Teaching Pet Peeves

We all have things about teaching that drive us nuts. What are your pet peeves, especially about English language teaching?

pet peeve noun - /ˈpet ˈpiv/ something that especially annoys you:

Weak coffee is one of my pet peeves.

What are your own “pet peeves” about teaching, about this language teaching thing we partake in? Anything that bugs you, drives you crazy? Anything that really gets under your skin when you read it, read about others believing it or doing it? I have a quite a few ELT pet peeves. Download this video as a presentation here.

I have over 30 years invested in English language teaching. I’ve seen and almost done it all. No exaggeration. I’ve always kept changing, moving … it’s kept me supple and verdant as a teacher.

Private teacher, backpacking teacher, online teacher, business English teacher, taught refugees and immigrants, supply teacher, taught public school ESL for years, blogged, wrote coursebooks, designed 1,000s of materials, directed a school, managed an international ed-tech ELT company, taught university pre-service teachers, TESOL graduate school professor, many teacher training stints, managed teachers and teacher trainers, presented at conferences around the world, published author, held many online webinars, ran my own online professional development portals, built and programmed ed tech, tech tinkerer, social media advocate …. and ELT Buzz everything. That’s just off the top of my head this morning.

I say this because I believe and feel strongly it’s incumbent that I share what I’ve learned through my experience and years in the “industry”, plying the trade. That’s what my blogging has always been about. That is part and parcel of my social reconstructivist philosophy of education.

You can see my English Teacher Beliefs list or my list of ELT Myths for some of my critical posturing. Also, review my 50 Best Practices list. But if you want something really “critical” from my lookout tower – read the ELT Pet Peeve tweets that I’ve listed below. I collect them here because as we all know …. social media content and platforms are ephemeral. In time, these will all be erased.

Many of these ELT Pet Peeves you will disagree with, adamantly or just a little. That’s fine. We all have our own belief systems and come from different teaching environments and cultures. Comment, debate – the goal is to get us critically thinking about our role, our beliefs and challenging what goes on in ELT.

Why not do a lesson about “pet peeves” with your students? What are their pet peeves in life, at school etc … Become a subscriber and get many resources for this topic in the Lesson Library.

So without further ado (and forgive me for the long intro.), here are some of my ELT Pet Peeves.

ELT Pet Peeve #1. Teachers who don’t share lesson plans/materials with colleagues / staff and treat their lessons like a top secret coca-cola formula.

ELT Pet Peeve #2. “Real English”. REAL English – really? Yet, you’ll see people using it as a supposedly valid term, adjective. Drivel. All language is “real”. What is “unreal” English?

ELT Pet Peeve #3. Word lists. Teachers and curriculum designers who believe learning a list of words is effective and central to learning English.

ELT Pet Peeve #4. “Listen and repeat.” “Listen and repeat.” “Listen and repeat.” “Listen and repeat.” “Repeat after me.” “Repeat after me.”

ELT Pet Peeve #5. Accent reduction. “Speak Naturally”. We all have an accent, get used to it, love it, embrace it. NEVER reduce it.

ELT Pet Peeve #6. Educational blogs with loads of google ads splattered everywhere. Imagine your classroom full of Pepsi and “Buy This” posters splattered everywhere ….

ELT Pet Peeve #7. Linguistic discrimination. Glottophobia. The notion that the utterances of some speakers is more beautiful than that of others.

ELT Pet Peeve #8. – Linguistic determinism. Or the peddling online of articles saying “If you speak X language it changes your (vision, personality, taste buds etc ….). It’s culture not language ….

ELT Pet Peeve #9. The oversell of “bilingual”. It seems to mean you have brain super powers and it increases everything from spelling proficiency to your marathon run time.

ELT Pet Peeve #10. The prevailing notion that teacher in class training and education ALWAYS improves their teaching. Not so. Not always transfer, even seldom is transfer without other types of follow up.

ELT Pet Peeve #11. – Oversell. Systems. Snake Oil. Learn English in x months. x weeks. We guarantee it!

ELT Pet Peeve #12. Any form of grammar-translation. Let learners do this in their head but should not be a method of teaching a language.

ELT Pet Peeve #13. “Just Be Yourself”. Bad trainer advice. Don’t be fake but also act in ways to get your job done. Teachers are soft performers.

ELT Pet Peeve #14. Useless blog posts and articles. Click bait, SEO garbage. Like this one about introducing vocabulary. For example – https://bit.ly/2Ji8eA7

ELT Pet Peeve #15. – Teacher Guides. Never seen one or used one that is any good. Cluttered and meant to sell and enculturate teachers to “the book” method.

ELT Pet Peeve #16. Hangman. Just don’t even go there ….. If you need “filler” – talk to your students. Use authentic language.

ELT Pet Peeve #17. Teachers who believe the language they speak is the correct language all others should speak, write.

ELT Pet Peeve #18. Teachers who deliver all lessons from one spot in the class and don’t move around.

ELT Pet Peeve #19. Teachers who insist on accuracy over fluency. (There are many)

ELT Pet Peeve #20. Nat. and Regional TESOL / IATEFL etc .. organizations / publishers that become “foreigners country clubs” and dens of exclusivity (with of course token entry for local minorities

ELT Pet Peeve #21. The general lack of job security, no benefits, low pay across the industry. The FACT we call it an industry not a field or profession.

ELT Pet Peeve #22. The confusion by many of declarative knowledge with procedural knowledge.

ELT Pet Peeve #23. People, companies, organizations, schools, ALL who value, rank, assess teachers based on innate characteristics (skin color, native/non-nativeness, place of birth, hair color, smile, frown etc …).

ELT Pet Peeve #24. The dearth and lack of awareness or training among professionals of special Ed. strategies/techniques and its importance vis a vis language learning.

ELT Pet Peeve #25. Conference pricing. Everyone suggests teachers need to attend more conferences but nobody suggests decreasing prices.

ELT Pet Peeve #26. Parents that want/demand/look for white, western only teachers. Let’s do a better job at educating the public.

ELT Pet Peeve #27. The blah status quo. Not enough teachers, organizations, admins, schools, you name it ….. demanding change

ELT Pet Peeve #28. Language “tests” that involve paper only. Placement or otherwise …

ELT Pet Peeve #29. Discussing or negotiating class rules on Day 1. Day 1 should be a day of getting to know each other – rules can come thereafter.

ELT Pet Peeve #30. Employers who post ads (and the businesses that accept these ads) that indicate “the ideal candidate will be a native speaker”. Like this one.

ELT Pet Peeve #31. “English Only” school and class policies/rules.

ELT Pet Peeve #32. – Language classes with desks in rows. Or language teachers saying it is too much work to move and then remove desks.

ELT Pet Peeve #33. Correcting students during a discussion or free speaking activity.

ELT Pet Peeve #34. Too much pre-teaching. Not letting students have a go first. Little attention to pure enjoyment of the language and inductivism.

ELT Pet Peeve #35. – “Get into groups of X and discuss topic Y.” An imposed conversation that isn’t nurtured or of the students’ volition.

ELT Pet Peeve #36. That higher education in ELT is so and utterly male dominated.

ELT Pet Peeve #37. Teachers, schools, a curriculum that doesn’t promote student autonomy and independence.

ELT Pet Peeve #38. Sentence transformation and language manipulation exercises. Especially when it comes to tests, qualifications etc ….

ELT Pet Peeve #39. Ed-Tech Determinism. The belief that teachers must use technology because it is inevitable, the world is so etc ... all despite there being no evidence technology expenditure has improved student outcomes (PISA, 2015).

ELT Pet Peeve #40. The over assignment of English language learners to special ed programs in ESL programs.

ELT Pet Peeve #41. The presumption that pronunciation is a productive skill alone.

ELT Pet Peeve #42. The lack of focus on true communication and textbook driven teaching.

ELT Pet Peeve #43. Students who ask for homework that they’ll probably never ever do.

ELT Pet Peeve #44. The enduring belief among so many that there is or should be an order of acquisition.

ELT Pet Peeve #45. Lessons without a hook, art, soul, spice, flash, magic, creation. Let’s replace fun with flare.

ELT Pet Peeve #46. Admins, DOSs, head teachers, principals, school systems that don’t give teachers adequate (or any) paid prep time.

ELT Pet Peeve #47. The dearth, the lack of freedom to teach. Teachers as assembly line workers fluttering through imposed curriculum and pages.

ELT Pet Peeve #48. Teacher overcorrection. Especially of student-written work.

ELT Pet Peeve #49. Conference presenters that ask us to read lists of “points” on a screen that we easily could read before or after. Presentation malpractice.

ELT Pet Peeve #50. The belief that an innate, congenital, hereditary characteristic is the standard which all teachers should try to emulate.

ELT Pet Peeve #51. The lack of current events and news (world or local) in daily lessons and curriculum.

ELT Pet Peeve #52. Language schools closing and not paying their teachers or debts.

ELT Pet Peeve #53. Lessons teaching directions with “unreal” materials, decontextualized and not local or of the students’ world.

ELT Pet Peeve #54. The fact we need to explain, argue for, promote the self-evident notion of ELF.

ELT Pet Peeve #55. That so few women in ELT have come forward as #metoo ers. I know of a few scandals with women by several ELT big shots – one very big one I admire is a serial womanizer.

ELT Pet Peeve #56. Teacher visa discrimination. Why can’t well qualified teachers from some countries travel the world and teach while others can?

ELT Pet Peeve #57. Online digital ELT/TEFL franchise selling mongers. I made X in X days and you can too, sitting on the loo! Just pay me!

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