We will delete any ESL job adverts that appear in our forum. Our forum is for language discussions and not a free place to advertise jobs.
Lingro is a site that offers a useful translation tool. Enter the URL of a site or page, then choose the language you want to translate words into and you can click on the words you don't know and bring up a pop-up box with a translation.
Over at the TeflTrade blog, Sandy McManus has received another legal demand for material critical of a school to be taken down from his site. This time, his blog host received a letter alleging defamation from Mr Paul Lowe of Windsor TEFL, who appeared in this blog here and also replied to what I said here. In the first case, Abbey College, Malvern demanded that a post that contained a critical description of their summer schools was removed. The original text had appeared on Dave's ESL Cafe and Sandy had reposted it after it was pulled from Dave's.
When I was living in Japan, it was virtually impossible to avoid Nova advertising; they were all over the subway, in my newspaper and on TV. For the last few months, the company, the largest of the eikaiwa schools in Japan, has been in free-fall, ever since they got into trouble over their refund policies. The company now seems to be in its death throes.
Though the term information superhighway seems to have been consigned to history, the internet, in many ways, resembles a demolition derby more than a sleek road. Every year I clear out the dead links from our ESL links database; even though we add a new link most days, we now how forty fewer links than we did at the start of the year.
Interactive whiteboards, heralded as a breakthrough in teaching, have come under fire as possible risks to eyesight. While the claims that TV and computer screens would ruin people's eyesight have largely not been shown to be the case, it is possible that there is a risk here.
An extremely lengthy thread about Mark Smith and Smith's School of English, Japan on the AACircle ESL Blacklist was closed by the administrator on the grounds that he had seen 'indisputable documentary evidence' that Mr Smith was innocent of all the accusations made against him.
A few years ago, many ESL bloggers were claiming that blogging was going to change the face of ESL on the web. I always thought that these claims were excessive; many bloggers were coming into IT without many technical skills and were evangelical about what they could do without understanding the ideas behind Web 2.0 or what was happening on the web already.
The TEFL Blacklist has had its version of the OSCARS for the worst in the ESL/EFL world. It's an interesting and idiosyncratic selection, with some obvious choices of old friends and some quirky and unexpected choices.
There is a lot of debate at the moment on whether the Trinity College London TEFL (TESOL) Certificate courses offered by Windsor TEFL are accredited.
The TEFL Blacklist, set up by Sandy of TeflTrade, has been taken over by someone known as Inspector McHammered of the Lard, who has re-invigorated the site.
We are adding a new section to the site that will be text-based, with texts and comprehension exercises. It is new, so it is still very small, but we will be adding to it on a regular basis. Please free to contact us to make suggestions or correct any mistakes.
I was reading a book about how people use the internet and it said that the average search length has gone from 1.1 to 2.8 words in the last few years. The numbers may not seem to represent such a huge change at first look, but the more I think about them, the more astonishing the change seems. I have also just finished teaching on a pre-sessional course in a university in the UK where I have taught for many years and there have been similar changes that display a very profound change as I see it.
The BBC has recently reported on the visa scams going on in some UK English Language schools, though this has been going on for years and has never been a secret within the ESL profession. The problem seems to have come to a head because the DfES (the Department for education and Skills) introduced a registration scheme, despite repeated warnings from professional bodies that their criteria for inclusion were not stringent enough.
I have just cleaned out our links database, which I do once a year. About 10% of the links were broken, similar to last year. Unless ESL is particularly bad for this, it doesn't bode well for the web. So much of the web is dependent on links, yet such a high breakage rate means that after a few years much of it will be unreadable, and particularly in areas like blogs where people tend to respond to things they have seen on the web and post their thoughts and the link.
ESL training courses on the internet are a problem. While there are presumably courses that are worth the money, most seem a waste of time and money. Apart from the obvious defect of not having any observed classroom teaching, many are quite simply rip-offs and there is a problem with recognition, as many have set up their own recognising bodies.
I saw a job advert today for a teaching post in Spain that was quite possibly the worst job I have ever seen advertised in ESL:
Are you interested in teaching English in Spain? We need one person who can be here by ASAP (latest January 21st). The job is in Castellon.It is preferable to have spanish language skills. The job consists of teaching private English lessons in peoples houses. You would be responsible for arriving to each class by bus, train, bike, or walking each day. Classes are typically given during the evenings and one or two on Saturday mornings for a total of 15-20 hours a week.
Pay is 6euro an hour, with a 50hour bond to be worked at the beginning (300euro is paid at the end of 6month contract). Housing IS included in a small pueblo near Castellon. Seven hours a week are deducted from pay to cover all housing costs. Minimum weekly pay is 60euro, average about 90euro. Spanish classes are also included.
Please respond only if available to come before January 21st, 2006.
In an interview on ELTNews on a recent visit to Japan, Professor Henry Widdowson says that the most obvious example of a conceptually flawed theory in ESL teaching is "the current precept that English teachers must only use real or authentic English in their teaching that is to say the English that naturally occurs in the contexts of native speaker use. This directive comes from corpus linguistics and as such has no necessary pedagogic validity whatever."
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