Is it important that a teacher teaching English language must be trained?

It is an admitted fact that there are teachers who are teaching English successfully without having any professional training. But their number is not that great as to make a rule. We must realise that there are other people whose training and experiences have been successfully transferred to language teaching. For instance, linguists provided very useful insights into languages that directly influenced the teaching of English in the 1940s and 1950s, especially after World War II Structural approaches to language teaching, the Direct Method and Audio lingual method in particular are live examples of how much the linguistic “studies” of the early 20th century influenced language teaching in the USA and elsewhere. Linguistics, the study of language drew on the ideas of Anthropology, Sociology and Psychology that resulted in the emergence of two other equally important disciplines, Sociolinguistics and Psycholinguistics which along with Linguistics are at the core of Applied Linguistics or ELT (English Language Teaching). One area which is perhaps more important, pedagogy (concerned with class management. lesson planning teaching strategies, etc.) until recently did not receive much attention from experts.

Every teacher whether trained or not holds some presupposed beliefs about his students, their learning and the method, he would use to make his teaching effective. Irrespective of whether or not he is conscious of any old and modern methods he would base his teaching on some principles that would govern his teaching for the whole session. The knowledge that he can get from books would contribute to his development, he would still hold his basic principles dear to him.