Our showroom is closed for the holidays and will reopen for business on January 3rd. However, customer service and shipping/receiving will be operating on December 28th, 29th and 30th.
Thank you for your business in 2016 and we wish you the best for 2017!
Season’s Greetings everyone! It is hard to believe another year has gone by (well, we don’t want to believe it but the increased creaking of the bones makes it impossible to deny). If it is any consolation, this is the one time of the year when we have a sale. We can help you get some awesome resources for a (festive) song; at the same time, you can help us lower the number of books we have to count during our upcoming end of year inventory. Everyone wins! Here is how it works:
Who would have thought that a man who can rarely string together a complete sentence would influence what got chosen as Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year? Well, the unthinkable has happened again. Donald Trump’s electioneering, along with Brexit, have popularized the use of the term “post-truth”, which is an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.
The term has been around for a decade, but its usage has gone mainstream during the past year, and often collocates with “politics”.
Read more on the meaning and the rise of the term (and see the other words on the shortlist) on the Oxford Dictionaries’ site.
The Open Doors report was recently released and it shows that while the number of international students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs in the United Stated increased by 7.1% in the 2015-2016 school year, the number of students in intensive English programs (IEPs) decreased. Enrollment in IEPs actually decreased by a substantial 14.6%. A representative from English USA attributes the dip in numbers to the decline in Brazil and Saudia Arabia’s funding of students wishing to study English overseas.
For a full analysis, go to Inside Higher Ed.
The full Open Doors report.
Like there isn’t enough good news these days, a new website “Professor Watchlist” was recently launched in the United States. This website seeks to expose liberal professors who contradict Alt-right ideas in the classroom. According to its website,
“The mission of Professor Watchlist is to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.
For a fuller picture, please read more on Inside Higher Ed.
Immediately following the election of Donald Trump, the Immigration Canada website crashed because it was overloaded by traffic from the United States. Some Americans thought to escape to Canada by studying here. The day after the election, the University of Toronto saw ten times US traffic to its site than the day before.
Furthermore, Google searches in the US for “colleges Canada” and “university Canada” on the day after the election were over 200% higher than any day in the past five years.
Read complete coverage in The Globe and Mail.
On November 11th, the Canadian government announced a change to the Express Entry system, which is the system in which most people immigrate to Canada.
Effective November 19th, applicants who completed a degree in Canada will receive up to 30 additional points (scoring the highest level of proficiency on a language test only gets the applicant 22 points). It is believed that this change will help boost the number of international students choosing to study in Canada.
Read more in Canadian Business
This year’s California TESOL conference is being held in San Diego at the Town and Country Resort Hotel. English Central will be there and we will be joined by one of the fine publishers we represent, Express Publishing. Aside from having great resources on display, we will ahve a number of great giveaways too, so make sure that you come by our booth and say hi to Carrie and Alex.
Some teachers in the Boston area decided that they needed a professional development opportunity that speaks to the specific needs of teachers working in private language schools and Intensive English Programs, and from that the MATESOL PLS/IEP Mini-Conference was born. We are pleased to support and attend this inaugural event being held at CELOP at Boston University.
English Central is pleased to announce that Liz Lee is our new Senior ESL Specialist in Texas. We are honored and thrilled that Liz is bringing her considerable knowledge and experience to our team.
Elizabeth Lee graduated cum laude from Vanderbilt University and attended Vanderbilt-in-Spain. Her educational career began as a teacher of Spanish and English in Florida, California, and Arizona. She eventually joined the publishing world as a sales representative in California and Arizona and a trainer for the Western Region with NTC Contemporary Publishing. When NTC became a part of McGraw-Hill, she became a National World Language Consultant traveling throughout the United States to train teachers in best practices for language acquisition. Next, she worked for many years with Cambridge University Press as an Independent Consultant which led her to be very familiar with the needs of ESL teachers and students.
Working with English Central in the great state of Texas, she will be able to provide new opportunities for success in the ESL classroom. She is dedicated to helping her customers discover materials to support their curriculum and providing the best service possible.
She resides in Dallas with two dogs and has two adult sons. One son is studying communications at FIT—Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, and the other, a Texas State University graduate and owner of one of the dogs, is teaching ESL in France.
