Job Discussion Forums

[Bedouin]

To all members of the Middle East Forum

You may be interested to know that TESOL Islamia is a relatively new upcoming organisation which is concerned with teaching English to Muslim students worldwide.

Take a look at www.tesolislamia.org

or if you can try to participate in the forum at:

http://www.network54.com/Hide/Forum/194034

Regards

Sohail

[scot47]

Are you suggesting that muslims should be taught differently to lesser mortals ? If so, I find that highly offensive.

[Bedouin]

Scott

I'm so sorry that you're "highly offended" if different cultures might want to do things a little differently.

Nobody's making value judgements about non-Muslims. Its sounds like your projecting your hangups, frustrations and hatred of living in this region.

Please note that this is afterall the the forum concerned with discussion on Middle East where the overwhelming majority of ESL students are Muslims.

Kind regards

Sohail

[Stephen Jones]

Dear Bedouin,
I am intrigued. What other things need teaching differently to Muslims? Basketweaving, car driving, nuclear physics, C++, Java?
And what happens if a student reverts half way through the course? Do we have to start again at the beginning?

[scot47]

It sounds to me my dear bedouin, that you are the one having identification problems. Perhaps you are insecure as a Muslim ? Perhaps you need dasily reassurance that you are on the straight path ?

Have you made the right choice ? Think about it.

[sperling]

Okay, hold on everyone ... this is beginning to turn into a flame, which I don't like at all.

This certainly is not the first organization or group devoted to teachers teaching ESL/EFL to a specific religion. CTESL-L comes to mind, a mailing list for Christian ESL/EFL teachers:

"CTESL-L is an online fellowship for Christians who are teaching ESL/EFL. The list provides a non-hostile environment for Christian educators to discuss their work within the context of their faith."

I'm not a Moslem, but I would certainly consider participating in something like TESOL Islamia if I was teaching in an Islamic country. Certainly an understanding of Buddhism helped me when I taught in Japan and Thailand.

All the best,

Dave Sperling
Founder
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Dave's ESL Cafe
http://www.eslcafe.com

[Stephen Jones]

Dear Dave,
It's not the people who need some acclimatization who are objecting to the sticky. It's those of us who know only too well where it's leading. They already have a poll up on their site which states that 75% or so of their members feel the materials they are teaching are positibvely unislamic. That means for your information that there are pictures of women's hair (horror of horrors!), and even women driving and working, and other things that they can see on Saudi, let alone Western, television every day. If they had Janet and John they would ban it for encouraging promiscuity! It is their influence that is partly responsible for Saudi spending a small fortune producing the most drearily inadequate EFL material you will ever see.

[scot47]

I have to agree with Stephen Jones. This is not about exposing new teachers in the Muslim world tgo an understanding of Islam. It is about enforcing one particular version of Islam in structuring courses.

From California this may appear to be a nice touchy-feely multicultural initiative. My interpretation is that it is a narrow, sectarian attempt to straitjacket people.

[xnihil]

Stephen,
Just out of curiousity, do you think that a book which expressed traditional islamic values would, per se, be dreary and inadequate?

My guess is that it is a mere coincidence that the one book you have seen happens to be both dreary and Islamic.

Feel free to accuse me of being too touchy-feely (though not of the California variety) but it is too much to ask that as educators (who happen to be guests in their country) follow local mores rather than insisting on importing our own own values?

I certainly agree that, given the choice between inadequate material and "western" material, we should always choose the western, but, if all they object to is a few pictures, how hard would it be to print special editions?

It is absolutely true that language is, per se, culturally loaded, but I don't think that a group of people who choose not to be exposed to a certain set of behavior (ie exposing hair or arms, or examples of young people dating) should thereby be restricted from learning our language

Am I being unreasonable?

[Stephen Jones]

I can assure you I have seen loads of dreary badkly produced rubbish in Saudi. The reason that it is no good has nothing to do with religion. It is simply that producing good material takes a lot of time and money, and to do this just for your company is impossible, so what you get are stale rehashes of other books minus the humor, layout, color, and completeness. Yet you can't use standard texts because they might lead to complaints.

As for following native traditions this is rubbish. The most vocal of these people are not Saudis at all, but Americans and British, (with the occasional Egyptian or Jordanian) who feel that it is their right as converts to tell the rest of the world what to do. It is not me and Scot, but American and British "brothers" who go around telling other Muslims here that they are bad Muslims because they are wearing T Shirts, or have "unislamic" haircuts.

If you lived and worked in the States you would object to being told to tailor your teaching methods and materials to the beliefs of the Plymouth Brethren and the Amish.

[johnslat]

Dear xnihil,
As I mentioned on the Oman forum, another problem is - who would teach courses that stressed those Islamic values? While I think every society has the right to shape it's own culture, I would not be able to teach a course that lauded the virtues of theocracy and other matters that I suspect most of the supporters of those Islamic values would want to see championed in the texts. In addition, I doubt non-Moslems would even be wanted as teachers of such courses.
Regards,
John

[51]

the idea of having an efl syllabus which is 'islamic' or which is consistent with 'islamic values' is difficult to imagine. Would it be sprinkled with Arabic? If English classes begin with "salaam aleikum", then we can see how the language lesson is going to go.

It seems that this idea of 'islamic' tesol has been dreamed up by some armchair imams who are deviously implementing their policial islam agenda.

Many millions of muslims from the Middle East have learnt English without being physically or mentally corrupted by the EFL text books of the (western) non-believers.

If muslims want to write EFL text books for muslims, why don't they go ahead and do it. Do we need a website to discuss it for 8 years?

[sheikh radlinrol]

[veiledsentiments]

[middleastman]

Wow! This is hilarious. Have you seen the reading resources??

http://www.tesolislamia.org/materials/reading.html

Talk about hijacking a medium for your own purposes. I really dont get the purpose of this organisation (then again maybe I do). One of the things my students love is learning about other cultures!