Image: Nikos Koutoulas
Well, 2011 is upon us and I'd like to wish all the fantastic people who have read and commented on this blog the Happiest of New Years. May it bring you new motivation and success, and all the prosperity you deserve!
Of course, with all this New Year stuff, I'm supposed to be in the mood for making resolutions. I'm not sure whether I'm just burned out, too disorganised or old and wise enough now to avoid engaging in such follies, but the thought of making commitments and resolutions for the year ahead just doesn't appeal to me much at all right now!
However, I am in the mood for being a bit reflective -- about the year just gone. As an ELTer, I feel that I learned and discovered a tremendous amount over the past year, and perhaps it's all worthy of a blog post at the beginning of 2011...
So here follows a random instinctive "Best of 2010" list, for me personally. And yes, a lot of what follows is about me, what I have experienced and learned from. It is, to be quite frank, a reasonably selfish and self-centred list.
ELT Blogs
Scott Thornbury's An A-Z of ELT blog was by far the most educational and thought-provoking blog for me in 2010. The content, issues, and discussion appearing on this blog leave your average MA TESOL reading list and forum for dead. It effectively revives many topics from ELT's past and places them in a contemporary and collaborative digital setting, where past, present and future all converge. While Scott hosts and provides exemplary background information and questions to ponder, you get a real sense of the potential of web 2.0 and the notion of readers being participants and writers, too. An amazing learning and teacher development resource, and it is fast becoming far superior to any print-based TESOL/TEFL publication I have seen.
Teaching Techniques
I don't think it would be too unfair to say that, for many ELTers actively engaged in the blogosphere, 2010 was quite possibly The Year of Teaching Unplugged (I've already explained on this blog why I prefer to avoid the term Dogme), and judging by the rather rich list of postings I organised on this theme, it was certainly a huge part of this blog.
But beyond (or in addition?) to that, two particular techniques that I personally experienced and felt I learned a lot from were The Live Reading concept and the un)-plug-(un butterfly bow tie lesson sequence. I'm still contemplating how much of the success or interest I associate with those techniques comes from me being an experienced ELT writer returning to the classroom, but it also makes me wonder how much ELTers might be able to enhance and enliven their basic lesson approaches by learning some of the fundamentals of ELT materials writing...
This Twitter-based Discussion Group was a huge move forward for me personally, having the honour of being one of its founding Mods, but I also think it has had a very positive and motivating effect on a lot of ELTers who are active on Twitter. I know I've certainly learned a lot from participating in the discussions, even just from -- well, being a participant! There's still some fundamental experimentation and tweaking going on, but we're young and learning and all that... :-)
People
Where would be without them, eh?
I dedicated a post late last year to humble fellow ELTers to whom I've become rather attached over the past year or so, calling them Bright Lights of ELT to learn from and with. One of them even made a brilliant Season's Greetings rock performance that I, erm, enjoyed participating in (gets pretty hot under that wig and all the leather, let me tell you)...
There was also an absolutely brilliant live session recorded on video with Henrick Oprea and his fabulous teaching team in Brazil, who were generous enough to pass on their thoughts about my ruminations concerning blank sections in coursebooks. I might go so far as to say that video chat was the highlight of my blogging year!
I also enjoyed getting to know three of ELT's higher profile personalities a little better, these being Scott Thornbury, Gavin Dudeney and Simon Greenall. True down-to-earth gents all of them, and I'm enormously grateful to them for being brave enough to give me more than a couple of minutes of their time...
And of course, any mention of people ends up exluding more names than we ever want to. You know who you are (because you're reading this), and I thank you personally from the bottom of my heart!
So, onwards and upwards with 2011, it seems...
Why do I already feel tired, then?
=D
