It’s halfway through the summer again, a time when I coordinate 4-week general English programs (amongst other language learning courses) and the woes we all face have crept up on me like a bull in a China shop. Year after year, you’d think I’d have mastered solutions to the cries of students who […]
As the end of another term, year, (world?) approaches, it’s natural to consider how things have shaped up compared to last year. It was around this time that I made A language teacher’s Xmas wishlist, an awareness-raising list of concerns that tend to affect us no […]
The most interesting session at TESL Canada Conference early in October that I attended was Joel Rhein’s “Teaching against heteronormativity: creating inclusive approaches”, which lured me since I’d never been to one where LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, questioning or queer, etc) issues in the language classroom were the focal point. The dialogue regarded depiction in […]
No, I’m not going to be weaving a well-constructed post about an apple posing as a grape (pictured above) as a metaphor for an ELT issue–the operative word being “well”–nor am I beginning a series of posts that will piggyback off Scott Thornbury’s well-known blog format (ok, maybe just this once). Instead, two […]
It’s the Christmas…/cough/…holiday season and with it come the wish lists full of toys, games, clothes and gadgets. Although many of the gifts under this tree contain those things, none of them contain the more abstract wishes I have for English language teachers everywhere.
Observations of #RSCON4
The Reform Symposium, an annual free e-conference just wrapped up this weekend and as usual, it offered an incredible mishmash of education-related sessions running the gamut of K-12 and higher ed contexts in both content and language learning situations.
I’ve talked about its virtues as […]