Tag Archives: esol

Building

May 26, 2014Uncategorized#444ELT, academic research, challenge, efl, elt, esl, esol, journals, professional development, tesl, tesol, vocabularynathanghall

Image courtesy of Taryn

A few days ago, I posted this ‘challenge’ on Twitter:

Project #444ELT: Helping ELT professionals connect with ELT research

Read 4 journal articles every week for 4 weeks (a total of 16 articles)
Each week, write a blog post that has:
- a reference to each article
- a short summary of each one
- your remarks or thoughts on the content
- a list of questions raised after reading each article.
Share your post on Twitter using the hashtag #444ELT

To be totally honest, I thought it might catch a few people, but instead the response via retweets and favourites has been really surprising. I mostly did this to keep myself accountable, but I was secretly hoping a few people might join in as well. It is a little different than a blog carnival in that the person joining in can do it at any time instead of setting a deadline. This is meant to be ongoing as a means to promote the use of ELT research in the classroom. By forcing yourself to participate in this short challenge, it is hoped that this will create a routine of sorts that will carry on throughout your career.

I decided to choose a theme for each week. This week’s theme revolves around vocabulary learning/acquisition and the use of intentional and incidental means. Each study is different in many ways, but the common thread shows amazing continuity in the results with some solid applications for the language classroom.

So, without further delay, here is my first entry: Week one of #444ELT Continue reading Building →

Reviewing

May 14, 2014Uncategorizedefl, elt, esl, esol, helping, questions, reflections, tefl, tesolnathanghall

Image courtesy of CameliaTWU

One year. On May 17, 2013, I started this blog as a way of creating a separate space for me to reflect on what I was doing, learning, and thinking about as an ELT instructor and educator. What I didn’t expect was that anyone would actually read it. Seventy(!) posts later, here I am wondering what it is I have accomplished over this time. Did I really learn anything? Did I actually help anyone else along the way? Is it what I expected it would be or has it evolved into something different? Am I better for having taken the time to write these posts or could my time have been better served elsewhere? Lastly, if I was to close the virtual door on this site, would anyone actually care? Would I care? So many questions. Continue reading Reviewing →

Waiting

April 28, 2014Uncategorizedblog challenge, eap, efl, elt, esl, esol, narrative, onething, patience, story, teaching, tesl, tesolnathanghall

Image courtesy of Kate Mereand-Sinha

This post is in response to Anne Hendler’s blog post challenge to share one thing that happened today and post it with #OneThing on Twitter. I decided to write it as a short story instead, something I’ve never really done before. Thought it seemed appropriate. Don’t worry, I won’t give up my day job to become a writer any time soon!

With the sun straining to appear through the blanket of grey, I shoved my hands in my pockets and started my way towards the college. “At least it isn’t raining,” I muttered to myself. I’m not really a morning person, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to get used to the morning commute. I was careful to walk around a small snail creeping along on the sidewalk when I almost stepped into the line of car climbing out of the underground parkade. “Thanks for stopping!” I thought as he squealed his tires, launching himself over the curb and onto the road. The driver leans on his horn as he swerves around a truck backing into an a building parking lot. “Patience, please!” I growl. Oi. And I’ve hardly gone fifty paces. I begin to wonder what this day has in store for me. Continue reading Waiting →

Changing

April 26, 2014Uncategorizedchange, critical pedagogy, critical thinking, elt, esl, esol, learn, study, teaching, tefl, teslnathanghall

Image courtesy of Nick Page

Have you ever had one of those days where a certain topic keeps coming up over and over again in completely different situations? Yesterday was like that for me. The completely random topic? Critical pedagogy. Not sure why, but I’m not complaining. This is a topic that I have really started to sink my teeth into, even if I am still working out all that it encompasses and how it plays out in my language classroom.

For those not entirely sure about what critical pedagogy is, here is a really, really simplified (perhaps oversimplified?) version. In the beginning, there was Paulo Freire, a philosopher and educator from Brazil who wrote this amazing, albeit somewhat dense, book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. By the sounds of the title, I am sure you can probably start to guess where this is going. Freire believed that education should allow those who find themselves oppressed and cut off politically to gain a voice and be given the tools and space to transform their situation. Freire also fought against the traditional dispensing of knowledge by the teacher, instead giving the students the means to direct and create their own learning especially through social interaction. Basically, critical pedagogy levels the playing field by stripping away the hierarchical structure so prevalent in education. Students take what they learn in the classroom and transform their world outside of the classroom. There is so much more than that, so if you would like to understand it better, go here.

Okay, before anyone starts blasting me for missing important components of critical pedagogy, the purpose of this post isn’t to be a treatise on all things critical, but I simply want to provide a foundation to explain what I have been thinking about. In this case, three different things arose from the conversations and texts I read. Continue reading Changing →

Contemplating

April 13, 2014Uncategorizedblogging, efl, elt, esl, esol, learning, reflecting, teaching, tefl, tesl, tesolnathanghall

Image courtesy of Simon Powell

I woke up this morning and this was spinning in my head. As I write this, I have a feeling it should have stayed in there where it made more sense (at least to me). Oh well, I will give it a go.

17th May 2013. That was the day that I started this blog. I had bold ambitions to share my thoughts on issues that mattered to the ELT community and how they were being played out in my classroom. I never ever intended for this site to make me rich or famous (and for the record, neither of those actually happened anyway), but my hope has always been that it might help others to reflect on their own teaching and possibly start a conversation as I learned from those who read my posts.

In part, that has happened. Continue reading Contemplating →

Archiving

April 9, 2014Uncategorizedassessment, edtech, efl, eportfolio, esl, esol, formative, goals, objectives, peer-feedback, tefl, tesl, tesol, webtoolsnathanghall

Image courtesy of DRs Kulturarvsprojekt

Over the past few years now, I have been working on and refining my use of e-portfolios in my classroom. For those unfamiliar or only knowing a bit about what they are, e-portfolios are essentially an electronic archive of things the student does in the course of their learning. It can be made up of projects from inside or outside of the classroom and is primarily divided into two parts: the sandbox and the showcase. Continue reading Archiving →

Recollecting

March 30, 2014Uncategorizedadvice, efl, elt, esl, esol, mentoring, observing, open-book exams, reflecting, tefl, tesl, tesolnathanghall

Image courtesy of Mooshuu

Yesterday, I saw a tweet along the lines of, “If you could go back in time to your first year as a teacher, what would you say?” Good question. At first I wasn’t entirely sure what I would say, but the more I thought about it, the more it kept coming back to one thing: it’s not about me. Well, if that was all I would say, the younger me would probably say thanks and then move on. Also, if that is all I wrote today, you would be fairly disappointed in this blog post and might never return. For the sake of the skinnier Nathan and all those who dare enter this blog, here is what I could say in more detail. [Note: this was also sort of covered by Mike Griffin, although his was primarily about conferences.] Continue reading Recollecting →

Exploring

March 26, 2014Uncategorizedcoursebooks, efl, elt, esl, esol, learning, reflecting, teaching, tefl, tesl, tesolnathanghall

Image courtesy of Danie van der Merwe

Teaching is a strange career choice. Think about it. For almost the entirety of your young life, your goal is to get out of school. You finally graduate from high school and you willingly choose to endure anywhere from 2-8 more years of formal education just so you can go back to the classroom. Why? What drives a person to return when they have the opportunity to run away and be free? I was never the best student and I certainly had my fair share of difficulties with bullies (I was almost always one of the smallest students and I certainly wasn’t one of the “cool kids”). My parents were both teachers and I swore I would never become a teacher. I saw the amount of extra time they had to put into their job at home and on holidays (anyone who says teachers have a free ride during the summer needs to have their head examined) and I thought, “Who would want to do this job?”

Well, here I am in my ninth consecutive year as an English language instructor and I still love my job. I love the fact that I get to meet so many amazing people, students and colleagues, and I selfishly enjoy it when someone leaves my class feeling they have grown in their language ability. Was it only because of me? Of course not, but I do hope that I was able to help in some way.

Continue reading Exploring →

Considering

March 3, 2014Uncategorizedcopying, curriculum, efl, elt, esl, esol, lesson planning, materials, philosophy of language education, reflection, reflective teaching, tefl, tesl, tesolnathanghall

Image courtesy of Keith Kissel

I have a feeling this is going to be a rather short post, but this thought has been taking up space in my brain for too long and needs to get out. I also have a feeling that this isn’t going to be as clear as it seems to be in my head at the moment. Here goes nothing.

I think we have become lazy when it comes to preparing lessons. Okay, that is a bit harsh, but I think there is at least an element of truth to that. When I became an English language instructor back in [date as been removed to protect the age of the writer], we didn’t have the internet; we had to make our lessons from scratch! Actually, that isn’t entirely true, we did have a shelf full of books with some lesson ideas and photocopiable activities (thanks, Jill Hadfield!). I remember spending hours planning, prepping, cutting, glueing, copying, stapling, etc., just to get ready for the next day (I even used stencils and clipart!). I wouldn’t say that my lessons were anything fabulous (actually, I shudder in horror at some of the things that I did), but I did attempt to tailor my lessons to the group I was teaching.

My fear at the moment is that we have become so reliant on the what and not on the why. Continue reading Considering →

Studying

February 19, 2014UncategorizedCoursera, Dornyei, eap, efl, elt, English for Academic Purposes, esl, esol, ma tesol, MOOC, online learning, research, statistics, tesl, tesolnathanghall

Image courtesy of Ted Major

I finally caved into all of the MOOC hype and signed up for a course, although my reasons are purely selfish. To be honest, I’m not doing it because it is ‘cool’ or I am interested in the inner workings of a more social style of learning. Nope. I am doing it for the information. Last night, I watched a great workshop on YouTube given by Zoltan Dornyei on designing and analyzing data from questionnaires. It got me interested again in statistics, even though I dreaded the course during my MA TESOL program, and I felt compelled to find out more. Why? Well, it is just plain interesting. I am not one for just taking things at face value very often. I want to know why and how things occur. I have been reading a lot of journal articles lately and I find my eyes starting to glaze over when reading the data charts and various terms used to explain them. As my dad would often say, I know enough to hurt myself, in this case when it comes to stats. On top of all of that, I want to know more about the use of statistics for when I start to get into research myself.

To make a long story a little less boring, I ended up looking at free MOOCs and decided on a data analysis course from Duke University through Coursera. Despite my lack of time and a little bit of apprehension, I signed up knowing that I wouldn’t lose any money in the deal and should end up learning at least SOMETHING in the process. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to sign up and get started when the sheer enormity of the task started to hit me. There are readings and videos, assignments and exams. When am I going to get this all done? Well, I might as well continue forward was my oh so enthusiastic cry. Continue reading Studying →

ELT Reflections

Musings of a teacher always in training