Surprising as it may seem, schools are struggling to cope with an influx of students from abroad, with many teachers facing classes in which a third of pupils do not speak English as their first language, teachers’ representatives told the Times Online. The number of pupils who did not have English as their mother tongue had risen by 66,000 in a year, the conference of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers was told.

Read the full story…

Switzerland: English seen as “most useful” foreign language

Not just British tourists, also a majority of, er, Swiss reckon that English is the most useful foreign language in the country, although it is not Switzerland’s “lingua franca” as commonly believed.

Read the full story…

United Kingdom: Not Enough Cash to Teach English

Whoooaaaa… you misread, the headline doesn’t in fact read not enough cash to teachers of English. Headteachers have said the £2-million spent on teaching English to immigrant children in North Lincolnshire is inadequate, according to the ever influential This is Scunthorpe website. Schools say they have less to spend, even though the number of students whose first language is not English has risen.

Read the full story…

Estonia fears English too dominant in its schools

Education authorities in Estonia Thursday warned that the hands-down dominance of English in its schools is depriving the Baltic state of the language specialists it will need in the future.

Read the full story…

Turkey: English Time Celebrates Its 10th Year

Scourge of English teachers throughout Istanbul, the English Time language school celebrated its 10th anniversary recently with a reception held at Istanbul’s Divan Kuruçesme. Speaking at the reception English Time founder Fethi Şimşek stated that when they established English Time 10 years ago their concern was to raise the quality level of English education in Turkey (no, really, that’s what he said). He said they have been achieving this aim without making any concessions since 1998.

Read the full story…

United Kingdom: £10m Bill to Teach Migrants English

Town halls in Greater Manchester are spending more than £10m a year teaching immigrants to speak English, the Manchester Evening News declares. The Department for Schools says a growing amount of taxpayers’ money is being spent on teaching English as a second language. Your point?

Read the full story …

Scotland: International Rescue for City School Pupils

Language specialists (and not the Thunderbirds) are helping non-native speakers improve English as different cultures get along: excited chatter fills the room as the pupils work on their science project. What isn’t immediately obvious is how many youngsters discussing a recent visit to a butterfly farm are not fluent in English. They are all reading the same books, but alongside some sits a specialist teacher – armed with flashcards picturing insects and their name in English – ready to prompt when necessary.

Read the full story …

United Kingdom: The Primary School Where Every Child Learns to Speak 40 Languages

Welcome to Newbury Park Primary School in Redbridge, north-east London, where its 850 pupils will have learnt phrases in 40 languages by the time they transfer to secondary school, notes the Independent. The school has adopted a policy of teaching each language spoken by the 40 ethnic groups among its pupils.

Read the full story …

Iceland: Bilingualism: Why Not?

Last week it was reported that the fabulously named Bifröst University in west Iceland would become the first university in the country to offer a Bachelor’s degree in business taught exclusively in English. While there is already a range of courses offered in English at several of Iceland’s universities, Bifröst says that by offering the degree in English, it is responding to the needs of students planning to work in the international arena.

Read the full story …

Russia: Language Learning Popular as Ever

In a statement that may well bemuse anyone who’s ever taught there, the St. Petersburg Times reports that the thirst for learning English and other foreign languages continues as Russians travel more and seek international business partners.

Read the full story …

Stick poking remains a national pastime in Russia

Belgium: Language director defends EU’s costly translations

A high official in the European Commission’s translation branch has said that despite discussions and fears in recent years about mushrooming costs for translations and interpretations in the EU, the principle of granting each citizen the right to communicate with Brussels in their own language should not be altered, no matter the number of member states in the future. Mmmm… there be money in that there Brussels.

Read the full story …

Ukraine: All in English

When foreigners visited Kyiv some ten years ago, language was the main problem in adapting to the local environment. The situation is now somewhat different, proclaims the Kyiv Post. Although not everyone can freely chat with you in English, the majority of citizens can understand you and will try to help you in any way possible. Apparently.

Read the full story …

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United Kingdom: The Struggle to Cope When Children Do Not Speak Any English

Surprising as it may seem, schools are struggling to cope with an influx of students from abroad, with many teachers facing classes in which a third of pupils do not speak English as their first language, teachers’ representatives told the Times Online. The number of pupils who did not have English as their mother tongue had risen by 66,000 in a year, the conference of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers was told.

Read the full story…

Switzerland: English seen as “most useful” foreign language

Not just British tourists, also a majority of, er, Swiss reckon that English is the most useful foreign language in the country, although it is not Switzerland’s “lingua franca” as commonly believed.

Read the full story…

United Kingdom: Not Enough Cash to Teach English

Whoooaaaa… you misread, the headline doesn’t in fact read not enough cash to teachers of English. Headteachers have said the £2-million spent on teaching English to immigrant children in North Lincolnshire is inadequate, according to the ever influential This is Scunthorpe website. Schools say they have less to spend, even though the number of students whose first language is not English has risen.

Read the full story…

Estonia fears English too dominant in its schools

Education authorities in Estonia Thursday warned that the hands-down dominance of English in its schools is depriving the Baltic state of the language specialists it will need in the future.

Read the full story…

Turkey: English Time Celebrates Its 10th Year

Scourge of English teachers throughout Istanbul, the English Time language school celebrated its 10th anniversary recently with a reception held at Istanbul’s Divan Kuruçesme. Speaking at the reception English Time founder Fethi Şimşek stated that when they established English Time 10 years ago their concern was to raise the quality level of English education in Turkey (no, really, that’s what he said). He said they have been achieving this aim without making any concessions since 1998.

Read the full story…

United Kingdom: £10m Bill to Teach Migrants English

Town halls in Greater Manchester are spending more than £10m a year teaching immigrants to speak English, the Manchester Evening News declares. The Department for Schools says a growing amount of taxpayers’ money is being spent on teaching English as a second language. Your point?

Read the full story …

Scotland: International Rescue for City School Pupils

Language specialists (and not the Thunderbirds) are helping non-native speakers improve English as different cultures get along: excited chatter fills the room as the pupils work on their science project. What isn’t immediately obvious is how many youngsters discussing a recent visit to a butterfly farm are not fluent in English. They are all reading the same books, but alongside some sits a specialist teacher – armed with flashcards picturing insects and their name in English – ready to prompt when necessary.

Read the full story …

United Kingdom: The Primary School Where Every Child Learns to Speak 40 Languages

Welcome to Newbury Park Primary School in Redbridge, north-east London, where its 850 pupils will have learnt phrases in 40 languages by the time they transfer to secondary school, notes the Independent. The school has adopted a policy of teaching each language spoken by the 40 ethnic groups among its pupils.

Read the full story …

Iceland: Bilingualism: Why Not?

Last week it was reported that the fabulously named Bifröst University in west Iceland would become the first university in the country to offer a Bachelor’s degree in business taught exclusively in English. While there is already a range of courses offered in English at several of Iceland’s universities, Bifröst says that by offering the degree in English, it is responding to the needs of students planning to work in the international arena.

Read the full story …

Russia: Language Learning Popular as Ever

In a statement that may well bemuse anyone who’s ever taught there, the St. Petersburg Times reports that the thirst for learning English and other foreign languages continues as Russians travel more and seek international business partners.

Read the full story …

Stick poking remains a national pastime in Russia

Belgium: Language director defends EU’s costly translations

A high official in the European Commission’s translation branch has said that despite discussions and fears in recent years about mushrooming costs for translations and interpretations in the EU, the principle of granting each citizen the right to communicate with Brussels in their own language should not be altered, no matter the number of member states in the future. Mmmm… there be money in that there Brussels.

Read the full story …

Ukraine: All in English

When foreigners visited Kyiv some ten years ago, language was the main problem in adapting to the local environment. The situation is now somewhat different, proclaims the Kyiv Post. Although not everyone can freely chat with you in English, the majority of citizens can understand you and will try to help you in any way possible. Apparently.

Read the full story …

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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.

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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.

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