Teaching English as a Foreign Language For Dummies

by Michelle Maxom

Learn to: Your one-stop guide to a career that will take you places If you thought that teaching a language that's second nature to you would be easy, think again! Explaining grammar, or teaching correct pronunciation while simultaneously developing your own skills as a teacher can be a huge challenge. Whether you're on a training course or have already started teaching, this book will help launch your career and give you the confidence and expertise you need to be a brilliant teacher. Open the book and find: 'An invaluable manual for anyone thinking of embarking on a TEFL journey. Michelle Maxom's step-by-step guide provides practical tips to get you started and offers key advice to help unleash the creative English language teacher within.'
– Claire Woollam, Director of Studies & a Teacher Trainer at Language Link London

Genres: Nonfiction, Reference, Language, Teaching, Linguistics

400 pages, Paperback

First published July 21, 2009

Reviews

[Samar Almossa]

I use it as a reference and I read what is relevant to my interests and needs in time. Very useful book.

[I wish I had eyeballs]

Is aimed towards native untrained teachers and doesn't have a whole lot of information, especially not expert information, moreso just advice.

[Otilia]

Although I am not planning to teach in the EFL around the world sort of scenario but in a secondary school, I found many things in here useful and fun. I do love her enthusiasm, energy and passion. There are many fun and imaginative things to steal from this book and try in a class.

I was a little shocked by the couple of strange typos I found in it, I wasn’t expecting that.

Overall though I would certainly recommend this for budding teachers like me. The grammar teaching part is very good, the game and activity ideas quite fun and engaging, as for the advice and other recommendations it was just pretty awesome to have read in general.

[Robert Day]

The only thing that stopped me giving this one star was a couple of tables I liked. One gave a list of the order in which adjectives should be used in a sentence and the other listed all the tenses. The only reason I liked these is that I've never seen them elsewhere (yeah, I know: unbelievable, right? It even amazed a friend I have in India, who learned these things in school).

The reason I wanted to give one star is that this is the only book I've ever read in the Dummies series that had spelling mistakes and grammatical error (and lots of them, too). How frickin' ironic is that!

Don't read this book.

[Lino Matteo]

The purpose is to get ideas to use for Teaching Business English to foreign entrepreneurs for non Dummies

Want to work with entrepreneurs from other countries.

An excellent resource to assist with this project

Always enjoy "The Fifth Wave" by Rich Tennant

Scanned but will come back to it as necessary

[Frances]

Interesting read if you ever thought you wanted to travel the world teaching English. You learn the in and out and some of the downsides.

[Lenaïk]

Attention, ce livre n'est pas destiné aux professionnels déjà en charge de classes. Par contre, très très bien pour un aspirant, surtout les mises en garde.

[MK]

A Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) is an instructional guide for teachers, but it is also useful for students learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL).

[AJ]

This is….fine. If you’ve ever taken a tesol course this adds noting new and is just review. The most useful part is when it teachers about how to teach grammar.

[PurplyCookie]

"TEFL is not about language as beauty; it’s about language as communication."

My objectives are to be familiar with all those areas that go into English language teaching – methodology, classroom procedures, techniques and aids, language awareness and testing.

I appreciate that the author tried to present the tried and tested path to solid TEFL courses since that is what I'm looking for. It is okay to have debates on methodologies but I do want something that has been substantiated.

I would say that I'm the ideal target audience for this book since I'm more interested in the mechanics of teaching than the methodology behind language learning. Most of the time I find a lot of TEFL/TESL books proclaiming to be the former but are actually the latter. This leads to a waste of my time and money.


More of Purplycookie’s Reviews @: http://www.goodreads.com/purplycookie


Book Details:

Title: Teaching English as a Foreign Language For Dummies
Author: Michelle Maxom
Reviewed By: Purplycookie

[Ruth]

c 2009 (7) Curiosity caused me to pull this one off the shelf. Well put together and I can see it would be an additional tool for any TEFL candidates.