 Typically the idea came to me when I went to a conference in Paraguay in 2011 and Hugh Deller actually presented the idea and I thought it was very interesting coming from him because he is a major speaker. Just to give a little bit of a background story on my personal life. I was born in the U.S. but so a little bit of hypocritical aspect for me saying that. But I was raised in Brazil from the age of six and my introduction actually to the language of English as a more formal aspect was through EFL learning. So actually both my parents are English teachers, my mom is Brazilian, my dad is American and I was able to identify the difference between my mother being an English teacher and how she came across the language learning environment and my dad who just went to Brazil and decided to teach English not having any academic background whatsoever and he would come with different ideas as to teaching English apart from my mom who would actually go home and really study and really dedicate herself because she thought that that was the best thing to do. So I'm coming from those perspectives. Of course I'm coming from the idea that the non-native speakers are the ones that actually have to learn the language and they understand how students actually struggle from the environment of the classroom and the native speakers that I'm considering that are the ones that simply for the fact that they know the language that they just want to go ahead and teach it you know and they don't actually do a lot of research and dedicate to it not doesn't apply to anybody here. Just to give you like a heads up so you don't kill me afterwards. So the idea of non-natives and native speakers so I'm picturing the scenario so you have been assigned a book to teach and you have just prepared a lesson with some difficult terms and with new grammatical application so what does a non-native speaker teacher do and what does a native speaker teacher what do they actually do. So coming from just wait okay so possible outcome so the native speaker goes ahead and reads the text beforehand understands the overall meaning of the text okay so if you consider a more advanced group perhaps highlights the parts so worthy of debate so okay so we should talk about this and students won't be interested in this aspect and chooses a couple of examples to to work on some grammar issues that may arise during the discussion and what does a non-native speaker do so reads the text beforehand understands the overall meaning of the text so far no difference there takes notes on new vocabulary even vocabulary that they don't know or or they would struggle with searches for new vocabulary in the dictionary and even comes up with examples and probably even translations or phonemic representation so the students can actually engage in that aspect establishes a practice with the new words and goes on to focus on the grammar goes to the grammar bank and chooses a couple of examples of the grammar given and so on and so forth you know so a little bit of a more like enthusiastic way okay so like I said from the native speaker that just goes and like waltzes in the classroom and just says hello good morning I'm here okay so problems faced by non-natives so I don't have enough Lexis so those are some things that even me nowadays I started teaching Portuguese and I struggle with that okay so maybe I don't I know how the language works but like from speaking it but I don't know actually how to explain that so I have to my English isn't as good as a natives related to pronunciation and details within the language I might get caught out right so what do I do if a student asks me what's this I'm not sure I can trust my intuition right and monolingual classes are different from multi-label classes so even if you're in a country like I taught a lot in Brazil so I had the students that all of them were Brazilians basically and so the environment is quite different now problems faced by native teachers so this comes just to compare I don't know what the present perfect continuance is so when I was doing SELTA I actually had a lot of teachers come and they were Irish and they they knew how to speak the language of course but they didn't when it came to grammar and the structure of the language that was the class that they were all on the edge of their seats like wow this is so amazing I've heard of this verb tense before but I only know how to use it I know the word but my students don't understand my explanation or my accent when I translate my students speak in L1 so I don't know what they're talking about if they're talking about me and some aspects of my culture are different from my students so even that aspect comes comes across now the the reason that I that I thought of this is that even when I was listening to Hugh Deller he answered the particular question did you did learning a foreign language help you become a better EFL teacher and what he said was undoubtedly so yes this this in turn made me reflect on the problems my students were having attaining anything like a similar degree of fluency and made me start to cast a critical eye on some aspects of the ELT as a separation of grammar and Lexis and general obsession with sentence level rather than text level language text level language the reluctance of materials to recycle conversations and the physics topics and so on so when he he was talking about his experience when he went to China and when he started teaching English there and he had to learn Chinese and he started struggling like his students were struggling learning English right so he started like he took a step back and he said okay so I actually have to assess the whole situation differently and I really have to focus on how I'm learning Chinese and how my students are going to learn English and so I think that whenever you're learning another language be it Italian Japanese Chinese Irish for that matter you really start analyzing your own language and it makes it easier for you to compare I teaching here in Ireland actually gave me the opportunity to teach a lot of Brazilian students but don't get me wrong I don't use Portuguese in the classroom but at the same time what I do is I actually come up with words that are similar in Portuguese so Latin based words and they understand it far better and I also I try to use the structure of the language so that they understand where I'm coming from and they are able to differentiate between English and Portuguese and for Latin based languages such as French sorry French Italian Spanish they are able to compare and contrast and I also had the opportunity to go through the structure of other languages such as Chinese Korean and Japanese and try to tell the students okay so you don't have this in your language but you have something very similar to this in your language so it's the all about assessing and addressing their issues and and how they are learning the language and also telling them a little bit of your story in your background when you started learning a language so that they actually relax in the classroom they say ah okay you've been in my situation once so you are able to to see where I'm coming from and the struggles and everything I think that that's basically it thank you