I had reached a stage in my career where family responsibilities were waning and, more to the point, I was getting itchy feet. As a chemist, I had worked briefly in industry before moving into further education where I gained many years teaching and training experience.

However, English had always interested me, so 2005 saw me armed with a very old PGCE and a brand new TEFL qualification (from Global English!) and scanning the ads for overseas posts.

Ignoring ‘normal’ destinations (Spain, Greece, etc) I quickly zoomed in on ‘Teaching English to Aviators in Kazakhstan’. The scientific bent was enough. I applied, and within a few weeks arrived at Almaty International Airport complete with hastily scanned Russian phrase book.

The risks were high from the outset. The (UK) Company employing me was amongst the worst imaginable, the living conditions were dreadful, the pollution levels appalling, corruption and TB rife, and the crime rate unrecorded. Knowing all this, I went anyway, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

I lived in a crumbling ex-Soviet apartment block along with my Kazakh neighbours, grumbling about the mafia and increasing prices along with the best of them! I learnt to shop ‘Kazakh style’, fish for food, escape to the mountains, yell at the driver in Russian, and have the time of my life with some of the nicest people on the planet.

The work was straightforward and not at all demanding, so I quickly widened my circle of contacts in the aviation world, even managing to infiltrate a UK military base for a crash course in Air Traffic Control! The experiences rolled in, both in the UK and back in Kazakhstan where I returned for more assignments, often spanning months at a time. My reputation for teaching aviators was warming up and a request to attend a meeting at OUP led to the publication of the Oxford Express Series English for Aviation in 2008.

Now back in the UK I am adding English for Academic Purposes to my portfolio and hope to be travelling again before too long.

For more information on English for Aviation see:

http://www.oup.com/eltnew/local/global/promotion/express_series_aviation?cc=global

For more information on the course that Sue took, click here:

http://www.global-english.com/tesol-level2-bus.htm