On this day in TEFL history
A new regular feature. I’ll do one week each time:
9 Feb 1963, Canterbury – The first documented case of a class refusing to do a Humanistic Language Teaching activity, in this case the infamous “lay your head in a neighbour’s lap” pairwork task. The sit in by students demanding to be treated like dignified human beings lasted three days.
10 Feb 1492, Lyndesfarne – First documented use of the example sentence “Verily, thy catte is upon ye verry matte”
11 Feb 2011, Barcelona – First known case of setting up regular public confession sessions to talk about times when teachers went off the Dogme straight and narrow
12 Feb 1066, Hastings – The invading Normans receive an ESP class in “Ye Olde Battlefield English”
13 Feb 2010, Pyongyang – Special version of the IELTS test launched for the new British Council North Korea, with questions like “Speak for one or two minutes about a time that a story about our Great Leader made you cry” and “In your opinion, what is the best way to cook a rat?”
14 Feb 1904, Croatia – James Joyce abandons his efforts to write a whole novel about one grammar presentation in his Berlitz school and switches to the topic of a day in Dublin instead
15 Feb 1951, USA – One day after marketing executives come up with the concept of “teenagers”, high school students suddenly become too shy to speak out in language classes. Decades later, sociologists were able to map the precise spread of this phenomenon worldwide alongside with the concept of being a teen
16 Feb 2003, London – After street demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of people in 60 countries and a hunger strike by 35 ELT authors, Pearson change the name of their English teaching publishing arm “Pearson ELT” back to “Longman” – a moment later mentioned by the leaders of the Arab Spring as an inspiration
February 9th, 2012 at 10:17 am
hehe brilliant! This post has just made laugh out loud (I refuse to use the sickening three-letter acronym of that collocation). Thanks Alex for starting my day with a smile on my face.