TEFL blog

ESL students in Sevierville, Tennessee are using their new English language skills to do good deeds in the community, according to this article. After reading about Martin Luther King, the class has started a project called “100 Acts of Kindness” to fulfil his vision of harmony among people and races.

Each student keeps track of his or her good deeds and then reports back to the class. In this way they connect their English learning with their real lives and do some good at the same time.

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

According to this article on ShanghaiDaily.com, the vice chairman of China’s top legislature has said that English study in China is to blame for many of the mistakes found in Chinese publications in the last decade. Studying English, the argument runs, means that Chinese studies suffer.

The author of the article disagrees wholeheartedly, and blames the problem instead on an exam-oriented education system. English, the author suggests, is merely a scapegoat…

Do you live in China? Is the education system too exam-oriented, or is English to blame? Post a commment below…

The Korea Times reported last week that teachers are being refused jobs in private language schools in Korea because of their skin colour.

An American college graduate of mixed-race was, according to the article, told by a potential employer “I’m sorry but we only want white people. We want a native speaker that parents approve of”. The article highlights the similar case of a black American teacher who was told by 10 schools that he could not be hired because he was not white.

The owner of one English language school is quoted as saying that the parents are to blame, because they only want their children to be taught by white native speakers. The American teacher mentioned above says that “not only are [the parents and directors] racist, but they lie about it, deny it…”

According to the article, there is no legislation to protect against this discrimination, which means that skin colour often takes precedence over qualifications or experience when it comes to hiring teachers.

So, have you taught in Korea? Is this article a true reflection of the situation, or do you think it exaggerates the problem? Post a comment below…

If you were asked what the official language of the United States is, what would you say? I suspect that most non-Americans would say English. Well, you may be surprised to know that the US has no official language at national level.

And this, according to a recent poll, is not good enough for the majority of American people. 60% of Americans polled think that the government is not doing enough to protect English as the “common, unifying language of the United States.”

This has prompted a bill to be introduced in Congress to make English the official language. Newt Gingrich, a supporter of the bill, said that “the civilization will decay and the culture will collapse” without a common language, and 92% of those polled said that a common language was important to “maintain unity as a nation”.

Gingrich says that the proposal is pro-immigrant, and 78% of those polled think that the government should be doing more to help immigrants with English.

What do you think? Is a multi-lingual society a good or a bad thing? Does it hinder communication or promote multi-cultural values? Read the full story and post a comment below…

If you’re thinking about getting qualified in TEFL this year and want to know what a TEFL training course is really like, follow one of our TEFL course diaries.

There are currently 8 trainees on classroom-based and online courses around the world, keeping day-to-day accounts of their TEFL course experiences.

You can subscribe to the diaries by email or RSS, to keep up to date with the latest posts. These are the courses our current diarists are writing about…

• Long distance TEFL
• CELTA, International Training Institute, Istanbul, Turkey
• Midwest teacher Training Program, Madison, Wisconsin, USA
• Second Language Acquisition online course
• CELTA 2, Hounslow, UK
• Distance Learning TESOL
• Training Link Online TESOL course

If you’re taking a course this year and would like to enter the competition, you could win £400! Have a look here for more information.

In a post at the end of last year, we looked at immigrant-advocacy groups across the US who are bringing the ESL classroom to the streets, for immigrant workers who cannot attend lessons in the classroom for financial or transportation reasons.

Well, the School on Wheels literacy program in Chicago is doing something similar, offering free ESL tutoring on a bus. The bus, which has been revamped into a classroom, visits different suburbs with immigrant populations each week on a rotating basis.

The program’s 325 participants receive one-on-one tuition from 280 volunteers, who themselves undergo two days of training.

The program was started in 1993 by a former elementary teacher, Sister Marybeth McDermott. She said that they simply “went into the neighborhoods and rang the doorbells and asked if they wanted English classes”.

Have a look at this article for the full story…

Of the 6,912 known living languages listed in the Ethnologue, a total of 516 are classified as nearly extinct. The Ethnologue classifies a language this way when “only a few elderly speakers are still living”.

Yoruba language, spoken by the Yoruba, large ethnic group in West Africa, is not on the list, but according to Dr Frederick Fasheun, it soon could be. Dr Fasheun is the facilitator of a recent two day summit held in Nigeria to discuss the future of Yoruba language and culture. In this article in the Nigerian Tribune, he says he regrets that the Yoruba have abandoned their language in favour of English (among other languages).

He believes that it is time to teach and study Yoruba language in the country’s education system so that it does not “become vestigial and gradually go into extinction”. He also warns that Yoruba culture is being threatened in the face of a “rampaging American subculture”.

So, what, if anything, should we do to prevent Yoruba making the Ethnologue’s list? Is this an inevitable result of the globalisation of English language and American culture? Should we just accept this and watch the number of known living languages get smaller? Are we, in the English teaching profession, contributing to this? What do you think? Post a comment blow…

The Chinese government has launched a campaign, according to this article, to clean up mistranslations and bad English, in preparation for the world descending on Beijing for the Olympic Games in 2008.

Warning signs such as “Nice to live. Pay attention to safety” and menus offering “Swallowing the clouds” have made the government realise that if things aren’t changed, the city will “lose face”, according to Liu Yang of the Beijing Speaks Foreign Languages program, quoted in the article.

As well as correcting signs and giving Chinese dishes in restaurants standardized names, citizens are being offered free English classes to boost the number of foreign language speakers and police officers and taxi drivers are being taught useful English phrases.

Will everything be completed to the government’s satisfaction in time for the Games in 2008? If you’re teaching in China at the moment, let us know how things are progressing by posting a comment below…

Do you hold debates in your ESL classes? With a motivated and imaginative group of students, debates can be a very good method of improving communication skills.If your students are good enough, they might even follow in the footsteps of a group of students from the International Islamic University in Malaysia, who have won the ESL category at the 27th World Universities Debating Championship in Vancouver, Canada, seeing off a challenge from university teams from India, Sweden and Israel.

A member of the winning team, Suhaib Hassan, is quoted as saying that the university “understand[s] the importance of debate in sharpening a student’s skills in critical thinking and communication”.

If you’ve held debates in your classes, what have your students debated about? Post a comment below…

Our first site review of the new year is the highly recommended TEFL Logue.

Since August, Katie at the TEFL Logue has provided TEFL teachers with a goldmine of advice and resources. Her informative topics cover everything you might need as a TEFL teacher and more, from interviews with current teachers to branching out from TEFL, practising spelling to stress in the TEFL classroom. If you’ve been a teacher for a while, you’ll especially like her Top 10 clues that you might just work in TEFL.

Topics are organised into easily navigable categories. Each category is packed with articles of such variety that you’re sure to find something that interests you in every one of them.

Katie posts three or four resources every day, so put the TEFL Logue on your must-read list for 2007.

It doesn’t take long before teachers find a way to use new technology in their classes. iPods are certainly no longer in the “new” category, and I’m sure some readers have already found innovative ways to use them in their ESL teaching.

If not, here’s an idea from an elementary school ESL program in Pittsburgh in the USA. Teachers at the school record children’s stories from a book on to a PC, and then download them to the students’ iPods. The kids listen first, then “follow (the story) along with the words in the book and then listen to the story and read it out loud”, according to school Principal Barbara Mellett, quoted in the article.

The school hopes to expand the program beyond ESL, using iPods for students to “help rehearse and practise speeches related to social studies, language, arts and science”, according to school librarian Jane Sestric.

Have you ever used iPods in your ESL teaching? If so, how? Post a comment below…

Here’s a story which should serve as a warning to all of us about the importance of reading the contract before accepting a job. Jamie Doom writes about an ESL teacher who agrees to help out at an “important cultural exchange celebration” only to find that she has signed up for a kickboxing tournament…

Hopefully noone reading this has experienced a “misunderstanding” of such magnitude, but although this story is, (I hope!) fictional, it does highlight an important issue. It is all too common to see stories and forum posts on the web from teachers who have arrived at their new school, only to find that things are not quite what they expected, with “extra” duties or financial costs that they weren’t aware of when they signed up.

Sometimes, no matter how careful you are and how many questions you ask before accepting a job, this is unavoidable - sadly, there are a number of schools across the world who seek to exploit and deceive. Disreputable businesses exist as much in TEFL as in any other industry.

But you can certainly minimize the chances of being caught out, by thoroughly researching the school that offers you a job. Talk to other teachers at the school (if the employer has nothing to hide, they sould have no problem giving you contact details for one or two of their current teachers), join TEFL forums, do a search for the name of the school on the internet…

Here are some things which should set alarm bells ringing:

• Are they willing to offer you a job without speaking to you first?
• Are they unprepared to put you in contact with current teachers?
• Are they expecting you to accept a job offer without seeing a contract?
• Are they asking you to send them money?

Above all, read the contract carefully and ask the employer about anything which is unclear. A reputable employer should be only too happy to answer any questions you may have.

For a more detailed guide to finding your first TEFL job and what you should look for in a contract, have a look at our Introduction to TEFL.

Our story today comes from Seoul, where an English teacher at a language institute is alleged to have stolen lectures from another school. She allegedly attended pronunciation training classes at the other school for 3 months, hiding her identity, and then delivered exactly the same classes at her school. She is now accused of copyright infringement and theft of business secrets.

The accused teacher claims that she did not deliberately hide her identity, and a spokesperson from her school says that he doesn’t understand how attending classes at another institute for personal development can infringe copyright.

Her accusers, however, apparently showed some of their students transcripts of the accused teacher’s class, and they all agreed that the content was the same in both classes.

This case aside, how far should teachers go when applying other teachers’ methods in their classes? The article quotes one English teacher who took several lectures for non-native English learners prior to teaching a TOEFL preparation course, in order to “learn how to run a class and attract students”. Clearly there is a difference between using a few techniques and activities in your own classes that you’ve learned from other teachers, and copying a school’s entire methodology word for word. But where should we draw the line? Post a comment below…

Happy New Year to all our readers!

Our first post of the year comes from the Times of Oman, which reports on a talk at the British Council given by Sidney Callis, a British communication specialist. According to the article, he asserts that emails and text messages are beyond his comprehension, as they do not follow any form or pattern, and these forms of communication have no place in business writing today.

What do you think? If you’ve ever written or received an email or text message with a sentence like “i dont no wot u r doing”, you more than likely know that it is shorthand for “I don’t know what you are doing”, and would write it correctly in any more formal correspondence. But what about ESL students who spend hours every day in chat rooms on the internet, who may get so used to this shorthand that they fail to learn or recognise correct grammar and spelling?

Does this type of language have a place in writing today, or is it just a menace to ESL students and teachers? Post your opinion below…