Lowering the already low standards is not going to help things - the Korean media already vilifies foreign EFL instructors due to a small minority of miscreants but now new teachers won’t even have completed a degree and can arrive younger and stupider in greater numbers. - it appears that Korea really does not value English Education.

It’s time to get out of this industry and out of this country - they don’t want professional teachers.

The challenge is to essentially widen the range of comments and discussion in the edublogger arena - one of the keys to keeping your posts known is to tag them for technocrati with comment08 or include a link to that feed in your entry. There is also a list of participants on the wiki which will be a great source to find new blogs to follow - I’ll be adding my blog there and trying to participate as much as possible.

Really thanks for the praise guys. 

Part 1 has been edited in the newspaper, below is the original version as I wrote it.

Korea Herald Readers
Welcome. Feel free to comment and leave your thoughts on this weeks column. If you would like to learn more about me visit my bio page. I have also been blogging at this site for 4 years so there are a lot of entries if you care to look through the archives. Some of my favorite or more popular entries are available on the classic entries page.

Professional development is a term that many teachers in Korea scoff at as is evidenced by any number of threads on Dave’s ESL Café. This is not to suggest that Dave’s users are not interested in professional development, but that these threads tend to get derailed very quickly. A somewhat recent thread on ELT World Forums talked about this topic and hit both sides of the fence.

The thread on ELT world starts off by asking Are you professional? Emma quickly stated that “TEFL is like any profession in that some people are more professional than others and jargon is rarely understood outside of it’s assigned industry.” Spiral78 also said that “There are bad apples in every field, professional or not. The presence of bad apples in our field is no justification to claim that there is no such thing as a professional TEFL/TESL teacher.” I agree with both of these statements.

Four years ago I addressed this issue and there linked to three threads where teachers referred to themselves as slackers, losers (thread deleted), or prisoners. Recently a new thread came up titled Is ESL in Korea a “REAL JOB”? that is more positive than the title sounds. Join Me states that “What happens once you close the door to your classroom is up to you. You can either run a classroom or a zoo… When I hear people question if this is a real job, I think what they are usually saying is that they just aren’t comfortable doing it.” Zaria32 says that “It’s a complete joke only if you make it so...” There are of course a few people who took the negative slant, but essentially the response was to treat your position professionally.

The other side of the coin is the lack of professionalism that is directed at teachers by hagwons, public schools, and universities. Hagwons are notorious for not paying on time; public schools and universities often have limits on how many years foreign instructors are allowed to work (usually three years), lack of raises, experience does not count nor does performance for salary. Essentially a new teacher with zero experience will make the same as one with years of experience. It appears that employers think that all native speakers are equal.

Clearly not all native speakers are equal and if employers were willing to provide salaries and benefits that would attract and keep quality teachers, then the educational institutions and students would benefit. Unfortunately native speaker teachers are not perceived as assets but rather as expenses and are treated accordingly. Professionalism is a two way street but one that must initially be paved by the employer with salary based on experience, qualifications, and performance.

Employers also need to have the courage to non-renew contracts of teachers who display substandard professionalism. I have worked in several schools where teachers had a bad reputation amongst students and other instructors on staff – that administration was aware of – but had their contracts regularly renewed. These contracts were apparently renewed because of worries about replacing that teacher. In my opinion being short staffed is a much better situation than having the schools reputation go down due to poor teaching.

Due to the above issues, many instructors do not feel it is worth the effort to be professional thus creating a ‘catch 22’ situation, and the cycle cannot be broken by teachers. There have been many qualified professional teachers in Korea for years yet this situation continues. Employers must break the cycle and focus on hiring qualified professional instructors. Does this mean that I think teachers should give up on being professional and undertaking professional development? No.

I would recommend that all teachers pursue some form of professional development, with the end goal of becoming a better educator. The goal here is not to break the cycle mentioned above but rather to improve for one’s own sake. The benefits of professional development include better classroom management skills, better activities, and more efficient teaching to name a few.

Conferences are probably one of the best ways to learn more about teaching and how research is informing current teaching practice. In Korea there are a number of conferences held throughout the year with the largest and most well known being the annual KOTESOL International Conference held each October. The admission fee is cheap compared to international conferences in other countries and there are presentations for everyone with some of the leading researchers headlining each year presenting alongside local instructors.

A list of domestic conferences around Korea can be found at the KOTESOL web site (looks like the domain has expired). In addition, both Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press put on one day mini-conferences every fall, with announcements on their web sites. Attendance at these conferences is free and attendees always receive free materials as well as a 20% discount on books. Though these presentations clearly have a commercial slant, much of what is being presented can be applied to any textbook or classroom situation. If you live close to one of these venues it is definitely worth attending.

The final benefit to attending conferences is the ability to network with other teachers. Networking can provide instructors with leads on good jobs as well as opportunities for professional discussions after the conference. Major conferences, including the KOTESOL International conference, usually have a job room where applicants can apply and receive a preliminary interview while attending the conference.

This is part one of a two part series. The second part will continue with looking at active forms of professional development including reading books, journals, blogs, observations, self-reflection.

Ranking based on blog juice. Below are the top 20

5.1 EFL Geek
5.1 POPSEOUL!
4.5 Elyse Sewell
4.4 korean cooking’s Xanga
4.4 Coming Anarchy
4.3 The Marmot’s Hole
3.9 Asian Pop with YeinJee
3.8 Dramabeans
3.6 Web 2.0 Asia
3.5 Scribblings of the Metropolitician
3.3 Korea Beat
3.3 My Korean Kitchen
3.1 ZenKimchi
3.0 Seoul Searcher’s Blog
2.9 Frog in a Well
2.8 ZenKimchi Korean Food Journal
2.7 ROK Drop
2.4 The Daily Kimchi
2.3 East Windup Chronicle
2.2 Occidentalism

The Omnivores Dilemma is a book that will forever change the way you look at food. I don’t mean that it will make you a vegetarian, because that didn’t happen to me - I just had some bacon for breakfast and have steaks queued up for dinner. However, you will learn how much of what you eat is made from corn. This book is a fascinating read - I highly recommend it.

DNA: The Secret of Life is written by James D. Watson, winner of the Nobel prize and the discoverer of DNA. It’s written for the layman and talks about the history of DNA up to the present and what this means for the future of mankind. Another absolutely fascinating book on science.

Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking is about how the unconscious mind can make the best decisions immediately upon sizing up a situation and why getting too much information can often derail that same decision. It’s all about thin slicing. A must read and one that I will buy in order to read again in the future. I’ve also purchased The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by the same author and this book is queued up.

The list of books is going to be quite long so this will be continued in the extended entry.

Guns, Germs and Steel is a fascinating look at why some societies developed faster than others. This is a must read for anyone interested in understanding why Europe developed faster than New Guinea. Hint - it’s not related to genetics. Go read this book.

I’ve recently read three books on web design; CSS Mastery, The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, and Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax: From Novice to Professional (not yet finished). The first two books are absolutely essential for the amateur interested in improving their own sites and following web standards. The third book is incredibly dense and difficult but I’m sure will be beneficial once I’m finished it.

The Princess Bride - I spotted this in the bookstore on sale for $3 and had to take it as I love the movie. The book was great and I recommend reading it if you like the movie.

What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today’s Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable is a book of essays by multiple authors on what they consider to be their dangerous idea. Everything is interesting and some of it I disagree with, but all of it is worth reading.

The White Castle is a strangely compelling story. I don’t know how to express what I felt as i read the book, but I do highly recommend it. This book will make you think.

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China is a fascinating history of a family from the end of imperial china through communism upto the late 70’s when the author moved to England. Not the type of book that I normally read, but I’m glad I read it.

Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde and The Invisible Man are two classic tales that everyone knows about through movies and pop-culture. I really enjoyed reading the original stories and am now keen to watch a movie adaptation to compare.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are two stories that I frequently find quoted in various materials and wanted to read. I didn’t finish the first story. The story in no way drew me in or kept my interest. I fail to see how this is a classic.

Word counts are determined in two ways. First if I can I download the ebook version and do a word count - this is most accurate. If I can’t find an ebook then I count the words on 3 lines of the book, count the lines on a page and then look at the page count. Taking an average of words per page x the page count gets a rough estimate. However I found that this number is much higher than the real word count using the ebook so if I use this method I then multiply the total by 0.9 to get a much more accurate count.

I’ve actually found this to be quite interesting as I’ve read several novels that I wouldn’t normally buy. Many of them turned out to be quite good and a couple of them are terrible (one has been removed from the list it is terrible that the student didn’t want future students to suffer)

Below is the table from my moodle site with novels and word counts as it stands.

	Author	title	count
1	Yann Martel	Life of Pi	103,000
2	Dan Brown	The DaVinci Code	132,000
3	John Grisham	The Pelican Brief	113,000
4	John Grisham	The King of Torts	108,000
5	John Grisham	The Chamber	190,000
6	John Grisham	A Time to Kill	160,000
7	Alvin Toffler	The Third Wave	155,000
8	Sophie Kinsella	Confessions of a Shopaholic	92,000
9	Alice Sebold	The Lovely Bones	99,000
10	Wally Lamb	She’s Come Undone	150,000
11	Meg Cabot	The Boy Next Door	76,000
12	Dan Brown	Digital Fortress	104,000
13	Terry Pratchett	Going Postal	119,000
14	George R.R. Martin	A Game of Thrones	255,000
15	Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus	Nanny Diaries	95,000
16	Nick Hornby	About a Boy	81,000
17	Lauren Weisberger	The Devil Wears Prada	138,000
18	L.M. Montgomery	Anne of Green Gables	103,000
19	Mitch Albom	The Five People you meet in Heaven	40,000
20	Helen Fielding	Bridget Jones’s Diary	68,000
	Author	title	count
21	J.K. Rowling	Harry Potter and the Philosophers (Sorcerer’s) Stone	78,000
22	J.K. Rowling	Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets	84,000
23	Janet Evanovic	12 Sharp	71,000
24	Patrick Suskind	Perfume	83,000
25	Paulo Cohelo	11 minutes
26
	Non Fiction
&nbps;	Author	title	count
1	John Gray, Ph.D	Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus	84,000
2	Joel Osteen	Your Best Life Now	115,000
3	Mitch Albom	Tuesdays with Morrie	35,000
4
5

]]> 2008-05-03T07:20:00Z http://eflgeek.com/index.php/eflgeek/comments/a-right-twit/ UK teacher posts about how twitter has helped him with his classroom. Not as a classroom application but to help him connect with teachers around the world. Jonathon writes: After working pretty much alone for the last three years online, the chance to get an idea of what is going on in MFL classrooms around the world, especially in the UK has been wonderful. Twitter has allowed me this chance by being able to see what interests other people. It’s something like staff-room eavesdropping but hey, we all know how useful that can be. Thanks to Twitter’s users (in particular Jose Picardo) I came across Animoto which is a great site allowing users to submit music with images to create video. Animoto then does the rest for you, turning it into a half-decent slideshow. I’m also unfamiliar with animoto, but you can learn more about what Jonathon did with it by reading his post. I’ve also been using twitter for a very short time and have found several interesting resources from the people I follow. About half of the people I follow are EFL teachers and the other half are in web design. Twitter is interesting, but also potentially a waste of time - filter what you read and write is my motto. Anyhow go check out Jonathons post for more information. Teaching, teaching_application, useful_web_sites UK teacher posts about how twitter has helped him with his classroom. Not as a classroom application but to help him connect with teachers around the world.

Jonathon writes:

After working pretty much alone for the last three years online, the chance to get an idea of what is going on in MFL classrooms around the world, especially in the UK has been wonderful. Twitter has allowed me this chance by being able to see what interests other people. It’s something like staff-room eavesdropping but hey, we all know how useful that can be.

Thanks to Twitter’s users (in particular Jose Picardo) I came across Animoto which is a great site allowing users to submit music with images to create video. Animoto then does the rest for you, turning it into a half-decent slideshow.

I’m also unfamiliar with animoto, but you can learn more about what Jonathon did with it by reading his post. I’ve also been using twitter for a very short time and have found several interesting resources from the people I follow. About half of the people I follow are EFL teachers and the other half are in web design. Twitter is interesting, but also potentially a waste of time - filter what you read and write is my motto. Anyhow go check out Jonathons post for more information.

What I found most interesting was the responses related to the activities we did during the semester. Students consistently ranked activities I made myself much higher than ones from teacher resource books. I’ve included screenshots (in the extended entry) of the survey results where I’ve highlighted in yellow the activities I did myself.

Do I think this means I make better materials than can purchased commercially? Yes and No. I make better materials for my teaching style and my students. With the materials I develop they are 100% tailored to my class and students. Many of the materials I created are available on this blog if you do a search for them. However with commercial materials they are designed to please everyone and quite often end up being less than excellent but better than okay.

Looking at the survey results makes me want to create more personalized material for my students but the amount of time necessary to make quality materials is alot and thus I am required to use my own material to mostly supplement. Any thoughts or comments? What is your experience with personally created material vs commercial?

click images for full size version

This time however for the review section instead of just making notes of common errors, I walked around the classroom with my camera and recorded conversations. I then moved the video from my camera to the computer and we watched it as a class where students were encouraged to notice what they did correct and find mistakes if possible.

This went over really well in all three classes that I did it with. I will be doing this again in the future with this and other similar exercises.