Human beings are not designed to sit still all day. Thousands of years ago, on the plains of the Serengeti in Africa, people walked 10-20 kilometers every day (Medina, 2014). It has only been...

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

Human beings are not designed to sit still all day. Thousands of years ago, on the plains of the Serengeti in Africa, people walked 10-20 kilometers every day (Medina, 2014). It has only been... The post It’s time to move: Energy breaks for the language classroom (by Marc Helgesen) appeared first on Teaching Village.

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

Learning students’ names is hard. And I’m not particularly good at it. And my teaching situation makes it challenging. My students have maybe 20 teachers. Some of these teachers are young. Some are old. Many... The post Learning Names (by Marc Helgesen) appeared first on Teaching Village.

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

Learning students’ names is hard. And I’m not particularly good at it. And my teaching situation makes it challenging. My students have maybe 20 teachers. Some of these teachers are young. Some are old. Many...

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

I work in a small English conversation school for children. At the beginning of each class, I have my students sit on the floor in a semicircle facing me. I am also seated on...

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

I work in a small English conversation school for children. At the beginning of each class, I have my students sit on the floor in a semicircle facing me. I am also seated on... The post Breaking the Ice Everyday (by Mark Kulek) appeared first on Teaching Village.

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

The ‘From the Teacher’s Family’ issue was recently published on the iTDi blog with posts from Rose Bard, Matt Shannon, and Ayat Tawel.  These authors share posts about how being a teacher affects our families and...

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

I’m in the process of updating old posts to work with a new blog template, which has been quite a walk down memory lane. Hopefully, when I’ve finished, it will be easier for readers...

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

Barbara: Why did you decide to start a YouTube channel? Mark: I started my YouTube channel so that my students could practice English at home. I also wanted my students’s parents to see what...

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

pinterest-80cdd (1)

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

There is a brilliant quote about professional development which I always carry with me from Scrivener’s book Learning Teaching: “Twenty years’ experience can become no more than two years’ experience repeated ten times over” (1994, p195). It’s because of this quote that I continue to develop professionally and each journey usually begins by experimenting with something […]

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

There comes a point in every TEFL teacher’s life when we reach a fork in the road. We begin asking ourselves questions: Should I start looking for ‘a real job’? Where is my career going? Should I continue teaching or change careers? If we choose to continue teaching, the road forks even further. We could […]

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

We have all been there! Sometimes you’re swamped with work, with personal problems and you just can’t function. As a teacher, as a person, you just go through a very non-creative phase and you actually don’t know what to do. That’s how I have been feeling lately and in an attempt to get “unstuck” I have […]

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

Ever since I made my first creations using recycled toilet paper (TP) rolls, I fell in love with TP rolls and have been a big TP roll recycling fan. I am amazed how creative I can be with TP rolls. With TP rolls the possibilities are endless. That’s how big a fan I am. Toilet […]

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

Hi, everyone. Let’s do a quick grammar activity before you begin reading my blog post. Please answer the questions below. I will provide an example of each for you. 1) Give an example of the present perfect tense in a sentence about your professional life. I have taught ESOL to children and adults. 2) Give […]

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

Hi, everyone. Let’s do a quick grammar activity before you begin reading my blog post. Please answer the questions below. I will provide an example of each for you.

1) Give an example of the present perfect tense in a sentence about your professional life.

• I have taught ESOL to children and adults.

2) Give an example of the past perfect tense in a sentence about your professional life.

• Before I taught ESOL, I had earned a CELTA.

3) Give an example of the future perfect tense in a sentence about your professional life.

• By the time I retire, I will have ________.

Okay, okay – I know I said I’d give an example of each but the truth is I have no idea what past participles I might use to complete my future perfect sentence. Could it be:

• published a book on my experiences as an English Language Teacher?
• developed content for a famous publishing company?
• gone back to school for a PhD in TESOL?
• became a prestigious university professor?
• lived in at least 5 different countries around the world?

My list could go on for pages and pages, but you get the idea. In fact, I can almost guarantee that you are in the same boat as me.  You’ve completed at least a small handful of accomplishments within the TESOL field and you’re unsure where the road ahead may lead you. How do I know this? Well, if you are somewhere between beginning your first teaching job and retirement, you’re right there with me. Am I right?

I can just imagine us, me and you. We are two Xs on that good old grammar timeline that we love to draw on the whiteboard for our students: right above the word “now.” We are experts at what’s to the left of us, but we have no idea what’s to the right of us.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could just walk into a crowded room filled with experienced TESOL professionals and pick their brains with all our questions about our current classes and future ambitions?  Imagine hundreds of teachers, professors, writers, publishers, and world travellers – all just sitting there in this magical staff room, waiting for you to ask them something. Eager to speak with you, to give you guidance, to share their experiences with you.

Wouldn’t it also be nice if, in that same room, people just starting off in the ESOL field were seeking out your professional input and advice? As a teacher, I know you love helping others. What if you could change another teacher’s life simply by sharing a few teaching resources, words of advice, or stories that got you to where you are today?

Flickr: MTSOfan

One night, my son woke me up at 3 AM and I couldn’t fall back to sleep. The idea of this crowded, helpful, magical international ESOL staff room crept into my brain and I couldn’t shake it.  I then proceeded to do what I normally do at 3 AM when I can’t sleep: I checked my Facebook. By 5 AM, I made the decision to materialize my idea in the form of a Facebook group. By 6 AM I had drafted the group’s guidelines, and by 7 AM, my son woke up and I got him a bottle.

My good friend and former teaching colleague, Shaza Mahmood, agreed to help me manage the group – and the rest, as they say, is history. After just about two month of the group’s existence and 2500+ new members joining us from all over the world, I have to say I am quite pleased with the outcome of the group so far.

No matter where your X is on that good old grammar timeline, I know you’ll enjoy this group. You can pick the brains of all sorts of ELT professionals and at the same time, help out those with goals similar to what you’ve already achieved. You can share teaching resources and ideas, and make connections with people all over the world. You can share your past and present perfect sentences and get one step closer to discovering the past participle of your future perfect sentence.

We welcome all ESOL teachers (and those in a related field) with open arms and hope to see you in the group.

www.facebook.com/groups/ESOLTeachersWorldwide

Jen’s Facebook page: www.facebook.com/jenbrummerESOL

Shaza’s Facebook page: www.facebook.com/shazamahmoodESOL

Jen Brummer is an American ESOL teacher who has taught English in Japan, Kenya, England, the USA, and online through the wonderful world of Skype. She really appreciates the power of social media for connecting with other teachers for support and learning. She is the founder and co-administrator of the Facebook group ESOL Teachers Worldwide.

Tackling this subject I almost feel like an atheist walking into a church and shouting ‘God is dead’. I am met with the same amount of horror and resistance. Some of the comments made about me during the recent KOTESOL National Conference, where I presented a paper on this subject, included ‘she doesn’t believe in […]

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

Tackling this subject I almost feel like an atheist walking into a church and shouting ‘God is dead’. I am met with the same amount of horror and resistance. Some of the comments made about me during the recent KOTESOL National Conference, where I presented a paper on this subject, included ‘she doesn’t believe in fun’.

By trying to make a case against fun as a pedagogy, many people feel I am trying to take the classroom back to the bad old days when teachers, canes in hand, stalked up and down rows of regimented students who were copying grammar rules or tables or dates, or chanting them in unison. That rather than the modern, enlightened classroom where the student and the teacher co-operate with each other wholeheartedly, having fun exploring the vast universe of knowledge.

The problem is that while the first scenario was true for many students (I recall the German language lessons where we stood, chanting ‘Ich bin, du bist…’ with a hand held out, palm up, waist high, to receive the whack if you missed something), the second is most definitely not true for all students.

Certainly many claim to provide that experience for the students, but in reality school is as boring, as stultifying and as much of a burden for a significant number of students as it ever was.

And telling them that learning is fun is telling a lie, because for those who are having fun exploring, they would have it no matter what the circumstances, while for those who do not like learning school is hard work, forced labor and the only fun comes from outwitting the teacher. For example, I loved school. I didn’t mind the German teacher, I hated the math teacher (but loved math), and adored the science teacher – not because of how much fun they were providing, but because I love learning and they were giving me the opportunity to do that. My sister hated school, except for sport, and if they wanted to provide her with fun, they would have let her play tennis and basketball all day.

Moving on a generation, my two children also personified the extremes – my daughter couldn’t get enough of school (and it didn’t matter if the teachers provided fun or not) while my son couldn’t wait to get away from it.

And right there is one of the first fallacies of fun – that it will make the experience of having to learn something more palatable. Note that I said ‘have to learn’. More than anything else, having no choice in what you learn raises the stress levels, raises the boredom levels and leaves students sullen and resentful. Fun cannot be had when you are feeling like that, unless it is the fun of turning the tables on the persecutor (or perceived persecutor).

Add to that the fact that the ‘fun’ is often of the kind where you also don’t have a choice in the matter, and you get classes like the one my co-teacher conducted the other day. On the spur of the moment, five minutes before class was due to start, he informed me that he’d been cleaning out his apartment, and there were items he wanted to ‘auction’ off to the students, and could I please bring some Monopoly money down with me to class.

Each student got about 1200 fake dollars, I quickly practiced the numbers with them, and then the auction started. They could bid, either alone or as a consortium on items – they would get to keep the item – and thus practice numbers and some conversation.

Fun, right? The problem was the students were having fun he had not planned on. The boy who ‘bought’ the soccer T-shirt twisted it into a turban and was having fun with his friends, showing off his ‘new’ hat. But when my co-teacher saw this, he stopped the auction and spent the next fifteen minutes haranguing the students in Korean, obviously along the lines of ‘I prepared this for you, I let you have some fun, and see what you do, I can’t give you anything, etc.’ You know, the speech your mom and dad gave you when you weren’t having fun on an outing they planned for you.

Which leads into the second fallacy of fun – that you can plan for it and organize it. You can plan interesting things. You can even plan to do things that you think are fun. But that will not mean that it will be fun. Because the third fallacy is that fun is the same for everyone.

This is a fallacy perpetrated by the ad agencies. The images of people having fun on beaches, in the snow, next to the fireside, on the yacht or in the shopping mall are staged. Of course there are people who find a beach outing fun, but I’m not one of them. Sand everywhere that gets in your drinks, your hair, your food, and intimate parts of your anatomy. No shade, unless you cart it with you (and who thinks lugging a shade device, several folding chairs, a picnic hamper, a cooler and assorted lotions across several hundred meters of sand is fun?) and the eventual hot-sand dance as you head for the sea to cool down. The idea that fun is generic package that comes from a certain product or destination is disproven day after day, yet still used everywhere.

Those two fallacies work together with the final one – that you can force people to have fun. Unless you have a choice in the matter, you are not going to have fun no matter what people place in front of you. You might enjoy some parts of it, but in general you are not having fun.

How does this factor into the classroom? Well, here in South Korea I personally know of quite a few native teachers who were either fired or threatened with being fired because their classes were not fun. Not because they were bad teachers who ignored the students, or beat them, or didn’t understand what they were doing – no, simply because the kids had complained that their lessons weren’t fun.

And as we’ve seen you really cannot provide fun for all the students all the time, unless you allow them to do exactly what they choose to do. Fallacies two, three and four (you can plan fun, fun is the same for everyone, you can force people to have fun) mean that there will always be at least one student, maybe more, not having ‘fun’ in your class. And under it all is the first and biggest fallacy, the fallacy that leads administrators and owners of private academies to expect teachers to provide the ‘fun’ – because fun makes learning easier.

Anyone who has worked at learning something, whether playing a musical instrument or mastering physics, knows that there are long, boring hours spent memorizing information, reading it, working with it or simply getting the mechanics of the movements needed right.

We seem to have forgotten to teach kids that effort is good, that effort is OK, that effort produces results. It’s like signing up for a gym membership and the personal trainer does all the exercises for you, and then you’re upset three months later when you still have no abs to show. We do our children a disservice when they are never introduced to the idea that effort, hard work and long, boring hours are a part of achieving anything worthwhile. Of course there’s enjoyment, and a sense of achievement, and the satisfaction of a job well done. But mere fun does not lead to those moments.

Don’t get me wrong, as far as I’m concerned, I’m all for moments of fun in the classroom. There’s the moment when we read a sentence together and I stumble over a pronunciation and the kids burst out laughing. There’s the moment when the text just lends itself to a joke. There’s the moment when one of the students spots something silly and shares it. There’s the final five minutes of class when I show them the latest cute cats viral video, or we watch two guys on cellos dueling with each other (watch Two Cellos do Thunderstruck!). Fun arises spontaneously in a classroom where there is caring and sharing.

But, there are also the many many moments when students accomplish something they didn’t think they could, and the joy we share at that moment is transcendent.

And here is the final nail in the coffin (at least as far as I am concerned) of this current trend that asks teachers to provide fun for their students. Many people will tell you that it is based on Krashen’s theory about the lowering of the affective filter. It isn’t. Krashen himself said that the affective filter is high due to students being evaluated and tested, asked to produce the language before they are ready and other general stresses. As long as the tests and the expectations remain, all the fun in the world will not lower the affective filter.

Of course we all know that human beings learn best through play, that’s how our brains work. And providing opportunities to play a la Montessori has a proven track record. But that means the teacher and the curriculum have to relinquish their hold, and simply provide many different activities for students to choose from, and then stand by to answer questions.

And are schools ready to let that happen?

Most teachers would agree that ideally only English should be spoken in English class. However, in practice this is often more easily said than done. It’s easy to see why students struggle  – young minds whir away 24/7 in their native language, so suddenly changing into English mode is somewhat akin to a right hander […]

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

Most teachers would agree that ideally only English should be spoken in English class. However, in practice this is often more easily said than done. It’s easy to see why students struggle  – young minds whir away 24/7 in their native language, so suddenly changing into English mode is somewhat akin to a right hander being told to only use their left hand for an hour a week! For me, mastering this aspect of classroom management is still a work in progress, and one that I have to re-deal with periodically. First year students are the most challenging, but there are plenty of “hard nuts” with ingrained bad habits that will unconsciously chatter away in their native tongue seemingly no matter what you try! Looking back, I became much more effective at managing classroom chatter over the years and these days it is rarely a problem. I would like to share a few insights gleaned through my own experiences, trial and error, study and conversations with other teachers.

Be consistent, realistic and patient:

Make your expectations clear from the start, but be patient – it can take several months of consistent effort before students really get it. I prefer to gently lead students in this direction by making them feel good about the challenge . i.e. I’m always sure to praise students in front of others when they make a good effort to use English. I point out (non English) chatter, without going overboard to the point where it affects flow. In other words – don’t spend a whole lot of time and energy trying to achieve this goal overnight, but gently push kids in the right direction.

Students can also be trained to catch each other out. If you use the phrases “English only please!”, or “Don’t speak Japanese, please!”, your students will start using them too with a little encouragement. It can also help to periodically get an assistant to address your students and their parents in their native language about what you are doing and why it is important.

How to break a hard-core chatterer:

A while back, I had a ten year old student that was a hard core chatterer. Seemingly no matter what I tried he would freely babble away in Japanese moments later. He had been studying for a few years, and was doing okay overall. The problem was, all the other kids in the class were trained to only speak English in class, yet this one boy just didn’t get it! One day I had a flash of inspiration that fixed the problem within a fortnight: I walked into class and placed fifteen points on his desk (in my lessons with younger kids, I often reward kids with points that can be exchanged for goodies at the school shop. Sure, there are some pros and cons to this approach, but I’ll leave that for another article…) Anyway, fifteen points was more than a lesson’s worth of reward. The boy was delighted and confused. His peers were jealous.  That lesson, every time the boy spoke Japanese, much to his horror I took away a point. By lesson’s end, he’d lost all his bonus points and was a little upset. The next lesson however, when I put ten points on his desk, I was only able to catch him out a couple of times all lesson, and he couldn’t wipe the smile off his face! The following week, I only gave him five bonus points, and he kept them all! He got it, and never looked back!

An English lesson in English!

It’s really satisfying as a teacher to have your class free from foreign chatter. Students will learn faster and importantly practice engaging their brain in English, too. Parents are impressed, too! I strongly recommend making the process fun – appeal to students’ love of praise, and their competitive and fun-loving natures. This gets much better results than entering into a battle of wills. If you go about things the right way, you will reach your goal smoothly and naturally. If you feel like you are continually battling students over this issue or this aspect of classroom management is eating into too much class time, chances are you need to try a different tack.  Best of luck! I’m interested to hear of other teacher’s experiences and thoughts.

Leon Butchers is the creator of the best selling AGO card game series. Hailing from Auckland, New Zealand he has taught English in Japan for over ten years.

In the article ‘The Slavery of Teaching English.’ Sebastian Creswell-Turner wrote that ‘the job is tedious, the salary appalling and the prospects nil.’ The article was written in 2004 and recently published in the Telegraph of the 24th of May 2014. The article is set in Europe, and talks about the ‘hell’ that teachers are […]

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

In an education environment that screams ‘More! More! More!’ sometimes the smart teaching move can be to teach less. If you don’t have to spend your entire class explaining new language, students can spend more time recycling, reinforcing, and expanding the language they learn. If this topic interests you, I will be giving an online […]

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

Have you ever wondered why people blog? Are you interested in learning more about blogging? Are you already blogging and wanting to become a better blogger? Then you will definitely want to plan to attend the Spring Blog Festival! This is a free, 3-day, online event organized by Nellie Muller Deutsch, Shelly Sanchez Terrell, and […]

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village

A few years ago I wrote a simple little post about the reasons I love Teachers. Since then, I’ve had a chance to work with some amazing Teachers through the International Teacher Development Institute. So, I thought it was time to bring the post out,  dust it off, and update my list of reasons. I still […]

Read more of this post by visiting Teaching Village