Another (great) video: Caine’s Arcade
This blog appears to have become some kind of knock-off Youtube channel. Fear not: I’ll have some more original content for you soon.
In the meantime, check out this video about a nine year-old boy who will probably end up being the next Bill Gates 🙂
Language learning, cultural imperialism, fun?
This is a great short film (hat tip to Benny Lewis):
I hope there are lots of people like this around the world.
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by sendaiben
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New (Academic) Year’s Resolutions
Now that we are two three months into 2010 2012 (can you tell when I started writing this post?), it seems like a good time to think about new year resolutions. I didn’t make any specific ones this year, but I would like to make some for the next academic year.
In Japan the academic year runs from April to March, and at universities at least classes finish in February, allowing teachers some much-needed downtime to do admin, write papers, and think about next year’s classes.
So what am I going to focus on next year?
One of my priorities as a teacher and learner is effectiveness, or maximising results. I want to continue making my classes as effective as possible. I define effectiveness as the amount of learning over a certain time.
For my university classes, I am working off the following assumptions:
1. my students have already studied enough grammar
2. we only have a maximum of 22 hours together
3. my students actually want to learn English
4. most of my students don’t know how to get better at English
5. there are things I can teach my students that will help them improve their English
6. tests and quizzes, while very useful for assigning letter grades, are not very helpful
I am going to be teaching the following classes next year:
Reading
Communication
Listening
Presentation
I have already submitted my syllabi and know more or less what we are going to be doing, but I would be very interested to hear any advice or ideas about what I should do in each of these. I’ll be posting the contents later in the week. Please comment below.
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by sendaiben
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English teachers aren’t really teachers, are they?
This is something I have been thinking about for a while now.
I was just drafting this post when I saw this link by Steve ‘the Linguist’ Kaufmann (NB: I started writing this post three months ago).
I’m not sure that we EFL teachers are actually teachers.
After all, we are in charge of helping learners become proficient in a language. I see this as a skill to be practiced rather than a set of knowledge to be taught. I have always compared language learning to sports, and described what learners should be doing in terms of practice and training. The sports analogy seems to work very well:
1. some people are naturally better at sports/languages than others
2. anyone can get better at sports /languages through practice
3. formally studying sports/languages is of limited use on its own, although it can help if done in conjunction with practice
4. being good at one sport/language will often help you with another one
5. if you want to get better at a sport/language, you should aim to do meaningful practice every day
6. training equipment will help you improve at a sport/language, but is no substitute for practice
7. drills can be helpful, but you also need to practice under realistic conditions if you want to get better at a sport/language
You can probably make similar analogies to playing a musical instrument, or producing art.
The point is, if we are coaches rather than teachers, don’t we need to re-examine our teaching situation?
Are formal classes, exams, class assignments, and grades appropriate ways to help our students master the skill of English language use (as opposed to the academic equivalent knowledge), or are they actually counter-productive?
Now, most of us are restrained by our work situations: we can’t abolish classes or grades, but perhaps there is some way we can change our classes to make them more practical. I’ll be thinking about that in the new academic year, starting in April here in Japan.
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by sendaiben
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An interview with Ken Robinson
A great interview with Ken Robinson.