TEFLtastic with Alex Case

You might be surprised by how resistant the Japanese are to teaching technology. For example, chalkboards are still very common , even in classrooms that have two huge screens and projectors. However, the clever salesmen at Promethean have finally found a way of selling it to the Japanese by tying it in with their TEFL demographic problem and as this country is simply at the cutting edge of dealing with an aging (TEFL and general) population it will soon be relevant to the rest of you too. According to the manufacturers, here’s why we’ll all be using IWBs sooner or later:

- When a teacher’s eyes are getting bad they can simply change the font size to 72

- If the teacher forgets what they were doing five minutes earlier in the lesson, they can simply flick back to that page to remind themselves

- If the teacher needs a bit of a sit down, they can just sit in front of the computer and type – or simply shout instructions at the software

- When the teacher’s hands get too shaky to write, they should still be able to type

- The latest versions can tell when a teacher has nodded off in their chair and wake them up

- The technology can also put a limit on how long a single page can stay up in order to interrupt long and pointless anecdotes and explanations

- The automatic handwriting recognition software can tell when a totally outdated piece of language needs translating into something modern and do so automatically. It can also spot sentences that the teacher forgot about halfway through.

- Teachers who have take regular toilet breaks can take a mini IWB with them and so still write stuff up to keep the students remaining in the classroom busy, however serious their prostate problems

- Teachers can start the class with a summary of the last class on the board, to make sure they don’t tell the same story all over again

- The very latest IWBs can also dispense drugs at the right points, by timing or by monitoring the teacher’s (lack of) mental awareness

- An inbuilt microphone can repeat what the students said into the teacher’s earphone until they finally hear and understand what is being said

- Teachers who need regular naps can record several five minute segments of teaching to be played on the IWB whenever they nod off

Loads more IWB stuff (of varying levels of seriousness) here.

A new regular feature. I’ll do one week each time:

9 Feb 1963, Canterbury – The first documented case of a class refusing to do a Humanistic Language Teaching activity, in this case the infamous “lay your head in a neighbour’s lap” pairwork task. The sit in by students demanding to be treated like dignified human beings lasted three days.

10 Feb 1492, Lyndesfarne – First documented use of the example sentence “Verily, thy catte is upon ye verry matte”

11 Feb 2011, Barcelona – First known case of setting up regular public confession sessions to talk about times when teachers went off the Dogme straight and narrow

12 Feb 1066, Hastings – The invading Normans receive an ESP class in “Ye Olde Battlefield English”

13 Feb 2010, Pyongyang – Special version of the IELTS test launched for the new British Council North Korea, with questions like “Speak for one or two minutes about a time that a story about our Great Leader made you cry” and “In your opinion, what is the best way to cook a rat?”

14 Feb 1904, Croatia – James Joyce abandons his efforts to write a whole novel about one grammar presentation in his Berlitz school and switches to the topic of a day in Dublin instead

15 Feb 1951, USA – One day after marketing executives come up with the concept of “teenagers”, high school students suddenly become too shy to speak out in language classes. Decades later, sociologists were able to map the precise spread of this phenomenon worldwide alongside with the concept of being a teen

16 Feb 2003, London – After street demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of people in 60 countries and a hunger strike by 35 ELT authors, Pearson change the name of their English teaching publishing arm “Pearson ELT” back to “Longman” – a moment later mentioned by the leaders of the Arab Spring as an inspiration

Candidate number one is at the front of my mind because nearly three years after it was written it was back in my top ten most popular pages again last week and got its 107th comment last month. Its success is also a complete surprise because I had no idea that so many people Google for negative comments about the CELTA and though I meant to satirise some of the people who take that attitude it did not occur to me that anyone would take it seriously:

Don’t do the CELTA

I guess the moral of the story is that it’s always worth churning out the blog posts, because you just never know when something will strike a chord. And so churn them out is what I continue to do…

Candidate number two is an example of that too, but on a whole different level:

I was working on a list of links to my articles for students yesterday as part of the ongoing blog clean-up and one of the pieces I clicked on for the first time in years was a list of self-study ideas that is still probably one of the longest things I’ve ever written. Although it’s nearly four years old, I was a bit disappointed to see that it had only been shared once on Facebook. Suddenly, though, I noticed a little letter k next to the number 1. k… as… in… thousand?? Apparently so… (last two full stops typed with my chin)

70 ways to improve your English

Moral number two is therefore to write for students rather than for teachers. As I have hundreds of unfinished TEFL articles on my hard disk, I leave that one for the rest of you to do.

Only three out of six students turned up for my New Cutting Edge Intermediate class on Past Perfect last week, and as the class went on and no more people arrived I increasingly got the feeling that the worksheet I’d prepared wasn’t quite right for the nice atmosphere the four of us had created. Given that part of that nice atmosphere was just the right level of involvement from me, I couldn’t sneak out for thirty seconds to photocopy Fairytale Dominoes as first sprung to mind, and after that my mind was all out of springing. Luckily, there is a computer attached to the hated IWB, and the internet on it took me to an old article of mine on Past Perfect games that gave me the perfect no-resources game for just such as situation – one I’d totally forgotten about. ..

Many much better reasons for the rest of you to get typing away in my latest TEFL.net article here:

35 reasons why everyone should write TEFL articles

Don’t worry, Donald Keene isn’t a TEFL expert or new TEFL blogger who you should have heard of. I was hoping to get some interesting factlets about Japan from his autobiography for my JapanExplained blog. Couldn’t turn my TEFL brain off, though, and so underlined these two little factors that I’d never really thought of that way before:

“We studied hard at the language school, though there was no reward for proficiency. Indeed, everyone who graduated from the school was commissioned, regardless of his marks on the weekly tests. Perhaps there was an element of patriotism in performing one’s best in wartime when other young men were dying for their country, but I believe that a more important reason for diligence was the desire of each student to prove that his own university was the best” pg 34

“One of his students from Taiwan, of Japanese ancestry, had been born in America and had recently returned. Kerr intended to spend the summer at his house in the North Carolina mountains studying Japanese with his former student. He feared, however, that if he were the only one studying, he would not be very diligent. Competition would help, and therefore he was trying to find three or four others who wished to learn Japanese as well.” pg 26

The recent changes to BULATS made me wonder whether IELTS might be next to go computer based. I got onto Google to try and find any rumours of such changes, but blow me down – there had already been an equivalent Online IELTS released in 2005! How did I never hear of this? Did it just disappear? How did it not take over the world? And when will they, as they must, try again?

43 articles of mine on the topic brought together for the first time here:

Teaching grammar articles and tips