I've moved

Hi all, thanks for dropping by. To make things easier, I've decided to merge some of my blogs, which, including this one, can now be found at ELT World. I've been getting off my backsides and writing recently, so come over to the new URL and leave lots of lovely comments.

Latest ELL News from Arizona, Colorado and Florida

Here's the latest lowdown on what's happening in the World of American TEFL:

Arizona: Language Funding Becomes Law Without Signature

Gov. Janet Napolitano let a bill that allocates an additional $40 million for English instruction become law without her signature Monday, expressing concern that the state still has unfinished business on the matter.

Read the full story…

Colorado: English Language Learners Make Great Strides

Greeley-Evans School District 6 officials last week got some news they hope will increase graduate rates.

Read the full story…

Arizona: Get ELL Out of the Way of Court Intervention

Raner Collins, the federal judge in the litigation over Arizona's educational funding for English-language learners, now faces a moment of truth, reveals the Tuscon Citizen Online.

Read the full story…

Florida: San Pedro Mission Teaches English to Those Who Want to Learn

Before Lariza Abarca began attending the San Pedro Mission’s English as a Second Language program, she had to speak to people through a Spanish translator.

Read the full story…

America: The Ell of Learning English

Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free... we might even take a few of you who aren’t TEFL teachers. Welcome to TEFL, America style:

Florida: Demographic Changes On Horizon For County Schools

A new report unsurprisingly shows that a major increase in the Southeastern states' Hispanic population will force schools to focus more attention on Spanish-speaking students and Hernando County is no exception. In Hernando, the population of students enrolled in English Language Learners — or ELL — has grown considerably since 2005, after Hurricanes Frances, Jeanne and Wilma walloped the southern half of the state.

Read the full story…




Arizona: New law puts pressure on ELL programs

Responding to new legislation, the state is preparing to change the way it educates its English learners this fall. As part of those changes, there will be more pressure placed on schools to successfully move English learners to speaking proficient English — and to do it more quickly. Sounds like trouble if you ask me. Schools measure what they call “reclassification rates,” which show the percentage of those students who become proficient in English each year.

Read the full story…

The 'ell' of learning English

Tennessee: ELL Enrollment Expected to Increase

Each year, Nashville's public school system invests $15 million into the English Language Learners program. With a diverse student body that continues to expand that dollar amount may grow in the future. Throw money at the problem, that’s what I say.

Read the full story…




Massachusetts: No Longer Lost in Translation

None of her fellow students teased Maria Smolina, 13, just because she had to sound out simple test words, or because she confused her pronouns. They didn't think it unusual that she still can't get used to the taste of peanut butter or macaroni and cheese.

Smolina is one of about 200 students attending the Milford school system's redesigned program for newcomers to English. Out of its total enrollment of 4,200 students, Milford has the largest number of English language learner, or ELL, pupils of any district in the Blackstone Valley.

Read the full story…




North Carolina: Program Will Put English-Speaking Students in Spanish-Only Class

Bilingual education is making a splash in McDowell County. Superintendent Ira Trollinger has announced the beginning of a new language immersion program for kindergarteners. Starting in July, some kindergarten classes at Eastfield Elementary will be structured around the Splash program. So now you know.

Read the full story…




Maryland: States Seeking Proper Balance in Use of ELL Test Scores

Now that they have new English-language-proficiency tests to comply with the federal 'No Child Left Behind' Act, state education officials are trying to come up with guidelines on how school districts use those tests to decide when English-language learners no longer need specialized instruction. Better late than never, it would seem. States vary widely in how prescriptive they are in the use of those test scores, but most seem to be taking steps toward standardizing the process.

Read the full story…



Alabama: Some Families of Students with Limited Proficiency in English Leaving the Hoover School System, As the Number of English Language Learners is Down

After years of growth, enrollment in Hoover City Schools' program for students with limited English proficiency has dropped for the first time. School officials say it's an indication that some immigrant families may be moving out of the city in search of jobs or more affordable housing. Either that or they already speak English.

Read the full story…




Pennsylvania: Language Teachers Help Students Learn Skills for Success
 
At the Shenandoah Valley School District, Eileen Marchetti teaches 62 students English as a Second Language in two rooms that used to be the staff lounge. “The number of students changes from year to year, but it’s growing steadily. We’re at a premium for space here,” she said. The program provides specialized instruction to non-English speaking students in pre-K through 12th grade in reading, writing, speaking and understanding English. Since Marchetti started the program in 2002 with 26 students, the district’s ESL staff has expanded. Two full-time certified ESL assistant teachers now work with Marchetti, who is the program’s full-time coordinator.

Read the full story…



Florida: English on Wheels Program Now Stationary at Immokalee Library

Sitting around three tables, nine women come together to learn English at the Immokalee Public Library. Much like all the women, Lucy Gutierrez and Ana Sierra, both 30 and natives of Mexico, know the importance of understanding and speaking English now that they live in the United States. Today, the Immokalee mothers are attending an English for speakers of another language class so they can communicate with others at local businesses, their children’s doctor and also help their children with homework once they start school.

Read the full story…

ELT World Journal: Issue 3

Here are highlights of what you'll find in the new, action packed edition of Horizons:

What Would Motivate you to Take a New Job?

What do we want from our jobs? There must surely be a reason for us to move on to bigger and better things at one time or another. So, what are our motivations? What are those bigger and better things? Why do we make the decision to up and move to a new school? The poll that ran on the blog and the forum during December shed some light on to why we move from one job to the next… read on

Interview: Teacher Reflections, Global Connections

Last month on the ELT World Blog I highlighted the excellent Teaching without Borders blog: Teacher Reflections, Global Connections, explaining what a great idea I thought it was to reflect on the different teaching experiences of the different countries of the contributors. I’m delighted that Jennifer Uhler and Jeff Mattison have taken the time and considerable effort to tell Horizons about their blog… read on

Teaching Collocations

Whilst learners often focus on the acquisition of new grammatical structures as a guideline to their progress in learning English, the same cannot always be said of an English learner’s regard for the importance of progressive vocabulary acquisition. Whilst it is true that language structures form the basic skeleton of a language , vocabulary provides the flesh to these bones. Without words, what do we have?… read on

Was your Initial Training Course Worth it?

The four-week TEFL course, a starting point for so many of us in our careers as English teachers. But is it really worth it? What do we really gain from these short, intensive courses that can’t possibly hope to adequately prepare us for a career in teaching? A great deal, it would seem, according to the poll that ran on the blog and the forum… read on

The EnglishUK Teachers Conference

Anyone who’s ever attended a TEFL conference will tell you it can be something of a mixed experience in terms of what you gain from it. It’s not unlike gold mining: you have to sift through a lot of stuff to get to anything even remotely of use to you. Presenting at a conference is, on the other hand, a whole different experience. Anyone thinking of venturing into the conference circuit would be well advised to read the following article… read on

Academicus Electronicus

For this edition of the journal, I offer you, my dear friends, two websites dedicated to the development of TEFL professionals… read on

Teaching English in New Zealand

The situation regarding English language teaching in New Zealand is pretty similar to Australia and not so different from the UK in many respects. As in those countries, there is a private language school sector in addition to state provision through various ESOL programmes… read on

My Favourite Waste of Time

At a certain point, we all get fed up with certain aspects of living in another country. The little things suddenly become big problems in your life. Some of these things, however, bug everyone, and not just us poor expat teachers. Facebook, for all its sins, seems to be becoming a way in which we are able to find kindred sufferers, as M. le Prof d’Anglais explains… read on

Politically Correct Revisited

Last issue’s article on political correctness was well received by many of you, who were able to relate to the ideas being explored. Luckily for Horizons, Istanbul’s Stranger has decided to follow up on the previous article, exploring further the linguistic barriers to the cross-culturalization of the notion of political correctness… read on

The Ideal English Teacher through the Eyes of ELT Trainees

Do you remember what you thought about teachers when you started out as a trainee? How much have your perceptions changed? This article explores the way that trainee teachers in Argentina perceive those already in the profession… read on

Interview: The Latin America Job list and TEFL Tips

Sharon de Hinojosa, whom members of the ELT World forums know better as Naturegirl321, has been kind enough to answer a few of my questions about her internet projects. After years of gathering information about teaching on the South American continent, she has decided to make this knowledge available to others via her excellent websites… read on

Language lessons

California: It's been more than a decade since Kathy Zhao moved to the U.S., but most of the time, it's like she never left China. That's one of the reasons Zhao decided to visit the free weekly English Conversational Skills class offered by volunteers from the Arcadia branch of the American Association of University Women at the Arcadia Public Library.

Read the full Pasadena Star article.

Teaching without Borders

Last month I highlighted the excellent Teaching without Borders blog: from the people who run the Teacher Reflections, Global Connections blog, explaining what a great idea I thought it was to reflect on the different teaching experiences of the different countries of the contributors. I’m delighted that Jennifer Uhler and Jeff Mattison have taken the time and considerable effort to talk to me about what they want to achieve from their blog.

1) How did you come up with the idea for your site?

Jenn: As teachers who enjoy our jobs but also encounter problems, we thought it would be a positive experience to share these reflections with a wider audience. I think we also wanted to encourage ourselves to reflect critically on our own teaching and being held accountable to a peer audience really helps me to do something I ordinarily don't take time to do in a formal way.

Jeff: After the TESOL conference in Seattle last year, I thought about how I could start some casual research as I began a new teaching experience in California public schools. While teaching in Japan, I'd kept a daily journal reflecting on my experience in the classroom. Jenn and I have also kept personal blogs, Wanderings and Brave New Word. I figured that we could combine the practice of reflective teaching with the technology of blogging. The last element, collaboration, came from my communications with Jenn, Hisako, and Tomoko since leaving graduate school. We'd kept in touch, mentioning issues that had come up with our teaching. So we decided to weld these three things into a new form of journaling: the collaborative on-line reflective journal. The result has been a synergy of TEFL topics discussed and applied to various contexts.

We've posted on popular topics such as classroom management and American culture , to the obscure mentioning of learned helplessness and how to tell secrets.

2) What are the major differences you notice in your teaching contexts?

Jenn: The most obvious differences are not the cultural ones you might expect. Rather, I think the biggest differences are in our student audiences and institutions. I sometimes feel like, in my case, teaching English to professors in a post-Soviet context, could not be more different than battling the challenges of teaching ESL in a public California school. On the other hand, perhaps because of these different locations, I think we are able to objectively respond to each other's posts with fresh ideas and new insights. I benefit from Jeff's questions and often find myself finding a way to link the same issue to my own classroom teaching.

Jeff: We knew from the start that our different teaching contexts would be one of the most interesting features of the blog. With Jenn as a "native" speaker teaching EFL, Hisako and Tomoko as "non-native" speakers teaching EFL and myself as a "native" speaker teaching ESL, we each have a different interface of teacher and student identities. I've also noticed that these different contexts have given fresh perspectives in comments. Jenn likes to call my teaching environment, a public school comprised mostly of first-generation Hispanic-Americans, as the "teaching in the trenches on the front lines". There are some days where I'd love to be in the "ivory tower" of higher education, but I know there are challenges where ever one teaches. I think because we're all interested in commenting and encouraging each other, the seeming incongruity of our different contexts doesn't matter. It’s about communicating for professional growth.

3) What are your various backgrounds in teaching?

Jenn: I have taught overseas and in the U.S. for about the last ten years. My start was a bit surreptitious as a TEFL volunteer in the Peace Corps in a small village where I taught the whole town. Since then, I have taught > in an elementary school in Mexico, college and graduate programs in California, teacher training programs in Montana, Austria, and Estonia, university in Romania, and my current position as an English Language Fellow in Estonia. Jeff and I have in common a curious spirit and enthusiasm for teaching, but we did our MATESOL degrees together about three years ago at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Jeff: I started teaching watersports at Camp Leelanau during my college years. I also was a Peace Corps volunteer in Benin and Jamaica, but I taught environmental education in these settings. It was my experience in Jamaica, with its colorful creole language, that interested me in linguistics and language teaching. Since attending the Monterey Institute, I've taught English at Concordia Language Villages in northern Minnesota, a private Christian boys' junior high school in Japan, adult school ESL in urban Long Beach, and now at the middle school level in rural Salinas.

4) What are your other favorite teaching sites?

Jenn: I teach mostly academic skills. My hands-down favorite sites are the Purdue OWL site and (just for fun) an Etymology site (etymonline.com).

Jeff: For materials, I have borrowed so much from Boggles World (now Lanternfish). Because classroom management is one of my biggest themes this year, I've spent a lot of time with Harry Wong's articles on teachers.net. For random introductions to other ESL websites and blogs, I follow the ESLoop.

5) What are the main challenges facing TEFL teachers today?

Jenn: We fight so much for legitimacy as a profession. You can see it in professional venues, publications, materials, and conferences. We push ourselves really hard to define and redefine methods; to question our place as language teachers and cultural propagators; and to show that we have meaning to larger and more powerful aspects of our institutions. We really care about our students and think what we do is important, but language centers and language teaching are often marginalized -- through low salaries, inequities in hiring practice, location and budgets. And yet, we find ourselves not only teaching overloads, but also writing manuals, translating, producing materials, meeting with students, attending conferences on our own dime, requalifying ourselves, often without the extra compensation or incentives that other professionals might demand. The biggest challenges are hard to balance: How do we fight for recognition and prove ourselves without pushing the margins of our professional lives too far?

Jeff: Jenn really has her finger on the pulse of many professional issues for TEFL teachers. In the USA, I would add that ESL teachers are advocates for their students' rights as immigrants. Festooned with a myth of monolingualism, Americans think that assimilation is the "method" for acquiring English the fastest. Large immigrant population states such as California, Arizona, and Massachusetts have passed laws restricting how English can be taught. TESL teachers here are challenged with informing mainstream teachers, politicians, and everyday citizens of the complexity in language learning.

6) What are your most positive teaching experiences?

Jenn: This is a hard question to answer because I find it hard to compare different experiences. One highlight that sticks out is my teaching at the University of Montana two summers ago with Korean English teachers. It was positive because the students were so curious and self-motivated and the staff was pleasant to collaborate with (not to mention the gorgeous environs in Missoula!)


Jeff: Teaching at Kwansei Gakuin Junior High School in Nishinomiya, Japan has been my most positive teaching experience. I taught with such supportive colleagues and respectful students, it was a great way to launch my TEFL career.

7) What are your future plans for your blog/website?

Jenn: We are planning a presentation at the IATEFL conference in Exeter this April in which we comb through our blog to datamine patterns in our responses and entries. I think we both agree that it has been a good experience, and we hope to continue blogging (until we run out of words!). It would be nice to gather more community or to find other writers to comment and post in the future.

Jeff: We also are trying to "build the conversation" by expanding our audience and exposure on the blogosphere. Writing a thoughtful, helpful blog entry just for two or three people to read is like writing a novel just for the editor. Blogs are meant to be shared, and achieving that broad sharing requires a different skill set than teaching or writing. So Jenn and I are learning how to reach out to others. Thanks to you David, we're taking a step in that direction!



Subscribe to David's English Teaching World by Email

This interview will also appear in the forthcoming issue of the journal.

Teacher Reflections, Global Connections

I've recently received some very nice feedback on David’s English Teaching World from the people who run the Teacher Reflections, Global Connections blog and wanted to do more than just reciprocate because their blog is excellent.

The blog is the work of three language teachers in Japan, Estonia, and the USA, reflecting on their classrooms through this 'interactive online journal'. I really like the innovative idea of constantly contrasting the experiences of teaching in these three very different loactions.

Recent posts have covered the following topics:

The drudgery of giving feedback

In search of collegiality

Who’s got my back?


I really enjoy the contrasting writing styles as much as the evident differences in teaching locations of the authors. A highly recommended blog even for those not interested teaching in one of these locations.