By Tamara Jones
EAL Instructor, British School of Brussels
jonestamara@hotmail.com

Boot Camp

I am not particularly athletic, but in order to counter my Belgian chocolate and french fry addictions, I have found that I need to exercise a whole lot. So, I recently signed up for a ‘boot camp’ type of class with several other expat women here in Brussels. On the first day, the instructor, a mild looking guy named Dan, had us doing hundreds (oh, I wish I were exaggerating) of lunges and these jumping jack/squat combinations that left my legs trembling. It was brutal. The next day and for days afterwards, my legs were so sore that climbing the stairs had me making little gasping noises and getting off the sofa involved my husband’s help.

So, as you might imagine, when I woke up on the morning of the second of these torture sessions, I was filled with more than a little dread. This time Dan had us alternating sprints up and down a long, cruel hill with planks and other contortions designed to do something called ‘engage the core’. About 2/3 of the way into the lesson, when Dan shouted that we needed to race up and down this hill yet again, I wanted to cry. I felt like I couldn’t face that hill again. As I lined up with the other ladies, I felt tired and sore and a bit sick. When Dan shouted, “Go!” I just wanted to go home. But, I ran. We all did. And, when we got to the bottom of the hill and Dan cheerfully told us that we would have a moment to rest and then run it again, I rested and ran again.

How does Dan do it?

As I was laboring up the hill, I couldn’t help but wonder at the fact that this young, kind, friendly guy was getting a bunch of women to run up and down a hill as fast as we could again and again. It was painful and awful, but we were doing it. How? How was he managing to motivate us to do this? Well, obviously there was a huge amount of self-motivation at play. We paid for the class and we were all there to counteract our own personal Belgian chocolate and french fry addictions. But, there was more than that. Dan did a couple of essential things to get us running and doing all those difficult core exercises that I think all good teachers do to motivate their students.

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By David Barker
Author and Publisher of Materials for Japanese Learners of English
Back to Basics Blog for Teachers

Have you ever sat through a really terrible presentation? I’m guessing that you have, and probably more than once! If you Google the phrase “Death by Powerpoint,” you will find that there is a whole mass of articles and videos about this on the Internet. Last week, I did a presentation at the JALT national conference in Hamamatsu, Japan that was aimed at raising awareness of the need to prepare properly for conference presentations. The title of the presentation was “How Not to Give a Presentation,” and I tried to cram as many common presentation mistakes as I could think of into 12 minutes. I have uploaded the video onto my own blog, and I wrote a very long article to go with it listing the things that bug me most.

The presentation was very well received, with the audience taking it in the spirit in which it was intended and joining in the fun. Many of them came up to me later that evening and said, “I watched your presentation at 12, and then I watched it again at 1, at 2, and then at 3!” It seems that we still have a long way to go in raising the standards of presentations at teaching conferences. Anyway, if you are interested, please take a look a the video. (Please note that it makes much more sense if you read the article first.) http://www.btbpress.com/category/btb-blog-for-teachers/

By Tamara Jones
EAL Instructor, British School of Brussels
jonestamara@hotmail.com

My husband, a wonderful man but not an English teacher, thinks that teaching private conversation lessons must be a breeze. In his mind, it’s just basically making conversation for an hour. He knows that I am a chatty person by nature, so how hard can that be?

Well, it IS hard! It IS really, really hard! Even on a good day when the teacher is feeling great and the student has eaten and slept well and they have all sorts of common interests, it can be one of the most demanding hours in the week of an English teacher. And that hour can seem like forever, as the teacher juggles the dual burdens of keeping the conversation flowing and focusing on accuracy at the same time. Sure, I can chat with just about anyone at a party, but when someone pays me for my time and expertise, I feel as though I need to step it up a notch.

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By Richard Firsten
Retired ESOL Teacher, Teacher-Trainer, Columnist

Now that I’m retired from teaching ESOL, I have the luxury to sit back and observe things at my leisure. Having been in the field of ESOL for the better part of four decades, one thing I like to observe and muse about is how many items in English are now accepted or may one day be accepted as standard language that weren’t “back in the day,” as they now say. I’d like to share some of my observations with you and ruminate a bit about a few of them. I’m going to have some fun pointing out why some items don’t seem logical and why others seem totally unnecessary to me. But the long and short of it is that these items are commonly used by native speakers every single day, and that’s what I think needs discussing.

Almost all the examples I’ll be giving come directly from educated native speakers, which is what I find most interesting, that educated speakers are saying what they’re saying. It used to be that many of these utterances were considered uneducated or nonstandard, even substandard – but oh, how times have changed!

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By David Barker
Author and Publisher of Materials for Japanese Learners of English
Back to Basics Blog for Teachers

When I did my initial teaching course way back in 1992, our trainers made it clear that standing at the front of the class and explaining things to students was simply not the done thing. Good teachers, we were told, don’t explain things; good teachers have special techniques for “eliciting” or “facilitating discovery” of the points they want to get across.

I suspect that this was a reaction to the excessively teacher-centered methods that had gone before, and to be fair, my trainers did have a point. After all, who wants to sit in a classroom and be “talked at” day after day? As with so many things in our profession, however, this new awareness did not result in a logical “Perhaps we should do less one-way explaining” or “Perhaps we should combine explaining with other methods of instruction,” but rather the more reactionary “Right! Nobody is to explain anything anymore!”

This way of thinking was particularly noticeable in the area of vocabulary instruction. In the 1990s, no self-respecting teacher would offer students a simple translation of a new word. Well, not in an observed lesson, anyway! I remember being told that there was no need to translate words because a skilled teacher should be able to convey the meaning of any vocabulary item through other methods, such as the use of gestures or mime. I still hear this claim a lot even now: I can explain any word without using the students’ language!

Again, an argument can be made in favor of this approach, but I think it misses an extremely important point that is often overlooked in language teaching: the question we should be asking ourselves is not “Is it possible for me to do XYZ?” but rather “Is XYZ the most productive way of using the very limited time available?” It is all very well contorting yourself to demonstrate the meaning of a word like “accelerate” through exaggerated mime, but is that really the best use of the teacher’s and the students’ time?

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