The
language teacher's survival handbook
About the book
In this book we address some of the day to day issues that teachers face inside and outside the classroom, based on the belief that the glue that holds your lesson plans together is you and if you don't feel right then your lessons won't be right. It could be called "Surviving being an English language teacher".
This book is not a methodology book about teaching. We think that there are already a lot of very good books like that on the market, but it does address some methodological issues. It's not an activity book (again, there are lots of these available). But there are activities that teachers can use. This book is about surviving teaching.
Chapters on stress, interviews, the staffroom and teacher development are included to help you feel more comfortable and confident about being a teacher, before you sit down to plan your lesson.
There are also chapters on topics that you will find in other books, such as grammar, teaching in company, using materials and teaching children, but taken from a slightly different angle. Our approach is to take typical challenges voiced by teachers themselves as our starting point and work through them.
There are chapters on body language, culture shock and using mother tongue in the classroom because we think these subjects are part of the fabric of teachers' day to day lives but seldom dealt with in training courses or basic methodology books.
There is a guide to the history of EFL, which gives an overview of language teaching methodologies and helps you to situate yourself within the "bigger picture". We hope too it will make you curious to find out more. There are also practical reference guides to English language exams and teacher training.
Finally we have included lots of practical teaching ideas. Well, you can't have too many of those, can you?
Lindsay Clandfield & Duncan Foord
About the authors
Lindsay
Clandfeld is an English teacher, teacher trainer and author based
in Spain. He began his teaching career in Canada and has taught at the
secondary and tertiary level in Mexico, Spain and the United Kingdom.
Lindsay has addressed conferences and trained teachers in over 15 countries.
He is the author of coursebooks and online material. His book Dealing
with Diffculties (DELTA Publishing, with co-author Luke Prodromou,
2007) won the Ben Warren International House Prize and the Duke of Edinburgh
English Speaking Union Highly Recommended Prize in 2007.
Duncan Foord is Director of Teacher Training at OxfordTEFL, Barcelona. He has spent 20 years in ELT, teaching and training teachers in the United Kingdom, France, Spain and the Czech Republic. He has worked around the world as a moderator for Trinity College London. He has contributed articles to various ELT publications, including Onestopenglish.com, iT’s for Teachers and HLT Mag, and has presented conference workshops on a range of topics. He is the author of Activities for Teacher Development (DELTA Publishing, 2008).