TEFL blog

According to the US Department of Education, over 200 million Chinese children are studying English, compared to 24,000 American children studying Chinese. Of course, the population difference between the two countries accounts for a little of the difference, but still, the discrepancy is huge.

In the same report, the Department of Education states that “critical need foreign language skills are necessary to advance national security and global competitiveness”, and proposes establishing grants and training teachers under President Bush’s “National Security Language Initiative”.

Complacency, it seems, has finally caught up with the US and other English-speaking countries, for whom the global dominance of the English language provided a competitive advantage for so long. In today’s increasingly globalised world, where the ability to answer the phone, write an email or negotiate in more than one language brings such obvious advantages, businesses with monolingual employees will surely lose out.

What do you think? Post a comment below…

How important is punctuation?

According to this newspaper article, a group of middle school students in the US studying correct punctuation usage picked up on the lack of a comma between “Washington” and “D.C.” in one of their textbooks. They told the publisher of the book, who admitted the mistake and said they would correct it in future publications.

Their teacher was proud, and as the School Principal pointed out, it showed that the kids were observant, and had learnt something from their English class.

But how important is punctuation in English? As an ESL teacher, can you say, in all honesty, that you have ever actively taught correct comma usage (or any punctuation for that matter)? Do you feel confident enough about your own knowledge of puctuation to correct it in your students’ work? Do you think it matters? Post a comment below…

I read a couple of blog posts this week by people just finishing studying intensively for a CELTA course. Both of them, it seems, came down with a bad cold a day or two after finishing the course. This is nothing new, I know - 4 weeks of intense pressure followed by a big come-down, sickness is almost inevitable.

So, do we need this pressure to prepare us for life as TEFL teachers, or should more course providers offer less intensive courses, giving trainees more time to reflect on and assimilate what they’ve learnt? Post a comment below…

“English as a Second Language week” was held this month in Toronto, aiming to highlight the growing significance of ESL in Ontario. One of the key isssues was that of ESL and social integration, with growing numbers of immigrants coming to Ontario each year.

In this article in the Epoch Times, Sharon Rajabi, President of TESL Ontario says that immigrants need cultural as well as English language training, so that they know how to work in a new culture and what the conventions are”.

According to Rajabi, Torontonians are sensitive to immigrants’ needs. But is this true everywhere? Do all cities embrace the influx of immigrants in need of ESL training as Toronto does? Should we be doing more to implement ESL programs in the workplace and in the community, to ease social integration?

And what about the other way around? Thousands of ESL teachers every year go to live and work in non-English speaking countries. Many make an effort to embrace the culture and learn the language. But others choose to make little or no effort to integrate socially or linguistically. What do you think? Do expatriate ESL teachers have an obligation to integrate, to learn cultural conventions, to learn the language - not least so that we can understand some of the linguistic problems our students are having? Post a comment below…