Published by the Gwangju International Center since 2001
The reason that children work or study right after they get into the classroom is that they have curiosity. Curiosity and wonder, so evident in the enthusiasm of young children and so much a part of their life, are expressions of the basic human emotion of interest.
A new session is beginning at your school, and you need to select a coursebook for the EFL course that you will be teaching. What to do? Go to the ELT bookstore in your area to check out the coursebooks available.
There is a new guy in town, though he is not new to Korea or to Korea TESOL. Taking up a new position at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) is Reece Randall. He is also the new second vice-president of KOTESOL, and one of his roles in that position is to oversee the organization’s special interest groups (SIGs). In this interview for the Gwangju News, we ask Reece, among other things, to explain what SIGs are and how they work.
This article reports on a quite successful, combined journal-portfolio project with 76 university students over a one-semester period. Its purpose was to determine satisfaction with the project, its effectiveness in improving autonomous learning program design, and its effectiveness in improving autonomous study habits.
Expats are a quite transitory group. Many are very active in their adopted community, and then one day they are gone. You lose touch with them, and as the saying goes, “Out of sight, out of mind.” Well, what we have done is contact a number of former Gwangju residents who were also active members of the Gwangju-Jeonnam KOTESOL Chapter and asked them what they are up to now and how their experience here, including their KOTESOL experience, may have helped them in life after Gwangju.
If you have been around Gwangju for a while, you have likely heard of Julian Warmington – that pack of energy from New Zealand. Julian taught for years at Chosun University. During that same time, he also spent years contributing to a fledgling Gwangju News, where he wrote articles, served as co-editor, and later served as editor-in-chief. Julian was also considerably involved in Korea TESOL, serving for several years as editor-in-chief of The English Connection, KOTESOL’s quarterly magazine, as well as founding and being a driving force in KOTESOL’s Environmental Justice Special Interest Group. In this interview, we touch on all of the above but focus on how EFL instructors can instill in their students a strong sense of environmental awareness.
“Many expat teachers in Korea today got their start in English teaching at one of the many private English institutes that populate the streets of every population center in the nation. I did not begin my days in Korea working at a language institute (aka hagwon) – nor did any expat in Korea at the time. It was against the law. “English fever” and “English hell” are not such recent phenomena. During the Park Chung Hee administration, only a very few hagwon were granted business licenses, and those that were so lucky were limited to teaching content directly related to standardized exams such as the college entrance examination, and hiring non-Koreans to teach English was also against the law. “
We are all familiar with the terms linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. But peace linguistics may not be so firmly seated in our lexicons. To find out more about this, we turned to Jocelyn Wright for an interview.
