Our search committee for ESL Writing teachers completed the applicants’ interviews. However, unlike previous searches, we all felt completely confident in our ratings of the candidates. This was because of one part of the interview process that we had recently added.

Research of mainstream college instructors at our college showed that they expect students to have control of the grammar in their papers. Thus, our ESL Program realized the importance of selecting candidates who understood how to deal with grammar in the writing context. For this reason, we developed a part of our interview process that has been very effective for helping us choose the most qualified Writing teachers.

The first part of the interviews typically starts with questions like these:

• What’s your philosophy of language teaching and learning?
• What made you decide to become an ESL teacher?
• What do you think are the most important qualities for a successful ESL teacher?
• How do you motivate students in a writing class?

Then, in the second part, we give the applicants a paper with two exercises. We have found these to be very effective in determining applicants’ ability to apply their grammar knowledge to helping students write.

The first exercise starts with a couple of sentences which contain typical ESL grammar mistakes. We also include a “possible” explanation of what the mistake is. By doing this, they can see that their explanations for the remaining eight items can be just one sentence.

Notice, we don’t ask them to explain the grammar rule. However, we can get a sense about the applicant’s knowledge of basic grammar terminology like auxiliary verbs, passive, transitional expressions, dependent clauses, subordinator, and gerunds.

Then before doing Exercise 2, we give them a couple of minutes to read and formulate their response.

This exercise provides the applicants a quick, relatively stress-free opportunity to demonstrate their approach and to open up a discussion with us about an important aspect of teaching writing.  No resume or letter of recommendation could do this.

There are different approaches teachers take to dealing with grammar in a paragraph; there isn’t necessarily the “perfect” one. However, how applicants responded to the exercise has raised some red flags. For example, some applicants merely edited the mistakes:

This type of approach clearly indicated that the applicants probably had little pedagogical background and/or experience teaching writing.  This doesn’t mean that the applicants would automatically be disqualified. They could still be hired, but we would want to do some training before assigning them a Writing class.

Here is a link to the two exercises: Teacher interviews Grammar Ex

For more about interviewing for ESL teaching positions, see • “What would you say if you were interviewing for an ESL teaching position?” (A question from a reader) 

For more about dealing with grammar in the writing context, see • Most Effective Technique for Marking Grammar on Essays to Develop Self-Editing Skills

David Kehe
Faculty Emeritus

*About the free-download materials. During my 40 years of teaching ESL, I have had many colleagues who were very generous with their time, advice and materials. These downloads are my way of paying it forward.