An imaginary anthology

In the past few years, there has been a steady increase in the number of ELT related blogs. With more and more people blogging about English language teaching, it’s hard to keep up with all the excellent writing that comes up.

Over the past few weeks, I started imagining an anthology of my favorite blog posts. Not necessarily a print version, but maybe a webpage. My favorite reads all in one place, no need to do extensive searches to find them.

Just a few days ago, I read Jason Renshaw’s post about hidden gems, and decided this would be a good time to blog on this topic.

Here I’d like to suggest a few categories and a few examples of blogposts that might exist in each one.

The first category would be Practical Tips. The posts in this section would give some simple suggestions and advice for teachers, covering everything from time management to classroom management.

T is for Time (Scott Thornbury's An A-Z of ELT)

Ten ways to motivate the unmotivated (Ken Wilson's Blog)

5 problems and 5 solutions (Anita Kwiatkowska's l_miss bossy's ELT Playground)

The second category would be Humor. This section would contain posts that made me laugh, and reminded me not to take myself too seriously.

Oh, those halcyon days when... (Alex Case's TEFLtastic)

Six technological inventions teachers REALLY want to see (Lindsay Clandfield's Six Things)

Unraveling English Language Teaching acronyms (Jason Renshaw's English Raven)

The third section would be Reflections. This section would include all the blogposts that caused me to think about my teaching in a new way.

Being Critical about the Role of the Teacher: Allowing Students to Disagree (Sara Hannam's Critical Mass ELT)

Adrian Tennant’s Six Acts of Sheep in ELT(Guest post on Six Things blog)

Truthtelling and the global EFL teacher (Karenne Sylvester's Kalinago English)

This list is fairly brief, as I must admit I don’t spend nearly enough time reading all the magnificent blogs out there.

I’d like to hear from you.

Which blogposts do you think belong here? And, which categories do you think should be mandatory for such an anthology?

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.