Cool TEFL Blog: A Foreign Perspective

I’ve started following a blog called A Foreign Perspective, whose “owner” has been living in Adana, Turkey, for about three years now and teaching English. He is perhaps not your typical English teacher, in part because he’s been in the same location for a length of time (I think the majority of teachers aren’t), and his blog is not your typical English teacher blog.

People mostly take it for granted that the longer you’ve been abroad, the more in-depth observations you can make – perhaps not only about your “host” culture, but also about your own. I think it’s neat to see this in practice in a blog as well.

I came across A Foreign Perspective via a post where author Jake was considering why some of his learners had been studying English more or less all their lives and still couldn’t really speak it. (Of course it also flattered me that he though my response was clever). Since then, he’s made posts on topics like how far a book he’s reading may relate to the country he’s in, a neighborhood boy who now sells tissues on the street (and the challenge of how to really even think about or deal with this, not to mention “prevent” it), and family differences in Turkey. Dialogs frequently develop in the comments section of the blog, which serve to provide even more food for thought.

I think being is a position to make observations like he does is one of the greatest benefits of teaching English. Of course you don’t have to be teaching English to have valuable insights, but it does put you in a position to stay somewhere for a while, and also to interact not just with travelers passing through, but also with a wide variety of locals. So if you’ve been abroad a while, or are just interested in insights that come from living abroad, do check out A Foreign Perspective. And see some other sites the TEFL Logue has reviewed here.

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