Please visit our website (http://www.tesl-hk.org.hk) and pass this message
along to your teacher-friends. Your contributions are welcome!
Many thanks,
Angel
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Welcome to the inaugural issue of TESL-HK, a professional newsletter for
English language teachers in secondary schools in Hong Kong and around the
region. We are excited to begin this journey, and are especially pleased
to have you along. Our aim is to address issues that are important to
you--things that you and your colleagues are thinking about every day as
you enter your classrooms and interact with your students. We plan to
bring TESL-HK to you two times per year, and we hope to see every one of
you involved in determining what goes into this newsletter. More on that
later.
VISIT OUR WEB SITE TO SEE TESL-HK NOW:
You might be wondering who 'we' are (we would be too!). Well, 'we' are a
team of local and expatriate TESL and TEFL specialists from the English
Department at City University of Hong Kong who have a keen interest in
English language teaching in our schools. Through our experience with our
BA (TESL) and MA (TESL) students, we have developed a genuine concern for
helping foster and develop the sense of community among English language
teachers in secondary schools in Hong Kong and around the region, and
providing them with an outlet to express their concerns. We feel that
TESL-HK is an ideal way to do this.
But why another newsletter? Some of the teachers we spoke with in planning
TESL-HK told us that there were already a number of newsletters available,
so what will make TESL-HK different? We think this is a good question.
TESL-HK will be different because it will provide a voice for you--the
English teacher--to address issues that are of importance to you. We're
not here to tell you what we think you should do. We're want to hear from
you.
How do we know what's important to you? Well, we sent out a preliminary
questionnaire to a number of secondary schools to get some idea of what
teachers would like to see in a newsletter. We received replies from 342
English teachers in 95 local secondary schools (if you were one of our
respondents--many thanks!), and your responses gave us a very clear idea
your priorities.
Topping the list were practical concerns, such as classroom activities,
teaching strategies, teaching innovations, and all sorts of fun stuff, like
tongues twisters, grammar puzzles, and poems. Also important were an
outlet to address teachers' problems and concerns, and space for teachers
to share their experience on teaching. TESL-HK will provide all this and
more.
But do you know what we think is the best thing about TESL-HK? You. That's
why we ask you now (and throughout this first issue) to send us your
thoughts, concerns, and issues in any way you can--by snail mail, e-mail,
fax or phone--and we'll do our best to include them in future issues of
TESL-HK.
Thanks for reading.
The TESL-HK Team
(Angel Lin, Yvonne Loong, Dino Mahoney, Christina Ng, Ken Rose, Gertrude
Tinker Sachs, Eunice Tang, Wai King Tsang)
English Department, City University of Hong Kong
Tat Chee Ave., Kln., Hong Kong
E-Mail: ENTESL who-is-at CITYU.EDU.HK
Fax: (852) 2788-8894
Phone: (852) 2788-8196