American English teacher and author, Jacob Hidas, followed his ancestral path back to Budapest where he currently teaches English through CETP (Central European Teaching Program). Jacob gives us his advice on how to successfully teach English and live large in Hungary.
Sometimes with the learner-centered approach to teaching, we teachers may forget that we must still maintain control of the class in order to assure that each student gets his or her fair share of the learning experience. For instance, what to do about the cute couple, young man and young woman, in ...
The corner bookstore is filled with books on the marvels of Italy, but it is important for teachers to be versed in the hard facts of teaching in Italy before embarking on their journey. Few countries conjure as many deep passions. With thousands of years of history, and over seventy-five percent of...
Follow travel writer and ESL teacher Caleb Powell around the world as he ranks his Top Ten Best Locations for teaching English overseas … from booming Brazil to sophisticated Italy and Japan to exotic Russia and United Arab Emirates to remote Mongolia… all have teaching experiences to consider.
Going abroad to teach English is often thought of as a great way to immerse oneself in a new culture and get an entirely different perspective on life. But it can also awaken talents or skills in one that were never previously considered or explored. When I went to Valencia, Spain to teach English, ...
I came to the Nagoya area of Central Japan to teach English in February 2011, one month before the massive earthquake and tsunami that ravaged the coast of the Tohoku (Northeastern) region of the country. Living in Japan in the wake of this significant and internationally-recognized disaster has bee...
The CALL Interest Section of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL) offers language teachers world-wide the opportunity to participate in the Electronic Village Online (EVO), a professional development project and virtual extension of the TESOL 2010 Convention in Boston. Th...
Warming up the crowd at the 40th annual mid-April annual CATESOL conference with examples of English “bloopers,” from the likes of politicians and newspapers, educator H. Douglas Brown shared a San Francisco Chronicle headline that read, “For molesting kids, man is sentenced to English lessons,” and...
California Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (CATESOL) www.catesol.org is an organization that offers support to Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages throughout California and Nevada in the USA. It was founded in 1969 and is a nonprofit organization open to anyone conc...
Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL, or often called English as a Second Language, ESL) can be a highly rewarding career, offering you the opportunity to live and work abroad. There is also a strong industry in English language instruction here in the United States and in other En...
According to The New York Times report, the American-based Chinese undergraduate student population has tripled in the past three years, bringing benefits to both the US colleges and language schools as students seek English language courses.
Creating an effective and popular Writing Skills Class for ESL students can be a challenge at best. Students are often frustrated by the amount of time they need to devote to the process and teachers are dissuaded by the correction load that a large writing class can produce.
If learning a new language can be equated to staving off drowning from a sinking ship, then the first few weeks of study are a matter of grabbing floating debris and fending off shark attacks. While it's maybe not that dramatic, it does involve some important decisions. As a teacher, it's your job t...
The controversy surrounding Arizona's new immigration law enforcement may impact non-native teachers in the classroom. The state's Department of Education recently started telling individual school districts that teachers with accented or grammatically incorrect English would need to be reassigned f...
Personal computing, communication, and entertainment devices have become an indispensible part of modern life, certainly including the teaching and traveling lifestyle. Tens of thousands of these devices and accessories appear in the market so ESLFocus has narrowed down the choices to an even dozen...
Despite its great influence on the energy that drives all of Western life, Saudi Arabia remains something of an enigma. The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), named after its benefactor, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, is an ambitious, multi-billion dollar, 36,000,000 square...
Instigating a debate sure to raise partisan hackles in a time of immigration rights controversy and immigration reform, Arizona now finds itself about to receive a ruling on the general issue of State's rights versus the federal mandate that state education must include English language training. A...
On April 15th of this year, Rosetta Stone went public with an IPO of some $115M. Today the Wall Street Journal reports that with a rise in price of 40%, the offering has become the second most successful such offering of the year.
Among capitals in Brasil, Belem has one of the lowest percentages of green space per capita, although it is located at the entrance to the Amazon, which contains one-third the world's tropical rainforests. It was a challenging spectacle that took place in Belem, the ninth version of the World Socia...
In a small, dusty village where the merciless sun cooks the land to a scorching 110 degrees by noon, I hear "Sister! Sister!" and see two grinning girls running up to me, their eyes shining and happy. Stretching their skinny arms out, they reach up for my hands and lead me away, carrying my cement-e...
Early on in my college career, the thought appealed to me. I could go to Europe and live in the same streets my great-grandparents grew up in. I could go to South America and finally conquer Spanish. I had too many notions of where to go and what to do. One day, sitting in an Art History lecture, I ...
Ancient ruins… A magnificent city of stone nestled in the mountains of Southern Peru… Machu Picchu. The gateway to Machu Picchu is Cusco, one of the preeminent tourist destinations in the world, and with good reason. There is much more than archaeological treasures to be experienced in Cusco however...
Duccio Nacci, photographer, husband and father of three,was born and raised in the heart of Tuscany, in the gemstone town of San Gimignano which was founded as a village in the by the Etruscans in the third century. Perched on the top of a hill overlooking valleys below, postcard San Gimignano has b...
From the Scheramitova airport, with the self-proclaimed taxi drivers noisily vying for passengers, to the potholed highway, causing our bus to swerve precariously into on-coming traffic as we headed 180 kilometers east, I was already taking mental notes that would eventually make it into my book. Ot...
A three-year-old girl sits on a window-ledge at the battery-recycling shop where she works. Her eyes stare blankly at the camera, showing no hope or happiness. This is just one of the dozens of startling images in David Elliot Cohen’s new book “What Matters.”
Tinariwen -- meaning “Empty Spaces" in the Saharan Language of Tamashek -- hold the honor of being the first band of the Tuareg people to use electric guitars in their music and in their music they seek to stand up as the champions of their people against the injustices of the Malian government.
Philadelphia hosts the 46th Annual TESOL Conference ‘A TESOL Declaration of Excellence’, from March 28th to 31st, with an expected turnout of more than 6,500 and with Miami-Dade public school superintendant, Alberto M. Carvahlo as the keynote speaker.
I can’t believe I haven’t written anything on my blog for over a year. I suppose because I didn’t do as much traveling this year as I did last year. At the end of the spring semester I changed schools and had to move from one Beijing university to another.
The TESOL 2011 Annual Convention and Exhibit runs March 16-19 in New Orleans, and will surely be a dynamic convergence of TESOL professionals. This year’s theme, “Examining the ‘E’ in TESOL,” is going to be addressed in the conference’s plenary session, which will feature Thelma Meléndez with the U....
