Category Archives: Uncategorized

Acquiring

February 10, 2014Uncategorizedacquisition, efl, elt, esl, lexicon, listening, POLE, praxis, process, product, pronunciation, reading, speaking, tefl, tesl, tesol, vocabulary, writingnathanghall

Image courtesy of Premshree Pillai

I really enjoy being a language teacher, but I make a terrible language learner. When I was younger, I barely scraped by in my French lessons, but when we moved to another province in Canada when I was in grade nine, I found out how far behind I was in regards to the other students. One of the biggest things I noticed was how small my personal lexicon was compared to my classmates. Sure my grammar was bad, but since I didn’t have the words to put together meaningful sentences, no one really noticed.

Fast forward a number of years to when I had moved to Lithuania and was taking Lithuanian language lessons while working as an English language instructor. There was this initial rush of learning as my vocabulary grew while taking lessons and living my day-to-day life shopping, working, and socializing with others. My confidence grew as did my vocabulary, but it was somewhere around the six month mark that I started to notice a levelling off in my lexical growth. I decided I needed to take action, so I bought myself a set of CDs that promised to help me learn a pile of new words. I transferred the audio files to my iPod and listened intently as I walked to and from work each day. It was at that time that something hit me. The words I had learned in my first six months were sticking in my brain much better than the ones I learned while walking. At first I thought it was the fact I wasn’t seeing the words, so I wrote them out to look at as I walked. That didn’t really help. “Okay,” I thought, “what else could it be?” Then it hit me — context. That is what I was missing. Continue reading Acquiring →

Healing

January 28, 2014Uncategorizedefl, elt, esl, esol, language teaching, ma tesol, mental health, PD, tesolnathanghall

In support of the Bell Let’s Talk day today, I wanted to share a few of my thoughts and concerns in regards to what the English language education community is doing, or should be doing, to support both the teachers and their learners dealing with mental health issues. Continue reading Healing →

Collaborating

January 27, 2014Uncategorizedcollaborate, cooperate, efl, esl, esol, teaching, tefl, tesl, tesolnathanghall

Image courtesy of jphilipg

For those who don’t know, I grew up in a small town in northern Canada. Until my early teens, we didn’t have much of a shopping centre other than the Coop Mall which had a grocery store, a hardware store, and a clothing store all of which were part of The Cooperative. I had no idea what that meant until much later in my life. You can understand then why I found it amusing that my television idol at the time, The Friendly Giant, talked about cooperation. I had no idea why he would be discussing groceries on TV. Weird.

Much (much) later in life, I found myself in a very collaborative MA TESOL program working through the differences between cooperating with others and collaborating with others. It seems so simple on the surface, but the nuances of working through material with two or three other people certainly helped refine my definitions of those two terms.

For the sake of this post, I will oversimplify my understanding of what these two terms mean. I will use the building of house to illustrate my point. Continue reading Collaborating →

Testing

January 21, 2014Uncategorizedcurriculum, efl, elt, esl, esol, exams, goals, language testing, objectives, tefl, tesl, tesol, testingnathanghall

Image courtesy of Jack Hynes

I’m back! For those that actually read my blog, I apologize for the long hiatus. In keeping with the spirit of this blog and my single word titles, I give you my one word excuses: testing, marking, moving, celebrating, moving, searching, moving, buying, interviewing, accepting, learning, teaching, preparing, sleeping. There, does that help?

There have been a few things floating around in my mind lately (but only a few), most of them related to assessment. My current frustration is with ‘teaching to the test’, often associated with washback (not to be mistaken for backwash which is just gross). I am getting ahead of myself. Let me back track a bit. Continue reading Testing →

Creating

November 28, 2013Uncategorizedassessment, content, efl, elt, eportfolio, esl, formative, self access, students, summative, tefl, tesl, tesolnathanghall

Image courtesy of Lorraine Santana

One of the things I love about Twitter is the online chats that occur based on areas of interest. This is a great way for anyone to have a say, regardless of class, position, or status. While I would love to participate more, time restraints and scheduling conflicts make it impossible for me to participate in the chats that I would love to take part in. As a result, I try to follow up by reading the tweets after the fact and the posted summaries as well.

Yesterday, I got to work in the morning and quickly read over the #ELTchat transcript and was pleasantly surprised to see a topic discussed that is close to my heart, that is student-generated content. Even this past weekend, I was discussing this very area of interest with other teachers during my session at the BC TEAL regional conference. While yesterday’s chat discussion predictably centred around the creation of content, I was mystified to find that little was mentioned about why this content is created and for what purpose. On top of that, not much at all was said about the use of student-generated content by other students as listening or reading material. The result of reading over that transcript has prompted me to take a deeper look at what student-generated material is and what is its ultimate purpose. Continue reading Creating →

Networking

November 26, 2013Uncategorizedconferences, efl, elt, esl, esol, networking, presenting, professional development, tefl, tesl, tesolnathanghall

Image courtesy of Official GDC

Over the past weekend, I had the privilege of giving a session at the BC TEAL Lower Mainland Regional Conference in Vancouver, BC. I had a great time reconnecting with friends and colleagues, even if I was exhausted from my delated flight adventure involving long layovers in Toronto and Calgary and only four hours sleep.

The focus of my presentation was on creating a collaborative self-access library which included a bit of hands on practice with the things introduced. This is the same topic I gave at the TESL Ontario 2013 Conference in October with a number of changes made based on feedback given and my own thoughts about what went well and what didn’t. While it did go much better this time, there are still some things I would change if I do this presentation again.

Over the years, and even as recent as a couple of weeks ago, I have heard people complain about people who go to different conferences to give the same presentations to pad their resumes and build their ‘fame’ as an ELT professional. I understand this concern, but I feel that is a very shallow, narrow view of why people give conference sessions. Continue reading Networking →

Watching

November 25, 2013Uncategorizedefl, elt, esl, esol, movie, PD, professional development, punishment, reflection, reflective teaching, respect, support, tefl, tesl, tesol, trainingnathanghall

Image still from the movie Entre les murs

This weekend, I made the exceedingly long journey to Vancouver for the BC TEAL Lower Mainland Regional Conference. I had a great time and I will certainly blog about that soon, but that isn’t the purpose of my post today. On the plane back from the conference, I watched the movie Entre les murs, an intriguing movie about a teacher and his middle school class in Paris. Even though I am not a K-12 teacher, I found it to be a fascinating and quite convincingly realistic voyage through a typical school year. I think the thing that caught my attention the most was that I felt like it wasn’t contrived, a compelling story without the need of a storyline. Unlike many of films on schools put out by Hollywood, this story didn’t have a hero or villain, blatant agenda or mountain top experience. Instead, this story left me with more questions than answers. In the end, I didn’t find myself really liking or detesting either the teacher or the students. I felt a variety of emotions throughout the film, but none stayed consistent. Instead, it got me thinking about my classroom, my approaches to teaching and how I can learn from this situation. Here are my somewhat scattered thoughts: Continue reading Watching →

Pitching

November 21, 2013Uncategorizedacademic, assessment, efl, elevator pitch, elt, esl, esol, formative, listening, presentations, speaking, summative, tefl, tesl, tesol, writingnathanghall

Image courtesy of Sean Benham

On a side note: This is my 50th post on this blog. As most of you know, I don’t get too excited about things like this, but it is nice to look back over the six months I have been working on this blog and see what has transpired since then. No matter how many visitors, retweets, FB shares, and so on that I get, I am in awe that anyone would think I have anything even remotely interesting to share. Thank you for putting up with my rants and incoherent rambling. I appreciate you all. Really.

Today I did elevator pitches with my students and I thought they did a really great job. I decided to do those instead of a traditional presentation for a number of reasons, but mostly because I feel it is more realistic than a lecture style speech. For those who are not aware of what an elevator pitch is, here is the basic situation.

Imagine you have walked into an elevator and standing there is the CEO / President / Manager of the company you would like to work for or with which you would like to do business. As the doors close, you have one minute to pitch yourself or your idea before the doors open again and you lose your opportunity of a lifetime. Continue reading Pitching →

Tutoring

November 19, 2013Uncategorizedefl, elt, esl, esol, peer-feedback, speaking, tefl, tesl, tesol, tutoring, Weissberg, writingnathanghall

Image courtesy of Rob Cabellero

I am a terrible photographer. Really. For many years, I worked in the photographic industry as a sales person and trainer, but what I knew in my head about how a great image comes together never developed when it came time to push the shutter button. It still frustrates me. Sure, there are times I get a decent picture, but as the wise Doug Peterson once told me,

It goes the same for writing. Continue reading →

Punishing

November 17, 2013Uncategorizedefl, elt, esl, esol, Krashen, levels, listening, reading, tefl, tesl, tesolnathanghall

Image courtesy of florian b.

I’ve waited a while before writing this post in order to protect the person who I am writing about. I don’t want anyone trying to guess who it was who did this. The point of this post is to make all of us think about what we do when we choose reading or listening material for our students.

One day, when I was having lunch, a fellow teacher was showing me a text that she planned on using with her class that afternoon. As I looked at the text, I wondered about the difficulty level and asked her if the students were going to be able to handle it. She exclaimed, “I know it is too difficult for them, but the students have been mentioning that the texts I have been giving them were too easy and they were finishing too quickly. I am doing this to put them in their place.” Continue reading Punishing →

ELT Reflections

Musings of a teacher always in training