EFL Teacher Training

Spring cleaning comes to an end

Leslie

--- Advertisement --- This is, I think, the last batch of old articles I’ll be linking to for the time-being. The next step is to go through and edit a lot of them. Please be sure to leave your comments and/or questions. What is Karuta? This article is a short description of a game everyone knows, even if you [...]

So, what’s your English name?

Leslie

--- Advertisement --- Recently I wrote about Disney English in China. That article mentioned one kiddie named Wei Ziyun who has supposedly adopted “Robot” as his “English name” to show his love of that adorable scamp Wall-E. How cute, huh. Bollocks. Crap like that makes me wanna puke. The Old Naming Lucky-Dip – (without the fun of getting [...]

More from the archive: Professional Development

Leslie

--- Advertisement --- I’m still cleaning stuff! Here are some articles I wrote about professional development type topics. Lots more to say about this when I have time and can organise my thoughts clearly. Preamble: Making Classes More Interesting This turned out to be a bit long and unfocused and I should really re-record the video for this. [...]

It’s official: English Teaching is a Mickey Mouse Job

Leslie

--- Advertisement --- Disney English schools are not new, but I’ve refrained from commenting about them until now. And, to be perfectly honest, it’s hardly breaking news that TEFL is a Mickey Mouse endeavour for the most part. Today, however, I stumbled across an article worth discussing over at SFGate (Now, SFGate, by the way, turns out [...]

Autum Cleaning Continues

Leslie

--- Advertisement --- The autumn cleaning (here in Sydney) continues for your reading pleasure. Here are some more articles from the archives (that didn’t get binned in the clean-up): Motivating Students and Engaging Them with the Topic This article deals with a perennial problem and gives an example of how to overcome it with some fairly simple “tricks [...]

Spring/Autumn Cleaning at EFL Teacher Training

Leslie

--- Advertisement --- I’ve decided to do a bit of spring cleaning around the site (well, autumn cleaning for me here in Sydney, Australia, actually! ). So I’m going through and “pruning” a lot of things and tidying up some of the backend elements (e.g. adding a recent comments widget and a blog archive widget [...]

Japan Disaster Relief Effort - Update

Leslie

This is a short update about the relief effort in Japan and where the money collected by GlobalGiving is going. Last weekend I asked if you could lend a hand. Thank you to everyone who did. I just got an email from Global Giving (one of the relief organisations I linked to in the last post) [...]

Japan Earthquake Relief & Assistance

Leslie

You’ve no doubt heard the awful news about the massive earthquake in northern Japan. I know a few people in Tokyo. I haven’t heard back from them yet. I really hope they’re safe. I also know that I have a lot of readers from Japan — which is where I was living when I first started [...]

Thinking (again) about TEFL and The Jam

Leslie

--- Advertisement --- I’ve taken an extended hiatus from this site, but I’m back. I think. Maybe. That depends. The TEFL Industry There are plenty of things to dislike – or even downright loathe – about TEFL. Not so much the job itself (although, like any other job, there are things to rag on – justifiably or just [...]

Danger, Will Robinson, danger! Unidentified collocations exiting your mouth. Danger, danger! You have 20 seconds to comply…

Leslie

--- Advertisement --- Here’s an interesting development in the “I didn’t think it could get more absurd” world of TEFL: Robots to Replace English Teachers in Korean Kindergartens Korea is planning to introduce small robots named Engkey into all its kindergartens by 2013. One of the developers of the Engkey robots spouted off this piece of carefully-penned PR [...]

Will you be celebrating Halloween?

Leslie

It’s good to get out on the street and do a little vox pop sometimes; pound the pavement, get back in touch with community, uncover what those outside your corner of the world are thinking. Find out whether Tyrone will be celebrating Halloween and how he feels about Halloween pranks… Have you pulled any awesome [...]

Halloween Printables and Crafts

Leslie

If you teach kids and you’re looking for worksheets, games, colouring sheets, and craft activities, you’re going to love this! If you don’t teach kids, then “these are not the droids you’re looking for. Move along, move along…” [If you don't know that reference, watch this video:] I recently posted a link to two things Halloween-related: 1. [...]

Halloween Lesson Plans

Leslie

October already! Which means that it’s Halloween. A few years ago, I made a little Halloween Pack with half a dozen lesson plans and links to some other resources. Most of the readers of this blog probably have it already. If you haven’t got it, or you know people who’d be interested, please feel free to [...]

Blog re-opens… let’s see how it goes…

Leslie

Okay, so the “blog” part of this site is back. I shut it down and deleted every single “blog” post long ago, pretty much only leaving the more article-y pages (and there’s a lot of crap that needs to be cleaned out of them, too). The truth of the matter is that I don’t really [...]