ESL School

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Surely we all hate clichés, but if this is true why do they seem to have such a long shelf life? Sorry but once you start thinking this way, the clichés...

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The last day of the year once more. And the general air of gloom and doom is hard to escape. It occurred to me that the way the Internet allows people from all parts of the globe to connect with each other means that the suffering of regions, no matter...

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With many countries facing economic instability, the mobility of international students is showing some signs of ...

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English language teaching is unlikely to escape unscathed from global recession. Schools will be worrying...

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The international banking sector is in turmoil. That can’t affect you or me, surely. Think again. In the intricate world of global business, nobody is...

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The perennial question concerning career prospects in ELT has been raised yet again in a forum. To answer the question, I think we need to take...

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In the UK the ESOL debacle continues. First we had an ESOL syllabus and courses offered free to qualifying students who needed to pass specific tests in English in ...

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I raised concerns about teacher training earlier this week. Now I want to consider the competition among Anglophone countries to attract students for English...

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I thought I would try to spark off a debate about some of what I feel are key issues and challenges for the future of English language teaching. I want to start with teacher training ...

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This week in London the annual Study World agents workshop took place in London. Such fairs are a regular feature...

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ESOL in the UK is in a pretty pickle. It has become a political issue that is being handled in the most incompetent manner. First came ...

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Most schools run exam classes; students looking to enter universities or proving their competence to employers are keen to pass ...

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I have been wondering how to make high-quality English language teaching available to more...

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Do you think it is a trendy fad or a serious approach?...

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In theory the Internet frees teachers to set up as independents and have the world at large as a market. I certainly know...

Do we need new learning theories for English as a lingua franca?

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Is it just my imagination or do teachers today spend less time weighing the relative advantages of language learning theories, preferring to rely on their own intuition for what works best with their learners? I raise this question because...

At what age can childen start learning a second language?

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In recent years there has been a meteoric rise in teaching English to young learners. One report reveals that in Japan some parents expose their children to some form of English from the age of eighteen months. While it might be advantageous to children to start learning foreign languages...

Greetings ESL experts,

Allow me to say thanks to Jake for his introduction of me and for giving me the honor or presenting to you the newest member of the ESLemployment team, Brenda Townsend Hall, PhD.

For those of you who might be unfamiliar with her work, Dr. Townsend Hall is a communications consultant trainer and course designer. Now, she’ll be blogging for ESL School and writing for the ESL Expert newsletter. She offers face-to-face and distance training in the fields of interpersonal communications, business English, written communications and cross-cultural awareness. She also has runs a distance-learning training course, Teach Business English, for teachers wishing to enter the field of business English . . .

Recently I was talking about careers to a group of university students. For most of them English language teaching was perceived as a short-term means of seeing the world before coming back to find a “real career”.

I started thinking about my own life in English language teaching and have to admit that at first I did just fall into it rather than make a conscious career choice. I needed to be in a certain place at a certain time and it was the work that was available and for which I had the right background . . .

Here we are at the end of 2005. As usual, the year seems to have flown by; it doesn’t seem as if already we are six years into the new millennium!

It seems counterproductive to me for employers and teachers to see each other as sitting on opposite sides of the fence.

Friends,

Of course there are bad employers and there are bad teachers. The one needs to be able to recognize and jettison the other: teachers should not stay with bad employers and schools should not keep bad teachers on. But then we do not live in an ideal world and most employers, and most teachers, have strengths and weaknesses . . .

I am still thinking about the importance of looking ahead and planning for students' future needs.

I wonder how schools teaching English today plan for the future. Indeed how far ahead can we realistically look when thinking of the demand for English teaching?

I have been wondering how schools use the Internet now that it has become such a fundamental feature of our lives.

I'd be interested to hear what readers think are the main reasons for students learning English nowadays. Of course, English has been seen for many decades as an asset when it comes to finding a job. This was especially true for nationals of countries that had a thriving tourist industry. But the increasing globalization of business seems to me have changed the way we use English in workplaces.

Hello again. I don't know about you but I loathe acronyms. Yes, I know they have a convenience factor but they also seem to me to be potentially sinister, redolent of George Orwell's Newspeak. Our field has its fair share of them and woe betide anyone who uses one wrongly. Never, for example, say ESL or TESL when you mean ESOL or TESOL. Why? because you might unwittingly insult a learner by referring to ESL (English as a second language) when the learner might be a speaker of several languages with English some way down the pecking order: it is politically more correct to refer to English for speakers of other languages (ESOL). So important has this distinction become that the heavy hand of officialdom in the UK now requires people seeking British citizenship to demonstrate that they have at least ESOL Entry Level 3 from the national "skills for life" curriculum (strange distinction, after all we hardly need "skills for death"). Exam boards now dutifully provide ESOL qualifications that seem to have eclipsed the old EFL certificates, making English as a foreign language somehow less relevant.

Hello again. I am interested in knowing what guidance schools give their teachers about the content of their lessons. As English language teaching gains ground globally, I think students know why they want to learn the language (it gives them a distinct advantage in educational and employment fields) and teachers know why they want to teach it (opportunity to travel, see the world, meet many different people, the reward of being effective in the classroom, etc.) But do students and teachers know what content they want lessons to have?

Sometimes we get so caught up in the day-to-day issues of running a school that we forget to think ahead. Does that happen to you? In today's dynamic world, though, I think we really have to keep an eye on trends to ensure continued success. I came across this interesting report recently that gives some clues about how we should be organizing for the future.

English Teaching Professional magazine has published results of a survey of teachers in over 110 countries on their opinions on the future of English language teaching. Sixty-six percent of teachers thought there would be an increase in the importance of English as a global language over the next ten years and over 80 percent thought that the numbers of students would increase accordingly.