Before I entered the university setting, I trained teachers as a senior EFL instructor, as the Director of an Intensive Language Institute, and as a professional presenter at regional, national and international conferences. I have also trained teachers in ‘specialty’ groups such as public School Teachers and Hebrew and Korean teachers. I have been doing this for decades. While the subject matter varied, the sound, up-to-date research-informed pedagogy and methodology of effective and engaging language instruction was always the center of my training pragmatics.
I offer below a varied set of examples from both my ongoing professional presentations as well as my more exotic teacher training projects.
I lived and taught EFL, Business English and Cross-Cultural Communications for four years. During that time, when our college, Sundai Gaiko (Sundai College of Business & Foreign Languages,) was mostly closed, we did Japanese Teacher Training for Japanese English teachers seeking to become more communicative and learn more modern language teaching methods and pragmatics. I did this for two to three months for three years and learned a lot about how to train teachers, the problems they encountered and their needs for communicative instructions including inductive grammar instructions.
Many of us were drawn to teaching ESOL by a fascination with different cultures and our students often feel the same way. No matter what cultures your students are from or where you are teaching, cultural differences and similarities are a pervasive background to everything that happens within an ESOL class. Cross-cultural activities can become a means to enhance and accomplish target content, functional and structural learning objectives. Before beginning, it is important to stress the crucial role authentic context plays in second language acquisition. When we choose objectives that have a variety of cultural contexts, students can become more interested and more motivated to communicate in the target language. They are then able to offer germane cultural realities they have grown up with and thus invest the task with more authenticity as they move into linguistically challenging arenas.
Since 2010 I have been writing a blog to extend TESOL teacher training out into the world for whom ever can benefit. It is specifically for ESL and EFL instructors no matter where they are or who their students are. I am primarily a pragmatics trainer because this is what my students have always needed the most, these posts show this part of my instruction.
For several years, once or twice a year, I trained Korean English Teachers for A.C.E. at Seattle Pacific University. Here is a glimpse of that and other similar programs. For the most part, I helped them move away from rigid methods of teaching like Grammar Translation to more Communicative teaching methods, especially in grammar instruction. Training these teachers to incorporate authentic use of the language, motivational activities, inductive and deductive methodology and to use relevant and fun strategies was useful and illuminating.
Task-Based Learning: Teaching/learning a language by using language to accomplish open-ended tasks. Learners are given a problem or objective to accomplish, but are left with some freedom in approaching this problem or objective.
This presentation seeks to show the primacy of the Output Hypothesis advocated by several theorists and to critique the Output hypothesis and its importance in terms of SLA through the observation of severely autistic people who acquired language with virtually no output. Secondly, as a teacher educator and parent of an autistic son, I wish to give specific advice to teachers including ELL on the autism spectrum in their classes on how to accentuate SLA through a variety of means. I also provide links that might prove helpful for anyone engaged in tutoring or working with students who have autism.
I have been an English Language Teacher (ELT) Trainer for graduate-level TESOL certification programs for fifteen years. These programs were part of The School of Teaching ESL (STESL) which was founded in 1985 by the well-known Dr. Nan Butler who created the curriculum which is now owned by SPU. Aside from instructing, I added to and created a considerable amount of ELT curriculum over the years. I taught all elements of ELT including linguistic theory, pedagogy and pragmatics for new English teachers, including K-12 teachers seeking endorsements. I added to, revised, updated and created ELT materials and courses incorporating modern and research-informed practices as our profession changed. I have trained, evaluated and graduated over a thousand certified ESL/EFL instructors who are now teaching all over the world. Below are some ELT samples that I taught, revised or created.