Dr. J's Blog of ELT Praxis

To go along with my new blog theme of praxis, I thought it would be fun to evaluate myself when I was a new teacher nearly 20 years ago in Japan. More specifically, I explore what made me a bad teacher, a mediocre teacher, and a good teacher. But first a little context: I started my English language teaching career shortly after graduating from college in 1998. I took a full-time teaching position for the most famous eikaiwa in Japan at the time, Nova. Back then, there was no social media: no Facebook, no Twitter, no YouTube, and not even blogs. When I wanted to learn about teaching English in Japan, I used my Netscape browser to do a search using Yahoo! because Google didn't exist yet. I wasn't even aware of Dave's ESL Cafe yet if it existed back then. I had no idea was I was getting into, but I was fortunate enough to have a generally good experience even though I wasn't the best teacher. What Made Me a Bad Teacher? That's an easy question to answer: lack ...

For a class, I wrote a 7-page annotated bibliography and presented a 7-minute presentation on role-plays in task-based instruction, which is one of my areas of interest for research. The most useful bit of information I got from this research was that the preferred term in this area is "information gap task" as opposed to "role-play" or "simulation." The term "role-play" reminds most educators about the suggestopedia method or drama (which many instructors rule out as time-consuming and chaotic), so it often does not get much respect in second language education research. Information gap tasks can be tied easily to task-based instruction , which is a more recent and widely used approach to language teaching than suggestopedia. Another great find was Dr. Teresa Pica from the University of Pennsylvania. She appears to be the leading expert in information gap tasks and would be a very valuable resource if I decide to do my dissertation on this t...

After conducting several workshops entitled, "Successfully Conducting Role-Plays in the English Language Classroom," the most common concern I get is about a teacher trying but unsuccessfully implementing role-plays in her classroom. To paraphrase her, "Why can't I get my students to do a role-play?" My first response was that she needs to prepare her students for the role-play. Some teachers who are inspired by my workshop rush to their classes and implement this new activity without warning. I believe the students first reaction is shock and then resistance. Students resist because they don't know the teacher's reason for a sudden change in the curriculum. If the change comes in the middle or at the end of a course, there's little chance that the students will be willing to try something new. They have already planned their own learning strategies for the course, and a new activity such as a role-play threatens their well-established lear...