These posts contain links to and commentary about aspects of the language teaching industry.
Who said January is the time for change? For us, it’s more often a September calling. Opportunities pop up all around. When the window for change comes, do you teeter on the edge then back in where it’s safe? This message is for everyone who is comfortably stuck and knows it.Read More »Are you ready to jump?
Essentials in my instructor room: a nice desk, a filing cabinet, a computer with internet connection, a printer, and other teachers.This is my desk at the university. Is it important for teachers to be altogether in one office? Does it make more sense to physically separate teachers of one program? Read More »What’s a staff room to you?
With the new academic year just around the corner for many public schools (almost everything in Canada, including university, begin classes the Tuesday after Labour Day each year), the anticipation of a new classes, new students and in some cases new programs, is building among the teacher community. Is it met with anxiety or excitement? Read More »The 1st week is around the corner
After potentially a summer off, if I were the photocopier, I’d dread the day school begins: all those instructors, all those handouts, all that toner. Why do we feel this automatic reaction to photocopy so much material? I think it often boils down to anxiety. Read More »Photocopier: Oh no, not you again!
The traditional labels used in our industry ranging from Elementary to Advanced beg for a constant myriad of issues to arise for program coordinators, teachers and students. Read More »Rethinking level descriptors
We learned. We did learn, in a spirit of vengefulness: we would give Mr. Erskine no excuses. There was nothing he wanted more than to get a foot on each of our necks–well, he would be denied the pleasure, if possible. What we really learned from him was how to cheat. It was difficult to fake the mathematics, but we spent many hours in the late afternoons cribbing up out translations of Ovid from a couple of books in Grandfather’s library–old translation by eminent Victorians, with small print and complicated vocabularies. We would get the sense of the passage from these books, then substitute other, simpler words, and add a few mistakes, to make it look as if we’d done it ourselves. Whatever we did, though, Mr. Erskine would slash up our translations with his red pencil and write savage comments in the margins. We didn’t learn much Latin, but we learned a great deal about forgery.“1
Do your students look forward to skimming an article for its main ideas? No? Shocking. There’s often a couple of hiccups we face with many reading and writing practice activities: they’re not always authentic; there’s minimal interaction between students; they’re not actually practicing reading or writing skills at all. Read More »Learner interaction in reading & writing activities
I was sitting at my desk in the basement of Wetmore Hall, watching instructors before 10AM scrambling through the resource library fixed to one wall… Read More »Novel in an hour