Talk to the Clouds archive (to be removed soon)
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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…
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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…
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“Tadoku” Means Extensive Reading
TESOL professionals with training in communicative language teaching methods often complain about the state of foreign language teaching in Japan, where grammar-translation, usually called 訳èª/yakudoku is still the dominant method. Yakudoku, though, is not the whole picture, even if it sometimes seems that way. In fact, various Japanese groups are working to supplement or replace…
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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…
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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…
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Helping Burma and China
Today has been a strange day–I’m still mentally dealing with the gargantuan disasters in Burma and China, but I’m also relieved that the human rights situation in the United States has improved marginally, with the probable legalization of same-sex marriage in California. I guess TESOL people tend to have global connections and an interest in…
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Tame Info Overload with RSS
A big part of professional and personal development is staying current with research, news, and conversations among others in our fields. There are so many great and worthwhile blogs and blog-like sites that the ones in my blogroll here are just a drop in the bucket. How do you keep up with everything without clicking…
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Where do you buy your ESL books?
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and there’s a well-known ESL bookstore here, Alta Books. I’m always looking for more places to buy books, because Alta is pretty far away. They also don’t stock some of the things I especially want to buy in person rather than online, such as the Cambridge readers.…
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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…
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English-Teaching Zombies
No, no, not me and my mentor-teacher after we graded a stack of 30 multi-draft essays–we’re talking about a videogame. English of the Dead is not a joke, but an honest-to-goodness game produced in Japan for all those gamers who would like to work on their English and destroy a few zombies. You can even…
Got any book recommendations?