Turkey Confidential

Turkey Confidential is a series written for English teachers especially "New Teachers of English as a Second Language" and " English Teacher to-be"s, aiming to view the challenges, conflicts, the positive and the negative sides of being an English teacher in Turkey.

I was lucky, I knew that I was going to be an English Teacher when I was 13. How about my colleagues in Turkey?
Istanbul University-English Language and Literature Department is famous for its low grades their students get to pass, it is very very difficult to get one of those AAs there. It's not about studying all the novels word by word, reading all the critics about them or having the talent to write your essays with a unique point of view or anything. Honestly, I don't know what the academics and the professors are actually looking for, may be it is the feeling you need to give them with a quarter of a sheet of paper that you are capable of resolving the tricks hidden in the novels and reflecting them in a highly academic level. I have always been a hardworking student but those years remain a challenging part of my academic life.
I remember the last days of the last semestre of 2004, from about a hundred students only very few of them knew exactly what they were going to be doing after they graduted.
Yes, unlike the private universities in Turkey there were more than a hundred students in the lecture hall where you had to come early to get one of those seats in the front, otherwise you may not have the chance to hear the lecturer. And I think that the strangest thing in our education was you could graduate without opening your mouth to utter a few words during the lessons. I had, a few times! Therefore, most of us had a huge gap
between our writing capacity and the speaking level. Can you imagine; We were going to be teaching it soon!

What are the job opportunities you have as an English Language and Literature graduate? You could be many things; First of all, you could be an English teacher, a translator, an interpreter, an editor for a magazine, a sales expert in import- export companies, you could work at the consulate, or almost anywhere requiring fluent English. Nontheless, not surprisingly, most of my classmates became teachers for certain reasons. What do you think the reasons are? The teaching profession is a wide field, what are the areas you could teach in Turkey, in what conditions? The answers will be on my next post...