ABOUT ME
I'm Silvina, a passionate and dynamic ELF teacher. My teaching career began in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I was born and raised.
As I started learning English when I was 8, by the time I was 15 my teacher Sandra offered me the chance to teach Young Learners at her small language school in Lanús, our neighborhood. She was the first person who trusted me and transmitted her love for teaching. I remember setting a table in a small room at home to help teens from my neighborhood pass their English exams at school... Good old times...!
As soon as I finished high school, I entered the Teaching Training College and then, after some interruptions and 8 years of working in administration to afford my studies, I became an official English teacher.
In 2009 I got my first teaching job in a private primary school in Buenos Aires City and two years later, I started working in a state primary school nearby. At the same time, I taught Business English in-company and, by doing so, I realized I wanted to continue teaching adults.
However, working for the state school allowed me to get a Fulbright Scholarship to teach Spanish at Albright College, Pennsylvania, USA for two semesters. It was definitely a life-changing experience and a springboard for moving to Spain in 2015, right after I got back to Buenos Aires. Surprisingly, teaching Spanish was the most challenging teaching experience ever! Even though I'm a Spanish native speaker and a qualified teacher, Spanish grammar is so complex...let alone the subjunctive.... that I devoted countless hours to preparing PPP and materials for my students.
By the time I was living in the States, I had gotten a BA in English and I was about to finish my MA in TEFL.
Once in Spain I worked in-company for a big language school in Madrid and Barcelona until 2018 when my son was born. I came back to teaching in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, but I decided to try online. As my adult students come from different fields and backgrounds, it was difficult for me to find materials that suited their interests and needs, and I used to spend endless hours looking for resources on the internet. This downside turned into an upside when I started to make my own materials and discovered my passion for materials writing. In September 2020 I took the 3-month NILE course on Materials development, which was an insightful experience and the starting point for this blog.
In order to continue improving my worksheets, in July 2021 I took an online course at University of Oxford, Creating your own ELT materials, taught by the experienced materials writer John Hughes. I strongly recommend it to teachers who are willing to start writing their own materials or improve the existing ones. After all, as teachers we're all materials writers but we aren't aware of It!
This is all for now! Thanks for reading my bio and using my materials!
Silvina
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Feel free to contact me if you...
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... see typos or mistakes in my worksheets.
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... try out my materials and you'd like to share some feedback.
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... would like to start sharing your materials and don't know where to start or what to do (...been there!)
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---want some feedback on your own materials. Happy to help!
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Join me on Linkedin: Silvina Mascitti
Facebook page: EFL Creative Ideas