Dr. J's Blog of ELT Praxis

As I was revisiting textbooks on how to teach writing for academic purposes a few months ago, I realized how much emphasis is on describing and explaining the varieties of essays. However there's very little on pedagogy. I've asked myself, "Should the writing teacher spend more time lecturing, consulting, or marking. Lecturing makes little sense to me as a writing teacher, but many ESL programs set up their writing courses the same as their courses on the other skills. The textbooks I've been reading don't really address this issue at all. I believe (I wish I had more evidence than my own experience and observations) that the teacher's main role in an EAP writing classroom, if it's necessary to have a classroom, is consulting or tutoring to help the student craft their essay. But how much time should an EAP writing instructor take to mark papers? I've been noticing more tweets and blog posts about this issue these days, so I wanted to write a sn...

Last Thursday, I was reviewing literature for a research project that is just underway, and I came across a couple tables that resonated with me so much that I had to share it on Twitter. The tables come from Simon Borg's 2010 article "Language Teacher Research Engagement." These tables would have come in handy if I had found them prior to my research project with teachers at an intensive English program (IEP) in the United States. They would have supported my professional learning and curriculum development philosophies as an administrator because I believe these two areas, professional learning and curriculum development, should have strongly overlapping goals as an English language teacher. Furthermore, I believe that it is in the best interest of an institution to support this in order to improve the curriculum. This belief is based on the assumption that curriculum is not static because is based on the needs of the learners, which are dynamic, as well as the ...

An experienced teacher should be able to know their strengths and weaknesses.  Although I don't enjoy teaching grammar, I'm not bad at it.  However, I know that enjoying teaching a subject can make you a more effective teacher because your enthusiasm can positively affect students' engagement. I've been effective at teaching verb tenses this term, but then I noticed that the curriculum called for about an hour of class time to review articles.  I have never had great success teaching articles, perhaps because there's no instant reward to this.  It takes students a long time to master articles (if you don't believe in fossilization ), and the more time spent on explaining articles and their usage, the less effective I become as a teacher.  Because students have already learned articles in a previous class, I found no risk of flipping this one class and do some informal action research. Before Watching the Videos After wrapping up the previous unit, I tol...

If there's one thing I find difficult to do as a teacher, it is taking student praise.  This is example of a humblebrag , a newer word in the English lexicon. The truth is that I was raised in a household where praise was restrained and mainly reserved for achievements that clearly exceeded expectations. Actually, I find it more difficult to give praise than to receive praise because of this upbringing. It took me a few years to praise students who adequately met my expectations. Student Praise Last term, I had a very rewarding experience teaching English to a relatively small but dedicated group of students. This combination of class size and student motivation helped me meet the linguistic, academic, and cultural needs of each student more effectively than in most other classes. Most of the students preferred this extra attention to their needs and skills, but there was one that didn't want me to get to know his learning and studying strategies too well.  I had tw...

As I was reading literature for my dissertation, I came across a table that I found useful to reflect upon my teaching, particularly on student evaluations.  Although not a part of my dissertation, one of my interests is investigating differences of student evaluations from context to context.  For example, I have found the level of formality and education/entertainment ratio differs from class to class and culture to culture.  I wanted to use this table from Barnes & Lock's (2010) article, "The Attributes of Effective Lecturers of EFL as Perceived by Students in a Korean University," published in the Australian Journal of Teacher Education, as an reflective exercise for my own professional development, and if it is seems useful, I may be interested in applying this table (or similar ones like it) as a teacher educator. Barnes & Lock (2010) divide effective teaching into five major categories: rapport, delivery, fairness, knowledge & credibility, and organiz...

I've taught three classes in which I never changed the content of the course and I only changed the teaching approach by very little. They were my advanced writing class at the University of Wisconsin in La Crosse and both methodology courses at Sookmyung Women's University in Seoul. In all three classes, I noticed a marked improvement in the students semester after semester. Either the students were getting better or I was improving. I taught the same material in relatively the same manner in Seoul for 3 years, which is 6 different terms. In La Crosse , I did the same for 4 semesters. However my feelings about the outcome were different for each case. Seeing better results from my students from term to term in Korea was rewarding. This meant I didn't have to spend as much time explaining certain vocabulary and concepts as I did in previous terms. The students' English levels weren't necessarily higher, but it seemed that their understanding of the content ...