Other Award Winners
Great books, great publishers and great people!
We at
English Central are very proud that we represent and distribute several fine publishers.
Because of
Whodunit's recent award, we decided to highlight all the other titles in our catalogue that have either won, or been nominated for, awards for excellence.
The Winners!
English for Specific Academic Purposes Series, Garnet Education: 2009.
The perfect preparation for EAP students transitioning into a specific discipline.
The Developing Teacher, by Duncan Foord, DELTA Publishing.
Thoughtful and creative ways for teachers to take control of their own continuing professional development.
Dealing with Difficulties, by Lindsay Clandfield and Luke Prodromou, DELTA Publishing.
Solutions, strategies and suggestions for dealing with challenging classes.
The Nominees...
Teaching Unplugged, by Scott Thornbury and Luke Meddings, DELTA Publishing.
An introduction to the 'Dogme' approach to teaching - materials light and very student-centred.
The Language Teacher’s Survival Handbook, by Lindsay Clandfield and Duncan Foord, iT's publishing.
An excellent all-in-one resource to equip new teachers with everything needed to successfully navigate that first year of teaching.
Fast Track to Reading, by Peter Viney, Garnet Publishing, 2010.
A unique literacy text designed to help adult learners decode the Roman alphabet.
Getting Ready for Speech by by Lebeayu and Harrington, Language Solutions.
A basic-level speech and presentation text that provides all the support and language needed for students to become confident presenters.
We're glad to see that these great books have been recognized as belonging on every library shelf.
Cool Websites
Job Market
We often get folks coming by asking us if we know of any good jobs going.
Even if you are quite happy where you are right now, it's always nice to see what's available in our industry.
The industry standards are:
Mark's ESL World Job Postings, which seems to be giving Dave's ESL Cafe a run for his money.
Dodgy picture on the home page aside, it looks like there is some other decent content and good links to be found here too.
ESL Teacher's Board is a huge and long-running site. Lots of information available here, along with the chance to post your resume.
Another long-running site with a ton of traffic is
ESL Monkey.
The new kid in town at ESL 2.0, is called
TEFList.
At this new job site you can download
video resumés - although we have to say, the one we watched was pure cringe-worthy, so anyone else who wants to try (sans guitar and avec professionalism) will stand a good chance of catching a good employer's eye.
To check out if any colleges in Ontario are hiring, go to
Ontario College Employment.
And a seemingly
good US job site that has over 30 links to ESL job boards and sites,
ESL Job Sites is very comprehensive.
To save you from having to write these down, you can find all these links and more information on
English Central's Career information site.
If you know of other great job sites, please
let us know, so we can add the link to our list.
Calling Private Tutors
For all those private tutors out there who would like to get more attention from prospective students, please
add your information to our employer list and we will gladly direct online and in-store requests to your information.
Teaching Tips
Corpus-Based Teaching
One of the more recent buzzwords in our industry is ‘corpora’. Resources now claim to be ‘corpora informed’ or ‘based on corpora’ and as teachers we are being encouraged to utilize corpora in our classes.
In a nutshell,
corpora, the name for data banks of sampled language (spoken and written) has been of great value to linguists and educators wanting information about the use and frequency of words and structures.
But instead of teachers using corpora only to discover aspects of the language to teach to their students, why not allow students to experience this discovery on their own?
The relatively recent development of a new online corpus tool now enables teachers to do this.
Using a Corpus
One of the best corpora to use is
http://corpus.byu.edu. This is the corpus created by Brigham Young University and it’s free, easy to navigate and very comprehensive.
'Top 10' Activities Ideas
The following activities are designed to get students discovering and working with frequency collocations by looking at words in a ‘Top Ten’ list.
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Give students a list of collocates comprising of the first 5 most frequent and some less frequent collocates. Students work in pairs or small groups and select what they think are the top ten.
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Provide the list of top ten collocates, but not in order. Students work in pairs or groups to order them according to which ones they think are the most frequent.
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Give students a numbered list of collocates, but leave some of the words out. Tell them the missing words and they have to work out where they go relative to the other collocates in the list.
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Prepare 'Top 10' collocate lists for several key words (e.g. vocabulary featured in their course books). Write the list of key words on the board. Put students in pairs or groups. Dictate 10 collocates. Students work together to decide which key word goes with which list.
Creating a Top Ten Collocate List
In order to generate a top ten list go to the website and chose the corpus you would like to work with (UK or US).
After registering, type your key word in the “WORD” box. Next, you need to choose the part of speech of the collocate. For example, the list that appears here is of adjectives collocating with the word “language”.
After selecting the part of speech in the POS box, go to the first box with a number in it and change it to “1”. This will give you adjectives one space before your key word. Set the other box (for collocates after your key word) at “0”.
Then hit the SEARCH button and your list will appear. Write down a list of the top ten most relevant collocates. Note that if you want to omit some words, e.g., “Spanish” you can replace them with collocates further down the list, e.g., “universal”.
This column was guest written by Ken Lackman, of Ken Lackman and Associates.
For more activities:
Classroom Games from Corpora (www.kenlackman.com/getmaterials.html)
Ken's upcoming workshops on using corpora
Corpify Your Coursebook
Oct. 16 TESL Toronto conference
Classroom Games from Corpora
Oct. 30 TESL Ont conference
Classroom Games from Corpora
Nov. 6 English Central
Erratum
TESL Toronto's Fall Conference is being held on Saturday,
October 16th, and not on the 15th as was stated in September's newsletter.
Apologies for the slip!
Connecting to Facebook
It is made up of two separate detective mysteries and is aimed at intermediate level adult students.
Fiction in Action: Whodunit has just won the 2010 Duke of Edinburgh ESU Language Book Award! For the past four decades this award, organized by the English-Speaking Union, has been given annually to the ELT book that the judges feel has contributed most to the understanding of the English language.
The Anti-Conference Conference Returns
Barry O’Sullivan is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Director of the Centre for Language Assessment Research (CLARe) at Roehampton University, London.
Anne O'Keefe is senior lecturer in English Language Teaching at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland.
It seems that a lot of folks are getting excited by lecture-capture technology and the possibilities this new advance can offer. Matterhorn is open-source and enables classroom lectures to be recorded and made available on the Internet.
Ever feel a bit out of the loop? We certainly did when we found out that 
In the spirit of giving thanks, here's a nice way to have your love of language do some good at the same time. Take this vocabulary test and fight world hunger by creating a donation for free rice.
