Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.
With the price of just about everything going up during inflation,
we thought we'd bring our prices down.
So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer,
which is apparently a thing.
Mint Mobile unlimited.
Premium wireless.
I'm going to get 30, 30, 30, 30, 30,
I'm going to get 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20,
I'm going to get 15, 15, 15, 15, just 15 bucks a month.
So give it a try at MintMobile.com slash switch.
$45 up front for three months plus taxes and fees,
from our eight renew customers for limited time,
unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month,
so it's full turns at MintMobile.com.
Hello listeners, this is just a reminder
that I'm doing a free online workshop.
On Thursday, the 18th of April at 10 o'clock in the morning,
UK time, it's part of the Advanced English Summit,
a series of 10 workshops by 10 different teachers
on a variety of subjects.
The overall aim is to help you progress
to an advanced level of English and beyond.
The topic of my presentation is vocabulary.
It's called how to really learn vocabulary
and not just stare at word lists.
And if you'd like to attend, you can,
it's completely free, everybody's welcome,
but you do need to sign up.
So just check the link in the description of this episode.
Click the link, then enter your email address,
then confirm the email that you'll receive,
and then after that you will get all the details
of the summit, the program of all the different presentations,
including mine and you'll get a Zoom link,
so you can join the talk and watch it as it happens live.
If you can't attend because 10 in the morning,
UK time is not convenient for you,
then still sign up because you will get access
to a recording of my presentation afterwards.
Okay, so Thursday, the 18th of April,
10 o'clock in the morning, UK time.
How to really learn vocabulary, that's my talk.
And so click the link in the description
to sign up to get the details, and I'll see you there.
You're listening to Luke's English podcast.
For more information, visit teacheloop.co.uk.
Hello, listeners, welcome to the podcast.
You're all right, how's it going?
You're all right, mate?
Yeah, good.
Let me tell you about what you can expect from this episode.
So in this one, you're going to hear me in conversation
with Elena Muto-no-no, who is a business coach
for language teachers, and we're going to talk about
learning English, teaching English as a non-native speaker,
and managing your career as an online language teacher.
Here's some information about Elena from her website,
ElenaMuto-no-no.com.
So Elena is a seasoned business coach
who helps online language teachers move beyond one-to-one
lessons and create a smarter system
that lets you teach on your own terms
and guarantees a stable income.
So she helps teachers to develop their career,
to manage their career, to work out how to continue being
a language teacher in a sustainable way, okay?
Because being a teacher, being a language teacher,
being an English teacher, in my case,
although this is wonderful, it can be draining,
it can drain the energy from you,
unless you manage your time carefully, okay?
Now for so many English teachers,
this work that we do, helping people learn English,
this is our livelihood.
For some people, teaching English is a sort of a holiday job,
or it's a sort of a bit of a fun thing
that you can do while traveling, right?
That does happen, you know, you hear about people
who teach a bit of English on their year off
or something like that.
But for so many teachers, this is our job,
this is our career, and this is our livelihood,
and doing this work long term in a sustainable way
requires careful time management,
a business strategy that works,
the right work life balance,
and a good sort of healthy mindset
to make sure that we avoid burnout and exhaustion,
which does happen to a lot of teachers.
Burn out, that's basically where you just use all
of your energy resources and you're just exhausted,
and you're unable to get the energy back
in order to be able to do the work properly
and you just kind of flat line.
It's a horrible experience.
I've managed to avoid it most of the time.
Sometimes I feel a bit burnt out,
and I need to take time off and find ways to get my energy back.
But it's, I mean, obviously, people in most careers
have to consider these things, managing energy levels,
but in this episode, we're gonna talk about this
from the teacher's point of view.
So we talk about all of this,
but I also wanted to ask Alaina about her own story
and her background, because English is not her first language,
and she's progressed from being a learner of English
to being the inspiring business coach that she is today.
And so the plan is to talk about learning English,
being an English teacher, when English isn't your first language,
taking control of your career as a teacher,
and the various complex mindset and strategic changes
that you need to make in order to manage your learning,
your career and your life.
So just that, which seems like a lot, doesn't it?
So this should be interesting for you
if you're a learner of English,
because Alaina talks about her experiences
of doing what you're doing,
but also this should be interesting for language teachers,
and not just English teachers,
but teachers of any language, really.
And this includes people at any stage of their teaching career,
if you're just considering becoming a teacher,
including a non-native teachers of English,
if you're just considering doing that,
or if you're already doing that,
and you're in the early stages of your career,
or if you've been doing it for some time,
and you're still attempting to deal with the challenges
that this work poses.
So hopefully this will be interesting for everyone.
Okay, so anyway, I've just given you an idea
of what you can expect from this episode
and the conversation in it.
I think it's really interesting.
I really enjoyed talking to Alaina.
I'll talk to you again briefly at the end of the conversation,
just to give you some information
about how to find out more about Alaina and her work.
But now, let's get started, and here we go.
Luke, thank you so much for having me this exciting.
This is one of like, big dreams come true.
Oh, really?
Yes.
I used to always recommend your podcast to my students
when I was teaching myself,
because I started teaching online in 2010,
and I was constantly looking for materials
and your podcast was on the list.
So yeah.
Well, to be honest, there wasn't a lot of other stuff
at that time.
It's not like all the many different podcasts
for learners of English.
Exactly.
The top there was maybe about three or four.
Yeah, there weren't too many, all right.
Yeah, not too many.
Yeah, yeah.
But anyway, so, all right.
Now, you interviewed me last week for your podcast,
and that was interesting.
And I got to kind of, you know,
I got to talk about my story of the origin story
of Luke's English podcast and so many other things.
But what I want to do here is talk to you,
because, well, I should say, first of all,
I guess I first heard about you.
I'm not sure how long ago, five, six, seven, eight years ago,
perhaps, I think it was you had a Facebook page,
a sort of support group for teachers.
Yeah, I did, yes.
And also, I think some of my colleagues recommended you to me
as someone I might want to contact.
You know, and I think you had a course for English teachers.
Yeah, yeah.
So I kind of was aware of you then.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've been doing like working with teachers for a minute,
since 2014.
And that was following several years of teaching ESL online
to a mainly Russian speaking audience.
And then after the war started in 2014,
it was really difficult.
I mean, I felt that burden of like, oh, here's what it's like
when your audience is really only one country
and something happens to that one country
and then it just throws everything off.
And yeah, I could no longer do the things that I was doing.
I think at the time I was kind of maybe ready
to try something different, but this really pushed me.
You know, I feel like, yeah, I podcast you
was saying how we often are so reluctant to invite people
to take action.
And we ourselves as human beings are just very reluctant
to take action unless there's something
that just kind of pushes us.
And in my case, it was circumstances
that was like, I think I would have continued teaching
Skype lessons for a while.
But I could no longer do that with the audience
that I had.
It was no longer viable.
And people were going through a lot of turmoil.
And so I had to rethink stuff.
And that's when I began using English
as the language for my marketing and for my content creation.
So you switched from, let's say, a client base
if we can call it that in terms of students.
But if we're talking about this from a sort of business
point of view, you switched from having a client base
that was mainly Russian speakers and you
would communicate with them in Russian.
But then when things.
Yes, and all my marketing, yes, in Russian too.
But then when things got very complicated starting in 2014,
you decided that you couldn't really continue in that way.
And so you decided to open up and do everything in English
and start to reach people from all over the world.
Now, let me just kind of try and go back a little bit.
So I think I've probably done an introduction to this
where I briefly explain what it is that you do.
So people know that you work with online teachers
and find ways to help them manage their careers essentially
and deal with the personal and professional sides of that.
The mindset changes, the strategic stuff.
And so you seem to have gone through various career
changes yourself to get to this point.
So can we go back a bit?
And actually, I want to first of all ask you
about your learning of English yourself, right?
Because you're an English teacher.
Now you're then a teacher trainer, right?
And now you are a sort of business coach for teachers.
So it's not just about how to teach,
but how to manage all the rest of it, the sort of business side.
But let's go all the way back to the beginning.
So you actually a learner of English,
I don't know if you still consider yourself to be or what,
but certainly English is not your first language.
Is that right?
No, it's not.
Yeah, my first language is Russian.
And I spoke, I come from Crimea, which
is in the south of Ukraine.
And so I grew up speaking Russian.
And I took English at school, but it was like very basic.
It's well, one of those like we took,
we had a lot of hours of English, but we couldn't speak it.
And so I getting closer into my high school years,
I started wondering like, what do I want to do
in terms of what I wanted to study?
I really liked arts.
I really liked literature and languages.
And it was really exciting for me.
But doing just Russian language or teaching Russian language
literature was not something that was as exciting as trying
to open up a new world by means of new language.
And so that's how I got into English.
And I thought, well, maybe I could work in my English.
And so at the time, my parents found a tutor for me.
And she worked at a university.
And she was very good.
And we had two lessons a week, two hours each.
So I had old together.
Yeah.
How old were you?
Sorry.
How old were you?
That's all.
I was.
I think I was 15 or 16.
OK.
I was 15.
Yeah.
So I would go after school and do like two hours.
And it was very interesting because she
was preparing me for the test at a university level.
And my English was probably like A1 level for those
families today.
It's just like really just basics.
I did not know much.
And I remember coming to her home
and she put on this audio tape with, I think it was called
Lady Bird Collection.
And it was like one of those stories
where for children, you know, but also for learning.
And I think it was called Secret Garden or something.
And she was like, well, listen to it for about 10 minutes.
And then you tell me what you heard.
And I'm listening to it.
And I hear absolutely nothing.
Like maybe some kind of tiny little words here and there.
But I understand nothing.
I think this is like, and I just feel so embarrassed.
Here I am sitting here.
She's about to teach me.
She's going to figure out how to teach me.
And I have no idea.
And so at the end of it, she asked me,
like did you understand?
I said I didn't understand anything.
It was really, really, really painful.
And I keep it out of that list.
I was crying.
And my dad's like, well, if you don't want to take
lessons with this teacher, we'll find another.
No, I want to take lessons with her.
She seemed to be very knowledgeable.
And I loved her resources.
She had like a ton.
Like you walk into her office.
She had all these books and tapes.
And I thought, yes, I definitely
want to learn with her and from her.
And so that's how I started it.
And I remember one time coming to her classes.
And I overheard somebody else, like a student,
another student before me, speaking to her in English.
And I thought, wow, she's speaking like she's speaking Russian.
Like, I will never be able to do that.
I remember saying this to myself because I was like,
this is just impossible.
Like nobody can do it.
And here we are.
So what happened then between that moment
if you're thinking there's no way I can do this to,
to, you know, what you can do now?
I was a lot of, she, she did a lot of training
and like very intensely.
She worked with me very intensely.
And in the beginning was really, really hard.
She took pretty much a level.
She took me a level up like where I was supposed to be,
but I wasn't.
And then she started giving me the materials
on that level, like reading and listening,
but listening with tape scripts,
they were called at the time.
So she would give me like stories to listen to,
but with the tape script.
So I would first work on the script.
I would translate it and then I would listen
and then I would like try to connect the two.
That was I think the most helpful.
And of course, we worked on pronunciation
and we worked on grammar.
And so because we had a two hour slot,
she could put like a ton of stuff into that class.
And it was really, it was a lot of materials.
In the beginning, I felt like I had to memorize a lot.
And to be able to even summarize a text,
I would like read and understand,
but I had to memorize because I couldn't yet,
like I didn't have the words to put things into a sentence
or I didn't know how to put them into a sentence.
So I started like memorizing chunks.
And at first, it was just almost like theater kind of thing.
Like I'm just going to memorize
and just trust that one day it will work.
And you know, parallel to that,
I was learning grammar and I was working on pronunciation,
which I loved more than anything
because it was like these really simple dialogues
that you could understand.
But over time though, I think four months later,
she had to leave and I was kind of left on my own
and I took our headway pre-intermediate
and the intermediate textbooks,
yeah, right, with the tapes that we had to find somebody,
I don't know, and I just worked through them on my own.
And in the summer, she came back,
she was working in Moscow, then and she came back
and we met, I bought like maybe 10 or 12 classes with her.
And I came to the first session
and she gave me assignments and I went back home
and I'm reading through it and it's like,
this is so easy.
Like I can't believe she's giving me such easy tasks.
And so I worked through it, it took me, I don't know,
it took me, it used to take me hours
and now it's taking me like a short period of time.
And I come to the class and I said to her,
and she's like, okay, she gave me a text,
can you summarize it?
And so I started summarizing and in the past,
she would stop me and she would correct me
almost after every sentence.
And here I am sitting there talking the whole time
and she had these glasses and she would like,
just put it on her like, she would just like,
raise it, raise the glasses, she would look at me
and look at me and look at me
and I just keep talking and talking and talking.
I think she gave me enough foundation
and then I just, the materials that I had,
headway to just keep going.
Good advert for headway there,
Oxford University Press.
Yeah, I know, right.
Yeah, I know, right.
I love those books but they were like you said,
they were one of the few that were available.
So that's what we've got.
Yeah, good stuff but so you were,
you were just sort of doing all that kind of control
studying, did you not have
more casual kind of conversation stuff going on as well?
Was it, it was not available at the time.
I think my only conversational stuff
happened the following year after that summer.
We had some, you know,
some interaction with Americans and somebody asked me
because they came and visited and somebody asked me
to come and translate casually and I came in
and I was able to translate and I was like,
oh my gosh, I can translate, I totally know what they're saying.
But it was very, we had very few options at the time,
you know, and you probably know that it wasn't even
the listening comprehension that I was learning
from headway.
The only thing I could do or improve it
is by looking at tape scripts, right?
And figuring out, oh, okay, you know,
that's how they're saying this.
So there was a lot of like classroom almost learning
and the actual live language happened when I was
listening to music.
I was listening to Elton John of all people.
Yeah.
And it's interesting because two years ago,
I got to go and see his show in New Orleans here.
Wow.
And it was very emotional for me.
It was his last show, right?
The Yellow Recrowed and I was sitting there
and hearing everybody singing all those songs
and me, myself sitting in all these songs
and remembering how I used my like little dictionary
to learn those words specifically,
like the word sacrifice, right?
That I learned from his song.
Because the way he pronounces it's definitely not
the way he pronounced the word,
but he like breaks it into more syllables than it is.
But I just had this surreal feeling like here I am
in New Orleans and I'm listening to this concert
and there's all these people
and they're all singing his songs.
And I see him on the stage and I'm here
and I'm singing the songs and I totally get what's happening.
And it's like my English, my journey to English started,
my live English started with his songs
because that was like the only way.
It's also I had to like buy tapes
because it's not like you can go on YouTube
and listen to any song you want it.
That's amazing, but a real success story then.
What do you think was there a key to this?
I mean, what do you think was the core reason
that it worked for you?
Any idea what was the sort of secret recipe?
I really did a lot of listening comprehension
and I think I focused a lot on listening,
listening and connecting it to the written language.
So that thing that really inspired most of my life,
I did not like reading by itself.
It would take a while for me to actually
like reading by itself in English.
And it was like a different story altogether,
but like learning the language,
connecting the way it sounds
with the way it's written on the page was like magic.
I felt like I could crack the code.
It's also how I learned music too.
There was a time my friend was playing something
and she had a notation on the piano and she was playing.
And I thought it was just magic
that she could look at some kind of squiggles on the page
and that made music.
And that's actually what pushed me into learning piano
and I did seven years of that
and I still do piano on the piano on a regular basis.
So the magic just off connecting what you hear
to what you see and how it comes from completely
like this blubber of things that you don't understand
to becoming crystal clear.
It's just incredible.
And I think hearing music as well and hearing the words
and finally being able to understand,
I think that was like the cherry on the top.
It was just so incredible and so empowering.
I guess with music, you get that emotional reward
from understanding what you're hearing.
Yes.
I mean, music is, you can't only use music or songs
to learn a language.
And it's true for English, of course, because as you said,
like when Elton John sings the word sacrifice,
sacrifice, it was like five syllables.
That's why it took me forever.
What the word is?
Of course, you didn't have to add GPD to answer that question
because you had to like sit and listen, force yourself
to kind of figure out what is this.
But you have to also understand that later
when I learned about how the new movie that came out
and how the guy actually learned Elton John's style.
It's about the film about him.
It was a cool rock and roll.
Yes.
I did not see the film, but I did watch the behind the scenes
and the man actually learned to play the piano for the movie.
I mean, can you believe this?
I have no notations of Elton John.
It takes me a while to learn how to play.
But anyway, so, but he was saying the interesting part about him
is he's saying in one accent and he's spoken a different accent.
And that, and that, I never thought of that,
but that was kind of an interesting thing.
That's a phenomenon, isn't it?
Yes.
I've done actually several episodes about this.
Why do British people sing the song?
Why do British people sing in American accents?
It's a bit of a mysterious phenomenon.
But one of them is, I guess, that the whole genre of this music,
pop rock, does have its roots in America
and sort of American soul, rock and roll, folk,
and blues music.
That's the language of that kind of stuff.
That's when someone sings I, they sing it as I,
like that, you know, like it's not.
It's not I want to hold your hand, but I want to hold your hand.
I want to, so it's definitely an, if you did it in an English accent,
it wouldn't sound as good.
I want to hold your hand, and it sounds so corny.
But also, there's other reasons as well.
That's another story for another time.
But it's certainly interesting that, yeah, when people sing,
they do change their accent and they sing in an American accent for sure.
Okay, so you kind of, your English went really well.
It kind of improved really strongly.
And I guess now we're in your sort of mid-twenties or something like that.
Yes, I mean, I went to college, then to study English.
And by the time I got to college, my English was at a good level.
I tried to enter several universities in Kiev, and I could not,
because the competition was really high.
So I went back to Crimea, and I went into like a smaller local college.
And I worked there with a lot of Americans.
They were teaching.
And so my British accent becomes American or more American, I should say.
Because of me hearing and being exposed to it all the time.
But also, I did a lot of reading.
That's where I actually fell in love with reading is at college.
And I had done a lot of reading before then, high school.
But only like assigned reading.
So I never read for pleasure.
Now there was a lot of assigned reading at college.
But I really enjoyed what was reading.
Like cycle linguistics or the theory of language acquisition.
Yes, I know.
I was such a nerd.
Cycle linguistics though, it's so amazing.
But I remember like nobody ever reads a book in cycle linguistics before it.
They go to bed.
But I was like, oh my gosh, this is the best thing.
What is it?
Can you tell us briefly what that is?
Well, some of the, there's a lot of things in cycle linguistics.
How your brain activity and language is connected.
One chapter that really, really spoke to me, it was very interesting is how.
What happens to your language when there's deterioration due to Alzheimer's and dementia and how that.
And how there are patterns like, you know, with certain types of dementia, you, you, you lose certain types of language abilities.
And it was just incredibly interesting how that worked and how like learning a language.
And how your mother tongue and the way your brain works in your mother tongue then is translated into another language and how you have to kind of shift the way your brain works.
Yeah, but that idea was kind of dementia and stuff.
I've got me to thinking, well, like, what if I get hold and I lose English?
You know, like, that was a really palpable thing that prompted me to like, I need to teach my kids Russian because I don't know what's going on.
You think that's possible?
You think that's.
I don't know.
I mean, they're different.
They're different theories, of course.
There are theories, there are people that have lost the language, the new language that they had acquired or it has become less kind of prominent against.
So it's almost like when you have dementia, you might have more memories of your past as you were as a child. And so maybe there is from that you bring up a lot of of your language, your mother tongue.
So I don't know.
There's no, there's no like 100%.
That's why I like to cycle linguistics and arts in general.
There's no like here is the answer. It's like it can be this way, but it can also be this way.
And it's just fascinating.
But that is fact, yeah, that is absolutely fascinating.
The sort of neurological connection between, you know, the sort of language learning meets biology in a way.
Yeah.
And at some point I was quite interested in sociophonetics as well, like so how, how the, how our accents are formed by the places where we live.
And I actually wanted to, I was very interested in studying Appalachian English in the United States and its connection to Scottish English. And I even, I even sent a paper to the University of Aberdeen when I was like looking for
a doctorate programs and I was accepted into their doctorate programs in the year of the year of Aberdeen. I even have the acceptance letter, but they did not have the funding.
And so it was, it was very expensive. That program is so like because it's sociophonetics.
It's very specific, very few people study this.
But I was really nerdy. I was really interested in the way again.
It goes back to the music of the language. I mean, doesn't it?
It's like, how does language sound? Why are these like sounds disappearing? And these that don't make sense, they appear in the language because Appalachian English is quite interesting in itself.
And I spent a year studying there doing my masters in Kentucky.
So all of a sudden I was like, this English starts quite different. And then a year into it, people were like, you sound like you're from South Asian.
Well, because Appalachian is English is a sort of classic accent.
It's one of those very, almost extreme American accents.
Right, right. Yes. And it's very, you know, unfortunately stereotypical.
But I was really curious and where it came from. And so I was trying to connect that with Scottish.
And I found a lot of parallels. And there were lots of articles. I, I loved, you know, specific books on, on, you know, accents and pronunciation of the British Isles.
And I was studying that.
And yeah, so, so I say, there's just talking about like language learning. It ended up becoming absolutely just my thing.
And from there, surprisingly when I moved to the US, I just went into teaching online, you know, and so, because I couldn't get into the PhD program.
I was like, okay, well, if I can't get into PhD, I'm just going to like see how I can go online and maybe make your career teaching online.
Small details are big surfaces. Tight corners are odd shapes. Flat, rounded, textured or tall.
Whatever your next project, there's a spray paint pattern that's just right.
Because Rustolium's new custom spray 5 and 1 gives you control with five different spray patterns. So you can tackle nooks, crannies, edges and curves without worrying about drips, runs, uneven coverage or anything else.
Custom spray 5 and 1. Only from Rustolium.
Tired of ads intruding into your favorite comedy podcasts? Good news. Ad free listening is available on Amazon Music for all the Music Plus Top Podcasts included with your Prime Membership.
Dive into a world of laughs by downloading the Amazon Music app for free or go to Amazon.com slash comedy ad free.
That's Amazon.com slash comedy ad free to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads.
Can I ask you about your decision to move to the US? What prompted that move? And why didn't you move to England?
I got married.
Oh yeah, well, that's yeah, it's often.
Yes, and so my husband was was already working here. In fact, I had spent quite a bit of time in North Carolina and Kentucky.
And I had been to Tennessee and all those states around. And then he got a job in Louisiana, which is specifically New Orleans.
And which at the time I called it New Orleans, which is incorrect, by the way. Yes.
Yeah, that's how we say in the UK, we call it New Orleans. And we also call it the other city Los Angeles.
But it's actually new. How do you say New Orleans then? New Orleans. New Orleans.
New Orleans. Yeah. Yeah. And you actually the more the more it just slides into like one syllable,
New Orleans, like some people just say, New Orleans, like, New Orleans. And and it's okay. That's when they know that you're local.
But the stress there is on the all parts. Yeah. Yeah. New Orleans. Yeah. Yeah. It's not for the lens. Yeah.
And so yeah, we we moved here. And this isn't like the talk about accents. That's a melting pot of all kinds of accents.
And in the beginning, I had trouble understanding some of them. It was embarrassing. I had to like ask my husband to say,
what did he say again? What did he say? It's interesting because today I can understand I have no issues.
And then my friends from other parts of the US come and visit like I have no idea what this person was saying.
But I learned to hear the music again. I just had to get my ear attuned to it.
Interesting you keep talking about music because New Orleans is such a musical place. Absolutely.
I mean, you know, it's like the birthplace of jazz music, isn't it? Really?
Yes. Yes. Louis Armstrong. Yeah. Wonderful. I'd love to visit it. They speak French in some parts of Louisiana.
They do. They do. Yes. We went one time. It has been I went to a brokerage, which is one one place like very famous.
The birthplace of Zydeco music, which is the occasion French kind of has lots of influence.
And that was the first time when I would walk like down the street in their little town, brokerage.
And I would hear people speak French. And I was like, where am I? People, what is going on?
And yeah, the locals, they're just sitting there and saying these and they talk to each other French.
It's occasion French. Now my kids are in French immersion school here. And so both of them speak French.
But occasion French is something that they study also is a local variation of French.
But yeah, there's a lot of influence French influence. And I it was it was interesting to hear it spoken in.
In the United States. I don't I don't see anywhere that I've been to anyway.
Such a big influence of French, you know, like usually hear a lot of Spanish, you know, other languages depending where you are.
Like French. This is just steeped in it. And of course there's the architecture, the stories, the legends, the Joan of Arc and all that.
You see that everywhere Catholic churches.
I guess it was the last state, you know, to have been owned by France.
I mean, it was like the last state to be given to sort of be given its independence from France.
But anyway, right. So you kind of like you've got to New Orleans, sorry, New Orleans.
And after being steeped in language, you know, studying language and immersing yourself now after having studied it, immersing yourself in English.
And you kind of just living breathing English. And you decided to then start teaching English by helping other learners of English to sort of follow in your footsteps, right?
Yes. Yes. So you became an online English teacher. Was it mostly online? Yes. Yes.
I tried to, whenever I was got here, to get a job at a school because that seems like the easiest pathway, I guess.
You know, you're in the United States. It's very unlikely that you're going to teach English as a second language as much.
The funding was actually limited, but they did hear Louisiana. There's well everywhere in the US right now.
But there is specifically, there was in Louisiana, a shortage of teachers, just regular public school teachers.
And you know, though it wasn't like the thing that I wanted to do necessarily, but I was like, this is something I can't do.
So you're talking about teaching American kids? Yes. Like regular school teaching English, but a regular school.
And I interviewed and they liked me, but they couldn't, you know, because of the paperwork. And I was still like being, you know, processed.
My files were still being processed and they couldn't process my paperwork for me. And so I was like, well, okay, well, I'll try something myself.
And by then I had to add some students from that I had tutored in Ukraine that I started tutoring and then word of mouth.
And I did a little bit of marketing, but it was very interesting to this idea of how marketing worked.
Like word of mouth was so strong that even though I was doing marketing and I was putting myself out there and I had a blog on blogger, you know, and we had this Google plus or whatever else we had at the time.
Yes. Yes. And I couldn't get clients that way, but I had a ton of clients to word of mouth.
And I did that for a few years. And mainly, obviously, all my students were Russian speaking students until the war started. And then I had to kind of reinvent myself.
And that's when I decided it was it was scary, but it was also a great opportunity. It pushed me to say, okay, here are the things that I don't want to do.
Like I don't want to teach generic English anymore. I don't want to teach test preparation. I don't want to do business English anymore because I used to like anybody would come to me.
I will teach you anything.
So I kind of let go of jack-o-ville trades. And I had to like find my, I guess, what they call it unique selling point or selling proposition, whatever this is.
But really, I had to find that my English was good enough as a non-native speaker, which was a lot of mindset work.
That's that was confidence was it?
Yes, because like I was okay as a teacher for the Russian speaking audience in my mind. That was confident enough.
But am I good enough to go out there and offer my services to people who's who could be looking for the so-called native speaker?
Like would I be a good, a good person to teach them? And so that was, that's where a lot of work had to happen.
And I narrowed down my niche to work with students on accent training because I had done that at college. And that's when my work with teachers began as well.
I had kind of two niches for a while until I let go of teaching students and now I'm working primarily with, with teachers.
Okay. What was it, what was the work that you had to do?
To accept my English, is that the question?
I don't know really.
Because you said you had to get to a point where you felt confident enough to, you know, give to sell your services.
And so you said a lot of work had to be done. Was that just kind of like on, on your own English skills, on your teaching skills or just your own mindset?
I think it's mainly mindset because I was confident in my teaching.
Like to see myself as good enough as somebody who can teach English as a non-native teacher and just be just as effective.
And somebody that people would hire and pay money to without speaking my mother tongue, you know, so that was a lot of work.
So what did you tell yourself? What did you have to tell yourself at that point?
So one of the things was I figured out that I walked this journey that most of my students are walking, right, from not speaking the language to wanting to speak it with confidence.
And I know exactly how it feels.
And I found the strength in being able to go from the level of not being able to speak the language to the level of confidence.
And I felt like that's what my students wanted and they wanted to have somebody who can relate to their experiences.
And so when I figured that out, like, this is actually great.
I can actually be more useful to non-native speakers as a teacher, as a non-native speaker, because I walked that journey, because I have that unique understanding and the level of compassion of what it means to be able to speak.
And it means to learn a language from scratch and to get to a point of confidence.
And a lot of them needed that and a lot of them found that inspiring.
And that's how I was able to use that as a mindset, because otherwise you constantly go back and, well, but I'm never going to be paid what other people are being paid.
And you see yourself as, well, wait a minute, there's something I can offer. And that really makes a huge difference.
Yeah. I mean, there's this big sort of conversation about a native and non-native speakers that goes on right.
And non-native speakers face a lot of pushback.
And there's a lot of kind of accent prejudice and all the rest of it out there and stuff like that.
And that's what it means is that non-native speakers who teach English can be, you know, they have a perspective on learning English that native speakers don't have.
And it's not, you know, it's really not black and white. It's not just a case of native speakers are always better teachers.
No, non-native speakers are better. It's really kind of almost case by case basis. It depends on all sorts of factors.
Native speakers definitely can be very, very, very insightful and very, very accessible and inspiring for learners of English for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah, I found that if I am able to, for some people, I would be like a better help and guide in specific situations if I just focused on those people in my mind when I go out and market.
Like don't just go out and market to like people that want supposedly a native speaker and try to say or try to sound or try to be like a native speaker.
Try to be yourself and show to people how you can help them with the tools you already have.
And with the story, your own story of learning the language, inspire them.
And when they feel inspired, they feel the divinity, they can trust you to guide them through the process even though you're not a native speaker.
Yeah.
Yeah, very interesting. So, so then now you, so we've shift, we've gone from sort of learning English all the way through to learning to be a teacher yourself through to sort of teacher training helping other teachers.
And now we are at the stage where you're, you're really sort of a business coach as much as a teacher trainer, you're a business coach.
Can you tell me about the work that you do now then and you know what sort of how you help teachers and the sort of challenges that many teachers English teachers have these days and how you try to help them.
And I actually work with teachers of foreign languages and it doesn't matter whether they teach English or other languages.
That is one thing that I wanted to do because it really did matters.
A certain point, most of language teachers find themselves in a situation where I found myself in where you trade so much time for money, you burn out.
And in the end, you really work with a handful of students and there's very little impact.
Even though you're online, you're sort of recreating your sky prune, right?
Now zoom room, but the time was sky prune and there was a lot of burnout and I was trying to figure out myself like how can I make it easier for myself?
How can I make teaching languages just as effective without one-on-one classes or you know, group lessons?
I was just going to say most of the people listening to this are on the other side, they're learners, they're the sorts of people who would learn from people like you and me or other teachers.
They might not necessarily realize how or why teachers can be completely exhausted and why burnout can happen.
Can you just sort of paint a picture of what that might be like from the other side?
Yes, so that's a good point, Luke, because a lot of students when they go on bigger websites where they find teachers, they may not realize that they're not good.
They may not realize that for many teachers this is not just like, this is my side gig.
I mean, there are some people that definitely it's just something they do for fun, for experience, but many teachers are doing that professionally.
They take this job really seriously and they want to teach a language and then they do everything to like stand out on this platform with a bazillion of other teachers and it's really difficult.
So then they get students and when you get students, you pretty much like fill out fill up your schedule, five, seven, eight classes a day.
And while it seems like it's nothing because, you know, at least you're not in front of a classroom, you're just like having a casual conversation.
It's not a casual conversation because there's a lot of work that goes in and behind the scenes, you prepare for classes, you may prepare a homework, maybe you do some kind of different activities for your students to keep them engaged.
And over time, you realize that like your classes might be over after five to six hours, but then you have several hours of preparation.
And then supposedly one day you want to leave this platform so that you can work for yourself because many of the teachers, like I said, they're professional.
And for that, you need to sort of figure out marketing and by the time you're done with teaching in person and preparation for your teaching, the last thing you want to do is work on your marketing.
Right. So even if you do anything, you know, maybe record a podcast or YouTube videos, you can't stay consistent with it.
Or if you do stay consistent, it's kind of like really chaotic and all over the place. And now with the overly saturated market, if you don't have a strategy, it's like it almost becomes like a waste of time or something that you tell yourself, oh, I'm doing something so that one day can leave this platform.
And even if you do leave, like it's very hard to imagine yourself teaching a language outside of one on once I had to really
challenge myself as a one on one teacher and one thing that challenged me was having kids because like, okay, I can no longer do five to seven to eight hours straight teaching classes.
And I cannot hire help because I'm in the US and you know, I can't just take kids to some kind of daycare. It's super extensive.
And I had to figure out a way to do it. And I started experimenting with teaching.
Most of my students were kind of a two, B1, B2.
But I experimented with teaching through voice chats. Voice chats. Yes, voice chats. So this is what now they're showing us like this AI powered learning, which I don't think this is not this is not what I am interested in.
But I started experimenting with some students by giving them prompts instead of doing classes and giving them assignments. So the prompt would be tell me about your like we could work like take a segment for three or four weeks and work only on tenses.
But I would add communicative approach and give prompts like tell me about your first experience going to the zoo, for example, not the zoo, but like you're travel your worst travel experience your best travel experience.
But people will be forced, for example, to use a very specific tense form. And as they send their voice messages, I then check them asynchronously, right?
So not in the same time. And the person can then re record themselves.
And that's where I found a lot of learning happening much faster than one of my classes. I found that the students were more.
Well, as they were responding and listening to my feedback, they were able to improve their language skills and speaking skills much faster because they had like tiny little fragments of learning throughout the week as opposed to meeting with me once a week and then not doing anything between classes.
Yeah, so it's sort of kind of you could have flipped the class online class system. Yes, yes. And it meant that so people were basically sending you voice recordings.
And then you had a bit of time to respond to them a bit later.
Yes, one of my kids was taking a nap. Yeah.
Exactly. While you're there with the baby in your arms and doing all the things that we do. Yes, yes. The students are out there like getting your prompt whenever and then taking the time to record and sending it to you just yeah, that allows you all that much more flexibility.
So that pushed you in a different direction away from the sort of one to one model where you're locked into a certain time into a slightly more time flexible thing. And then I guess the next extension to that was courses. Is that right?
Yeah, yes, yes. And then I started teaching teachers that approach. And when I began teaching that in 2016 people like you kidding me like this is this is never going to work.
This is just not. But over time, like I kept talking about this, you know, teaching more sustainably teaching smarter that was like my thing like we can't constantly be be tied to hours.
I mean, I still teach one on one. I still coach one on one. But I I focus a lot on sustainability. Like is your business sustainable? Are you able to take as many students as you want to?
Do you have that capacity? Do you have that format right now to take more students? And when when teachers discovered that they actually can do a lot more with asynchronous learning and then it be.
Hello listeners, I just need to interrupt here. Because at this point in the recording, the zoom call that we were using froze in fact a lane as side of it froze.
And so she kind of got cut off mid sentence. And we didn't manage to kind of fix it for a minute or so. So I just need to fill in what Elena was saying. So Elena at this point is talking about synchronous versus asynchronous learning.
And from the teacher's point of view and the students point of view, I suppose how actually asynchronous learning can be a really effective way of doing things. And for the teacher, this can be game changing because it means that you're no longer trading hours for money.
So synchronous learning would be where from the learners point of view, you're learning with the teacher there and then. So it's in the form of lessons live lessons. We would call them in a classroom or in a zoom call or something.
So having lessons right there with the teacher that's synchronous learning learning at the same time that you are spending time with the teacher.
Then asynchronous learning is where the teacher gives you tasks and you go off and do those tasks in your own time, right, according to your own schedule. And then you kind of you do the task, you then sort of send the results off to the teacher who checks them in their own time and you do it like that.
So that's basically the difference. And Elena at this point is saying that she realized and you know teachers can realize that they can essentially charge the same amount of money for asynchronous learning for asynchronous teaching as they can for synchronous teaching, which is actually very liberating for a teacher because it means that you're not locked in to a potentially very, very demanding schedule daily schedule of back to back one to one lessons instead.
You can sort of send out tasks to your learners. You can maybe take on more learners send out their tasks and basically manage your time more easily.
Okay, so that's that's kind of what Elena is saying at this point. So let's now continue from the point where the zoom call recovered and stopped being frozen. Here we go.
For your month of asynchronous learning as you would charge for a month of one on one classes and that's like a very foreign concept like well, but an hour with the person while you're not, but you're giving them even more practice and more feedback and more different activities.
And so once people get really okay with that and with selling like that and when they free up more time, they're able to do more marketing, more strategic marketing, not just like those spaghetti on the wall marketing, which we all used to do.
Then they get more people in and then they're able to actually start creating courses is usually what happens is like you're exhausted, right? You're teaching one on one and then a Facebook add pops up and says, hey, don't you want to create a course that will help you mix six figures in your sleep and you're like sure, you know, you have no time, no mental capacity, no emotional bandwidth to create a course.
And you jump into a course on a promise that maybe you launch it and then you'll get six figures and that sounds really enticing, but it usually doesn't work, you know, and so.
A model helped teachers get to that point, and you will steps, it's kind of like, you know, you're eating an elephant, you know, one bite at a time as opposed to the whole thing.
Very interesting, we're going to have to wrap the conversation up though, because, you know, as sort of it's quite appropriate for the topic of conversation, you know, like I've got to rush off and pick my son up from daycare, you know, real life is knocking on the door.
So sorry that you're going to have to stop this conversation now, but well, I guess two things I want to say one thing is that I think you're doing really great work and you know, you're helping out a lot of teachers and helping teachers to manage their time, manage the, the huge challenge, which it can be, you know, the huge challenge of being able to continue teaching.
Sort of in a sustainable way in a way that allows the teacher to maintain their energy levels and their enthusiasm and all that stuff, and that's really important, you know,
because the students, right, you know, the long run and benefits the students because if they are exhausted, students can feel it and they're just as exhausted.
So, you know, thanks for supporting the teachers and I hope that all the learners out there also understand the importance of doing that.
And the second thing I wanted to say is, well, how do people sort of follow your work and sort of get into the stuff that you're doing, because there will be teachers listening to this as well.
There will be people who were in the same position as you a number of years ago, a similar position, who will kind of be interested in learning more about the things you've done and the things that you recommend.
So, what, how can people find your work and stuff like that?
Yes. So, I'm on Instagram at Elena Multanono. You can find me and follow me and I'm there quite often and I really enjoy that platform and I use it to connect with teachers.
I also have a YouTube channel where I post my content also at Elena Multanono and mainly it's just live lessons or just short videos on subjects that people mainly ask me questions and, you know, that's about the business work of being a teacher rather than a rather teacher.
Yes, yes, this is, yes, thank you. That's it's mainly for teachers. Now all I do actually is for teachers, because I just decided to dedicate most of my resource and most of my time to it.
Yes. So, I really enjoyed doing that.
And I have a podcast that you came on. It's called Online Bound and it is for language teachers who want to learn more on how to teach languages online in a more sustainable way.
And I talk to people who are already doing it or who are aspiring to do that. And I talk about not just the regular business tips that you will find anywhere else.
I talk about the emotional and all strength and support that we need to make this journey possible because we can't really move forward on tips alone.
There's a lot of resilience that we need to build the grit, the support of our communities where we find ourselves and that that plays a huge part.
Okay. Well, yes.
Great. Really interesting. Thanks for telling us all about your story and all your experiences.
Thank you for inviting me. Yes.
It's been very interesting. And yeah, thanks for your time.
Well, yeah, listeners, you can listen to my conversation with Elena. She interviewed me all about, oh, we touched on all sorts of things, but you kind of got into the reasons I started doing my show.
Yes.
How it was in the beginning and how it is now.
Yeah, exactly the path of, you know, that I've taken from being coming in English teacher and then going into setting up my podcast and and the considerations behind, you know, my, my choices.
Relating to doing this as a job, you know, as crazy as it may seem. So yeah, you guys, you can listen to that. It's that episode should be available now, I suppose. I think we're probably going to be available in, we're now in March.
So it will be available in April.
Yeah. I think there'll probably be this episode will go up around about the same time as that one I expect.
Well, anyway, thanks again and have a lovely day. Yes, it's quite windy. I imagine that that's messing up all to my connection too.
Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, windy new Orleans. Hopefully it's hopefully it doesn't get too windy because it does get very windy there.
It does. It does.
Not good winds.
Thank you so much, Luke. I appreciate it. Thank you. And all right, take care and you know, speak to you soon.
Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Okay. So we're pretty much at the end of the episode now. I just want to say thanks again to Elena for her time and for talking to us about her story and everything like that.
So just a reminder of where you can find Elena. So there's her website ElenaMutonono.com. You can find her on Instagram, which is at ElenaMutonono.
Her YouTube, let me just find that out actually her YouTube is unsurprisingly ElenaMutonono again. So that's it. That's the Instagram, YouTube and website.
The fourth thing her podcast, it's called online bound online bound. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts and you should see in the list, probably fairly recent, a recent episode is the one where she interviewed me and she asked me about, well, the things I mentioned just earlier, you know, about how I started and
the sort of the challenges into some extent that I face in terms of managing my time and dealing with the way that I communicate with my my audience and all sorts of other things.
Okay, so you can listen to it. It'll be a recent episode of the online bound podcast. All right. So that's it. That's basically all I needed to do at the end here. Instagram ElenaMutonono. YouTube, ElenaMutonono.
website and ElenaMutonono.com podcast online bound. You'll find links in the description. Okay. How was this episode for you? Did you relate to the things that Elena said about learning English? Did you relate? Did you relate to the things that she said about being a teacher because I have quite a few teachers listening to this show?
And maybe you are someone considering a becoming an English teacher at some point and, you know, there's a lot of stuff to consider like how do you find clients or learners? How do you find them? How do you manage your time? Are you just going to spend all of your day teaching one to one lessons back to back?
That can be pretty tiring. So how can you try and break out of that sort of system talking about making online courses or flipping learning into an a synchronous approach? Lots of things. And you can find if you listen to Elena's podcast, you talk about all of these considerations. Her podcast is for teachers for language teachers.
Okay. So if that's something you're interested in doing or something you're already doing and you're kind of trying to deal with the business side of it and all the many things that relate to that, not just the business strategy and marketing things, but just the personal emotional mindset related issues.
Then you could listen to Elena's podcast and it could give you some perspective. It could give you some advice and inspiration. Okay. Yeah, links in the description. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. That's the end. All right, that's it. No more rambling at the end. Nothing else. We're just going to have a clean break at the end of the episode.
Thanks so much for watching. Thank you very much for listening. I will speak to you very soon, but for now it's time to say goodbye. Bye. Bye. Bye.
Thanks for listening to Luke's English podcast. For more information, visit teacherlook.co.uk.
Or a lot. Shopify helps you do your thing. However you chitching, Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell it every stage of your business from the launch your online shop stage to the first real life store stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage. Shopify is there to help you grow. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout.
36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms because businesses that grow grow with Shopify get a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash work. Shopify.com slash work.
If you enjoyed this episode of Luke's English podcast, consider signing up for Luke's English podcast premium. You'll get regular premium episodes with stories for vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation teaching from me and the usual moments of humor and fun. Plus with your subscription, you will be directly supporting my work and making this whole podcast project possible.
For more information about Luke's English podcast premium, go to teacherlook.co.uk slash premium info.
