Podcasts

Maybe you're a lot like me and came overseas (for only a year!) to teach because you wanted to travel and make some money at the same time.  You had a good time, and kind of fell into the ESL thing as a career, without ever really planning to.  Or perhaps you had it all planned out, and studied linguistics or something at uni, but never really had any training in the more practical aspects of teaching English. 

Well...the best thing to do would be to take a Celta course (on the horizon for me!).  After that, reading some books, such as these ones:


Teaching English to Children in Asia.
Principles of Language Learning and Teaching 
World Link, Book 1 Teacher's Edition.

could be extremely helpful  The World Link book is an ESL textbook, but is has a very good, practical teacher training section in it.  

But maybe you're cheap like me,  and have all those books and think the CELTA is too expensive but want to continue learning about teaching ESL.  The next thing to do it to go to Itunes and download some podcasts.  My favorites are:

ESL Edgycation
ESL etc.
ESL Teacher talk.

Perfect for when you're on the commute, or working out at the gym.   And I've learned an outrageous amount of good, practical kind of stuff that I've incorporated into my teaching.  Some examples of topics on these podcasts are: The First Day of Class, Motivating Students, Two Discussion Activities.  I'm not sure there's any ESL teacher out there who wouldn't find stuff like this helpful.