Teacher Discussion Forums

I remember a European survey from 1993 which showed how pupils who'd learnt English almost without exception wanted to go to an English-speaking country. I'm not aware of any other survey since, though I have conducted my own here in China, informally. I've asked literally hundreds of persons random...

The main academic champion of this kind of thing is a woman named Skuttnab-Kangas, I think. Even though she and others term English and Chinese (for example) "killer languages" no one has seriously tried to advocate not teaching English all over the place as far as I know. Is that what you wish to ...

It's a much discussed issue in academia. However, although there is much hand wringing, of course there are few practical solutions. Frankly, if you are an ESL teacher you are a stormtrooper for the "business and progress comes first" army, and that is the end of it. Whether it concerns first langu...

could you give me an example? I've never heard of a language abroad being threatened into extinction because of the spread of English... certainly native american languages, but I don't see how TEFL relates to that.. in situations like immigrant communities or other small language pockets, it is na...

A very valid topic that any TEFL teacher worthy of the title is addressing. A few colleagues and I (some of us foreign, some domestic) are currently working on a project to create what one might term an 'EFL and language awareness' course, intended to teach EFL and solutions to the language problem ...

http://dotsub.com/films/thelanguage/index.php A student of mine presented it to me. I really liked the video, very informative. But I'm not sure if it would be wise to make a lesson out of it and, if so, how. Some of my students are ini fact interested in language issues (they're all learning at lea...

Those who are happy with the nun who simply teaches English as if it were Algebra, well, it’s a pity, but we don’t seem to be able to stop wars either. peace, revel. But it's still our job as teachers to teach them to learnpeace and actively engage in the prevention of war. We can set an example, a...

I think that what a lot of people don't realise is that the grammarians and dictionary writers don't invent the rules of the language like politicians passing laws, but instead try to work out what's going on by looking at how language is used. For example, researchers for the OED spend a lot of ti...

Greetings, I am fairly new at teaching ESL. I just started teaching in a grade 4 classroom with one ESL student. He has been in the country for a few months but is picking up English very slowly. I would like to work with him while the rest of my class goes to French but I am told I cannot do this....

Interesting thread.

As long as there is no authoritative Academy to establish an official standard, we are left with various standards floating around. Take your pick.

Oh, and I just want to clarify that I'm indifferent as to whether English is taught as a national or ethnic language on the one hand, or a global one on the other. I'm just saying that, either way, objectives of the government, teachers and textbooks and other teaching materials ought to be consiste...

The usual language content aside, what do you think of the content of many textbooks for compulsory education? and I stress compulsory education. Obviouly other courses might be more specialized for various specific purposes, or in some countries students might be free to choose their second languag...

To the OP, interesting question.


No. At least not at first, anyway. But I suppose I would have learnt through practice eventually.

I'll eat my last words. Now that i think about it, the fact that I'm a native bilingual able to speak a third language fluently, get by in a fourth, and read a bit of two others , plus have a minority religion puts me in a different category even if I'm a native speaker of English. After all, most n...

Yes, yes, all this is obvious, but we are not concerned with minority contexts in ESL/EFL, are we? We speak in general terms, from grammar to collocation, from familiar to unfamiliar language, from appropriate to inappropriate use and on. Intersting. You might be right on this, I don't know for sur...