Rose Senior

Rose Senior is the author of many excellent articles on English teaching, as well as a brilliant book, The Experience of Language Teaching (Cambridge University Press).

I recently invited her to write the introduction to my latest book, The ELT Daily Journal. You can read the introduction on her website, along with some discussion questions:

Transitioning smoothly from novice to professional

If you are not familiar with Dr. Senior's work, I highly recommend you find a copy of her book. You can also read her monthly columns for English Teaching Professional at the ETP website:

English Teaching Professional

The ELT Daily Journal - in print now!

My third book, The ELT Daily Journal, was published in late April. It's now on sale at createspace.com and amazon.com, as well as several other online bookstores.

A little about this book: it's a daily journal or diary for new teachers. Each page of the journal section contains a teaching tip or teaching activity. Although it's intended for people just starting out teaching ESL or EFL, it's also suitable for more experienced teachers.

I spent a couple of years putting the material together for this book. I contacted several well-respected authors in ELT (Scott Thornbury, Andrew Wright, Rose Senior, just to mention a few names) to contribute tips to the book, and their contributions made the book even better.

Anyway, I'm delighted the book is finally in print. Now I'm working on getting some promotion for the book.

You can read more about the book here:

The ELT Daily Journal - CreateSpace page

and see a few sample pages here: The ELT Daily Journal - Amazon page

Several new articles on EIT

I've published a few more articles on the English in Taiwan website. Take a look here:

Starting a New Class Part 3: Student Expectations

Warmers and Lead-Ins

Break Time

Ending Lessons

In the next few weeks, I'll be providing some information on my latest book, The ELT Daily Journal: Learning to Teach ESL/EFL.

New Articles on the English in Taiwan website

Recently, I've had some practical articles about teaching English published on the English in Taiwan website. I'm hoping to post an article or two every month.

You can see the first two articles below:

Starting a new class - Part One: Learning Names

and

Starting a new class - Part Two: Learning About Each Other

New book in 2013

Whew, I haven't blogged in a long time. I thought I'd return to the blogging format briefly to announce my new book, The ELT Daily Journal, which will be available in early 2013. To read more about this unique book, I refer you to the book preview just published in Humanising Language Teaching e-zine: Book Preview - The ELT Daily Journal I also had an article recently published in the IH Journal, titled "Mastering the Mingle": Mastering the Mingle.

guest post by Tessa Woodward, author of Thinking in the EFL Class

Recently, I asked Tessa Woodward (author of Planning Lessons and Courses, and editor of The Teacher Trainer) to submit a blog post about her new book, Thinking in the EFL Class (Helbling Languages). She responded with this wonderful piece on the writing process:



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People often ask of a writer, ’How long did it take you to write your book?’ It’s a tricky question to answer because it just depends when you start the counting.

Do you start with the day you do something different in class and the students love it and start laughing and talking? Or with the thinking up of other ideas and trying them out? The doing of the background reading? The realising you are in an ’area’ of work which is building up quite a mass of paper in your study? Or with the conversations with friends that you have as you struggle to tell them, clearly, what you are up to at the moment professionally. Or with the writing of proposals to publishers and the discussions to see if what they want and what you think you can give are the same? Or with the actual first day of sitting down and planning out chapters for the publisher who IS interested in what you think you can provide? Oh and then there is the writing or typing. Do you count the conferences you go to where you search in vain in the programme for something that looks like what you are into? Do you include the desk editing of hundreds of pages to make them lean and fit? And choosing colours for the cover and writing artwork briefs for the cartoonist? Yes, you have to include all that. But do you also count the exploratory self-published book on a similar subject brought out some years ago? Hmm. Should really.

So I guess the shortest possible time I could say, if you mean the actual sitting down and scribbling and then re-scribbling would be ‘18 months’ and the longest would be, ‘About 9 years!’

What I CAN say though is ……’I enjoyed every last bit of it. I really like making things!

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For more information about Tessa's new book, visit the Helbling Languages website.

Upcoming ELT conferences in Taiwan 2011 and 2012

There will be quite a few ELT conferences this year in Taiwan.

One of the best known is the ETA - ROC International Symposium on Language Teaching which will take place in November. This year's symposium contains a number of "big names", including Stephen Krashen, Rod Ellis, Paul Nation, Ken Hyland and Tim Murphey.

Another conference that looks promising is the 2011 NTUT International Conference on Applied Linguistics, also in November. Michael Hoey and Susan M. Gass will be presenting.

For more information about these two conferences, as well as several others in 2011, go to the list of conferences on the Forumosa website:

ELT Conferences 2011

In addition, take a look at this list of conferences in 2012:

ELT Conferences 2012