Becoming A Teacher In California

Group Dynamics I have always been fascinated by social dynamics and how they affect groups in personal and professional contexts. A teacher must be constantly aware of group dynamics while teaching. The teacher is not, however, merely exporting language information-grammatical structures, vocabulary, etc-but also acts in a role model capacity. This translates into how the teacher presents materials and engages the class. While researching for this essay, I stumbled across an article titled, Teacher Identity as Pedagogy: Towards a Field-Internal Conceptualisation in Bilingual and Second Language Education. The article explores using the teacher’s personal identity as a ‘field-internal’ teaching tool, as a way to teach students a language, but also excite collaborative skills in...  [Read more]

Mighty big place, Partner. As Ferdinand Braudel, the great French historian observed, ‘the land dictates the people’, and it is a good idea never to stray too far from this theme. If you want to know what ‘cold’ is then head up to Minneapolis, north of Toronto, in the mid winter. If you want to know what ‘hot and humid is’ then try Orlando in the height of the summer. If you transcribe a line from Los Angles to Miami and turn this into a road trip then the number of different peoples and environments you will encounter is immense. By all means there is a thin veneer of Americanism, and everywhere you will find both McDonalds, and the presence of the Federal Government; however, you shouldn’t let this take your eye off the ball of the fact that the people and environment of...  [Read more]

British english vs american English With English being recognised as the global language of choice, which one is considered the official language? So just how did American English diverge from British English in the first place? American English roots back to the early colonial days of the late 16th century, were a whole gamut of cultures converged into a single society. In some colonies English wasn’t even a spoken language and in those colonies that did speak English it was quite different from the English we know today. The Elizabethan English of the day consisted of many varieties of regional English dialects. All these different dialects, intermingled with a multitude of cultures formed one big boiling pot, of which over time, a new variant was produced – American English. And...  [Read more]