two ads for Provoking Thought

In order to promote my new book, PROVOKING THOUGHT, I've put together a couple of short ads to get the word out. Here they are:

Provoking Thought ad 1

Provoking Thought ad 2

(Thanks to www.grapheine.com/bombaytv and www.grapheine.com/classiktv for their assistance with the two ads!)

Creativity in ELT

Last night, I discovered this wonderful article on creativity and teaching:

The art of being creative

written by Marisa Constantinides. A well-written piece on how we can develop into more creative teachers. If you are interested in teacher training, you might also want to read her blog post over at Kalinago English:

How to Become an ELT Teacher Educator

Positive Psychology and ELT

I found a link to the following site on ELT News:

ELT and the Science of Happiness

which contains some interesting reading and activities. It's the creation of Marc Helgesen. I'm always looking for activities that involve an element of psychology, so I think this will be worth trying out in some of my classes.

Book preview

Humanising Language Teaching webzine has just published a book preview of my new book, Provoking Thought. It contains a brief description of the book, along with 6 activities. Take a look:

http://www.hltmag.co.uk/oct09/teach.htm

a couple of interesting things

I haven't added much to this blog lately, so I thought I'd post a couple of links that caught my eye.

The first is about a talk given by Ben Goldstein in April 2009 on the topic of "Breaking Taboos":

http://www.bengoldstein.es/blog/2009/04/breaking-taboos/

I'm sorry I missed the talk, but the handout and powerpoint are quite informative.

I also enjoyed this interview with Karenne Sylvester on TEFL Tradesman blog (Sandy McManus) :

http://tefltradesman.blogspot.com/2009/08/karenne-kalinago-answers-six-questions.html

I especially enjoyed her eloquent answer to question #6, What's wrong with the TEFL industry?

I'm now back in Taiwan, finishing up work on my second book. More on this subject next month.

More videos

I've discovered some new videos teachers out there might want to take a look at.

Here's Lindsay Clandfield talking about his books and his career:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlrH0o0bGpk

and this clip features Scott Thornbury and Luke Meddings describing their new book, Teaching Unplugged:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyMSeuvShJo

Gavin Dudeney and Nicky Hockly, the arch-enemies of hardline Dogme teachers the world over, explain here why technology is not SO evil:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsaROgjoQQI

Duncan Foord can be seen here talking about his book, The Developing Teacher:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo2jlBisMDo

Finally, here's Mario Rinvolucri letting us know about the future of English language teaching:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kC13wAsCHLk

Creativity in the News

According to a recent article, there is a connection between living abroad and creativity.


http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13643981



This article was published in the Economist and cites research from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.