165 © 2016 Jonas Langner and Andrea Zhok (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) 24 Opening doors to teaching: understanding the profession Jonas Langner 1 and Andrea Zhok 2 1. Introduction Over the past fve years, fnal year students in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol (UoB) have had the opportunity to take our unit ‘Teaching Modern Languages as a Foreign Language’ for credits. The unit is currently offered for students of French, German, Italian and Spanish and taught by language teaching experts from all four languages. It was initially set up for students of German only, but due to popular demand, it was opened up to other students within the School in 2011. The unit attracts around 40 students each year and combines lectures and seminars on theoretical aspects of language teaching pedagogy with tutorials and teaching experience in local schools. This enables students to gain various transferable skills and invaluable insight into teaching as a possible future career. Keywords: experiential learning, practical experience, MFL pedagogy, becoming a teacher. 2. What we did For many students taking our course there is a strong element of continuity in their encounter with teaching. A signifcant number will have spent their year abroad (Y3) working as foreign language assistants. 1. University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom; j.o.langner@bristol.ac.uk 2. University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom; a.zhok@bristol.ac.uk How to cite this chapter: Langner, J., & Zhok, A. (2016). Opening doors to teaching: understanding the profession. In E. Corradini, K. Borthwick and A. Gallagher-Brett (Eds), Employability for languages: a handbook (pp. 165-169). Dublin: Research-publishing.net. http://dx.doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2016.cbg2016.479