Dr. J's Blog of ELT Praxis

Last week, I started reading The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff to my daughter as part of her bedtime regimen. I bought this book years ago after a colleague recommended it to me when he learned I was interested in Taoism. Since then I have embraced much of its philosophy, but I stop short of calling myself a Taoist. I didn't realize until now that Taoism has deeply affected my attitudes and beliefs towards English language teaching and scholarship, especially concerning the concept of praxis. Below are some examples.   The passage above comes from Chapter 3: Spelling Tuesday, page 26. It's not a subtle attack on academics, specifically those whose goals are to get published to be accepted among an elite circle of scholars. This is particularly striking to me because, at this point in my life, I would like to gain acceptance among this elite circle, which I perhaps naively equate to tenured professors. However, I strive to make my life's work beneficial to English l...

Earlier this month, the TESOL International Association held a summit in Athens, Greece on the future of our profession. This summit was recorded and can be viewed here: http://www.tesol.org/summit-2017/themes/futurology-recorded-sessions There were many takeaways from this summit, and I've been following reactions both internally, through the myTESOL online portal , and externally, through the Twitter hashtag #TESOLsummit. Below are some screenshots of tweets that got my attention. These struck a chord in me because I believe CPD (collaborative professional development) is not the future of TESOL. It is the present! It's what I'm doing right now on this blog and what I have been doing by engaging TESOL teachers and researchers online. However, online PD is not an option for many teachers, either because of accessibility or personal feelings towards social media and e-learning. On the flip side, accessibility and personal feelings towards massive international...

Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/gforsythe/18162314289 What is an Open Educator? According to a recently published article from the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (IRRODL): An Open Educator chooses to use open approaches, when possible and appropriate, with the aim to remove all unnecessary barriers to learning. He/she works through an open online identity and relies on online social networking to enrich and implement his/her work, understanding that collaboration bears a responsibility towards the work of others. Does this sound attractive for English language teachers? It seems to some who offer courses through or with YouTube. But what does it mean "to remove all unnecessary barriers to learning?" Working for free? Not necessarily. If you read the article, it seems you'd be working on a sliding scale depending on the socioeconomic status of the learners, but this sliding scale is a sliding slope. Ho...

Depending where you are and where you want to be, 2016 was a good, bad, or typical year for ELT programs in the United States.  Bad year for university jobs, teaching and administrative Good year for community college jobs Typical year (trending positively) for professor jobs Typical year (unpredictable) for other jobs If you want to learn more, read on. I describe each job sector through my interpretation of ELT job opening announcement data from the TESOL Career Center, Higher Ed Jobs.com, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. University Jobs I work at an intensive English program at a public university in the United States, and it's quite noticeable that the ELT job market has taken quite a hit this year with the Saudi government cutting scholarships . I saw this firsthand as the Saudi enrollment numbers at my university dropped, but this is only a few years where most programs saw record numbers of Saudi students . My data confirms this trend.   Since 200...

I've been in the field of education (teaching & learning) since I was a preschooler at the age of four. For most of this time, I have been a student. It's only been in the last 18 years that I've been in the role of a teacher and 4 years that I've been in an administrative role that supports teachers. So I've seen teachers in many contexts from different perspectives, and my favorite teachers have been and still are English and foreign language teachers (social studies teachers come a close second). It seemed such a fun job when I was a student, and for the most part it turned out to be a fun job as a teacher. However, the pay is quite modest and even low for foreign language teachers who can get a full-time gig. I know why I and my friend-teachers do it, but why do others do it? I have my assumptions, so I read Why We Work to confirm my assumptions and to learn something new. I didn't expect the author to describe my line of work that much, but he did...

I am fascinated by science and the future, and that's what got me reading Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence . by Jerry Kaplan (Yale University Press, 2015). On page 151, I came across the paragraph above, and the first sentence is written in a way to confirm the fears of many teachers, especially technophobic teachers. In the second sentence, Kaplan casually connects the terrifying notion of being replaced with the flipped classroom. Instructional designers and administrators now prefer to call this flipped learning, which has become an industry of its own. See https://flippedlearning.org/ . Flipped Learning  Yes, please visit https://flippedlearning.org/ ! As of this writing (web designers love to redesign the sites every 6 months or so), "academic subjects" is at the center of the main menu. Guess what is the first academic subject listed? English/ELA. For old school English language teachers, ELA refers to En...

I'm collaborating on a research and development project for integrating extensive reading into intensive English programs. After the initial review of the most recent literature, I was quite surprised at the overwhelming positive effects of extensive reading on reading proficiency, comprehension, and motivation. Although I'm still skeptical, I'd like to share the findings with you. I looked at 17 articles published since 2012. Although this may not seem like much, 3 of these articles were meta-analyses, which investigated a much larger quantity of studies on extensive reading. Only one was not relevant to intensive English programs, bringing it down to 16 articles. Many of these articles came from the 2015 discussion forums in Reading in a Foreign Language . The majority of those discussion forum articles were not empirical studies, but they went in depth answering "What constitutes extensive reading?" After summarizing these answers, this blog post covers the r...