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21 Nov 09
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Technology and CPD |
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20 Nov 09
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The complete guide to ELT Jargon Part 26 Chat bots- Teachers who are reduced to automatic expressions of “interest” by a student who keeps on going on and on
Cognitive strategies- Ways of avoiding having to think in class
Connectionism- Knowing enough people to get a university job
Constru... |
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18 Nov 09
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How I nearly learnt Japanese Although starting yet again on yet another language with the usual recipe of vocab lists, graded readers, self study textbooks and horribly uncommunicative language classes was about the biggest pain in the arse I could possibly imagine, unlike Darrrrren... |
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17 Nov 09
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What I just learnt on YouTube A rare occurence, I know, but this kansaikidsdotcom YouTube channel (of a school called The Learning Tree which I had never heard of- thank you Google!) had lots of little teaching ideas for young and very young learners that I’d never thought of o... |
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16 Nov 09
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Real teaching with technology by numbers From an email that’s been doing the rounds:
“I went into class this morning with the naïvely optimistic expectation that the set of laptops I had brought in with me would actually work.
They did not.
By the numbers:
8 – number of laptop... |
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14 Nov 09
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A way to do away with ALTs? (= assistant language teachers). You can see why they might want to, because although their pay is being cut and skimmed off by recruitment agencies while they get abuse for not being qualified teachers and then treated like human tape recorders when they... |
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13 Nov 09
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If your students hate classes based on the textbook … there are six possibilities:
1. The whole concept of using a textbook is wrong
2. Having a textbook is wrong for that class
3. You’re using the textbook too much
4. You’re using the wrong textbook
5. You are influencing your students with your ne... |
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11 Nov 09
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Teaching preschool English links I’ve done a fair bit of kindy (as we call kindergartens in the trade) English teaching over the years, and I’m doing it full time at the moment for the first time in quite a while, so will be writing about that and giving lots of links for... |
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09 Nov 09
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Completely meaningless TEFL research results Part One I was recently discussing whether there was research to show that using an IWB (interactive whiteboard) does/ does not lead to increased learning. Here is how I have decided to use those research results once they are finally clear:
1. Because it ... |
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08 Nov 09
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New photocopiable handouts November 2009 Part One It has come to my attention (that great school teach phrase which I swore never to use mysel) that whatever link I put top gets clicked on more than the others. Unless by some lucky chance everyone coming here wants to do a past tense review on Monda... |
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08 Nov 09
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The CLT robot “I suppose that in the not too distant future this sort of hopping from group to group and ‘listening in’ can be taken over by some language-surveillance computer or robot. This device would hover above the participants, the symbolic... |
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07 Nov 09
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More ELT publishing bad news? Farewell to the Georgian Press List, taken over by CUP.
Although my own copies of Georgian Press books were long ago lost in my endless moves from country to country leaving teachers’ rooms stocked with my books behind me (I will reclaim my copy... |
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06 Nov 09
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Losing my best students Getting back to my paranoid fears of the last post (because a blog might be time consuming and pay nothing, but unlike seeing a therapist it’s free), there definitely does seem to be one kind of student I have lost more than others since I’ve be... |
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04 Nov 09
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H1N1 as a reason for cancelling classes … or just an excuse?
You have to wonder. That is, you have to wonder if you are always paranoid about your last performance class. Sorry- sometimes my AmDram lovey side and my TEFL teacher side seem very close indeed, and I expect all observatio... |
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02 Nov 09
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The most overrated things in TEFL Part Two -Explaining everything you do
This a classic example of the limitations of the philosophy of Diploma-level teaching: write your lesson plan on the board (language and human interactions are unpredictable, but your lessons obviously shouldn’t be), expla... |
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31 Oct 09
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Four ways to get your worksheets on the Net in less than ten minutes Apparently in a recent meeting of some fairly influential people in TEFL, the way I do it was mentioned as the future of TEFL materials distribution (I’m rephrasing* the report I got of it a bit), so I feel perfectly placed to tell the rest of yo... |
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28 Oct 09
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Golly gosh, not Geos too??! Two years after the demise of Nova, by far the biggest chain of Eikaiwa (English conversation) schools in Japan, rumours are that one of the remaining big three, Geos, is also showing signs of strain with late payment of wages, pressure on students to pay... |
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26 Oct 09
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The TEFLbs detective Part One – Brain Gym and ELT Brain Gym™ and ELT – a personal path of discovery by Philip Kerr
“About ten years ago, I was introduced to Brain Gym™ by the director of studies of a language school in Cordoba. She was a good director of studies, a very nice person, an... |
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25 Oct 09
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Me me me, me me me, me me me me me me me … because that is what blogs are for talking about, are they not?
With that in mind, I have started a new page of interviews (with me, of course) and blog guest pieces (I think you can guess who by), which together with my old Publications with... |
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24 Oct 09
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Use all your talents when teaching at the Idol Foreign Language Academy in Akihabara, Tokyo. Only in Japan… |
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23 Oct 09
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ELTJ in defence of textbooks Part One There’s been a lot of online chatter on the topic of textbooks recently, all of which are neatly linked to by this recent Turklish TEFL blog post. As if to prove that the online world is just a faster and less informed version of journals of th... |
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22 Oct 09
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New TEFLtastic worksheets October 2009 Part Two Have to try and get this done before the baby wakes up, so here it is, no messing:
Mr Bean narrative tenses (with which my students truly got Past Continuous and Past Perfect for the first time, and all while I was out of the classroom doing student... |
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20 Oct 09
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New TEFL articles etc October 2009 Chuseok holiday came just at the right point for me, so for once you can actually read my articles in the month which they are supposed to be for:
Natural Interactions (in HLT magazine for the first time in many years, so you get to see my softer, feely... |
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18 Oct 09
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Proof of a TEFL oligarchy?? I’d always scoffed at such conspiracy theories before, but I could have sworn that there were more than this many publishers of EFL materials in the UK. Maybe Delta Publishing etc have all been taken over by Saudi oil princes like Premiersh... |
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16 Oct 09
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Karenne on The Industry- Interview Part Three An Interview with Karenne of Kalinago English, part 3
What are your predictions for the future of TEFL?
Difficult.
There are radical changes going on in education, in general, globally. The TEFL industry will either catch up on some of these shifts o... |
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15 Oct 09
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From Inside Inside Teaching Part One- On Observations From the fabulous book by Tim Bowen and Jonathan Marks
“I bet you’ll have a fit when you see how I teach” (a teacher on being observed) pg 1
“What our observers say to us after our lessons reveals more about them than about us” pg 1
“Most teac... |
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13 Oct 09
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Best of Mastertalker Interactive Games and Activities Not like me to actually have useful ideas on TEFLtastic I know, but as I ripped all these ideas off one TEFL e book I can hardly claim it is even as much an article as the other things that I have labelled as such. The book is this (not reviewed by me,... |
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11 Oct 09
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Classroom language links I gave a Classroom Language course a few months ago, which is meant to give non-native speaking teachers more confidence in using English in the classroom. The same information could also be useful for native speakers who need to simplify their langua... |
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09 Oct 09
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Karenne on teaching- interview Part Two An Interview with Karenne of Kalinago English, part 2
Where are you teaching and what kind of teaching do you usually do?
I mostly teach at software and IT companies and also at one of the biggest banks in Stuttgart, Germany. My students are adults,... |
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08 Oct 09
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New TEFLtastic worksheets October 2009 Part One I really should put these in some kind of order of goodness, but frankly
(1) Whether they seem good, bad or indifferent to me depends more on my mood than anything else
(2) The extra five minutes it would take sitting in the virtually natural light free... |
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07 Oct 09
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TEFL as often private education- often good or often bad? Or actually, it is perhaps better to ask “often better or often worse”, as we can only choose from the options we have available (as in my usual Dip post obs litany “Yes, you can criticise my lesson, Ms DELTA tutor, but I asked you for... |
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06 Oct 09
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Karenne on blogging- Interview Part One An Interview with Karenne of Kalinago English, part 1
You seem to have a real community feeling on your blog – something I’ve never managed. Any ideas on how that happened? Was it a deliberate attempt?
Yes, it is very deliberate.
That’s the... |
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04 Oct 09
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Linguistics can be useful! David Crystal explains why “Bob” is such a strange, and therefore funny, name for a girl in the best episode of Blackadder 2 (and why “Pretend your name is Keith” is not nearly as funny in The Chicken Song)
“if I were a scriptwriter, and I had t... |
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01 Oct 09
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Who do you feel solidarity with? This is prompted by comments on my How can we increase TEFL pay? post and Sara Hannam’s TEFL unions/ solidarity post, and also by the feeling that it is one thing getting stumped for an answer to “1, 2, 3, 4, what the hell are we fighti... |
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30 Sep 09
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Another money saving tip for TEFLers See below for the original ones |
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30 Sep 09
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A sense of perspective from an unexpected quarter Meaning even more unexpected than a TEFL book with a sense of perspective…
“You lose a few and pick up a few. That’s how it goes. If I could fulfil everyone’s desires, why would I need to touch the soil of this earth with the soles of my feet?... |
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27 Sep 09
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New TEFL articles etc September 2009 TEFL on the Net (an attempt to summarize all things for all TEFlers in 600 words- you can judge my success for yourself and comment here or there)
How to find EFL worksheets on the internet (so you never have to spend as much time doing that as I did when... |
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25 Sep 09
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Money saving tips for TEFLers As we don’t seem to have made all TEFLers better paid just by blogging about it (what is wrong with this world???), here are some tips I have been collecting from other teachers and TEFL blogs and forums over the years on how to make the money that you ... |
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23 Sep 09
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Last week’s new worksheets September 09 Part One Past continuous memory game
Remembering and forgetting Childhood memories (narrative tenses and functional language- good for IELTS speaking and cutting down on students’ pausing time)
Functional language elicitation text (in which my student... |
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22 Sep 09
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A fireside chat with Sandy McManus He’s been the most famous/ notorious online TEFL figure for around five years, and the age of Twitter doesn’t seem to have calmed him down at all. In this exclusive TEFLtastic interview, Sandy shows his sensitive side
Only joking! He does giv... |
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21 Sep 09
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Breasts in ELT And you thought Sexy ELT was an attention grabbing blog post title!
This post was prompted by the infamous Bosomgate incident and agreeing to censor the word “tits” in my contribution to the Birds in ELT series on Kalinago English. I must say that I... |
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17 Sep 09
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How can we increase TEFL pay? The question in the last blog post ”Does better pay lead to better teaching?” seems more or less agreed on- maybe, but probably less so than other ways of investing that money and anyway we can never prove it well enough that companies wil... |
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15 Sep 09
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Does better pay really lead to better teaching? I’m not talking about schools offering better pay and therefore being able to recruit better teachers, because if the whole industry got the standards that we occasionally demand that wouldn’t work. What I want to discuss is a school givin... |
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14 Sep 09
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What I just learnt about American English Or should that be “What I’ve just learnt about American English”? I get confused after 6 years living in East Asia and reading the International Herald Tribune (I’ll never go back to the Guardian again!) every day. Still, good to be learning s... |
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13 Sep 09
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Two more nearly been there moments “I started French at the local grammar school, where our teacher has some difficulty managing the new reel-to-reel recorder. So we spent quite a lot of time listening to French played at high speed, both forwards and backwards”
“My main reason for... |
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11 Sep 09
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Determiners (articles etc) games, songs and worksheets When I was trying to find other sites to link to, kept on ending up back here, so this page must have something going for it! This was by far the most appreciated grammar point in my classes in the last academic year, so not sure why there aren’t... |
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10 Sep 09
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SLA error correction In best EFL progress test style, change at least one word in the often seen sentence below to make it less ridiculous:
“Out teaching methodology is in line with current SLA theory”
Took me a while too, in fact I must’ve seen this dubious statement t... |
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09 Sep 09
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My TEFL blog stalker experience Don’t especially want to get into all this again, so although I’m going to retell the story due to a reader request, this time it’s the stalker’s name rather than my workplace that I’d prefer people not to mention if... |
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09 Sep 09
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Free books for teachers in Korea and Japan but let me know which ones you want quickly, because I’ll need to make sure they stay or go when I go back to Korea this weekend. Here they are, mainly from OUP and with the most recent ones at the top:
Business Result Advanced
Business Result... |
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08 Sep 09
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Why you don’t know where I work …unless you (like Jason Renshaw and possibly Darrrren Ellllliotttt) have worked it out from the clues, in which case I would very much appreciate you not making guesses online. The reason for that radio silence and having to ask ELTJ for special... |
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