more help with?

AF. — Yeah, definitely. I mean, so it goes back a little bit to what I was saying with the first group I had, they were less used to this sort of style of teaching. I guess for them it had been a much more structured education during the Soviet Union and there were less opportunities for you to make the syllabus slightly more bespoke. For the first group, it was mostly survival English. When you move to a place at a certain age, there’s not really an expectation you’ll ever learn the language fluently. So, it is being aware that your aim with the classes is really just to get to a stage where life is as comfortable as it possibly can be as a refugee in a far-flung country. So, it was doing stuff like, “Look, in your daily life, what are the situations you come into which present the biggest problems?” and then we can sort of do specific things. For example, coffee shops came up quite a bit. They didn’t know what to ask for or how to ask for it or how to pay. So, we did role plays, oftentimes, and I’d sort of tell them multiple ways that they could ask for it and multiple ways that they might be asked for what coffee they’d want or what drink they’d want or whatever. That was one way that we’d sort of cater it to them. But I think the most effective times came when I moved away from asking them the broad question of “what do you all want to focus on?” and then maybe narrowed it down into “in your life, can you tell me one incident where the language barrier has presented a problem and tell me is there something we can do to focus on fixing that?”

When I learned a language, I always wanted to learn it perfectly, but in reality, that’s not really the aim for these learners. It’s understanding that there’s a different goal there at the end and it’s not about using perfect grammatical forms the whole way through. It’s really just about getting your meaning across and being understood and understanding what people are saying around you.

MP. — I like your mention of survival English, giving that key language toolkit, but at the same time in your teaching practice, how much space is there for creativity in the classroom? Obviously, you have this focus of what is necessary, what is purely practical, but is there space for fun stuff as well?

AF. — Yeah, there definitely is. We try and keep it light in the class. It’s an hour and a half class (though we’ll usually take a break), but once we’ve gotten through the lesson—and even as we’re going through the lesson, if it’s a smaller class, especially with the second group I’m now doing—you can have a bit of a laugh and a joke. It is not really a strict atmosphere in the classroom at all. On top of that, oftentimes they’ll come in with questions because I’ll always say, “Look, if there’s something that you feel like you can’t ask anyone else, this is not just the space for serious questions about grammatical forms.” They’ll come in and they’ll ask me how to say, “I’m very displeased with you”, but in slightly more vulgar ways, or they’ll ask for slightly more colloquial forms for… well, anything you can imagine basically that isn’t sort of in the textbook, let’s just say! Sometimes the lessons are sort of punctuated with questions to that effect and then we try and keep it light by moving it around as much as possible, making sure that everyone’s taking part in the lesson. It’s hard to say concrete things but there’s a quite friendly atmosphere where everyone feels comfortable asking questions even if they are a bit daft or whatever, especially if they’re daft half the time.

IS. — There must be that balance. When we start something big, something new, like conditionals for example, you cannot have much fun when you are just in the part of explaining that. But when it gets to practice, then I do try to make it creative and fun for them. Even speaking about conditionals, we try to invent the situations, like what would I do if I had one million pounds or if I won the lottery, we had these different conversations with imaginary situations.

In one group, a B2‑group, we actually agreed that lessons are our way to escape from reality. And we do try to have fun there, because very often we’d come there in the morning, and we could not even say good morning, because all of us knew that the morning was not good. After another bombing, another piece of bad news from back home, and we’ll just discuss, acknowledge, and then we’ll just escape to the English studies and it actually helps a lot, them and me. Then, it’s another reason for being more creative and to have more fun during the lesson.

MP. — Iryna, as a Ukrainian person, do you feel that that changes the situation for you, that you are also displaced as well? What do you think that gives to you, in terms of your ability to teach these people?

IS. — It’s like I am on the same page as them, as far as background emotions go. I kind of have a bit better context that I know what kind of spirits they’ll come in, in the morning, because I follow the same news. I know what regions they are from, and it is like it gives me additional context to know what is going on there, because I know. Even if you live here and you are interested in the situation in Ukraine, you’ll still not have that. Being native, it just gives you a bit better understanding. That’s all. But on the other side, I think that if they have—probably Alex would approve or disapprove this idea—but I think that once they have a British teacher, they just switch to that English learning mode faster, whereas with me, they’ll feel like they need to discuss the situation back home, and it takes a bit of time from the lesson.

MP. — What is the importance, if there is an importance, of IT, digital technology, in your teaching practice?

AF. — I have found that the IT stuff is useful for the listening practice, but to be honest with you, I just usually think it’s easier, because it saves us having to mess around with the passwords and everything, just to go to the back of the book when there’s a listening exercise and read the script out to them. I’ve done it with the computer but usually I find just reading the script allows me to cater it to the level that they’re at a bit better. I can go faster or slower than they would have on the CD. I think it’s usually a bit easier like that.

But there are little bits of digital elements. Every once in a while, I’ll ask if they’ve been watching a TV show or I’ll say no homework this week, but if you can watch some English TV and then tell me about it the next day or the next week or whatever. That’s probably the extent of the digital. We don’t do as much on laptops or computers or anything like that. And I never asked them to do homework on computers, which is probably just more being aware of the age demographic of the class as much as anything.

IS. — So obviously, we use Zoom a lot. All the breakout rooms. I do love them, because they do help to separate people into different groups, and you do not care about the noise, how loud anybody speaks or what topics they discuss. They have this privacy, and you can just monitor from time to time, whereas in the face-to-face, it’s a bit more challenging to organize. Also, I have recently discovered Kahoot! I like it a lot. It just gives a certain spark to the process.

Also, we use YouTube a lot. I mean, the amount of material, I can’t even say. They’re different, and we always manage to find something that would support the material that we have learned. As soon as we’re in the UK, in London, there are lots of vloggers that offer all the up-to-date and very current materials with very new and fresh language. We try to use that. They use it for self-study. They’re following lots of teachers on Instagram, and they share that as well. I’ve just realized they never talked about Facebook, so probably their segment is Ukrainian speaking. There aren’t many English texts or videos there. That’s probably it.

MP. — Are there common linguistic problems that you encounter in your teaching, just especially obviously with the starters? Is there anything that’s coming from the Ukrainian background, particularly difficult in learning English, just in a general sense?

IS. — Yeah. Of course, because like all people that just start learning English, and I guess still as they reach B2 or C1, they still use Ukrainian semantics, so it’s practically like a Ukrainian skeleton with some layers of English on top of that. That’s something that we work on very often. So, there are huge phonetical differences. Ukrainians do not really care about the length of vowels, for example. In English it may really change the meaning of the word, and in Ukrainian, no, it doesn’t matter how long the vowel is. The word will still be the same. Then, different constructions, like gerund, for example. Or articles. We do not have this part of speech at all, so that’s something really new for them to learn, like, “Oh!”

AF. — In the first group, understandably they’d often struggle with basic verb conjugation. You’d have, “he play football” come up all the time, stuff like that. We were getting there towards the end, but that persisted as a problem. Questions like when to use the definite or indefinite article persisted in that group and persisted in the higher-level group as well at B1+. I find that tense is always pretty difficult. Russian only has two proper tenses and then a synthetic third one, so then it’s a bit difficult for them to understand the nuances of all of our different tenses. Much like what you get with Spanish speakers or Romance speakers who would say stuff like, “I play football five years”, because that’s how it would be in their language. Those are sort of minor ones, because everyone can really understand what they mean. But there’ve been issues with tense that have sort of confused them and meant that they’re not making complete sense, and it is difficult to understand what they mean like that.

I think pronunciation can also be difficult and specifically stress on words. English and Russian and Ukrainian have very different sort of stress conventions and so there’d often be difficulties. Oh, and also the pronunciation of the phoneme /θ/ – there was just absolutely no chance! But I think on the whole they are picking things up without too many issues.

MP. — Is there anything that you find difficult about your role as the teacher?

AF. — Not particularly. I think it’s been a bit frustrating at times, especially after having come from the first group where there was extremely strong turnout and on the rare occasion they were not going to be able to make it to a class, there’d be a message in advance. With my current class of students, it is quite often that they just don’t turn up and don’t message and don’t turn up for weeks on end. And so that’s been a little bit disheartening in a way but obviously, I don’t really know what they’re going through. I don’t really know what’s happening with them, so there’s a lot more understanding than there would be for, say, another group. I’d say that’s probably the main one, if I’m honest, was that it was nicer with the first group because they were all quite good friends and for them it was a really nice opportunity to socialize, especially on the Sunday evening classes. They would all stay for a while in the teaching area and just sort of have a coffee and have a chat and occasionally, under the table, pour each other a drink or two.

MP. — Are there assessment points for the students?

IS. — We do not do that. They see their own progress. Like I said, I just hope that they’ll find their very first videos, and they can listen to themselves because as soon as I see the progress, I always tell them, “See? We couldn’t do that before, but now you are confident in that.” Now you can hear, can recognize this or that structure, but we do not have any marks or any other assessment.

I have a very funny student. He’s 57, I think. He’s in the starters group, and he’s very diligent. He’s always ready. All the home tasks are done. Even if I do not ask, he’ll take a picture and send it to the WhatsApp group, and he always asks for some type of assessment, so I bring him stickers, and he’s very happy with it.

MP. — Obviously, as you said already, you have the morning where it’s not a good morning, and things need to be discussed or will be discussed. Are there any other practical effects given the ever-evolving nature of the situation? Do you get more students joining? Do you have students that are absent if it’s been a particularly bad situation in their hometown, for example? How does this affect the classroom?

AF. — Yeah, definitely. It is a very common thing. There are obviously different situations. I tutored a few people in my first group who were from the now occupied East, a few people from Mariupol, and obviously Mariupol doesn’t exist anymore, so they don’t really go back. There’s nothing to go back to, and also the land they would go back to now is occupied by Russia and so they wouldn’t be able to get there. But the people who’ve come from places a bit safer like Kyiv or Kherson now or Lviv or Dnipro, all of these sorts of places are not safe, obviously, but there’s a possibility of going back. Often, they go back to put their affairs in order or they go back to speak to family or see family. That is quite common, and often people let me know that they’re not going to be in their classes for three or four weeks. And obviously a lot of people, less so my first group than in my second group, they have careers and they work and they’ve continued working for the same Ukrainian companies that they had been working for whilst in Ukraine. And so, they’ve gone back in some cases just because they needed to be in the office for a few weeks to deal with whatever’s come up, before coming back to the UK a lot of the time.

IS. — No, no, I wouldn’t say so: even those that need to go back to Ukraine for different reasons. We had one lady who missed almost all the term because she went back to Kharkiv. Kharkiv is not the safest place, to be honest. She joined us for online lessons. She’s in her middle 60s. Ukraine is two hours ahead, so we started our evening lessons online at seven, and it was nine for her. She was like, “I already had coffee. I do not want to miss this!” That was a highlight, something she was looking forward to. I remember the first time, I was tickled to death, because she had red lipstick and a necklace on. It was like an event she attended. I mean, the situation itself, it doesn’t influence the fact of their presence or their involvement, not at all. On the contrary, I think that they have that possibility to have tea after the classes, in the lobby they’ll have the coffee and some cookies, and they’ll have a few hours just to stay there and talk to each other. I know that they are looking forward to that meeting every, every week, and they spend two, three hours there, just talking. For them, I think it’s a kind of therapy, so we have this official English part that gives a reason to show up, and then an unofficial part where they just talk, share, discuss.