Rania’s Third Space

Hi everybody!
I finally sat down to put on paper –rather on screen- what this third space means for me. I’m really surprised it took me all that time to get started. I usually jump into the things I have to do. But this time I kept postponing it. This has surely been a very busy period yet again I was a bit numb to express in words all the great feelings I had during my stay in Lancaster. Correction. I should say I still have because I still carry this third space thing with me months later in my ‘natural habitat’.
This continuation is even more evident since I started teaching my classes again. Everyday I use something of my experience there. I’m still in my third space. It’s like a parallel universe. I really needed this course. I felt I had to plunge into the British culture, contemporary life, authentic situations, real-life language. And I got it all, plus the excitement of sharing the same anxieties with people who are so different.
I cherish the time we spent chatting in our kitchen or walking around Lancaster. There was a double procedure: explore a place and at the same time connect with people. I also treasure the time I spent there on my own absorbing pictures and impressions analyzing feelings and experiences. I distinctly remember the point I started thinking in English when for example I was getting ready to go out choosing what to wear or organizing what I had to do for the day. Ah! I also found amusing that on my first day there, while shopping, I addressed Tanya in greek. You see, as she was not English she had to understand me. But it was all Greek to her.
I didn’t want to read the other people’s accounts because I wanted to be as unaffected by their attitudes as possible. However, I think that it’s difficult to have 26 totally different interpretations of the same experience because we all share the same ground. English is not our mother tongue, we all love teaching it, we all care about getting better at it and motivating our students is an important issue for all of us.
Teaching is a difficult job but teaching a foreign language is really hard because the subject you teach is also the tool for teaching it. I’m sure this course has helped us a lot to deal with the uniqueness of our trade.