Number one: cosplay
Only joking- I mean of course that the status of English teachers is not so obviously low that when I met the love of my life and asked her to marry me she actually agreed!
You won’t hear a lot about it on the TEFL forums, but there are actually a lot of other advantages to choosing Japan to teach in: (more…)
Hopefully it’s just Mayday bank holiday rather than my lack of effort TEFLtasticwise recently that has seen a sudden drop in my number of views, but if only to make myself feel better I thought I’d give a list of where I’ve been making much more effort elsewhere, with links:
TEFL.net Idea Thinktank
15 fun ways to switch students onto graded readers
15 fun job application practice tasks- CV writing, cover letter, interview practice, HR vocabulary etc.
TEFL.net articles
15 common misconceptions about Business English and ESP
15 cultural differences in the Japanese classroom
15 more cultural differences in the Japanese classroom
15 criteria for a good cultural training lesson
15 more criteria for good cultural training lesson
15 important cultural differences in the classroom
15 more important cultural differences in the classroom
Onestopenglish (Macmillan) articles
Motivating teachers whose Business English students miss class
UsingEnglish articles for teachers
Why your students overuse their dictionaries- with solutions
70 characteristics of a good grammar presentation- possibly the longest article on this subject ever!
Why your students don’t want to do pairwork- with solutions and some pondering about whether they might not sometimes be right
Why your students still make mistakes with grammar they know well- with solutions and a call to relax when there are no solutions
The advantages and disadvantages of peer observations- with how to exploit the advantages and avoid the disadvantages
Things to put in a Self-Access Centre or Student Library- with tips on how to do it on the cheap
Why do my students question me?- with solutions
Why your students have problems with listening comprehension- with solutions
UsingEnglish.com articles for students (teachers might also want to have a look at what I am writing about them)
Why does my teacher make me read silently?
Why doesn’t my teacher correct all my mistakes when I’m speaking?
Why does my teacher make me learn the phonemic script?
UsingEnglish photocopiable PDF worksheets
Travel English pairwork B and V
Business and technical English easily confused words
CAE Reading Part Two match the quotes
TEFLtastic worksheets (pain in the arse to print out but worth the effort)
English for job applications/ HR worksheets
Cultural training worksheets for EFL classes
Requests and offers functional language review
The Roots of Medical English LP and 4 worksheets
And that’s it for TEFL stuff. The other thing I’ve been busy with is my wedding speech for the day after tomorrow, which could well mean that May will be an even less busy month in TEFLtasticland. Anyone fancy writing a guest piece or feeding me a story to keep the 1700 viewers I get on a good day entertained until I get back into the flow? If so, try the “Contact me” link on the right…
“Native-Japanese speakers taking the paper-based Test of English as a Foreign Language, or TOEFL, scored lower than students from China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, South Korea and Vietnam in 2007. Even North Koreans scored higher.”
From the famous Japan analyst William Pissant.
To which my reply is- (more…)
As a blogger and writer of articles on the internet whose technical knowledge stops at Word, as usual I feel half chuffed at churning out so many articles, including a good one here and there, and half guilty at creating so much work for those who can name a programming language more recent than BASIC. So, with many thanks to the tech sorts who made this possible and without further ado, here are the new bits and pieces on the web that I’ve been associated with:
The TEFL.net review pages I edit now allow comments on any of the titles reviewed there, which is a fabulous idea which I wish had been mine.
On TEFL.net too, there is a new Idea Thinktank of practical teaching games etc, on which I have about 12 (!) articles including 15 Fun Things to do with a Whiteboard (yes, that’s a whiteboard rather than an interactive whiteboard- showing my age??) and the 15 Most Fun Pronunciation Games.
As if that wasn’t enough, I’ve also got some slightly more weighty ones up on the rejigged TEFL.net TEFL Articles Page, including Easy Ways to Improve Your TEFL Career.
And on Usingenglish.com in March:
Election- Second Conditionals speaking practice
101 IELTS Speaking Part Two Tasks about sports and hobbies
Why your students speak L1 in class
Why your students don’t do their homework
101 IELTS Speaking Part Two tasks about people, places, actions, things and times
Setting up workshops for teachers
Business English silent letters and syllables
The language of trends spot the difference
I also had a review of a couple of BULATS books out in MET magazine this month, should you have a copy handy and fancy a look.
To make up for all the navel gazing recently, have decided to give the public what it wants for once. And what the public wants is TEFL sex!
That first paragraph should get some nice bizarre Google searches coming my way, but actually I’ve already done that topic to death (really!), so I’ll instead be expanding on the most popular recent post, which was on writing the perfect CV and cover letter for a TEFL teacher. Now we have, for your delight and delectation:
The perfect CV and cover letter for an EFL exam class teacher
The perfect CV and cover letter for a TEFL young learners teacher
The perfect CV and cover letter for an EFL manager
The perfect CV and cover letter for a teacher trainer
And last and (possibly) least:
The perfect CV and cover letter for a Business English teacher
In answer to my own question, I’m actually quite happy being a TEFL pleb again after trying teacher training and what have you, which is perhaps why I am the only person who will give advice to others on how to get into it as I’m not competing with you for the jobs…
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:
Fabio “my name is Italian for fabulous” Capello thinks he’s going to learn English in a month:
http://sport.independent.co.uk/football/internationals/article3263515.ece
I hope his ideas of what he can do with the English football team are a little more realistic.
I particularly loved the claim in that article that if you do 150 hours on the software you are guaranteed a level of Upper Intermediate. Seeing as how you could theoretically do that many hours in two weeks, that really would be impressive to go from “my English is not so well” to someone who can: (more…)
Man, what a week! Don’t know why it always all comes together, but last week had some of the teenagers not answering a single question from an IELTS reading by the end of the time limit, a two man Business English class with mixed levels and only the higher level student doing the preparation work I had set the lower level one to help him catch up, etc. etc. Maybe they are just holding out for Xmas same as me. So, if you came here looking for inspiration, hope to see you again next week…
Luckily, though, it’s been a good weekend for using a little time mangement tip which I picked up while studying languages and which also comes in very useful when I am writing full time (as I will be again soon I hope if I have many more weeks like this- very reasonable rates, if any publishers or TEFL website editors are reading…). The trick is: (more…)
…but nicely summarized.
I take it all back about Time magazine. It may not be the Economist or L’Express, or even El Pais Sunday magazine, but they have managed the article about Nova from a publication outside Japan with least factual errors. My one quibble is using TOEIC scores as a comparison of language learning levels in different countries. (more…)