Talk to the Clouds

Category: recommendations

  • Spotlight: (Thriving and) Surviving in Japan

    I’d like to spotlight a new addition to the recommended blogs here, Surviving in Japan (without much Japanese). This blog/how-to-directory is an ever-growing guide to how to improve your life in Japan if you are not perfectly fluent in Japanese, but are in English. The author, Ashley, is a writer (and part-time teacher) with a…

  • CATESOL 2010 Food & Shopping Suggestions

    I’m looking forward to CATESOL 2010 in Santa Clara! Some of you will be arriving soon; I’ll only be there starting on Friday, but I thought I’d post some suggestions on where to eat in the area. If you aren’t familiar with the area, it looks like there’s nothing nearby–just corporate offices for Yahoo!, Namco…

  • Getting on the Same Page: Book Gifts for Friends and Family

    Is it just me, or do friends, family members, and random strangers sometimes make strange assumptions about us once we become English teachers? They may think we support English-only policies, are ashamed of our first languages if we are multilingual, are constantly judging them on their use of English, etc. They may resent us for…

  • Open Mailing Lists

    I’ve had a request for a post on the topic of free, open mailing lists (MLs). Many teachers are not members of organizations such as TESOL, for one reason or another, and so don’t have access to the MLs and online discussion groups provided by these organizations. MLs can be extremely useful–you get new ideas,…

  • Learning Diary: Tadoku For Me

    A basic principle of any form of teaching is that a teacher should avoid asking students to do anything she wouldn’t do herself. Dr. Sarah Nielsen, the head of my MATESOL program, always put this into practice by joining us during in-class reflective essays. Most models for extensive reading programs similarly encourage the facilitator of…

  • Medical English Resources

    I’m looking for free online medical English resources for an advanced client who may look for work as a pharmacist in the Tokyo area. He already has much of the scientific and medical vocabulary, so it’s the colloquial vocabulary and cultural aspects that we’ll be working on for the most part. Of course, my perspective…

  • Amazing Online Dictionaries: ALC FTW!

    I’m back from my “vacation”–I think I need another one to recover from it. Oh well, on to the topic at hand! Most EFL and ESL teachers have a few students who rely too heavily on their electronic dictionaries. These dictionaries are limited, and don’t include critical information such as the tone of a word…

  • TESOL-related news

    Where do you get your TESOL-related news? An easy way to keep up with big and small stories is to check TESall.com’s Headline News Ticker for Teachers. This “news ticker” collects links to all kinds of English-language online news articles and blog posts. Although they generally link only to English articles, the coverage is truly…

  • Blogroll: Cognitive Daily

    Cognitive Daily is another blog I recommend. Generally, Greta and Dave Munger’s posts serve to introduce a piece of psychological, sociological, or neurological research and interpret it a little (the comments are sometimes very enlightening, as well). Because they cover many aspects of cognitive science, there are often posts that relate to teaching or learning…

  • Blogroll: Language Log

    I’d like to introduce some of the links in my blogroll, the list on the right of blogs and blog-like websites. One with which you’re probably already familiar is Language Log. It’s so well known that I hesitated to write about it, but if you haven’t seen it, you’re really missing out. Most–not all, but…