Archive for the ‘Linguistics, applied linguistics and SLA’ Category

I’m starting to pack to go to Korea, and the lack of CDs is a godsend. Books, however, are going to be a problem…

If you are in Japan, my loss could be your gain. If you are interested in any of the books below, I will send you a copy and even include one of the freebies listed at the bottom, in exchange for writing a review for TEFL.net reviews, as explained here. Please note, however, that I am paying postage out of my own pocket and will be rather miffed if good intentions does not turn into an actual review, so only volunteer this time if you are sure you can do it. When the publishers are paying postage like usual, however…

If you are in Korea, I might also be willing to add it to my box of books to take and send it from there, so you might be second choice but still, volunteer away!

If anyone is interested, please use the Request to Review for TEFL.net box on the Reviewer’s Guide page (a vital read for everyone who is interested), leave a message here, or email me using the Contact Me button on the main page of the blog.

Books available:

Oxford University Press
Activities Using Resources- Heather Westrup and Joanna Baker (Oxford Basics)
Vocabulary Activities- Mary Slattery (Oxford Basics for Children)
Listen and Do (Oxford Basics for Children)
The Oxford ESOL Handbook
Creating Songs and Chants- Carolyn Graham

Summertown Publishing
Success with BULATS

Marshall Cavendish Education
Achieve BULATS

Cambridge
The TKT Course

Delta Publishing
Challenging Children

The English Company
The English Course 3rd Edition (Gary Ireland, Kevin Murphy, Max Woollerton)

Already been reviewed, but will give away to people who volunteer to review titles above:

Oxford
Form Focused Instruction and Teacher Education

A History of English Language Teaching

If you don’t believe me, before you buy one of language courses for just 100 dollars* have a free trial of one of our other “…in just three months” ® courses, for example:
- Anyone can learn to run 100 metres in 10 seconds in just three months
- Anyone can learn good taste in just three months
- Anyone can learn to speak in a squeaky or ridiculously gruff voice without being embarrassed in just three months
- Anyone can learn to accept a language that assumes different gender roles in just three months
- Anyone can gain a Meryl Streep- like ability to mimic accents in just three months
- Anyone can learn to settle down for self-study every evening rather than turning on the TV in just three months
- Anyone can train themselves to learn something just because they are told to in just three months
- Anyone can become charismatic in just three months
- Anyone can overcome memory loss in just three months
- Anyone can expand their vocabulary in their own language by 5000 words in just three months
- Anyone can learn perfect pitch in just three months
- Anyone can become interested in inane chatter at house parties in just three months
- Anyone can train themselves to prefer books and films they don’t understand in just three months
- Anyone can learn to abandon Hollywood films and news from back home in favour of knowledge of the local obscure culture in just three months
- Anyone can stop preferring a good book to pointless small talk with strangers in just three months
- Anyone can learn delayed gratification in just three months
- Anyone can lose the desire to express complex thoughts in just three months
- Anyone can overcome their natural human weaknesses in just three months
- Anyone can learn to relate to people who they have nothing in common with in just three months
- Anyone can drop all their cultural baggage in just three months
- Anyone can learn to be word perfect in reciting a 5000 word book in just three months
- Anyone can reverse their ideas of what it means to be polite and impolite in just three months
- Anyone can learn to prefer vocabulary lists to ice cream or sex in just three months
- Anyone can learn how to never give up on something once they have started it in just three months
- Anyone can learn never to doubt the usefulness of what you are being taught in just three months
- Anyone can learn to sustain an interest in something they chose on a whim in just three months
- Anyone can learn to reverse all their normal body language in just three months
- Anyone can learn to never be distracted in just three months
- Anyone can learn to resist all temptations that could get in the way of studying in just three months
- Anyone can learn to never think of excuses for procrastination in just three months
- Anyone can learn enough Physics to enter an undergraduate course in just three months
- Anyone can learn to be a saint in just three months
- Anyone can find a meaning to life in just three months
- Anyone can learn to be a perfect parent in just three months
- Anyone can drop all their annoying personal habits in just three months
- Anyone can learn to enjoy studying in just three months
- Anyone can learn to stop asking for colour, decent illustrations, lack of typos and other reasonable production standards in their self-study materials in just three months
- Anyone can learn how to spot an outrageously ambitions claim for self-study materials in just three minutes
- Anyone can learn to stop trusting a newspaper that has advertorials for this kind of crap in just three seconds

* Price of monthly payment when paying for the course in the usual 360 monthly instalments

Positive messages to chant to yourself in front of the mirror or record on your iPod include:

1. “I will make my students love English so much that they cry when they can’t come to class”
2. “Having no money is good for my karma and the environment”
3. “I am totally psyched about teaching adverbs of frequency”
4. “The Present Perfect Continuous is all part of God’s great but mysterious plan” (more…)

- The basic meaning of klots, from where the English word klutz comes, is “wooden beam”
- “Jezebel…means ‘daughter of garbage’ [in Hebrew]; her name was probably [really]… Jebaal, daughter of Baal…” (Born to Kvetch pg 22) 

- “Beelzebub…,lord of the flies,was a takeoff of Baal Zevul, lord of heaven” (Born to Kvetch pg 22)
- “Schlong” is a yiddish word (it also has the innocent meaning of “snake”), and “schmuk” and “putz ” also means penis
- “Chutzpah” is an entirely negative word in Yiddish
- “Bubkes” as in “He isn’t worth bubkes” literally means “beans” or “goat droppings”
- “Glitch” possibly comes from the Yiddish word “glitsh”, from glitshn ’slide’, similar to the German word “glitschen”- “slither”
- “Maven” comes from the Hebrew word “mevin” “one who understands” via the the Yiddish word “meyvn”
- The London slang word “nosh” comes from the Yiddish word “nashn”, similar to the German word “naschen”
- Another Cockney classic is “schlep” from from the Yiddish “shlepn” to make a tedious journey, similar to the German word “schleppen”
- The original (Yiddish) meaning of “schmaltz” is melted chicken fat
- “Schnoz/ schnozz/ schnozzle” comes from the Yiddish word “shnoits”, snout, similar to the German word Schnauze
- “Shtick” comes from the Yiddish word for ‘piece’, similar to the German word “Stück” 
- “Spiel”/ “shpiel” comes from the Yiddish word “shpil”, play, similar to the German word “Spiel”
- “Glitch” comes from the Yiddish word “glitsh”, meaning slip,” “skate,” or “nosedive,
- “Kibbutz” is the Hebrew word for “collective”
- “Tush”, the American slang for bum, comes from the Yiddish word “tuchis”/ “tuches”/ “tokhis”
- “To keep shtoom” comes from the Yiddish word “shtum”- silent or speechless
- “Shyster” and “gazump” also come from Yiddish

Other random facts from Born to Kvetch

- Why brideGROOM? It was a completely different word that disappeared from the English language, so they just changed the pronunciation to make it the same as the closest word by pron (technically, assimilation) pg 35

- The showbiz term ‘a turkey’ means a show that “flaps its wings but never flies” pg 23

New words (for me) from Born to Kvetch
the Tetragrammaton- YHVH- the real name of God
antiphrasis- saying the opposite of what you mean, as a kind of euphemism

ale tseyn zoln dir oysfaln, nor eyner zol dir blaybn af tsonveytik- all your teeth should fall out,but you should keep one to get a toothache with

hak mir nisht ken tshaynik-don’t knock me a teakettle-stop rattling on about the same thing all the time (like the lid of a boiling kettle rattling)

yeytser-hore-bleterl- a small blotch of the evil inclination- a lovebite

zol dir dreyen farn nopl- you should go dizzy in the navel

a dank dir in pupik- thank you in the navel- thanks for nothing

vi got in frankraykh- like God in France- “living in sin”

der malekh ha-moves zol zikh in dir farlibn- the Angel of Death should fall in love with you

shtarbn in fremde takhrikhim- to die in someone else’s shrouds- to die in debt

mayn kadish, kadishl- my little mourner- my son (the person who will say the Kaddish when I die)

zolst mir megulgl vern in a henglaykhter, bay tog zoltsu hengen un bay nakht zolstu brenen- You should be reincarnated as a chandelier (you should hang by day and burn by night)

All from Born to Kvetch, both the funniest and the most serious book I have ever read about Yiddish.

Coming up: Phrases that really should exist in English Part Two- Japanese English and Random Facts about Yiddish- someone please nag me if that turns into the usual promise of posts that I get distracted from…

I must be the least likely blogger of all time, being neither technically savvy nor generally interested in online content- I’d never read a blog before I started this one, and I still reckon most of the best stuff is still in books. Anything from Zoltan available on the web? I thought not.

Once in a while though, I do stumble upon some good stuff. As that gives me even more stuff I want to read, I usually don’t find time to even mention it here, so here goes while I still feel a little recharged from my summer hols:

The Linguist Blogger

Some very thought provoking stuff, and perhaps a lesson to me that blogging less frequently produces greater quality… Two recent ones that particularly took my fancy:

Building Nations with the Cunning Use of Foreign Languages

Language Learning and Weight Lifting

Back in the world of TEFL, the other Dave is going through some highlights from his articles and he has chosen well, particularly:

In Search of a Word: Can Ambition Survive in TEFL?

When is it too late to get out of TEFL?

If like me you were stimulated by the ELT World articles but irritated by having to have a Google ID to comment, feel free to leave your comments here instead:

While I’m on the subject and have to make the most of Favourites on this PC (it’s staying in Japan when I go to Korea), here is a list of TEFL, linguistics and Japan related sites I most often end up at, in approximate order:

1. Dave’s ESL Cafe international job forums (the pointless bitching makes it more memorable somehow, maybe it’s the Dynasty of TEFL sites)

2. The TESall.com TEFL news ticker (including links to the forum discussions that are actually worthwhile)

3. The TEFL tradesman (as foul-mouthed and crusading as we’d all like to be)

4. The TEFL Blacklist (does exactly what it says in the title)

5. EL Gazette digital (a real TEFL newspaper. Click on the link on the main page to subscribe for free)

6. An Englishman in Osaka (just very funny, and so beats all the much more informative Japan blogs, of which there are many, in competing for my online time…)

7. Guardian TEFL (some real journalism would be nice- see EL Gazette for that- but a good way of keeping up with TEFL press releases anyway)

8. The Life of Mike (some odd changes of direction, but some thought provoking and entertaining posts)

9. Notes from the TEFL graveyard (hits the funny yet practical, cynical yet enjoying the life balance that I struggle with on my blog)

10. Teacher in Development (would probably be around number 2 if there were more posts)

11. Metatesol (pithy, to the point and almost inactive- this one would also be higher if this little bit of prompting results in more posts)

If I was a better person the list would probably be different, and Rave’s ESL Au Lait wouldn’t even be in the list let alone at the top and Insights into TEFL , Humanising Language Teaching  and Developing Teachers would be in there, but like my irrational desire to eat cheap gyudon, that is where I really end up. End of confession- how many Hail Mario’s for absolution?

I thought so.  Try these with your classes, then:

Student A: How are you?
Student B: Old

Student A: How are you?
Student B: How am I? How should I be?

Student A: How are you?
Student B: How should I be, with my feet?

Student A: How’s your brother?
Student B: Dead

Student A: What’s doing?
Student B: Nothing
A: Nothing?
B: Nothing.

Student A: How was your weekend?
Student B: It should happen to my enemies

Student A: What time is it?
Student B: What am I, a clock?

In case you haven’t guessed they are all from Yiddish, specifically mainly from the surprisingly readable popular linguistics book Born to Kvetch. More good stuff from there coming on TEFLtastic soon.

As mentioned in a comment or two below (and in every other sentence in my real life conversation), I am off on my reasonably well deserved hols from Friday and won’t even be looking at a computer screen for the next 10 days. For those of you who can’t live without an opinionated TEFL rant until I get back, I’m sure there must be something in my 458 posts over the last 14 months that you must have missed, so have a little trawl through the archives here- I’m sure there must be something there to entertain and/ or offend you!

For those of you still here for the serious stuff that I was supposed to have set this blog up for, here are the links to bits and pieces I have been involved in elsewhere in the world on TEFL. The top two are my own particular favourites from the last few months:

15 ways to help your students forget

15 ways to help your students dream in English

15 games for the language of describing people

15 real life situations for the language of describing people

15 typical textbook activities you can personalize

15 difficulties in teaching the language of describing people

15 ways to write a TEFL review

Office vocabulary compound noun stress

Why does my teacher make us work in pairs?

Talking about your job and company first class

Business English prepositions

Present Simple/ Continuous and Tense Review Guessing Game

Complaints prepositions practice

ARELS- Association of Reasonably good English Language Schools
 
BAAL- The false god of Applied Linguistics
 
Direct method- A system of language learning aimed at making Japanese students say what they really mean

Ditransitive- verbs often used with the object “Lady Di”
 
EAP- English for Academic Purposes- learning English to seem intellectual
 
Facilitation- Rather than leading the language learning process, teachers aid the students by standing there doing nothing and spouting stuff like “Don’t ask me, you are empowered to control your own learning”.

Feedback- Based on the similarity with playing an electric guitar, in ELT this term is used to express the teacher’s ability to produce discord and put people on edge with the use of error correction

FFI- Form focused instruction- designing your lessons just to get good marks on the categories you know are on the student evaluation and lesson observation forms

Fillers- breakfast foods suitable for teachers who will be photocopying through their lunch break

FL- foreign language. Pronounced “fleur”, with as outrageous a French accent as you can manage
 
Focus on form- The problem of teachers writing down all the things students tell them during a level check interview and only remembering to notice the language they use during the last few seconds. Often contrasted with focus on forms*

Focus on forms- A teacher being distracted by the student’s figure during a level check interview and only remembering to notice the language they use in the last few seconds. Often contrasted with Focus on Form*

Fossilization- The immobile face and blank stare that teachers who have been in the business too long develop

Gap filling- The favourite physical threat of drunk TEFL teachers

Grammatical terminology- “all these like little name things” (definition by an English Language Teaching Assistant in Hong Kong, quoted in Teacher Language Awareness pg 157)

IH- International House, the chain of schools formerly known by the less successful name of “Nationalism House”

Immersion language learning- A way of increasing student motivation to speak. See also waterboarding*

Implicit knowledge of language- Students hiding the fact that they’ve known that grammar since primary school in order not to seem like a swot or to save the teacher embarrassment

Inductive approach (the) - Giving students who pause forever before speaking an epidural injection to force delivery

Inflections- Passed on in the spit of Spanish people trying to pronounce /h/

ALR- ape language research-looking into whether it is possible to teach English to West Ham or Birmingham City fans

Chomsky hierarchy (the) - Noam’s at the top, and whoever agrees with him most is in 2nd place

critical period- (more…)