TEFL blog » 2006 » December

The British Council is renowned worldwide for its English language teaching programmes. According to their website, in 2005-2006 they employed over 2000 teachers to teach 1.1 million English class hours to 325,000 learners in 53 countries.

Unfortunately though, in the New Year, their teaching centre in Moscow is to stop providing English classes. This is reportedly due to the Russian Foreign Ministry’s demand that the Council apply for a teaching license. A license has not been required before and applying for one is, according to the British Council’s Natalya Minchecnko, quoted in this article, “an arduous and time-consuming process which the British Council finds practically impossible to complete”.

Although the students who have signed up for classes in 2007 will have to look elsewhere, the British Council does stress that its non-teaching services will not be affected, and that it remains committed to “working in Moscow and across Russia and delivering projects and activities in science, arts and education, including the Information Centres and exams”.

What do you think about the Foreign Ministry’s demand and the British Council’s decision? Post a comment below…

A debate is raging in Switzerland over the teaching of English at primary school level. Legislation is being introduced aiming to protect Switzerland’s national languages German, French, Italian and Romansh, and includes a proposal to give one of these languages preference over English in foreign language teaching.

Supporters are arguing that national languages should be given priority as many young people have trouble communicating in them, and worry that the national languages could be eclipsed by English.

But several regions have already introduced English at primary school level.

So, in a country with four national languages, should children be taught two of these before considering English, or should English take priority? What do you think? Post a comment below…

Adult ESL students at the Aiken County School District in South Carolina have been participating in a Christmas card writing scheme for American military personnel in Iraq. The project was started to help students with their writing skills, learn something about the culture and increase troops’ morale, according to the article.

What do you think about this project? Post a comment below…

Last week we posted that the British government spends £110 million a year on translation services for immigrants, money that many would argue would be better spent on English classes.

Perhaps the government should follow the example of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Teaneck, NJ, USA. The church has recently started offering ESL classes to immigrant day labourers on the road. The church has offered classes on their premises for some time, but recognise that not all immigrants can attend, for transportation or financial reasons. So instead of the immigrants coming to them, they’ve taken the classes to the immigrants, teaching them while they’re waiting for work.

The classes focus on language useful to the immigrants in their work, such as the names of tools, explaining what the matter is if they get sick, and asking when they will get paid.

The feedback from the participants in the article is positive. One immigrant, who is also co-director of an immigrant resource centre, says the classes “provide visible evidence that immigrants are eager to assimilate into society” and that “we really want to adjust but we don’t always have the opportunity”.

The church, according to the article, is not the first organisation to bring the ESL classroom to the streets, with immigrant-advocacy groups nationwide doing the same thing.

So it would seem that given the opportunity, immigrants are keen to learn English and integrate into American society. Should the British government learn from this example and change its funding priorities? What do you think? Have a look at the article and post a comment below…

Ever wondered where your career in teaching English as a Foreign Language can lead? Have a look at Bruce Hope’s story. Bruce went to Japan in 2002 with the intention of watching the World Cup and teaching for a year. Now, four years on, he is married, and working as foreign human resources manager and trainer for a worldwide chain of English language schools…

If you’ve ever taught English to children, you’ll know that songs feature in many textbooks as an effective way of teaching grammar and vocabulary.

Have you ever wondered how they get written? Have a look at this interview with Steve Roslonek, who has just released an album of children’s songs called Marvelous Day. At least two of the songs were originally written for publisher Macmillan Oxford for educational products distributed in Asia and Mexico.

Fast Monkey is one, and the lyrics, according to the interview, go something like this:

I’m happy, I’m very, very happy, I’m happier than a happy monkey. I’m sad, I’m very, very sad, I’m sadder than a sad monkey.

What do you think about using songs to teach children? Do you find them effective? Post a comment below…

At a time when issues of integration and cross-cultural understanding are hot political topics in the UK, the British government has revealed, according to this report in the Daily Express, that it spends £110 million a year on translation services for immigrants.

Apparently, the costs include a local council translating details of its refuse collection service into 15 languages so that non-English speakers can understand the recycling system, and one-to-one “Quit Smoking” sessions in Turkish.

The report quotes the head of MigrationWatch UK as saying “We should expect immigrants to learn English and should not remove the incentive to do so by spending millions on translation.” A Bangladeshi woman quoted in the report agrees, saying “When you are trying to help us you are actually harming… We don’t need to speak in English at all.”

On the other side of the argument, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality is quoted as saying that the costs were a feature of globalisation that we should “just soak up”, and a project manager for a local council project says “If they need it in their language we make sure they have it… everybody should have equal access to knowledge of the services”.

So, who is right?

Could this money be better spent on teaching English, to help migrants integrate into British society, taking on the “obligations that come with the privilege of living and working in Britain” as Tony Blair pointed out in a speech on migration two years ago.

Or should everyone have the right to access knowledge in any language regardless of the cost to the British taxpayer?

What do you think? Post a comment below…

According to the Education Guardian, discerning students, influenced by economics, global terrorism and even the threat of avian flu, are choosing to study English in Australia, New Zealand and Malta, rather than the UK.

What’s more, fewer students overall are going abroad to study English, as the quality and availability of private schools and language education in state schools around the world continues to improve, and countries become more self-sufficient in providing English language education.

In fact, according to the report, non-native speaker English teachers now outnumber native speaker teachers globally.

As well as the cost of studying in the UK, another factor turning students away, according to the report, is the declining interest in British cultural references in teaching material. Is this the end for red phone boxes, London buses and fish and chips in our text books? What do you think? Post a comment below…

Need a new way to teach your students shopping vocabulary? Show them this video, filmed in a Jusco shop in Japan and made, says purplemary, who posted the video on YouTube, for high school students learning English…

A group of parents in Texas has taken the state to court over the quality of their kids’ ESL classes. They say that when their children have to repeat a grade, it’s because of poor quality ESL instruction, not because they are not capable. Their claim would appear to be backed up by statistics, which show 16% of “Low English Proficiency” students dropping out of school, compared to 4% of other students. The court will decide whether the Texas Education Agency needs to do more to monitor ESL classes…

This job vacancy has caused quite a reaction in some blogs. The Univeristy of Kurdistan Hawler is recruiting teachers for positions in the secure northern region of Iraq, with a salary of $30,000.

Would you teach in Iraq? Doesn’t everyone deserve the chance to learn English, regardless of where they live? Post a comment below…

The Japan Exchange and Teaching Program (JET) is 20 years old this year. More than 46,000 people from 55 countries have participated in the program in that time, many working as Assistant Language Teachers.

Meanwhile, though, according to this article, English fluency in Japan is embarrassingly low, and a government proposal to teach English at elementary school has met with resistance. Opponents say that Japanese children should spend time concentrating on the complexities of the Japanese language instead, and one Japanese author has said that Japanese should be proud that TOEFL scores in the country are among the lowest in Asia…

What do you think? Should Japan follow its neighbours’ lead and introduce an English language program in elementary schools? Have you taught in Japan? Do you agree with the author of this article? Post a comment below…

…Meanwhile in the US, a group of middle school ESL students learn English through art, and an ESL teacher in Arkansas is recognised with a $15,000 award for Arkansas Teacher of the Year.

In a recent post, we suggested that complacency was finally catching up with English speaking countries, as businesses start to lose out competitively due to lack of foreign language skills in their employees. The US Department of Education stated that “critical need foreign language skills are necessary to advance national security and global competitiveness”

Well, it seems Conservative Party leader David Cameron is thinking about addressing this concern in the UK too, with a suggestion that the Party would bring back compulsory language lessons in British schools. At the moment, pupils can choose to stop studying languages at the age of 14, which has led to a sharp decline in numbers going on to take Modern Language GCSE exams at the age of 15 or 16.

With the US Education Department’s goals of increasing the number of Americans with critical language skills, and now Cameron’s hint at a policy pledge, are we seeing the start of a much-needed reversal in attitude towards foreign language learning?

What do you think? Post a comment below…

If you’ve ever thought about using technology in your English classes, but are not quite sure how to go about it, you might want to sign up for the Electronic Village Online Sessions. These online discussion sessions and virtual workshops are being run as an extension to the 2007 TESOL Annual Convention, taking place in Seattle in March.

The online sessions run from January 15 to February 25 and are free and open to everyone. There are 13 sessions available, including:

• Beginning Internet Activities
• ESL/EFL Student Video Production
• Teaching with PowerPoint
• Becoming a Webhead
• Blogging for Beginners
• Digital Gaming and Language Learning

Sound interesting? Click on the link above to join the sessions.

If you’re thinking about teaching in Korea, the E2 teaching visa can be difficult to get your head around. These guidelines, scanned by a teacher working in Korea, may help. Remember to check with the Korean embassy or Korean immigration before making any decision based on these guidelines.

The Prague Daily Monitor reports that Czech babies as young as 14 months are having English classes in 10 cities across the Czech Republic, with plans to introduce classes for even younger students. The youngsters attend a 30 minute class once a week, where they listen to simple English songs and memorise words and expressions in the form of a game. The aim is for the students to learn English as their second mother tongue.

How young is too young? Should more countries follow this example and introduce language classes for babies? If so, how far should this go? In this article, Marco MacFarlane discusses the problems that immersion teaching (teaching learners exclusively in English) can cause in children who have not yet mastered their mother tongue. He talks about te condition known as “subtractive bilingualism”, in which the first language is “actually eroded by the learning of the second, and both languages remain relatively underdeveloped”.

What do you think? Post a comment below…