This morning I recieved an email asking if I would post about the upcoming JALT 2008 conference.

I just recieved the following email from KOTESOL regarding the Seoul Chapter annual conference. If you are intersted in presenting or attending click the link to learn more.

Dear KOTESOL Colleagues,

KOTESOL Seoul Chapter is seeking workshop presenters for the Seoul Chapter annual conference on March 28, 2009.

For more information, please check out the notice on the Seoul Chapter main page (http://www.kotesol.org/?q=Seoul).

The conference offers an opportunity to share your research and teaching insights with like-minded colleagues in a professional yet warm and cordial setting. We urge you to send in your proposals, even if it might be a first for you!

Best wishes,

Grace Wang
KOTESOL Seoul Chapter, Secretary

English villages across Korea are losing money and have failed in their purpose. I’m not surprised. Read the whole story at the Joongang Daily.

Regional governments invested heavily in the villages without much consideration for educational demand.

As a result, half of them are concentrated in the Seoul metropolitan area and some are only a two to three minutes’ drive from each other.

Most of them offer short-term programs lasting only a few days, which means they cannot satisfy the original purpose of complementing English education at schools and substituting costly English learning programs abroad.

Charles is conducting research on Korean oral literature and culture as seen by foreigners. If you live or have lived in Korea then go fill out this survey and help him out.

I’m filling it out now and have also added the link to my facebook profile.

Dealing with racism in hagwon (language institutes) is an article in Susan Kim in the Expat Living section of the Korea Herald. This is the same section that I write for.
The article is interesting and since it will go to subscription shortly I will include it in full in the extended entry.

I’m very interested in hearing comments from readers in Korea and outside of Korea about their experiences with this issue.

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The 31 day comment challenge is something that I’ve been meaning to write about and participate in since it started but I’m already 7 days behind. I first heard about it from Langwitches where there are already numerous posts about the activity.

The challenge is to essentially widen the range of comments and discussion in the edublogger arena - one of the keys to keeping your posts known is to tag them for technocrati with comment08 or include a link to that feed in your entry. There is also a list of participants on the wiki which will be a great source to find new blogs to follow - I’ll be adding my blog there and trying to participate as much as possible.

Brandon Carr writes a lengthy post about where English teachers in Korea can go for legal help.

Korea Law Blog’s advice to English teachers is this: Stop trying to “sue” your scummy hagwon owner with a $500/hour big law firm. Talk your case over with Gerald Staruiala, then pay Mr. Bong-Soo Jung his fee to file your complaint with the District Labor Office. This starts a process of administrative tribunal backed by criminal prosecution (i.e., the power of the State)—the most effective implement to deal with a snake.

Secrets of Those that Do the TEFL Hiring is both a thread on the ELT World forums and a post on the ELT World blog summarizing the thread. This is an informative read with perspectives from various people involved in hiring from around the globe.

I’ve been going to ELT World for a while now. The forums have a good mix of people from various countries and it doesn’t seem to be quite so vitriolic as Dave’s Cafe. There is also a little more professional talk, though that is not all - there’s still the chatty threads and fun things that one would expect from a message board.

The downside is that there are not enough regular posters. there are 3-5 new posts/threads a day in the busiest forums, but other forums haven’t seen a post since I started there. I really think that this forum has potential to be an excellent community and for ELT instructors world wide. However the admin has tried to copy Dave’s cafe by have forums for each specific country or region when there isn’t the user base to support this. If there were only 2-3 forums to start the users that are there would be more concentrated resulting in more new threads in the area of high traffic. This would draw in more users and eventually there would be a large enough user base to diversify and add more forums.

Despite the lack of focus, I am an active member there and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. If you are looking for a community with potential for growth and that is not over moderated and filled with negativity like Dave’s Cafe then I suggest you head over to the ELT World Forums and give them a boost. Also check out the affiliated blog.

For the past few months I haven’t been commenting on or linking to other blogs very much. I’m not sure why, but instead of saving posts in order to comment/link to them later I’m going to try and get on it right away.

First off, Larry Ferlazzo has been doing some serious high quality ELT blogging for some time now and there are so many posts that i have failed to comment on or link to it’s a shame. Be sure to check out his archives. I submitted an entry to the Fourth ELL/ESL/EFL Carnival that Larry posted including this comment EFL Geek from Korea, who might be the “dean” of ESL/EFL bloggers. I don’t know about that, but I like the sound of it. Thanks Larry. Another recent entry is The Best Websites for Learning English Pronunciation

The Marmot (47 comments and counting) also links to an op/ed piece in the Korea times - Foreign Teachers need to be given a Stake in the System. I agree with the basic premise that foreign instructors need to be given a stake in the system, but the author shoots himself in the foot when he writes:

Candidates should be selected from the top 50 universities of English-speaking nations with a demonstrated ability to deliver knowledge in a confident, meticulous, and courteous manner.

The author has a B.A. in Sociology and an M.A. in Asian Studies, how does that qualify one to be a language teacher? Sure it meets the visa qualifications, but I would take a teacher with education and linguistics degree from an unknown university over a teacher with an unrelated degree from Harvard.

The Marmot (9 comments and counting) also links to an article stating that SMOE will send foreign instructors to a 2 month training program.

I’ve recently had an epiphany. I’m going back to the root of language teaching. The traditional method of grammar translation is the best way to teach English. Clearly if students cannot use grammar correctly they will never be able to use the language.

Over the last 15 years it has truly become apparent that Communicative Language Teaching is just another fad that is quickly fading away just like The Silent Way and TPR. The only truly effective way to learn a language is to translate word for word classical works of prose.

I know this is true because over the last 6 months I’ve been doing this for my Korean study and now I am fluent in Korean with native like command of the language. I’m considering taking on part time work teaching other foreigners Korean since Korean language teaching has also been suckered into the belief that CLT is the way. Practitioners of CLT should be burned at the stake like the witches of the 17th century.

Come join me in returning to the roots of language teaching by focusing on grammar translation.

Alex Case is reporting on some (il)legal troubles that bloggers are encountering with one individual on the internet. It seems that this individual is threatening to sue owners of blogs even when said blogs have written nothing about this individual on their own blogs.

It also appears that he has been somewhat successful in shutting down two bloggers already. He is currently targeting Alex - go read Alex’s post and offer your support.

According to this article in the Korea Times foreign teachers are starting an association. The organization is called The Association of English Teachers in Korea (ATEK) see also this thread on Dave’s cafe for further commentary.

This has been definitely been needed for sometime, but has always met with the response that this type of organization/union is illegal for foreigners in Korea to participate in. I’m not sure about this as ATEK may not be a union. In any case I am 100% in support of this. Below is a quote from the Korea Times article.

ATEK aims to solve difficulties and troubles that many foreign teachers now face. He enumerated the issues; unpaid salaries, pensions, taxes and health insurance, unsafe and inadequate housing arrangements, arbitrary changes to employment contracts and employers’ refusal to provide letters of release as well as unfair banking practices.

Rainey-Smith, serving as a media relations officer for the association, said it will also encourage cultural diversity by campaigning against sexual, racial and other forms of discrimination such as advertisements of hagwon that say they only want ``white teachers.’’

In the long run, ATEK will pursue ``visa flexibility.’’ The Japanese government allows visa flexibility whereby teachers can enter the country and work for any employer unlike Korea where educators must remain with their sponsors and are not allowed to transfer to other workplaces.

I’ve been invited to participate in an extensive reading colloquim at the KOTESOL international conference in October. This is a room with 5-6 different presenters at their own individual stations where they speak and answer questions for about 20 minutes three or four times. attendees move from one station to the next and thus get several different points of view and experiences with Extensive reading in an intensive and personal manner.

Coincidentally March is Reading Month, at least in North America. My next column for the Korea Herald will be an introduction to Extensive Reading.

Additionally KOTESOL has started an Extensive Reading SIG. I’ve copied and pasted the information below including contact information for Scott Miles (he’s in charge). I’m not sure why there isn’t a spot on the KOTESOL web page for the SIG. I guess it’s coming soon.

We are very happy to announce the formation of the Extensive Reading Special Interest Group (ERSIG). Extensive reading is a great way to develop reading and overall language skills, and we’d like to do what we can to promote in further in Korea. Some of the purposes of ERSIG are as follows:
1. Promote extensive reading as a viable approach to reading and general language development in Korea.
2. Share ideas on how to apply extensive reading in the language classroom in Korea
3. Promote and disseminate research related to extensive reading practices

This spring we hope to recruit a number of people to join as officers and members and then hold our first meeting to define ERSIG’s structure, policies and goals. We will also try to get some time to speak in local KOTESOL chapter meetings to drum up some interest. Finally, to get ERSIG started off with a big bang, we plan to hold a symposium focused on extensive reading in the early fall. We hope to draw in some of the bigger names in the field of extensive reading.

We encourage anyone interested in joining ERSIG or just getting more information to contact us:

Scott Miles:
Aaron Jolly:

Bill Kapoun is an ELT instructor in Korea. He was in an apartment fire resulting in third degree burns to over 70% of his body. His employer did not provide health insurance and no Bill’s family is left with medical expenses estimated at $130,000. Visit the links below to find out how to donate to help pay his bills.

EFL teacher burned in house fire (korea times article)
update Korea Herald Article

facebook group

Official Homepage

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Joe Seoul Man has compiled a rather extensive list of universities in Korea and the salary/vacation/housing that each provides. He has asked for reader contributions to complete the list but as it stands its a great starting point. Go read it.

Gall is Google Assisted Language Learning and there’s an article about it in the referreed journal Language Learning and Technology. The full text is available and if you want to keep it or print it (with proper pagination) there is also a pdf available.

hat tip to the ELT World forums.

Another good column in the Expat Living section of the Korea Herald for which I am a contributing author. This piece comes from Lucy Johnson. All aspects related to English teachers are things I’ve been saying for years - not here, but with my friends over coffee. I’ve cut and pasted the whole article in the extended section as it will shortly go behind the subscription wall. The Indentured Foreigner - all emphasis mine.:

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I noticed a few bloggers complaining about not being able to permalink Korea Herald articles. There is a real easy work around for this provided you are using firefox. Go to tools > options > click the advanced button next to enable javascript and then uncheck disable or replace context menus.

After you do that find the article that you want to link to and right click somewhere in the text and choose this frame > open frame in new tab. You will then be able to copy the direct url to that page. You can see this in action by reading Robert Koehler’s article on the new visa regulations.

Screen shots in the extended entry.

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2008 has started and it’s time to talk about plans for the new year. I’m not making New Years Resolutions, I’m making plans for the year - don’t really like the idea of resolutions.

In late November, early December I was approached by the Korea Herald to write a column for a new section coming in January. I talked with friends, my wife and thought carefully about it, before deciding to accept the offer. The new section will be written by a large number of bloggers around Korea, with each blogger assigned a different “beat” or topic. It will be easy to guess my topic - education and in particular language education.

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The Yangpa* has the low down on some new visa rules specifically for Jeju Island. These rules will definitely separate the men from the boys.

* for the uninitiated yangpa = onion.