If you’d asked me in 1999, I probably would’ve predicted that Task Based Learning was going to take over the TEFL world, for better or worse. What a damp squib that turned out to be, with apparently even Cutting Edge no longer being described as a task based course. Despite being ubiquitous in UK state schools, Interactive Whiteboards remain the next big thing in TEFL and so don’t quite cut it as the biggest change of this decade either. Ditto with the thing that is stealing TBL’s thunder, CLIL.
Here are some things that could be candidates, and you can vote for these or add your own suggestions in comments below:
- Books based on electronic corpora, e.g. the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, The Cambridge Grammar of English and Academic Vocabulary in Use
- Teacher development videos, e.g. included with the latest edition of The Practice of English Teaching or available on YouTube
- Illegal copies of TEFL books, videos and recordings being available for Bit Torrent download
- Use of YouTube in lessons
- Most students having electronic dictionaries
- The proliferation of TEFL teaching certificates, with some of the new ones apparently overtaking Trinity and nipping at Cambridge ESOL’s heels
- Online TEFL teacher training
- The expansion of Wall Street English and other schools where the student does most of their study on computers
- TEFL job ads moving entirely online
- The Oxford Basics series and other books aimed at the minimal resources, minimal training and sometimes minimal language skills of the majority of real English classrooms around the world
- The commercialisation of the British Council
- Onestopenglish and other publishers’ sites taking over from independant sites
- ESLprintables.com and other materials sharing sites
- TEFL blogs
- The influence of Dogme ELT
- The influence of the idea of English as a Lingua Franca/ English as an International Language
- The availability of online English lessons, e.g. via Skype
- The expansion of IELTS
- University and Assistant Language Teacher posts been subcontracted out to language schools and recruitment companies
- Static or dropping ELT wages in Thailand, Japan, UK etc
- The long decline in the number of new methodology and photocopiable books
- The expansion of English into primary schools in most countries of the world
- Digital voice recorders
- The expansion of the EU
- Countries considering Indian and Filipino teachers in place of overpriced and underqualified Brits, Yanks and Aussies
- Marketing departments in publishers deciding on the next book up then commissioning it from writers, and hence the disappearance of sending in an idea for a book and getting it commissioned
- The decline in reputation of International House
- The rise and fall of Dave’s ESL Café
- The appearance and disappearance of TEFL Blacklisting sites
- The decline in influence of the Pilgrims mafia
- The reacceptance of a need for a “focus on form”
- More and more specialist ESP
- Computer based testing
