Archive for January, 2009

“It’s also worth remembering that in some places in the world your online certificate will actually be enough to get you work. These tend to be places where there is a huge demand for teachers, and where any Tefl qualification (irrespective of the format) is preferable to no training at all”

It’s also worth rembering that 94.7%* of those schools will also accept you with no TEFL training at all, and those are exactly the kinds of schools you should try to avoid.

Original claims from here.

Although Cactus TEFL has long been a target of a certain paper-based TEFL publication, I’ve always thought the fact that they mainly sell CELTA and Trinity CertTESOL and that you can compare different courses on one page is a good thing. So, why have they suddenly switched to selling online courses instead. Cash perhaps?

What you most need to know about online courses is that once they are set up they cost nothing to run. Zero. I don’t think that is what they wanted to say, but that is what came out of my interview with Global TESOL when I said “What about your training staff?” and they said something like “You don’t understand. This is online, we don’t need any staff.” In fact in an email they accused me of not doing my homework by even asking such a question. Therefore, once any online TEFL course company has made back its initial investment, every penny they are sent is profit for them and agents like Cactus TEFL.

* Actually I’ve no idea what the percentage is, but is seems you have to have decimal point to be taken seriously in TEFL nowadays (see a couple of posts below)

Can’t I get someone to write this for me as a guest post as well? No? Oh well, while I wait for Chomsky to do this 50,000 word guest article, let’s just make it a list of links with no attempted witticisms then:

15 tips for people attending TESOL conferences (a “tribute”* to Darren Elliot’s article in English Teaching Professional magazine)

15 more ways of classifying classroom questions

15 ways of classifying classroom questions

Hmm, felt like I’d spent far more time writing than that little list would suggest. Make me feel better by having a click on the links in December 2008 Part One and Part Two, will you? Or even better, make some of the time I spent updating my complete publications links page worthwhile by clicking here. Or should you want to read things by other people (why would you want to do that?) my links page is also totally updated and has quite a few videos for TEFLers so you can eat cornflakes and improve your teaching at the same time.

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“Cambridge University Press had committed to publishing the book with minor revisions, and then they suddenly decided not to publish the book. They had committed to it and suddenly changed their minds. Prof Herzfeld was on the editorial board of CUP’s anthropology series at the time, and he resigned in protest, as did other members of the board.

CD: Yes, they cited ‘the safety of their staff in Greece’ as their reason, right?

VF: Well they said that. However, the way I heard it, CUP had a monopoly on English-language testing in the schools of Greece as well…

CD: Do you believe that the Greek government threatened that they would lose this privilege?

VF: I have no idea, but assuming that they had a monopoly- two plus two, what are you going to make of that, four or twenty-two?”

From here. I’d recommend reading the whole interview, especially if you have any interest in the Balkans and/ or how language policy and nationalism go together.

No, most certainly not my fellow TEFL.net Book Review pages enthusiastic amateurs, who have written some great recent reviews on Creative Poetry Writing, New Insight into IELTS and Vocabulary . The guilty parties are people who really should know better and in fact think they do:

Step forward Brian Tomlinson and the rest of his multinational knowitall crew in the July 2008 edition of ELT Journal, who have somehow managed to give textbooks a score. And here they are:

Quick Smart English - 61.9%

face2face – 56.4%

Straightforward – 71.9%

Just Right - 68.5%

New English File - 63.3%

Total English - 61.5%

Innovations – 67.1%

Framework – 71.8%

Now, that is stretching credulity for me a bit I must say, especially giving a figure with a decimal point! At least they tested the books with a large cross section of classes and measured how much the students had improved using each course, though. Oh no, wait a minute, that was just a dream of mine. This bunch read through the books and gave them a mark (with a decimal point, remember) without having, as far as we can see from the review, taught with them at all. That’s right, they decided that Innovations was 10.7% better than face2face without actually teaching with either of them. At least they backed up their claims with references to other books, though. There are, for example, an awful lot of references to books by Brian Tomlinson, who apparently agrees with Brian Tomlinson.

How did this come about? It came about because they know what it takes to teach students well- so much so that they can judge a book without actually using it. That would save the publishers a fortune in trialling if it was so, but perhaps they should have a look at my previous post before cutting trialling out completely?

For the record, I have taught classes with both and know for a fact that in my classes face2face went down 15.43579% better than Innovations, although that is variable on humidity and maybe (as a comment in my previous post points out) just a couple of other factors…

Before you look at our theory in detail, maybe you’d like to look at some of our other books in the same series:

- We now know how to cure all mental illness

- We now know how to reintergrate all child molesters into society

- We now know how to teach football to people with two left feet

- We now know how to make all strikers regain their confidence 

- We now know how to cure all anorexics

- We now know the meaning of life

- We now know what all British parents should do to stop their kids turning into teenage brats

- We now know exactly how the brain works

- We now know how to motivate people who have no interest in something

- We now know how to make people forget all their previous educational traumas

Not convinced by the ones above? Well, they are all topics that a lot more time, money and effort have gone into than have gone into SLA and Applied Linguistics, so you might want to leave universal theories of second language learning for a while too- especially as the last few would all have to be solved before we could even start working out how to make a theory of language teaching…

Compare and contrast:

Koreans learning English

and

Japanese learning English

And

The Taiwanese learning about real TEFL teachers (or maybe they need to revise that point)

Laughing Coyote School of English in Nayarit in Mexico has recently got a lot of TEFL blog coverage due to them turning the tables on us by starting a blacklist of former teachers and trainee teachers. You can easily find the blacklist itself and the various blog and forum threads on it by googling the school name. Here, however, is what Juan Pablo assures me is the only interview they have ever given or ever will give. As such, and in order to avoid just repeating the information and atmosphere of other sites, I would like to keep most comments to further questions that you would like him to answer. Alternatively, you can email the questions to me (see the Contact Me link on the main blog page), and I will ask him. I have given one example of a follow up question that I hadn’t thought of in the interview in the comments section. If you have experience of the school and would like to contradict something he has said, I am happy for you to paste that part of the interview into one of those other blogs or forums and comment on it there (it is best to avoid cutting and pasting the whole interview if you can). (more…)

… make sure you don’t learn the local language.

“Indeed, the large numbers of people in Asia learning English, or coming to the West to learn English, without any corresponding trend among non-native speakers to learn Asian languages, were entrenching English’s position as the world’s second language.”

In other words, if you learn foreign languages you will help make yourself unemployed.

From the provocatively titled article Call to Nurture the English Language Empire.

by Karenne Sylvester of Kalinago English:

“When I was about 14, we went on vacation to the US. We were there to do some very serious shopping and my mother had a list of clothes, shoes and stuff for school – things we had little to no access to in Antigua.

When we arrived at the mall in Miami, Mom excitedly trailed me behind her as we moved from shop to shop.

This was heaps of fun until we had to travel one floor up. She led me to the most monstrous of machines, a staircase that moved!

Coming from the Caribbean where you’d be hard-pushed to find a set of stairs within a shop, let alone a series of endless stores stacked on top of each other, the grinding teeth of this metal beast stopped me dead in my tracks. (more…)

“International House Newcastle – The only school in the North of England that is accredited by British Council”

All the other school oop North were banned because of health and safety concerns with the presence of racing pigeons and whippets in the school, and misunderstandings by the Child Protection Agency of the teachers having ferrets down their trousers. On the plus side, the Dark Satanic Mills the schools were based in were judged to be a considerable improvement on the average building of an Oxford Street language school in London.

Joking aside, it can’t really be true that there is only one British Council accredited school north of the Watford gap, can it? (more…)