EFL Geek 3.0 - ESL & EFL in Korea

English Villages a failure

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.

Web 2.0

My latest article for the Korea Herald is now out and it is on web 2.0 in the classroom. Read it at the Korea Herald site or look in the extended entry.

Hope you find it useful. I know there are many many more sites that could be introduced but due to space constraints I had to limit myself.

My Last Column

This is also my final column for the Korea Herald. I notified my editor when I submited this lasted column. I’m just too busy to continue writing this column. I’ll be watching the Expat Living section to see who my replacement is and I’m sure I’ll be linking to it in the future.

Korea Herald Readers

Welcome. Feel free to comment and leave your thoughts on this weeks column. If you would like to learn more about me visit my bio page. I have also been blogging at this site for 4 years so there are a lot of entries if you care to look through the archives. Some of my favorite or more popular entries are available on the classic entries page.

KOTESOL 2008 - might skip

KOTESOL 2008 is just around the corner and presenters need to register by this Friday. I took a look at the site and presenters/members no longer get a discount on conference fees. The last 3 years that I attended/presented I paid my membership fee of 40,000 + 25,000 conference fees for a grand total of 65,000won. Well this year membership fees are the same, but now I have to pay 50,000 for conference fees (double) - all this for the priveledge of speaking.

I’m not sure it’s worth it especially since the list of invited speakers is a bunch of nobodys - the only ones I’m familiar with are David Graddol (definitely would want to see him) and Curtis Kelly (somewhat intersted). I do know who John Linton is, but he’s not worth seeing if your attending this conference to learn about teaching - He’s a doctor who’s lived his entire life in Korea. I didn’t find his patient interaction to be particularly pleasant and consequently I go to Korean doctors instead.

Anyhow I’ll make my decision tomorrow, but I’m definitely leaning to skipping this time around.

100 pushups

Today is the first day of the second semester, so back to work for me. The web design business is doing pretty well, since I’ve got about 3 clients backed up.

Today will be a quick meet the students and a 4 minute level test to see how many students I can kick out of my class and move them to the advanced class. Real lessons will start from day 2 this week. In other news, my university finally got around to giving us a raise after three years, so morale is much improved.

Finally, I’ve decided to take the 100 pushup challenge. I took the strength test on Friday and I’m in column three (the most difficult). I did my pushups for day one this morning and will work on day 2, come Wednesday.

Olympics News

I’ve been using newspaper articles with a couple of adult students for some time now. I thought it was time to share another resource - I just finished preparing an article to use later this week - it’s olympic related and was published today.

If you haven’t milked the olympics to death with your students you might find this useful. Taekwondo fighter kicks referee in the face - I took one article reformated it and found comments on another article and added that two page two - I think it should make for an interesting discussion. If you like it please leave a comment. As usual it’s available both pdf and
publisher.

Online learning

I spent over 15 years attempting to teach English conversation in Japanese schools and colleges. Getting students to talk to each other was often hard work, but it was better than having no conversation at all! However, now I’m back in the UK I have seen how much better the communicative method works when you have a variety of different nationalities. Wouldn’t it be nice to recreate this in classrooms in Japan, Korea etc. Well, now we have the technology! What you need is a good broadband connection, webcameras and headsets. And a link with a school or college in a neighbouring non-English-speaking country who have similar goals in mind.
I know of a couple of schools and colleges in Japan who would be interested in taking part in such an experiment with a school or college in Korea.
Maybe some of you are already doing this. Maybe some of you are interested in trying this out. I’d be grateful for any information, advice or leads anyone has.
Please contact me via this site or directly by email at chrisbondo@btinternet.com
Thanks.

Mad About English

Hat tip to Dekita.org

Mad About English, a film by Singaporean filmmaker Lian Pek, humorously documents China ‘s passionate love affair with the English language and their obsessive quest to learn it (some through very unorthodox methods).

This TechCrunch article shows another opportunity to_grow_ your_ career by pointing to a very grammatically (and politically) incorrect website, EngrishFunny, to which users send in photos of poorly translated or odd variations of written English in products, signs or instructions.

Deivis Pothin, a student of linguistics in London, shares his impressions and worries about the underlying message.

What is Web 2.0

English 360 has the answer.

Ultimate Online Slideshow Guide

I recently had a need to add a couple of powerpoint presentations to another web site I’m working on. I wanted to be able to embed the powerpoint and retain transistions and animations as well as embedded audio or video. A quick search didn’t reveal any definitive answers so I’m going to compare the options I did find. One of the keys with using powerpoint online is to remember that not everyone has powerpoint (but the viewer is free 2003 version & 2007 version and openoffice will also open powerpoint files with some loss in functionality)

I’m going to to look at a number of features across all options including: compatibility with pptx files, ease of use, privacy controls, embed, email, social network links, commenting, registration, downloading of original file, and licensing. To make the comparison equal across all options I’m using the same powerpoint file for all services and embedding it here. This is a powerpoint that I used in spring 2008 and it has several animations, transitions, video, and audio embedded. You can see the original by downloading it - I’ve included the ppt and pptx in the zip file (27.5mb). The options I’m looking at are:

Not all slideshow players are showing up in bloglines (and possibly other RSS readers) - visit my site to see everything.

Learn about each of these options in the extended entry.

Art Supplies

I recieved the email below from a reader, but am unable to answer it since I haven’t worked in a hagwon for 8 years. If you know the answer, please leave a comment.

Can you email a list of the typical art supplies available in the Hagwon classrooms? For example, scissors, paste/glue, construction paper, crayons, markers, rubber bands, string or yarn, etc.

My guess is that most of this stuff is available, and if it isn’t it is cheap to buy at the local stationary store (I know because I buy it for my children).