Posts Tagged ‘News’

Farewell to the Georgian Press List, taken over by CUP.

Although my own copies of Georgian Press books were long ago lost in my endless moves from country to country leaving teachers’ rooms stocked with my books behind me (I will reclaim my copy of The Encyclopedia of Language from Central School in London someday!) I will always have a soft spot for them as they were one of the first publishers to agree to send out TEFL.net review copies, being a set of historical graded readers and the book Selections. The question mark is there in this blog post title because book and publisher takeovers by the big boys don’t always have to be negative. Helbling Languages seem to have gone from strength to strength since they sold some of their titles onto on of the big 4, and the owners of Peter Collin Publishers simply took the money from their takeover to set up another TEFL publishers and buy up English Teaching Professional and Modern English Teacher magazines. However, the new owners of Peter Collin Publishers dictionaries seem to have done nothing at all with them, and the same was true of titles from Brighton’s very own LTP, who were mirroring the downfall of The Seagulls until the recent flurry of new levels and editions for Innovations and Business Matters.

The “more” is there in the blog post title because I have also written about ELT publishing here:

Proof of a TEFL oligarchy??

and here:

ELT Publishing Trendspotter

Looking at the pages of Education Guardian, there are four much loved (and for some reason also much hated) letters that have recently gone missing, and those letters are T,E,F and L. The Guardian TEFL pages still exist, but I don’t know how anyone would end up there without a single internal link on the Guardian webpages. I can’t say it will be much missed (last blog post 21 February 2007, most recent “articles” being ones persuading people to take TEFL courses written by people who work for TEFL course providers- first openly and then hidden after blogs pointed it out, a level of churnalism impressive even by recent UK standards), but it still seems like the end of an era for someone of my TEFL generation who went to the paper version every Tuesday for TEFL jobs and occasional news and to the newspaper nearly every other day for our obligatory unthinking left wing TEFLer views.

Obviously it happened because TEFL job advertising had long gone online elsewhere (even more than job ads in general), TEFLers are not up there with media types as an advertiser’s chosen market, and previous attempts to make money in related areas like Guardian Languages had failed. That The (long anti New Labour) Guardian can be so obviously capitalist is still a shock to the hidden teenager in me, but it is enlightening just a little to realise that Guardian Media make most of their money from the (secretly Trotskyist??) AutoTrader.co.uk

As I can’t seem to stop eliciting (really!) I’ll tell you what you will read on it and see if you can work out the dialect being saved and the technology doing it for yourselves:

“Reading your bladder of lard, please wait”

“First enter your Huckleberry Finn”

“Please enter amount of sausage and mash”

“Choose from Lady Godiva, Speckled Hen, Horn of Plenty or Pony”

“We are contacting your rattle and tank” (more…)

“Japanese college students who’d had little exposure to spoken English underwent 12 sessions listening to exaggerated “Ls” and “Rs” while watching the computerized instructor’s face pronounce English words. Brain scans — a hair dryer-looking device called MEG, for magnetoencephalography — that measure millisecond-by-millisecond activity showed the students could better distinguish between those alien English sounds. And they pronounced them better, too, the team reported in the journal NeuroImage.”

I can teach an Asian student to recognise and pronounce /r/ and /l/ better in five minutes, as can most other teachers I know who’ve been here more than a couple of years. There are loads of different techniques, but mine include making the students hold their hand at the side of their mouth palm down to represent their tongue and flapping it along with their tongue every time they say /l/ and holding it down every time they say /r/. Doesn’t mean they instantly get the ability to say it that way in natural speech, but even being able to stop and make an effort to say something that is clearly distinguishable when someone has misunderstood you (the best I ever achieved with Spanish “pero” and “perro”, as even my Rs in English sound a bit /w/ if what my Turkish students wrote during dictations is anything to go by) is no small feat. Someone give me a huge research grant, and I’ll find out how much it sticks!

Still, interesting piece of research. If only there hadn’t been some idiot journalist determined to use it to prove that babies are the best learners of L2. SPEND FIVE MINUTES TEACHING THREE YEAR OLDS, ANYWAY YOU LIKE, AND THEN TELL ME THEY PICK UP LANGUAGE LIKE SPONGES, MORON! And then teach them again after the three week summer break and see how much they remember. And then wait until they get to school and lose interest in the language because the lessons are too easy and they are embarrassed about looking like a geek in front of their classmates, etc etc…

All the evidence suggests that the most time efficient time for learning languages if you are not going to move to the country is in your teens, with adults second and little kids long behind. There are a million things I want to know about how to teach my adult students better (and about tips I can give them to help them learn better on their own), and few if any can be answered by looking at native speakers babies.

Also being talked about by Ask Auntie Web and The Linguist on Language. And more good science linked to bad journalism on Language Log here.

“in 1999 a…study by Dr. Allan Bernardo of De La Salle University investigated the effects of different learner and instructional factors on solving arithmetic word problems among grade school students. The results showed better comprehension and solution performance when the tests were in the learners’ L1 in spite of being taught in English”

From an interesting article discussing English medium education in the Phillipines and Malaysia, Intellectualizing a Language. Obviously, English medium education is not the same as CLIL and I am of course guilty of looking for any evidence to back up my already made up mind of CLIL, but that’s humans for you…

As someone trying to teach a grammar-based textbook with 8 year olds, I totally appreciate efforts to make teaching young learners more content based. The problem with CLIL is the stated or unstated idea that you can get two for the price of one- learn Biology in a CLIL lesson, get English free! You can’t increase learning by 100% whatever approach you use, and certainly not by trying to teach two subjects at once with undertrained teachers as the reality of CLIL will turn out to be round most of the world. Try telling that to education ministries though…

If you want to find out more about CLIL than I’ve given you here (and you could hardly learn less, seeing as it is an information free rant), you can probably find out more than I will ever know on the subject here:

The 2009 CLIL debate

CLIL debate articles from Guardian

CLIL debate on Youtube

OnestopCLIL (mostly have to pay to see it, but some free and good guide to where CLIL is now)

I’m cheating a bit (as 10% of that is for my TEFLtastic spin off JapanExplained site) and have no way of knowing if that is a lot or a little for a blog, but it’s a nice round number that sounds like a lot and comes nicely on my two year anniversary so I thought I’d give myself a cyber pat on my own back anyway. The third part of the title of this blog is because those stats are no real use to me (apart from livening up my day by making the spoken introduction to The Great Rock’n'Roll Swindle pop into my head), but I was hoping it could be of use to others who could use my blog as a platform to advertise their ideas, products, services, sites, blogs, or articles elsewhere. And here’s how to exploit me:

- Write a guest piece or send me a guest worksheet

- Be interviewed by me

- Tell me about any links for my links of the month posts or my links page that you think might interest me or my readers

- Tell me about books, e books, software, websites with paid content etc that might be of interest for our TEFL.net Reviews pages

- Review for us (you can put links to your site and a mini-biog at the end of the review)

- Contribute (meaning really contribute, not just write any old crap, obviously) to the TEFL.net forums (unlike mad, bad, sad Dave’s Cafe, you can put links to your site in the posts)

- Suggest any other ways to me

If you want to, email me by clicking on the Contact Me button or leave a comment here (please say if you don’t want the comment to actually go up on the post)

This American family borrowed 1000 dollars off their Norweigan exchange student and then he got booted out of the country!

Still, I still think host families in London win the prize. One Brazilian student told a hilarious story of rushing to secretly cook a potato while their host mother was out only to hear the car pulling into the drive and having to rush a baking hot but half cooked potato into their bedroom. More worringly, when I showed part of the famously depressing British film (even by the usual standards of British films) Nil by Mouth, two of my students said “That is where we live!”

So, I always tell my students to study in New Zealand, Canada, Australia and the States (in that order) if they want to stay in a host family. Amazingly, some people in those countries let foreign students stay for free, rather than to supplement the dole and a bit of cash in hand window cleaning and the occassional selling weed down the pub. Cultural differences never fail to amaze me…

That is “Survival in English Language Teaching for Adults”, the forthcoming shorter, easier course that is designed to compete with the cheaper courses offered by online TEFL course providers etc. Here is the provisional syllabus, published so that Cambridge can get your input before the final announcement is made:

- 20 ways to say “That’s an interesting question, let me get back to you in the next lesson”
- The 20 best activities for filling class time
- How to use one song, video or worksheet in all your classes all week
- 15 ways to get other teachers in your school or on the Net to plan your lessons for you
- How neatness and niceness can make up for a lack of teaching skills
- Hangman and four other games your kids’ classes will never tire of
- How to make your students like you
- Padding your CV
- How to stay awake in Business English classes, one to ones with housewives and IELTS exam practice
- What to say to teachers who think people like you are bringing the “profession” into disrepute
- The only three photocopiable books you will ever need to look at
- How to avoid the very worst schools
- Escaping jobs when your boss has your passport and has pushed you into so much debt by not paying you on time that you can’t afford to fly home
- Your suggestion here

There are strong rumours that, perhaps due to the 100 day sit in and short hunger strike of students on London’s Oxford Street protesting the price of books, the latest edition of the Headway series of textbooks (official title “Latest Updated Newer Edition of New Headway”, unofficial title “Now That’s What I Call Headway 7″) will be priced substantially lower than previous editions at only 5 pounds 99 pence. There will also be an even larger collection than usual of extras and special editions:

Special Edition of the textbook with room to write the answers in: 7 pounds 99

Special Proofread Edition: 8 pounds 99

Workbook basic edition (limited availability): 4 pounds 99

Workbook with CD, CD ROM, DVD, and holographic 3D pages with accompanying glasses (perhaps to prevent piracy?): 49 pounds 99

basic Workbook with answer key: 7 pounds 99

basic Workbook with proofread answer key: 9 pounds 99

basic Workbook with answer key that tells you something useful, rather than just the fact that you got something wrong: 11 pounds 99

Class CD: 30 pounds

Class CD with proper Australian and American accents rather than unconvincing attempts by out-of-work British actors: 60 pounds

Class CD with original versions of songs rather than cheesy Country and Western versions: 300 pounds

As above but without Eric Clapton songs: 350 pounds

As above, but version that doesn’t try to install software every time you try to play it on your computer: 400 pounds

Teacher’s book: 17 pounds 99

Teacher’s book that says “Students’ Book” on the outside, so that students can’t see that the teacher hasn’t read the text before class and doesn’t know the answers to the questions: a bargain at 35 pounds 99

Photocopiable resource book: 27 pounds 50

Photocopiable resource book without the special chip that causes the photocopier to break down if you do more than 5 copies (secretly installed in all editions up to now to stop piracy): 54 pounds

IWB (interactive whiteboard) software: 700 pounds

IWB that the software actually works properly on: 7000 pounds

It’s a bright new future in TEFL, I’m telling yer! If you have heard any rumours of other special editions of textbooks or other ELT publishing movements, please let me know by comment here or by email

Bondage as a common TEFL advertising theme from Gaba in Japan and EF in China, from More on Weirdo Language School Ads- The Atlantic

“Spaced learning” (nothing to do with drugs, despite the name) and other new teaching methods that are “producing dramatic results“ according to the Telegraph

More failed pop stars hitting TEFL, to join my mate’s possibly true story of training (and failing) the ex lead singer from The Christians?

“Teaching abroad was the right decision for Paul McCartney. Following a part-time 10-month TESOL course, McCartney left his “soul-destroying” job… to move to Shanghai”

Come on Paul, I know you’ve never had a decent solo record, but you were in the Beatles! (from TEFL: A World of Teaching Opportunities in The Telegraph, bizarrely home to less capitalistic stories on our fair profession than The Guardian)

Maybe he wants to join:

“teachers I knew [who] often came to work with visible lesions and sores because they frequented brothels”

from Sex, Drugs and ESL, a piece of journalism as serious as you would expect with such a title, from In These Times

Moving onto other bodily fluids:

The Elements of Bile- 50 years and the 500th attack on The Elements of Style by Strunk and White (also of Charlotte’s Web fame, which is something I’ve just found out 50 years after everyone else, it seems)

Also:

Dual immersion kindergarten not teaching other subjects as well as they could? (and with a lesson for CLIL??)

EFL publisher Pearson buys Wall Street English China

And if that ain’t enough for you, Karenne over at Kalinago English has her own links to 8 great articles on the ELT blogosphere this week.