Job Alert - Mexico City

The American School Foundation is looking for a Digital Literacy Coach to begin immediately and for the remainder of the school year. Details on the position are posted on their website Human Capital section.

American School Foundation website.

Job profile:

The Digital Literacy Coach (DLC) shall, under the supervision of the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) & Special Projects Coordinator, ensure that digital literacy is carefully and appropriately integrated into all content areas. The majority of the Digital Literacy Coach’s time will be spent working with teachers and students to achieve integration between digital literacy and content objectives as well as providing training and support to create a global and collaborative approach to learning. The DLC will pursue instructional change in the classroom through increased duration and intensity of DLC-teacher interaction.

See more info at the link above

Schools in Pakistan to Teach Chinese

The Chinese language continues its long, slow march to displacing English as the lingua franca of planet Earth. Whether it achieves this status at some point in the future is very debatable of course, but little by little more countries are seeing its necessity and adding it to mandatory study for children. Pakistan is the latest country to do so. BBC has the story.

The government of the Pakistani province of Sindh has announced plans to make Chinese compulsory in schools from 2013.

All educational institutions in the province will have to provide Chinese language courses from class six (10-11-year-olds), it says.

The provincial government says that the decision was taken because of Pakistan's close ties with China.

The two countries have been strong allies for more than 50 years.

In May, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani described China as his country's "best friend".

But some critics say the plan is political, will need considerable investment in teaching staff and materials, and further stretch limited resources.

Sindh Education Minister Pir Mazhar-ul-Haq said that the initiative reflected China's growing role as an economic giant in the world and would benefit Pakistan in the long term.

"Our trade, educational and other relations are growing with China everyday and now it is necessary for our younger generation to have command over their language," he said.

Videos of Mexico City

Here's a mid-summer look at some videos of Mexico City. Enjoy!

New Resources - Mexico Information and Learning Languages

We've added three new links to our blog page to help bring more information to TEFL job seekers and foreign language learners, starting in Mexico City.

Mexico City: An Opinionated Guide by American Jim Johnston, living in Mexico City.

Chilangish invites expats to contribute to what is a bloggy feature magazine covering Mexico City and events, giving the lay of the land to the new arrival.

On the language front, we've added Fluent in 3 Months, a blog that covers the amazing round-the-world journeys of Benny Lewis. We are impressed with his abilities to pick up languages through talent and hard work.

US English in the UK

American English has long influenced UK English, and sometimes to the ire of the English. Here's a BBC story.

Lengthy. Reliable. Talented. Influential. Tremendous.

All of these words we use without a second thought were never part of the English language until the establishment of the United States.

The Americans imported English wholesale, forged it to meet their own needs, then exported their own words back across the Atlantic to be incorporated in the way we speak over here. Those seemingly innocuous words caused fury at the time.

The poet Coleridge denounced "talented" as a barbarous word in 1832, though a few years later it was being used by William Gladstone. A letter-writer to the Times, in 1857, described "reliable" as vile.

Ugly and pointless new usages appear in the media and drift into everyday conversation:
Faze, as in "it doesn't faze me"
Hospitalize, which really is a vile word
Wrench for spanner
Elevator for lift
Rookies for newcomers, who seem to have flown here via the sports pages.
Guy, less and less the centrepiece of the ancient British festival of 5 November - or, as it will soon be known, 11/5. Now someone of either gender.
And, starting to creep in, such horrors as ouster, the process of firing someone, and outage, meaning a power cut. I always read that as outrage. And it is just that.

I am all for a living, breathing language that evolves with the times. I accept that estate agents prefer to sell apartments rather than flats - they sound more enticing. I accept that we now have freight trains rather than goods trains - that's more accurate.

TEFL Job Alert - Mexico City

Part time hours have come up for teaching business English classes in the Polanco are through a local language institute. Mornings only. If interested, drop us a line at Teachers Latin America.

Job Alert - Queretaro, Mexico

3 positions teaching business level English have opened for immediate starts in Queretaro, Mexico. Contact Teachers Latin America for details. www.innovative-english.com