English Raven

KOTESOL National Young Learners and Teenagers Conference - March 10, Daegu

The KOTESOL Young Learners and Teenagers Special Interest Group (YLT-SIG), of which I am a co-coordinator with Jake Kimball, is gearing up for its annual conference. This year we are being hosted by Daegu-Kyungbuk Chapter on March 10 at Kyungbuk National University. Our theme is "Creating Materials for Young Learner Classes".

We are very proud of this annual event for teachers of young learners and teenagers, and we put a lot of effort into getting top-class presenters and materials together. As with the 2005 event, we will be putting a conference kit together with plenty of resources, and fielding an impressive line-up of presenters.

More information will appear here as we confirm a couple of last-minute things. However, if you see this and you're teaching YLs or teens in Korea, make sure you circle March 10 on your calendar!

Boost! Reading and Writing Components Released...

It's a great feeling when you go through the turmoils and pure midnight oil-burning hard work of making textbook manuscripts and then finally get to see the finished product emerge. That's the feeling I experienced when I saw my Boost! Reading and Writing books finally come out this month. No rest for the wicked, however, as I immediately went on an author mini-tour here in Korea (taking in Seoul, Busan, Changwon and Daegu), and in April I'm off to Taiwan for a similar tour.

Boost! is a special series aimed at young learners and teenagers learning English as a foreign language. In some ways it is an epic series, covering four levels of proficiency and five different components (reading, writing, speaking, listening and grammar) - so 20 books in total. It is unique in that it seeks to cater to learners who have already put a fair amount of English under their belts but need something to help them take the step up to more specific skills.

You can find out more about Boost! by clicking on this link (featuring an interview I did with Pearson Education Korea as part of a presentation at the KOTESOL International Conference in 2006), or go to the official Pearson support site.

I'll try to add regular notes here in the blog about what is happening with Boost! The Speaking component is already in production as I write this and should be out in a couple of months. Listening and Grammar are not far behind.

OnlinEnglish Ready to Pounce!

As CEO of OnlinEnglish (www.onlinEnglish.net), I'm happy to say that the company is starting to grow at a phenomenal rate and with the help of my long-time friends and colleagues (Dean Stafford and Yannick O'Neill) we're getting ready to do some pretty big things!

OnlinEnglish already provides an innovative online program focusing on speaking and writing skills for our regional partner Jasaeng JS English in Changwon, South Korea. Through that contract we work with 12 online native speaker tutors and approximately 500 learners aged from 9 to 17 across 10 different levels of proficiency. The learning experience here has helped us to pave the way towards making OnlinEnglish a truly international company with lots of potential to do great things for EFL learners's speaking and writing skills.

Thanks to our good friends at YackPack, we now have the online facility we need to make speaking fun, easy and motivating. I've spent a lot of time bouncing emails and ideas with Tanna there at YackPack, and their devotion to their product is simply amazing. YackPack has the potential to do provide amazing communicative resources for learners of any language anywhere in the world.

Right now we are busy trialing our onlinEnglish programs with Boost! (written by myself and published with Pearson Longman Asia) and NorthStar iBT. So far so good!

English Raven reverts to free access for all

Well I'm happy to announce that English Raven (www.englishraven.com) has reverted to being a free resource site again for all teachers of EFL/ESL to young learners and teenagers. That means teachers everywhere now have completely free access to the 3000+ pages of materials and activities stored away on the English Raven site. Enjoy!

This followed a period of around four years where I was charging a membership fee to access English Raven. During that time I was subsisting mainly on a rather meagre teacher's wage here in South Korea, and with a distance MA in progress, a family on the way and a stubborn insistence to not succumb to illegal private teaching, I generally needed to supplement my income somehow... In fact, the initial decision to charge for membership was largely driven by feedback from visitors, who were telling me they couldn't believe the amount of quality materials they could access, and some actually recommended that I charge for it!

Some improvements to my salary, an international publication with Pearson Longman and a flourishing online teaching business well and truly fixed any income woes, and I immediately changed Raven back to a free resource again at the first opportunity. It's actually quite a relief for me, because I was never entirely comfortable with the idea of charging teachers to access materials to make their classes run more effectively. Teachers of young learners in particular need all the assistance they can get, and shouldn't have to pay out of their own pockets to make the schools they work at better institutions.

Well, that's that then, and I hope teachers find English Raven a useful and convenient tool.

Starting Up!

Hi and welcome to my weblog. I've been meaning to get one of these started for eons, it seems, but finally here it is.

You'll find me posting here about a variety of things, including (but I hope not limited to) my ELT publications and activities, my online language learning business (www.onlinEnglish.net), my teacher resource site (www.englishraven.com) and some ongoing observations about my young bilingual son Jamie (Jae-min).

In any case, thanks for stopping by and I hope you find something here that tickles your fancy!