Tag Archives: News

Bulgaria and Romania fret over possible flood of UK TEFLers

The Prime Minister of Romania and Foreign Minister of Bulgaria yesterday publically expressed their concerns over the expected sudden influx of low skilled, semi-nomadic TEFL teachers from the UK from January 2014 following the end of visa restrictions, many of … Continue reading

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Libertarians protest linguists’ monitoring of their language use

Proponents of freedom of speech and thought on both the right and left have recently kicked up a fuss about how their conversations, online communications, etc are being tracked and stored by linguists. According to Marvin Hassler of human rights … Continue reading

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Pearson buys Brazil’s largest chain of language schools

Story from FT here, and The Wall Street Journal, The Independent and The Daily Telegraph have all covered the story too. Forbes profile of the founder Carlos Wizard Martins, including explanation of the name, here. It was a bit tricky … Continue reading

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Change in editor at Modern English Teacher magazine

Having a stack of half finished TEFL articles and now two fewer places to put them, have recently been writing to all and sundry asking them to please take them off my hands. Turns out my advice that everyone should … Continue reading

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Expect a flood of criminal TEFLers to a school near you

According to the EL Gazette all British Council inspected schools in the UK will need to conduct criminal record checks from 2014, so if the country or school you are in doesn’t insist on such checks a whole bunch of … Continue reading

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Who would you give an OBE to?

Macmillan have proudly announced an OBE for Simon Greenall for services to ELT publishing. Although I’m a republican and so followed Sandy McManus in turning down my knighthood for services to TEFL blacklisting and attempts at TEFL humour, it’s good … Continue reading

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Hiberno English to become official language of EU after Brexit

Not only is annoying the British the only reason for the French blocking English as the official language of the EU, they have found a way of finally accepting the inevitable while pissing the UK off still further by preparing … Continue reading

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Two reactions against English in primary schools

Indonesia scrapping primary school English lessons and Quebec toning them down.  

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Big changes to BULATS

It doesn’t seem to have been officially announced yet, but my broken link detector took me to a major reorganisation of the BULATS website under which hid even bigger changes to the exam. What I’ve managed to discover so far: … Continue reading

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Japan facing new demographic crisis

As well as facing the world’s most rapidly ageing society, according to a speech by a government minister yesterday Japan is also having to deal for the first time with its supply of foreign teachers getting older and older as … Continue reading

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