Job Discussion Forums

[Thomcat]

Hi! I am a fairly new teacher interested in educating myself further with the primary purpose of becoming a better teacher. I took a TEFL course in Mexico about 1 year ago in which I learned a great deal, but it was four weeks, and there is only so much one can learn in four weeks. Furthermore, after taking the course, I found a job where I have learned a great deal. Unfortunately, what I learned in my TEFL course and what I teach are very different, and I would like to reach a middle ground.

Due to the fast pace of the courses I teach and the large number of hours I work, I find that much of the creativity that I was beginning to tap into during the TEFL course is being lost in the shuffle. I find myself following the book too much. In order to remedy this, and to learn more, I am looking for some recommendations. I am really open to any recommendations, but am thinking mostly about reading recommendations. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[fluffyhamster]

I guess you're leaning more towards methodology books regarding skills work than anything too theoretical (SLA etc) or grammary. If so, have you tried looking at something like the DELTA reading list? (Not too highbrow, not too basic. The only problem that I could see is that some of the books on such a list might be getting a bit out of date in terms of materials/exact methodologies represented, and/or harder to come by).
http://www.thedistancedelta.com/information/course/book_list.aspx

Actually, you might like to try a search for 'DELTA' and 'fluffyhamster' on the Teacher Discussion forums, for some of my actual comments on those sorts of books:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/search.php

Then there is this thread:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?p=40193#40193

But I mainly post about grammar, lexis, discourse, SLA, and occassionally, about actual linguistics (because I think that methodological ideas and options often takes care of themselves once you are in possession of a few suggestive linguistic facts), so the books I've recommended on quite a few threads over the years (I'm sure you can dig them up if you want to by searching for author 'fluffyhamster' and scanning the resulting thread titles) tend to be a bit drier/less "practical" (but is there anything as practical in the long term as good theory/approach-level stuff?) than is usually the case.