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Archive for the 'teaching' Category

Lexicophiles Top 100 Language Blogs

Posted by Anne on May 14th, 2010

Some very kind reader has nominated the undeserving Island Weekly in the Lexicophiles Top 100 Language Blogs 2010 in the category for Language Teaching. Thank you, bless you, light of my life, and may you live forever, as they say in the best fairy tales.
These friendly annual nominations are very kind pats on the virtual [...]

The challenge of compacts

Posted by Anne on May 1st, 2010

My last two-day compact for PAs didn’t go quite as well as they usually do, leaving me pondering what went wrong. As I’m teaching quite a number of similar ones in the upcoming weeks, I need to pause and think things through in depth, because I want the next ones to go better.
The conditions are [...]

Feed the grammar guru

Posted by Anne on April 10th, 2010

My favorite quote so far at IATEFL: “Do not teach things that are wrong.” That’s Dave Willis. And as he proves in this talk held before a room full of English teachers, it’s easier said than done. We often enough do teach total malarkey, namely as soon as we teach prescriptive grammar rules that don’t [...]

Let down

Posted by Anne on April 9th, 2010

The “professional development” event I was looking forward to has just been cancelled. Such a let down. The trainers needed 15 paying participants. Just 15! MELTA has about 300 members, and non-members were also invited, yet 275 Euros for three days was too much for them. Isn’t that sad?
Why won’t freelance English teachers invest in [...]

Paedagogical tinkering

Posted by Anne on April 8th, 2010

Tessa Woodward used a beautiful phrase in her plenary talk at IATEFL, “paedagogical tinkering“. What a great phrase! I’m a tinkerer myself (and have blogged about tinkering, too.) But what strikes me about this: She put “tinkering” in the context, not of fooling around and trying stuff out, willy-nilly, but of proper professional development, of [...]

The Onion Radio: Rules Grammar Change

Posted by Anne on March 2nd, 2010

Nonsense rules!

Pigeon: Impossible

Posted by Anne on February 22nd, 2010

Pigeon Impossible, the silent animated film by Lucas Martell released on 9 November that took 4 years to make, passed the 1 million views mark on YouTube after less than 2 weeks online. The film is set in the neighborhood of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., where two of my nieces and I [...]