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?

upcoming conferences in Taiwan

For any readers who are in Taiwan, you might be interested in hearing about two upcoming conferences.

The first is at National Cheng Chi University (Taipei), on October 16th, 2010. You can read more about the conference on the NCCU website:

4th Conference on College English - College English Programs: Design and implementation

Scott Sommers, a university instructor and blogger in Taiwan, had this to say about the conference:

I attended this conference last year. It was excellent - easily the best conference I have attended in Taiwan. If you are curious about the conference scene or interested in presenting, this is the number one ELT conference I recommend.

Another conference worth attending is the ETA - ROC 19th International Symposium on Language Teaching (Taipei) on November 12-14, 2010. This year, some familiar names (David Nunan, William Grabe, Stephen Krashen, Neil Anderson, Fredricka Stoller) will be presenting. You can see a complete program for the conference here:

ETA - ROC 19th International Symposium on Language Teaching

On the subject of conferences, Alex Case has some unbeatable advice for making it worthwhile:

Attending TESOL Conferences by Alex Case

Jeremy Harmer has some similar suggestions on his blog:

What Makes a Good Conference? by Jeremy Harmer

Finally, if you're giving a talk, Andrew Wright has some good ideas here:

Some notes on giving talks at conferences by Andrew Wright