Archive for January, 2008

“…but you would have to remember always that your work was to teach a small boy English. There is a great deal of drudgery in that. Do you think you have the patience for it?”

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“I appear to be regarded as something similar to flat-pack furniture: cheap, does the job and aside from initial construction, can be left to own devices without much attention.” (more…)

And there’s more! As much as I complain about TOEIC, it seems to have caused such a creative (?) outpouring that I’d even forgotten I’d written half of these. Think of the articles as my Kublai Khan:

TOEIC FAQs

How to choose a good TOEIC class and TOEIC teacher

100 Ways to Improve your TOEIC Listening

Those are all designed for students, although they could also help teachers give their students the right hints. Lesson plans, game ideas and tips for teachers all in the post below.

TOEIC is a very stupid exam, but has actually turned out to be one of the best things about being in Japan as far as my ELT writing career goes- your editor in London or almost anywhere else knows nothing about it and trusts you do, because you’re in Japan. Doesn’t quite make up for the all other writing work I’ve missed out on by not being able to pop back to the UK for a chat with the editor, but there you go.

Anyhow, have written loooooooads of TOEIC stuff for Usingenglish and Onestopenglish, and here are the links:

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“Kim Min-suk, spokeswoman of JungChul Language School, said that her school does not employ Asian English teachers because she believes the students prefer Caucasians. About 99 percent of teachers are white and the rest are Korean-Americans, she added.” (more…)

Despite the attempts of some textbooks to use more stimulating listening activities like jigsaw listenings, stories in episodes that end at suspenseful moments, comic dialogues etc, turning on a tape is still the most likely action to make some of your students either sleepy or panicky. As well as adapting drier listening texts to incorporate more fun textbook activities like those just mentioned, there are plenty of things you can do to make a listening text less boring and less difficult for your students. These can be divided into things they do:
1. Before listening
2. Before class
3. While listening
4. After listening

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 I’m not sure I have, but now you can- with my foolproof guide to putting your TEFL resume above the hoi polloi:

Getting an English teaching job abroad is becoming easier all the time, even if you don’t have the university degree and 4 week certificate in TEFL that have long been the minimum requirements. At the same time, though, getting a good teaching job in a good school is becoming increasingly difficult as the number of TEFL teachers with 10, 20 or even 30 years experience is increasing. As someone who in a previous job had to sift through hundreds of CVs in the first week of September every year to choose the 8 or 9 people we would give an interview to, I’ve gained a very good idea of what makes an English teaching CV stand out- experience that I’ve managed to use to make my own CV noticed for several jobs I was theoretically underqualified for. Some of the tips below are just things you can make sure you don’t miss out of your CV, while others are things you will need to think about throughout your career to make sure you build up the experience and qualifications you will need to make your CV really stand out. (more…)

“What do you know about the Silent Way?”

“Not much,…

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“…at that time the funding of Sanskrit and science were about the same at Oxford” (more…)

It might have just been an excuse to quit my gym session early, but got a sudden urge to sort TEFLtastic out. That means that my new favourite site has helped me convert all the Medical and Pharmaceutical worksheets into easily printable pdf files, and I’ve stuck them in as Word documents so you can correct my spelling mistakes before you use them as well.

Now that you can download Word documents and make all the changes you like, I’ve also started including stuff that is the raw material for a good Medical English lesson but that I didn’t get to make into a good worksheet before all my Medical English classes disappeared:

More words from Greek

More medical word roots

And don’t forget to have a look at my own personal Usingenglish page for new stuff on there: