In the spirit of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry's (Princess Royal's Volunteer Corps) aim to be of service in whatever capacity is asked of them, Philippa Morrell, the former Language Training Officer (LTO), spent two weeks in July teaching English to Reserve Officers from NATO ‘Partnership for Peace’ and ‘Mediterranean Dialogue’ countries as a faculty member of the CIOR Language Academy (CLA).

The Interallied Confederation of Reserve Officers, commonly referred to by its French acronym CIOR, represents the interests of over 1.3 million reservists across 36 participating nations within and beyond NATO, making it the world’s largest military reserve officer organization.

Founded in 1948 by the reserve officer associations of Belgium, France and the Netherlands, CIOR is now a NATO-affiliated, non-political and non-profit umbrella organization of member nations’ national reserve officer associations; and since 2000 has been running annual Language Academies where Reserve Officers teach fellow Reserve Officers the two official languages of NATO: English and French.

This year the CLA was held in Istanbul following on from the annual CIOR summer congress and military competition. Philippa Morrell was part of an 8 member team teaching English. Although she is a qualified Army instructor, and in previous civilian jobs has successfully trained people for whom English was not their native tongue, often, in very technical subjects; for the CLA she was originally meant to be a Language Assistant, as she does not have a formal language teaching qualification such as TEFL/TESOL.

However for various reasons, she ended up actually teaching on her own 2 classes of pronunciation daily for two weeks. She worked with the Beginners and Advanced Beginners classes and taught people from: Albania, the Czech Republic, Italy, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia and the Ukraine. Some of the students had very rudimentary English when they arrived and two-weeks later they were delivering well-paced, clearly pronounced presentations.

As well as the challenge of preparing lessons for an hour and half and an hour and three-quarters in length daily, she was also asked to make a presentation in French to the French students about the UK. After she had done that she really empathised with what her English students were going through in preparing and delivering their presentations!

With wonderful memories of her students; the city of Istanbul and her fellow faculty members; Philippa Morrell is hoping to teach at a week-long refresher course in January/February time. So while many people, at that time of the year, are skiing she plans to be teaching English! And she also hopes to be able to return for CLA 2009 in Sofia, Bulgaria.