FAQ time.
What is my job? I'm a "university teacher" - yliopiston opettaja. I teach out of the uni's language center, which serves multiple colleges at UTU. They don't call them colleges here, though...faculties? I am still learning all the different terminology. Language studies are a required part of most degrees, and so students can take classes from the language center in English, Swedish, Finnish (the three main ones) as well as Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, German, etc. Obviously, I teach English courses.
What kinds of classes do I teach? This semester, I'm teaching English Academic and Professional Skills (both first- and second-year), Academic Presentation Skills (for grad students who need to present their research at conferences), and Basic Academic Writing (for MA students).
How does this compare to what I did before? The EAPS classes are very much like the ones I used to teach at AUS, but they're more intensive. Similarly, I've taught presentation skills and writing before, but never in their own class. I feel like I had a really good foundation coming into this job, but I wasn't so set in my ways (or too good at what I did) that I couldn't mold myself to the curriculum here.
What else is different about my current job? Well, aside from the terminology, almost everything else! Some days it seems like the only similarity is that this is a university and so was AUS. The semester and course systems work very differently here, for example. The American system usually has two semesters per year, with most courses running for 3hrs/week for 17 weeks (approximately). If a course was fewer or more credits than another, it might meet fewer or more times per week but still run for the whole semester.
Here, if a course is shorter, it just stops sooner. October is the busiest month for me with all my courses running throughout. A typical week for now has me teaching 3 hours per day except for Tuesdays, when I teach 4.5 hours per day (those are 4 and 6 academic hours, by the way - 90 minutes is the normal teaching period length (2 academic hours)).
However, at the end of October, one of my courses finishes. Then one by one, they peter out until mid-December, when I'll only have one or two courses left on my schedule.
Who are my students? As I said, the language center serves multiple faculties, so my students come from all kinds of majors. This semester, I mostly have students from the Humanities and Social Sciences, at least in the undergrad courses (the grad courses are filled with any kind of doctoral work you could imagine!). I have a soft spot for my Logopedics students - they call it Logopedics in this country and Speech Language Pathology everywhere else in the world. They share my linguistic brain and it makes for a more engaging classroom for me. Then there's my Philosophy students, who I understand are saying very smart things but when they're done talking, I have nothing intelligent to say in response.
But don't Finnish people already speak English really well? I've been asked this question a lot. The answer is: sure they do! With a few qualifications.
First, not all Finns speak English. Far from it. Many have basic competency but it depends on where you are and what the situation is.
Furthermore, "speaking" English is a far cry from writing an academic paper in English (or giving a presentation, or conducting academic research in a their field of study, etc.). Those are particular sets of skills for specialized contexts, and they're not skills you can pick up by joining a conversation club or watching a lot of American TV.
In addition, "really well" may not be well enough. The course outcome goals are often tied to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages - B2 to C1 level of proficiency in most of my courses. You'd be surprised how "fluent" a B1 can come across in conversation, but flounder in more difficult situations.
Finally, even those Finns who do well in English in some skills (reading, writing, speaking, or listening) might be weak in others.
Have I ever used a MacGyver reference in class and my students understood it? YES. I DID. AND THEY DID. I was blown away.
