Current Staff Information

Dr Teti Dragas, MA Manchester, PhD, Durham; RSA DELTA/ CELTA

Contact Dr Teti Dragas (email at areti.dragas@durham.ac.uk)

Personal Profile

I am the director of the MA TESOL and the MA TESOL Applied Language Studies which are both taught postgraduate MAs that run here at the Durham University English Language Centre. As well as managing the MA programmes and being responsible for student admissions, I currently lecture and co-convene two modules, Language Teaching Methods and Practice, Language Teaching Methodology and English Language Materials Development and Evaluation. These modules reflect in part my interests in teacher training and development, in curriculum and materials design which I have substantial experience in.

Aside from my duties as MA director, I also teach on the Year-round Pre-sessional, whose focus is in English for Academic Purposes. I co-directed this programme for a number of years and this is where some of my experience of and interest in  curriculum and materials design came from. I am particularly interested in the relationship between curriculum, materials and practical teaching and how these interact.

Before moving into managing courses, I gained most of my early teaching experience on various EAP, ESP and General English programmes run here at Durham and at other higher education institutions in the UK. I have experience teaching students from a wide variety of L1 backgrounds which include: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Farsi, Russian and European and/or Latin langauges such as French, German, Spanish and Serbo-Croat and on a variety of courses and contexts. Being bilingual myself (English-Greek) and having learnt two languages as further "second" languages, has helped me towards an awareness of and sensitivity of both cultural and linguistic factors which affect L2 students which is important in EFL teaching contexts.

Having gained a RSA DELTA in 2003, my focus shifted slightly more towards ESP and EAP (English for Academic Purposes) and I worked for a number of years on specific EAP and pre-sessional courses. I  also developed and taught specialist ESP courses in the Balkans, in countries such as Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and FYR of Macedonia. 

I also drew on my experience of general English teaching and my love of being in the classroom to move into teacher training. I became a qualified  RSA CELTA trainer in 2006 and then worked specifically on developing the ELC's CELTA programmes for a number of years, running both full and part-time CELTAs  training up teachers who have gone on to teach both here and abroad. As a result, my current teaching on the MA TESOL reflects my experience and interest in teacher development and classroom practice.