Archive for October, 2008

“She… reported that her self-esteem was raised when her [MA in TESOL] assignments were returned with comments that revealed, in her view, a degree of closed-mindedness on the part of the tutors who had marked them.”

From pg 72 of The Experience of Language Teaching, a book that is still highly recommended and I’m more than halfway through (in under a week!)

By complete coincidence, I’d been writing about boosting your teaching confidence just before starting the this book, and here is my effort:

15 ways to boost your teaching confidence

More articles on that coming up (as I have lots of experience of losing mine!), and in the meantime here is my other recent article::

 15 ways of starting a preschool English class

And that is it for this month, because I’ve been too busy eating kimchi to write and anyway I did loads earlier this month, which you can find here:

New TEFL articles October 2008

Korean is one of the languages that has always seemed so alien and has had so little impact on my life till now (apart from the most important word- “kimchi”), that I’ve had a complete mental block on even your basic “anyong haeseyo”s. Luckily, being in Japan has not only added several important words to my Korean vocabulary (bulgogi, kalbi, namul- all foods, I’m afraid) but has also made learning Korean very slightly easier. This is not because I have personally proved the historical link between the roots of the Japanese and Korean languages (I’ve finally learnt enough about linguistics to understand that I know nothing about historical linguistics), but mainly because they have both spent the last 1500 years or so importing Chinese words with the passion of present day Americans importing Chinese toys. Add in some Japlish influence on Konglish and some grammatical similarities due to something or another that I don’t understand, and there is at least enough to stop me panicking for now. It has also given me something to collect that doesn’t take up any room in my luggage:

Vocabulary similarities between Japanese and Korean Part One
Months are named “one moon”, “two moons” etc. (irwol, iwol/ ichigatsu, ni gatsu etc)

The Chinese symbols and therefore meanings of the days of the week are the same, being 日／月／火／水／木／金／土曜日 - sun/ moon/ flame/ water/ tree/ gold/ earth day. The pronunciations of Wednesday (suyoil/ suiyoubi), Thursday (mogyoil/ mokuyoubi), Friday (kumyoil/ kimyoubi) and Saturday (t’oyoil/ doyoubi) are also similar.

Many words made from English roots but not used in English are similar, e.g. wonrum = ワンルームマンション - wanruum manshon = studio apartment (from “one room”), rinsu = リンス - rinsu = conditioner (from “rinse”), otobai = オートバイ- outobai = motorbike (apparently from auto + bike), nait’u = ナイト - naito = nightclub (in Japan, of a dodgy kind). There are also hundreds of shared words borrowed directly from English, and a few from other European languages like pang = pan (Portuguese- pao = bread) and misa (Latin- misa = Catholic mass)- Looooads more on this coming up I’m sure, maybe even a whole collection!

In both languages, there are totally different words for cooked and uncooked rice and for salt and salty.

Jar and bottle is the same word (byong/ bin)

Vocabulary that is exactly the same in Japanese and Korean (more…)

Heartbreak:

“One teacher reported that she had been the least nervous of all the people on her course - attributing this to the fact she already knew what it felt like to be deeply hurt…”

The Experience of Language Teaching page 40

I can see her passing on that tip now- “So, a couple of months before your TEFL course, make sure you pick a real bastard to go out with and then introduce him to your slapper sister…”

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11 hours (more…)

… Trinity, surprisingly. Details from Guardian TEFL here

Including such motivational gems as:

“Once people sit down and look seriously at the time and cost that will be involved, that will focus their minds wonderfully,”

“we can’t say that it is going to help you up the employment ladder.” and

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If you really want to get to know a town, there is no substitute for walking randomly and getting lost, and putting in that effort will help you train yourself to find your way around other towns too.If you rely too much on a map or following others all the time you might never get to really know your way around. However, even people who think they know everything about a town could probably learn something from a map, and for people who don’t really aim at having a thorough knowledge a map is of course essential- providing they know how to use one, of course. If not, whether training on how to use a map is worth it or not also depends on how long they have got, but also on how having to learn how to use a map can kill the fun of being a new place even more than being forced to use one.

All these things depend a lot on personality and previous experience, however. Some people will always get more confused by seeing a map, and others are always better off seeing one from the start.

And the metaphor is: (more…)

Nice to see some kind of variation on the TEFL blacklist model- the change in technology makes the repetition of the same old complaints slightly less tedious for a while. I predict it will all end in tears. You can follow its attempt to get added to Best TEFL Soap Opera Part Two here:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=9205333585

I write my “15 ways…” articles and teaching ideas in the spirit that even if what I put in there is painfully obvious, sometimes seeing something written down can help clarify an idea that was floating round somewhere at the back of your brain. A case in point is this description of two kinds of teachers who I’ve never consciously thought about, read about, written about or written for but have probably come across while only half realising it:

“There are two kinds of teachers here in Korea that really make me wince. One is the native-speaker who has been here for six or nine months, acknowledges that he was lost for three months but now ‘has it all figured out’

No help, no study, no reading, no questions to other teachers, he just somehow found a way to get through his classes without bosses, parents or students complaining..

He no longer feels uncomfortable in class, so he no longer feels the need to grow, change, develop or learn. Maybe he’s hit on one or two good activities, but I sort of doubt it.

The other kind is the Korean teacher who has studied modern teaching ideas and techniques, who does know what exciting things she could and should be doing in class, but who doesn’t do those things because she is afraid her boss or the other teachers or the parents won’t like them…”

Phil Owen, Korea TESOL President in The Korea Times, Thursday 16 October 2008

And after all the teaching and reading about teaching and writing about teaching and studying about teaching over the last 13 years, reading something that was only half remembered or half conscious is about the best you can hope for most of the time. It’s certainly the best you can hope from Complex Systems in Applied Linguistics, a brand new title from OUP. In summary, it says something like “a complex system is a mathematical concept that is different from just a complicated system and often involves techniques like computer modelling. However, because most of you studied English Lit at uni, we are going to deal with this subject without using a single mathematical formula and instead look at complex systems as some kind of metaphor of language, SLA and teaching. This basically means that we have to stop pretending that these things are easy to predict”

Or as a very short summary “complex systems are complex, but we think they are interesting and you will too (hopefully, because we’ve spent an awful long time researching them!)”

Not sure I ever thought any of those things were easy to predict, and am totally certain that more computer modelling and less metaphor is what has made complex systems interesting and useful, but did prompt a few minutes of musing and a tiny bit of “Oh yer, hadn’t thought about that recently”. Here’s hoping that Language Learner Strategies, which arrived in the same package from OUP, turns out to actually have something new to me in it. I’m on page 25, and it’s looking more hopeful so far.

Getting more or less back on topic, here are some other TEFL related bits and pieces in the same edition of The Korea Times:

“As ETS is a non-profit organisation, we don’t care about an alternative test organizer”

Well if you really don’t mind people doing other people’s tests, ETS, might I suggest you recommend BULATS and IELTS to all your candidates and stick to doing GRE?

And a fundamental misunderstanding of action research:

“This lead to my action research… I applied my research to develop the Pronunciation Rhythm Control Method (PRCM), which has proven to dramatically improve English speaking and listening skills for both students and teachers”

The whole point of Action Research is that it is to develop and adapt methodologies for use in a practical teaching situation, and coming up with a Method with a big M demands entirely another approach- one that the so-fine-you-could-easily-miss-it distinction between ‘has proven’ and ‘has been proven’ suggests this person has not gone through. Doesn’t mean I’m not open to her ideas, though, and I will be seeking out a workshop on PRCM if I can.

*I was going to call this post “The best you can expect in TEFL”, but this message I saw on a T shirt in Seoul today seemed to say it much more poetically…

androgogy- teaching like a girly man

behaviourism- the theory that making your students pretend they have stiff upper lips will make them act and speak like Englishmen, and wearing a crown in class will make them speak Queen’s English

co-hyponym - Getting students to hypnotize each other to help with vocabulary learning

communicative weight- the difficulty of where to look when talking to the obese

feminist pedagogy- (more…)

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