77 Instructor Profile: After graduating from Carleton University with a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature in 1980, Natalina L’Orfano embarked on a yearlong trip to her ancestral homeland, Italy. Little did she know that it would begin a life-long passion for teaching English as a second language. “While I was in Italy, everyone kept telling me that I could teach English,” Natalina says. “That gave me the inspiration to think about a career in ESL teaching.” When she returned to Ottawa, Natalina had just enough money to enroll in the one-year Certificate in Teaching English as a Second Language (CTESL) program at Carleton, graduating in 1982. Almost immediately, she was offered work as a supply teacher at Ottawa’s Willis Language School, later renamed the Language Training Centre of Ottawa (LTCO), which offered government-sponsored language training, mainly for newly-arrived landed immigrants. She was soon offered full-time employment, which continued until the LTCO ceased operations in 2017. Within a few weeks, she was welcomed as an ESL instructor by the Ottawa Catholic School Board, where she currently teaches at the Board’s St. Nicholas Adult High School site on Admiral Avenue. Context For adult newcomers to Canada who are illiterate or semi-literate in their own language, the challenge of acquiring both literacy and language skills in English is daunting. Progress is often halting. As student experiences are so varied, no one teaching approach is guaranteed to succeed and learning timetables are, of necessity, variable. In this environment, Natalina has found that the key to success is variety and flexibility. If one strategy or exercise isn’t working, try something else that might make more sense to a particular student. At the Foundation Level of language instruction, full-time face-to-face classroom learning is indispensable because students do not have the technology skills to participate in online learning and require personal support from the teacher, classroom assistants, and volunteers to understand what is asked of them and how to carry out instructions. However, if early lessons include how to use a laptop computer, it soon becomes possible to use eLearning exercises to enrich learning and accelerate progress. In Natalina’s Own Words When I started working as an ESL instructor, computers were not used in language instruction. My introduction to computer-assisted learning came years later after I began teaching at the Willis Language Training Centre in Ottawa. The Director, a computer enthusiast, had the inspiration to refurbish some old computers. His idea was that the computers could be used to teach basic computer skills by having students use them to compose résumés as part of their job skills training. The other instructors and I first had to learn how to use the computers – those big clunkers typical of the 1980s. There was a lot of pushback from some teachers, but eventually we learned enough about computers and software to instruct our students. The federal government-sponsored Language Instruction for New Canadians (LINC) program started in 1992. That changed a lot of things. The government put a lot more money into funding language programs. Schools that got contracts were provided with computers that could make use of CD-ROM-based language-learning programs. One of the early programs was called Explore Canada. It used the subjects of Canadian history and geography to teach language skills while also CC-BY-NC-SA 2025 New Language Solutions Avenue Instructor Standards for Technology-Enhanced Language Learning, version 1.2
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