A variety of online forums or message boards for both EFL teachers – at Dave’s ESL Café and ESL Base to name a few – and students. If you have a specific question, you can ask, and there may well be someone with a unique insight to share. Often you can contact people directly as well.
Forums are also often a good way to do a limited amount of research for job hunting. I’m not going to imply you should trust everything that’s there – in fact you may well find information that’s blatantly wrong, misleading, or skewed by a negative personal experience – but as a starting point, if you are basing your opinion on a variety of people’s comments, it’s not bad, especially when your other main alternative is to take the word of one person – a potential employer. Don’t base important decisions only on something you read on a forum (or for that matter any blog or logue); use your own judgment and consult multiple sources. But I think if you remove the online element from EFL, what’s left is rather small and I don’t know how much of a match it would as far as timeliness, bias (or the lack of it) or specificity.
I’ll be honest – in my opinion, some forums can get a bit scary, and some have a definite negative vibe. Some people use the cloak afforded by online anonymity to pull out all the stops and say/write things they probably wouldn’t in person. However, I think there are plenty of professionally-oriented (or just nice, fun and civil) forums of which being a part is a pleasure and you can be active or not at your own discretion.
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And then there are my forums which are just boring. Haven’t been able to drum up enough people interested in participating to get a self sustaining community. But if people post there, I’ll do my best to answer.
Here is the direct link if you’d like to check out EFL Geek’s Forums: http://eflgeek.com/index.php/forums/
There are forums on teaching issues as well as learning Korean.
As EFL Geek seems to know what’s what in Korea, this is a good resource.
daves eslcafe is probably the worst forum on the Internet, especially the China pages. The posters there are often arrogant towards newcomers, definitely self-opinionated, and usually contradictory. Occasionally, some of the advice is just plain wrong!
A much more pleasant place to visit for China information is ….
http://raoulschinasaloon.com/index.php
Well worth the visit if you are planning to head to China.
Thanks for this info on another China forum.
While I don’t disagree that the specific points you make may apply to some who post at Dave’s, I personally think that in general the site can still be valuable in a number of ways – though it’s certainly worth keeping in mind the context the information is given in – an online forum where anyone can post essentially anything.
(Hey, I’m afraid of getting virtually beat up if I say anything bad about Dave’s! Just kidding…)
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