Entries Tagged 'Resources' ↓

I have been looking at different TEFL institutes out there, but lately it seems like some courses have been doing bad things. The TEFL Institute Chicago seems to be one such institute. Unfortunately, it has been getting some negative feedback from both TEFLWatch. It seems like The TEFL Institute might not be a good course to attend according to the information that can be found on The TEFL Institute and TEFLWatch.

I am right now trying to come up with some TEFL activities for kids. I am trying to figure out some games with them to teach them vocabulary. I think I have a a few together so I will post couple of the ideas I have and after I try them out with my students, then I can post the feedback here.

1) Word Bingo. I have made up some bingo cards with pictures on them. I will be calling out the words and the students have to find the picture. The first one to get bingo wins!

2) Tic Tac Phrases. Kids have to guess letters in order to guess a phrase. If their team gets it right, then they get an X or O on the board.

One of the scourges of working in the TEFL industry is the bad schools. They sure make it hard to be a good teacher. These schools put draconian work provisions on teachers. They pay their salary late. They make things tough for teachers. They put stupid educational requirements in place. They are lead by people who are interested in money and not education.

The only way to deal with these type of schools is with a blacklist. TEFLWatch TEFL Blacklist is just one site that deals with all of the BS surrounding these schools. I don’t know if these kind of sites are enough to do justice for teachers, but it’s a start. We need to start highlighting the bad schools and start putting them in a TEFL blacklist on sites like TEFLWatch in order to warn teachers off of bad schools, language institutes and recruiters.

One of the best resources out there on the web for helping you come up with resources to use in your classes is the Open Courseware Consortium. MIT started by putting their course notes and lectures in an attempt to make their information more accessible to teachers around the world. Thanks to the push by MIT, other universities have gotten into the act in order to help people throughout the world.

You can get lecture and class notes on many different courses and subjects. Instead of giving you a list of courses, it’s better just to go and take a look yourself so that you can browse the listings and see what interests you or is useful for your classes. You owe it yourself and your students to take a look.

If you look over on David’s ELT World, he is putting up some awesomely great resources and information for teachers. In fact, his latest article, Methods of Teaching English has a link to a pdf file that examines many of the teaching methods available. He covers such topics as the grammar translation method, The direct method, The audio-lingual method, Communicative language teaching, Language immersion, Minimalist/methodist, Directed practice, Learning by teaching (LdL) and the Silent Way. Lots of good information in it and it’s definitely worth it to check it out.

Having good communication with other teachers is an important thing to have on a day to day basis. One of the best ways to have interaction with fellow teachers when you are teaching English abroad is to utilize teacher forums. There are many teaching forums out there that provide a place for teachers to socialize, talk about work issues and talk about teaching English. They are great.
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When I first started teaching, finding good resources was always a tough thing to find. It seemed like I spent so much time trying to find decent teaching resources. After I found some good resources, I would then have to modify them in order to fit exactly the lesson I wanted to. It was sometimes difficult to do at best.
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