Welcome from Betty Azar
A useful, practical, fun, friendly meeting place where ESL/EFL teachers can share ideas and materials—that’s my vision for this website. Its purpose is, simply put, teacher support.
I know without even knowing you that you are a busy teacher. I know how many demands there are on your time, how important it is to you to keep up with the field and continually improve your teaching by trying new things, and how students can chew up material faster than locusts on a leaf. (Well, that might be somewhat of an exaggeration—but it takes students maybe five minutes to go through material that may have taken you or me an hour or more to write.)
On this site, you’ll find materials you can download for use in your classroom—such as worksheets, games, communicative activities—plus teaching ideas, grammar information, and lively collegial forums. We hope teachers in training will join us, too, as well as researchers and other interested academics.
The web is perfect for communication among those of us who include some sort of grammar component in our teaching, but who are in far-flung corners of the world. Whether you teach from an Azar text, any other text, or no text—perhaps as a Peace Corps volunteer somewhere in the world with no budget for textbooks of any kind—I know you’ll find something useful here.
I hope you’ll share your experiences, ideas, and yes, pictures of yourself and your students with the rest of us. And, very importantly, I hope you will be willing to share materials you have created for your own teaching as a way of helping other teachers. If we pool our teacher-generated materials, we can create a global classroom, if you will, with students benefiting from the creative input of many different teachers. That’s an exciting idea!
Please join me in building a global community of teachers, sharing our knowledge and experience and supporting one another in our work. Together we can create a great site, tapping into the ability of the Internet to connect professionals—to the betterment of all of us.
— Betty Azar