Tag Archives: TEFL quotes

Welcome to England

Posted on 14/11/2010 by alexcase

“I did not fully understand the dread term ‘terminal illness’ until I saw Heathrow for myself” Dennis Potter

Posted in TEFL | Tagged | 1 Comment

Do no harm? Part Two

Posted on 16/10/2010 by alexcase

“In my second-year French class, I had to keep a journal. I could only say stupid things: ‘I got up at six. I ate breakfast. It’s cold. I’m tired.’ I was reduced to making these idiotic statements because I didn’t … Continue reading →

Posted in TEFL | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Even celebrities hate TEFLers

Posted on 12/08/2010 by alexcase

“The year before was a bloody disaster – I was rambling around the streets of Los Angeles, drinking way too many frappucinos and wondering what the hell I was doing here. I had no work and my mother was threatening … Continue reading →

Posted in Teaching English in Spain, TEFL certificate | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Goddess English

Posted on 19/05/2010 by alexcase

‘A FORTNIGHT ago, in a poor village in Uttar Pradesh, in northern India, work began on a temple dedicated to Goddess English. Standing on a wooden desk was the idol of English — a bronze figure in robes, wearing a … Continue reading →

Posted in Teaching English in India | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Something chewy from Jeremy Harmer

Posted on 30/03/2010 by alexcase

“…before you get too starry-eyed about the functional-notional approach… it would be good to remember Chris Brumfit’s worry that teaching formulaic ‘doing-things-with-language’ was a way of trying to force students to say things that WE wanted them to say, rather … Continue reading →

Posted in Functional language, TEFL, TEFL heroes- Jeremy Harmer, TEFL heroes- Scott Thornbury | Tagged | 5 Comments

Losing your students in the blink of an eye

Posted on 16/03/2010 by alexcase

“The psychologist Nalini Ambady once gave students three ten-second videotapes of a teacher- with the sound turned off- and found that they had no difficulty at all coming up with a rating of the teacher’s effectiveness. Then Ambady cut the … Continue reading →

Posted in TEFL | Tagged | 7 Comments

Michael J Wallace on science, theory and practice

Posted on 06/02/2010 by alexcase

All from Training Foreign Language Teachers, most of which seems to be viewable on Google Books here. “Atkins points out that craftsmen in metallurgy have been successfully making metals for hundreds of years, with apprentices learning from masters. However, the … Continue reading →

Posted in Linguistics, applied linguistics and SLA, Teacher training, Teaching methods and methodologies | Tagged | 1 Comment

From the latest book on technology in education

Posted on 02/12/2009 by alexcase

“we live in the Computer Age, and you need to get with the program. You are standing in the airport terminal of life, and the jet plane of teaching technology is about to take off. You must make a choice: … Continue reading →

Posted in Technology | Tagged , | 3 Comments

The CLT robot

Posted on 08/11/2009 by alexcase

“I suppose that in the not too distant future this sort of hopping from group to group and ‘listening in’ can be taken over by some language-surveillance computer or robot. This device would hover above the participants, the symbolic meaning … Continue reading →

Posted in links, Pairwork and groupwork | Tagged , | Leave a comment

ELTJ in defence of textbooks Part One

Posted on 23/10/2009 by alexcase

There’s been a lot of online chatter on the topic of textbooks recently, all of which are neatly linked to by a recent Turklish TEFL blog post. As if to prove that the online world is just a faster and … Continue reading →

Posted in ELT publishing, TEFL, textbooks | Tagged | 4 Comments