ELT Professionals Cooperating Around the Globe Sandra J. Briggs TESOL President 2007 - 2008

I. Introduction Sandy Briggs You, the participants

II. What Makes an ELT Professional?

The Individual Teacher It is you or me or the teacher sitting next to you.

B. Initial Training This can be a teacher in your school explaining what you will do to obtaining a university degree.

C. Teaching Experience We hope that the initial training comes before the teaching experience, but sometimes it is the other way around.

D. Professional Development This is everything that you do after you start teaching to continue to grow and develop as an ELT professional.

Professional Development Graduate degrees Workshops Professional associations Using the Internet Working with the teachers in your school

So when do you become an ELT professional?

III. What Advantages Do Nonnative ELT Teachers Have?

IV. What Do ELT Professionals Do to Be Professional? Keep a teaching journal Talk and plan with other teachers Join a professional association Read professional material Attend professional meetings

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. V. An Example: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. www.tesol.org

Position Statement on the Status and Rights of Teachers March 2007 Teachers play an essential role in educational advancement, and teaching should be regarded and respected as a profession.

It is a form of public service which requires expert knowledge and specialized skills, acquired and maintained through rigorous and continuing study.

Moreover, it calls for a sense of personal and collective responsibility on the part of teachers for the education and welfare of the pupils in their charge.

Position Statement Against Discrimination of Nonnative Speakers of English in the Field of TESOL March 2006

For decades there has been a long-standing fallacy in the field of English language teaching that native English speakers are the preferred teachers because they are perceived to speak “unaccented” English. . .

The distinction between native and nonnative speakers of English presents an oversimplified, either/or classification system that does not actually describe the range of possibilities in a world where English has become a global language.

Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) Interest Section in TESOL http://www.call-is.org/moodle Electronic Village: http://evo07sessions.pbwiki.com

VI. Using the Internet to Cooperate Around the World

VII. Conclusion

Sandy Briggs sjbtbf@earthlink.net