Archive for the ‘Youtube’ Category

If you feel like being shocked, amused, and/ or disgusted, have a little browse through what a search for “Eikaiwa” (”English conversation” in Japanese) on youtube brings up 

…Why does no one ever listen to me??

Rather than a complaint about how your friends back home ask about your experiences abroad for 10 seconds and then get back to gossiping about Britney, I’m talking here about students who meet your top-spec up-to-date grammar explanations (gathered through nightly use of the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English for alternate reading and weights practice) with skeptical looks, “my other teacher said…”, “Yeah, riiiight!”, “No, that’s wrong” and/ or spitting out of chewing tobacco. Reasons include: (more…)

“We didn’t have active discussion, active uses of English. … We inertly listened to her [the professor] during the class,”

 You’re thinking it’s from a 3rd world country, maybe one with a non-democratic regime, right?

Think again.

 ”Several students said they felt that the classes were poorly organized, and the wide range of student abilities made learning more difficult.”

Sounds like Japan, all shiny and Western looking on the outside but Confucian chaos on the inside. But no…

So, must be one of those European countries with teacher-led grammar-obsessed English classes like Spain we always forget when contrasting Asia with “the West”. Well, let’s have a look through the round window*…
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Thought I’d pass these tongue twisters onto everyone, because that is after all what the internet is for… With translations in Italian left in, just to prove that all TEFL teachers are exactly the kind of cultured, sophisticated people that would get invited to the Ambassador’s party :

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“You so want to be a part of the culture, fit in and find out what’s going on,” she says, with real feeling. “Dallas is responsible for making me learn English.”

I guess that makes Dallas the Harry Potter of its time (or indeed makes Harry Potter the Dallas of its time, which explains a lot).

From the Scottish newspaper The Herald- Secrets of Language An Open Mind and a Glass of Red Wine

And they have also decided to have a go at the “language learning as sports metaphor”, so I guess that my attempts to do that are less than original (like thinking you’ve invented a new TEFL game and then finding out that Mario Rinvoludicrous did it in 1871): (more…)

This was supposed to be a self-congratulatory post to pat myself on the back for a good 6 months of TEFLtasticking, but I must be getting sentimental in my old age and/ or around Xmas, because instead I’d like to give my TEFL Oscar acceptance speech and thank everyone else involved:

I’d like to thank:

-All the people who are responsible for the 60,000 views or so there have been in 6 months, including the person who searched for “alex case for hamster” on Christmas day, and if that means just 6 people viewing 10,000 times each I’d like to thank each of you even more…

- Anyone who has written any of the 450 comments, especially those who answered questions from readers (more questions always welcome) and those who made me chuckle

- All the blogs who have linked to me or mentioned my stuff, especially if there are any who I haven’t paid back because their mutual link has got lost in my mess of a links page

- Whoever the people at Wordpress might be doing whatever it is they might do that somehow makes it possible to do this

And a special mention for my guest writers (please have a click and a read if you have’t read their posts yet, it makes a very nice break from me waffling on) Katie from TEFLlogue for writing about “When I am TEFL President” and Do’s and Don’ts in Bosnia, Kaithe for writing about being Troubled in Tunisia, Sharon for writing about Eastern Europe when it really was an adventure, and Laurent from lo-la.co.uk on passing as and improving on a native speaker English teacher in Japan.

And finally a huge thank you to the editor of TEFL.net, who first suggested me starting a blog in June this year, for which my eternal gratitude should more than make up for the curses he gets from my fiancee, who I guess should also get a thank you for putting up with it. And thanks to my agent, my hairdresser, my make up artist, my stylist, I love you guys, sob sob sob, wave to the crowd (this speech still needs some work I think, all done much better by John Cleese)

Stephen Fry gets heavy with the grammar correction (not recommended viewing for CELTA trainees!)

Room 101- Grammar Bullies (recommended viewing for 74 year old Applied Linguistics professors)

This post was supposed to be quick seasonal sum up of videos of interest to those stuck in teaching, stuck in Japan and/ or stuck in the house, but the first video I found on searching “language” was so interesting that I didn’t get past reading up about that:

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If you search “English lesson” on youbtube, there are a couple of British Council lessons and stuff you could look at. Quite frankly though, televisual English lessons are something much better left to the Japanese: (more…)

… according to this Japan-related article by the Guardian. I’m guessing that is because the agriculture ministry is in charge of huge monsters that come out of Tokyo bay, leaving another ministry to sort out Richard Nixon in Futurama style giant robots, in the same way that one ministry gets horse racing, one cycle racing and one speed boat racing (really!)

This Japanese male geeky obsessiveness is just one of many examples of the similarities between Japan and the UK- yes, train spotters are here too, and totally unheard of in Italy, Turkey, Thailand or Spain. Other similarities include-

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