Recently in General Category

When I looked at which basic ELT qualifications employers were looking for, someone suggested doing the same for more senior positions.  I decided to separate managerial roles from university positions, and here I have just looked at managerial positions, starting from Assistant Director of Studies (ADOS) and moving up.

There are thousands of ESL teaching courses available, with all sorts of claims being made about them and accreditation that can be valid or bogus. One simple test is to look at adverts to see what employers are looking for, so I went through 200 adverts for basic teaching jobs around the world, and a few teaching online.  I ignored managerial positions, university and specialist jobs.  This does not rate the contents of courses, though it is clear which courses employers trust and prefer.  Qualifications are given with the percentage of the teaching jobs advertised that a person could apply for.

Ginger Software proofreads your writing, checking the spelling and grammar as you write.  You download and install it- it works in Windows with Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, and in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

I had a look at the Grammarly automated proofreader and personal grammar coach that claims to be the world's most accurate grammar checker, presumably in the automated category.  The bad news is that those who want to post any text and expect it to be turned into  perfect English will still have to wait for science fiction to become reality, but the good news is that it could be a very useful tool.

The title comes from Pedro Carolino's English as She is Spoke (1883), an accidental classic that is meant to be an English phrasebook and conversational guide, but as the author couldn't speak much, or any, English, he created a garbled translation of a Portuguese-French phrasebook that has a charm in its ridiculousness.

As I no longer live in the UK and only go back a couple of times a year, I may miss some of the changes occurring in British English that aren't easily seen on the web, so I keep in contact with all sorts of sources who try to keep me up to date.

The recently elected president of the NSU in the UK, Liam Burns, is quoted in the Herald Scotland as saying the following when he was NUS's Scottish president:

At the end of the day, the point of the university has changed. If you look at when only 5% of the population went, that was about knowledge, discovery, pushing boundaries, people talked about the crème de la crème. That's not the purpose of universities now - it is about social mobility and people changing their lives. The reality is you need that bit of paper to get into better jobs with greater earning potential and influence. So we want as many people to get one as possible, at the expense of quality if necessary.

Every week we get at least one Custom Essay Site submitted for  inclusion in our links database, and often several.  Many will make no money, but the fact that they keep starting means that there is money to be made out of them.  A few years ago, we used to get search sites for universities submitted all the time, but they dried up, while people wanting to break into the custom essay market keep piling in.

The race to the bottom in ESL is unlikely to be won for some time.  While the debate about the quality and validity of online training goes on, we had a spammer on the site recently trying to plug novelty TEFL Certificates.

With high unemployment in many English-speaking countries and a recession that doesn't want to go away, the demand for ESL training is buoyant.  The macro prospects for work, however, are not looking particularly good in many places- Europe is economically squeezed in many parts and ageing, the population of Japan is already shrinking, Korea's will follow suit in a few years, and China 's working population  is set to peak in a few years.