About me & this blog
My name’s Leslie. I’ve been an EFL Teacher since 1999—although it actually seems like much longer! I’m Australian and I started out in EFL at a Chinese community school on Saturdays (actually, that was in ‘98, I think), with kids who were mostly bilingual, but took extra classes in English and other subjects because (a) their parents were Chinese and thought that 100 extra hours of study a week would be good for them, and (b) their parents were worried about only speaking Cantonese or Hokkien or Mandarin at home. I liked that gig. Helped pay for my way through uni (second time round when I was studying Liberal Arts). And it made me realise how much I love both teaching and language.
When I was first at uni I studied Environmental Engineering, but dropped out after three semesters. Before setting off on that particular ill-fated journey, I naturally informed my high school teachers what I intended to study. And almost all of them (except maybe my Engineering Science teachers!) looked at me really quizzically. My English teacher said “You should read Satre”. My science teacher said “Engineering? No. You’re a teacher”.
So, I ended up back at at uni doing Arts in my mid-20s and soon got involved with linguistics and language teaching!
While I was doing that degree, I met and became quite good friends with a French exchange student, Vanessa. She was always asking me about aspects of English and we were forever discussing and dissecting elements of language (I was studying French at the time, too).
That was when I decided to really leap into EFL. I remember sitting with her in my room one day and I just grabbed the paper and said “Y’know what, I’m going to look for a job teaching English!”
And as luck would have it, there was a part-time opening at a a suitably cowboy outfit that one or two readers might remember called Astral (now defunct). I don’t want to name the DOS who gave me the position based on the dem-lesson I gave (REWARD, Upper-Int, Unit 11 (I think!): Food items and a reading task about nutters who cook using their car engines—Geez it’s been a while since I’ve seen that textbook! Ha!). Anyway, I don’t want to name her because it is somewhat dodgy practice to give an uncertified person a job (although I don’t think there’s anything illegal about it—I once heard (don’t know how true) that there is some loophole (or was) in Australian EFL that up to 3% of your staff can be non-CELTA trained but can’t be employed beyond 3 months or some such rubbish).
Point is: I don’t think she did anything wrong and I guess she was suitably impressed by my dem-lesson and/or desperate to (even temporarily) fill the position… AND… I owe her an ENORMOUS debt of gratitude because I just knew instantly that I was where I should be. It was so duck / water it was ridiculous.
After working there for a few weeks, I knew this was something I wanted to do and I started looking for how to get “trained up”. Then I think I got another day’s work there and was given exam classes to take care of. I even gave a workshop to other teachers about the IELTS test and how to break down the various components for students!
Well, the extra day’s work (on top of my full-time university load, my other part-time job stacking shelves in a supermarket, and the absolutely crazy relationship I was in at the time) meant that I could sign up to do a CELTA, which I did in the end through INSEARCH in Sydney. My trainers taught me a lot on that course, particularly Peter Schwarz, who drilled into me the importance of “form versus function”.
I knew I had to get out of Astral so I then took a gig with Windsor, where I met Madeleine Hills, who was the DOS, and Phil Welch, who was one of the teachers there. Madeleine was terrific to work for, and Phil and I ended up working together for a couple of years a bit later on. Diamond geezer. Last I heard he was teaching a “Language for Chefs” course, which is hilarious because I reckon Phil has gotta be the king of the frozen meat pie dinner!
After that, I went to Canada for a while before moving to London, where I picked up an EFL gig at a school in London called Stanton. David Garret, the owner of that school taught me an awful lot about the business—all quite indirectly—and I did my DELTA there through their inhouse training program.
It was at Stanton that I met some real masters of the craft and learnt a LOT about language teaching. I worked super long hours and spent a great deal of time preparing lessons and trying to work out afterwards where they worked and where they didn’t—and then why—and poring over piles of methodology books that would later appear on my DELTA and MA reading lists.
But I also had plenty of fun and made some very good friends in the years I was there. Peter “chub-chub-a-chub” Senior UCLES examiner and never wearer of two socks the same colour, Richard the salsa fiend, Handsome Robin (to his students—by his decree, that is!), Mike Dixon, Pete the part-time Welsh porn-star/stand-up comic… man the list just sooooo goes on and on!
Then I went back to Sydney for three years or so and worked at EF, down by the harbour. Jesus, they were a wild three years! Lots and lots and lots of stuff happened there. PHEW! And too many people to defame by mentioning! 
Professionally I had the opportunity to give quite a number of workshops and training seminars. I also got involved with the EF inhouse teacher training course—kind of like a budget-CELTA in which the new recruits are trained up for jobs at EF franchised schools in China and Indonesia (mostly). Modelled on the CELTA and Trinity certs quite heavily. I worked for Lindy Fitzgerald and Phiona Stanley in that moonlighter, and I’m happy to say that Phiona still messages me on Facebook from whichever exotic location she happens to be in at the moment! (Note: Adelaide does not count as exotic, gal!)
While I was at EF, a two-week inservice training course for practising English language teachers from mainland China was introduced and I was given the job of designing the syllabus for that and running the pilot version. As far as I’m aware, they still run that one from time to time. Last I heard, the tireless and totally awesome Keely McCauley was taking care of it. When she leaves that job, they’re not going to know what hit em, I tell ya!
Oh, and I also had the rather disliked job of being the dude who checked attendance records for the people on student visas—and subsequently notified immigration when someone was in breach of their visa terms. That was an interesting gig. Not just in terms of seeing people in my class, whom I quite liked as people, get deported (despite many “off-the-record”warnings from me), but also in terms of having to supervise the other staff to get their attendance data to me on time each week. Seems like a small thing, eh? You’d be surprised. The irreverent Kevin Dixon was in charge of that the last time I checked.
And not long before I left, I was given the job of supervising a test-design project to align with the brand new syllabus that had been introduced along with their own inhouse textbooks. This project actually fitted in quite nicely with some of the subjects I had done on my DELTA and which I was taking on my MA Applied Linguistics at the time.
So, I was busy at work and the totally mad crew that I worked with made for busy times in the bar outside work too!
And now I’m in Japan on the JET Program. I realised that the next step for me is to move into teacher training proper and that will mean training people up to work in adult EFL colleges as well as with children on programs like JET and EPIK and so on. And while I have plenty of experience with the former context, prior to coming to Japan, I only had very limited experience with kids and I no familiarity with (a) the high school teaching setting, and (b) a monolingual teaching environment. And I’ve always been interested in working in Japan so JET seemed like the most obvious choice.
That’s me.
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About this blog….
Well, this blog is really just another unexpected growth on the main site www.eflteachertraining.com and putting that site up (not that there’s much there at the moment!) is really just an extension of the two free resource packs I’ve put together recently for EFL teachers: the Halloween Pack and the Christmas Pack.
It started just before Halloween, 2007. When I was putting the Halloween Pack together, I just had in mind to send it out to other people on the JET Program. And really just to those JETs in my prefecture, lovely Kochi on Shikoku.
Then I thought it might be nice to contact some of the other JET groups and offer it to them as well. Which made me think “Hmm… I’m going to need a way to distribute it; I can’t be individually emailing everyone who’d like a copy!”
And so the site went up and an email delivery system got put in place and now this blog gets added to the mix because I’m really keen to hear the other voices (like yours!). It’s all been a pretty fast-paced ride for a guy who 6 months ago didn’t know the first thing about how to code a page, or what a cPanel was, or how to widgetize a blog theme (like I had to do with this puppy)!
I’m not really sure where I plan to take this blog (I wrote a page called “The Vision“, which has some vague ideas). I guess I’ll just try putting a bunch of things “out there” and see what kind of feedback I get.
I am starting to put together a sort of “map” of things I’d like to accomplish with the main site and I’d be very keen to hear your ideas. I’m not actually a teacher trainer yet so this site has kind of jumped the gun. I registered the domain name when I came up with the first rough idea for things I’d like to do to help language teachers do their job both more effectively and more easily… but I didn’t expect anything to come of it until at least the end of 2008! My current contract here finishes in July of 2008 and after that I expect I will be looking into knocking off the last couple of subjects on my MA and then training to become a teacher trainer.
So it seems a little bit silly to me in a way to be running a site called EFL Teacher Training when, in fact, I’m not yet a teacher trainer! 
But like I said, once I decided to offer that Halloween Pack to a bunch of folks, I didn’t want to be mailing it individually and the most appropriate place to put it seemed to be this site.
And that’s it! Here we are! I hope you can both learn something here and contribute to the community. I look forward to building this site (no matter how slowly) into just what the tag-line says: “The place for professionals in EFL”
Here’s to ya,
