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

Try Not to Die Here Please

Mextesol - Regional Convention Mexico City

Coming up this May 28th, 2011 from 8:30 AM to 7:30 PM at UVM San Rafael. The completeprogram is listed right here.

Mextesol Nationwide

Teachers Latin America will be attending and looks forward to seeing you there!

The Art of Explanation

Here's an interesting story at the BBC, related to explaining a new electoral voting system to the British public but with wide references to teaching in general and clear application to teaching EFL.

The full BBC story

Explanations of the AV electoral system tend to resort to analogies. But is this the best way to convey new ideas? The Magazine seeks tips from a teacher, a scientist, a philosopher, a cricket buff and two political boffins.

It's a bit like X Factor - only without the singing, and it doesn't go on for weeks. It's also a bit like choosing your favourite crisps, and then your second favourite flavour, and so on.

Ahead of the 5 May referendum on whether to adopt the Alternative Vote (AV) electoral system, those explaining this unfamiliar method of picking MPs tend to use analogies. But is this the best way to convey a concept to someone who knows nothing about it?

Author and award-winning teacher Phil Beadle says in a classroom, the key to getting information across is breaking it down into small, manageable chunks, checking each chunk has been understood and "grinding repetition". This isn't so easy to do in a three-minute news item, but other key methods are universal.

This includes getting people to see how the issue in question relates to them.

"It's been said about teaching that if you can't get students to see what's in it for them, then you won't take it on," he says. "Good teaching is about contextualising learning, connecting it to experience, finding an appropriate analogy."

Obviously, the larger the group of people, the more general the analogy has to be, hence the use of crisp flavours or reality TV to explain AV. Beadle, a secondary school English teacher, has used hip hop artists to teach William Blake and football in other lessons.

Beadle says there is a school of thought that people learn and take in new information in three ways: visually, aurally and kinaesthetically - through the body. The latter is when you learn by carrying out a physical activity, rather than just listening or watching a demonstration by someone.

"The best way to get people to understand is to use all these three ways," he says.

This three-pronged approach appeals to John Stern, editor of The Wisden Cricketer magazine.

He prefers to explain cricket while watching a match for demonstration purposes, and with a ball and bat to hand so the novice can see and feel how, for example, the seam affects the movement of the ball.

Follow the rest of the story at the link above