LESSON PLANS ON APEC WIKI

Lesson plans I submitted are now on APEC's wiki,
Cross Cultural Communication,
http://hrd.apec.org/index.php/What%27s_in_a_Name:_A_Cross-Cultural_Communication_Project

Gender Roles in Advertising, http://hrd.apec.org/index.php/Gender_Roles_in_Advertising

Public Service Announcements, http://hrd.apec.org/index.php/Public_Service_Announcements

Other lessons from TESOL submitters are found here http://hrd.apec.org/index.php/Tips_for_Teaching_21st_Century_Workplace_Skills

Am very pleased :-)

Aiden
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Subject: APEC Wiki
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 19:00:07 +0000

Greetings to all (there are 6 of you in this email…),

Remember a while back… I was bugging you about creating teaching tips for a contract for APEC? Well, here it is: http://hrd.apec.org/index.php/International_Education_Week_2010

All of our wonderful teaching tips are found at Tips for Teaching 21st Century Workplace Skills.

I cannot even begin to share my thanks and gratitude for all of your contributions. Thank you, thank you, thank you! If you had time, look around a bit. The Skills for Success in Multinational Business was developed by the Center of Applied Linguistics. The Business Language for a Global Economy was developed by Synergy. And the Learning About Each Other pages were developed by the US Department of Education.

Cheers-

Sarah
Professional Development Manager
Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc.
A Global Education Association
http://www.tesol.org/

Christmas Carol Learning Materials

I'm sharing on this blog post a message posted by Kieran on IATEFL's YG list. On the link provided you can find learning materials on Christmas Carols, which should be just in time since Christmas is around the corner.

http://christmascarol.esolebooks.com/

Visit Kieran's site at http://younglearners.eslreading.org/ for more learning materials.

Kevin Spacey on Being Successful

Peter Medgyes: Native or Non-Native language teacher?

The text below was the message posted by Dennis Newson at the YLTSIG list. Peter Medgyes is going to lead asynchronous discussions on Native or Non-Native language teacher? The discussions are going to be held on YLTSIG Yahoo!Group list http://groups.yahoo.com/group/younglearners/ You need to join the group in order to participate in the discussions.

Our fielder for the YLTSIG discussion from Monday 8 November to Friday is PETER MEDGYES, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest. Previously, he was a schoolteacher, teacher trainer, Vice President of his university, Deputy State Secretary at the Hungarian Ministry of Education and the Hungarian Ambassador in Damascus. Professor Medgyes is the author of numerous books and articles published both in Hungary and abroad.Many of you may have read his Changing Perspectives in Teacher Education (Macmillan Education, 1996), Laughing Matters: Humour in the Language Classroom (CUP 2002) orThe Non-Native Teacher (ELT) (Max Hueber,1999).


For the YLTSIG discussion we have decided to look again at an old and still disputed issue -
Native or Non-Native language teacher?

As Peter put it when I invited him to make a provocative statement to get the discussion started:

"I still know of language schools which are reluctant to employ non-native speaking teachers of English. If you were the principal of a language school, would you also give priority to natives?"

Well, would you or wouldn't you - and why?

The official start of the discussion is on Monday, but there is nothing to stop you posting right now if you have an opinion to share.

Dennis Newson
Formerly University of Osnabrueck, GERMANY
Committee member
Discussion List Manager IATEFL YLT SIG
Creator: YLTSIG NING
http://ylandtsig.ning.com/
Winner British Council ELT 05 Innovation Award
Unrepentant grammarophobe

YLTSIG Website: http://www.yltsig.org/
Yahoogroups: Subscribe: younglearners-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

SpeedGeek: Electronic Village Online Sessions

I'm reposting Vance Steven's message to the Webheads' List

Hi everyone,


This Sunday at 1300 GMT Elizabeth Hanson-Smith will coordinate a presentation on EVO, or Electronic Village Online. You can find information about the free professional development available over a 5-week period this coming January and February 2011 here http://evosessions.pbworks.com/, and you can come to this live event to meet some of the moderators who are now preparing to put on these sessions; e.g.

PLEs and PLNs
Susan Berg, Letizia Cinganoto, Daniella Cuccurullo

Second Life
Dennis Newson, Kalyan Chattopadhyay, Heike Philp, Maria Pinto, Nahir Aparicio

Podcasts
Evelyn Izquierdo, Jose Rodriguez, Miguel Mendoza

Digital Storytelling
Carla Arena

Multiliteracies
Vance Stevens, Dennis Oliver, Jennifer Verschoor, Nelba Quintana

Internet4YoungLearners (a 2010 EVO session)
Sandra Rogers

The event actually starts at noon GMT (4 p.m. in the UAE) when teaching practitioners gather at http://tappedin.org for informal text chat. At 13:00 GMT (5 p.m. in the UAE) we move to the presentation venue in Elluminate at http://tinyurl.com/y3eh

Please note, Elluminate is generously provided to us by Learning Times, and prior registration is required (non-intrusive, takes only minutes).

The Google Calendar showing these events displays at http://multiliteracies.ning.com/

All are welcome, and hope to see you there,

Vance

Letter-from-the-Chair Draft

Dear NNESTIS Members,


I hope that 2010 has been a good year for all of you as it has been for our Interest Section (IS). Since this will be my last letter as Chair, I’d like to bring your attention to three key IS issues: IS elections and exiting IS officers, TESOL 2011 Academic Session and Intersessions with other ISs, and the NNEST-Electronic Village Online (EVO) 2011 Session.

Firstly, we are going to wrap this year with an election for the various Steering Committee (SC) positions for 2011-2012. I will be stepping down as Chair, and Icy Lee will take over as Chair for 2011-2012. Aya Matsuda and Ryuko Kubota (members-at-large officers) and Lifen Lin (our web manager) will also end their terms in March 2011. Candidates for these positions will be announced soon, and I’m hoping that we could have our elections before 2010 makes its final exit. To Aya, Ryuko, and Lifen, many many thanks for your help and support. Rashi Jain will continue on with her role as our Newsletter Editor, and (name of new volunteer insert here) will be the (name of position to be filled, insert here). Election results will be announced to the list and an official announcement will be made during our IS business meeting in New Orleans next March.

Secondly, for the 2011 TESOL convention in New Orleans, we will be working with SLWIS (with NNEST as primary), SPLIS (as secondary), and with TEIS & EFL ISs (as third), and the following NNEST-IS members will be representing our IS in these sessions:

NNEST-SLWIS Intersession: Icy Lee, Lisya Seloni, and Claus Gnutzmann
SPLIS-NNEST Intersession: Paul Sze, Katya Nemchinova
TEIS-EFL-NNEST Intersession: Isabela Villas Boas

Zoreh Eslami, Lia Kamhi-Stein, Lawrence Jun Zhang, and Donna Fujimoto will be joining me for our Academic Session.

Last but not least, we will be offering NNEST-EVO 2011 in January to kick-off a good year for NNEST teacher professional development. We have a roster of great guest speakers per week who will be leading the synchronous and asynchronous discussions. The speakers (see below) are experts in their own right and are quite well-known in the TESOL/ELT academic circle.

List of Confirmed-Speakers

1. Jeremy Harmer

2. Jeff Lebow

3. Yilin Sun

4. Isabela Villas Boas

5. Michael Carrier

6. Marisa Constantinides

7. Robert Griffin

8. Icy Lee

9. George Vassilakis

10. Masaki Oda

11. RELO Thailand

12. Rashi Jain

The thematic weekly discussions will cover a range of NNEST-related issues, which unfortunately despite the vast research conducted and published papers in these areas, the same concerns and dilemma still exist today. Links to the synchronous and asynchronous discussions will be announced by the end of December. This EVO session is definitely something you wouldn’t want to miss!

Thank you all and have a great new year!

Aiden Yeh

Response to Week 2, EVO training, Pitfalls

Hi All,


I'd just like to respond to Holly's and Sandra's messages regarding this thread.

First, I like what Holly wrote about getting balance, support, and most importantly, the ability to forgive ourselves when we fail to do what we're supposed to do. Increasing/adding items to our 'things to do' list is really not a pitfall, but it becomes one when we stuffed in too many things at the same time. This is my common pitfall. I tend to over commit myself, to the point that I don't get enough rest, I produce a pretty mediocre job (which I could've probably done better), etc. A glance at how we all performed in Week 2 is a good benchmark in looking at our commitments. We are all committed to this training, yet not all of us shared with the group what we have accomplished so far. Are you like me? Have you over-comitted yourself this time around? Your session participants would probably do the same thing. So instead of producing/participating in making use of the learning opportunity, they'd tend to not fully commit themselves since they've probably had tons of other things to do in their 'to-do' list.

Sandra mentioned 'enforcing' people to participate. We all do want them to participate. But unlike her course, our participants are not graded. This isn't a pass or fail thing. We just kinda provide this learning service for free and we just hope that they somehow would benefit from this experience, one way or another. But this training session, although free and voluntary, we do have standards. And this year, as mentioned in Week 1, we do have some pending sessions. Your participation in this training i.e. evidence of meeting the tasks/benchmarks will be used to assess whether your session is ready for offering or not. I don't want to sound like the strict-principal that all teachers hate, but EVO has got a name to keep. And I hope that we are all in the same boat and using the same sculls so we can row it smoothly.


Have a great Week 3 everyone!


Aiden Yeh
EVO/NNEST-EVO 2011