Professional Devlopment

I dont really consider myself a professional, but nevertheless this weekend we attended the 15th KOTESOL International Conference. KOTESOL = Korea Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. It was interesting. I have never really been to a professional development conference before and it made me feel somewhat important. There were a lot of different seminars on different topics that were aimed to help us teach. Some were sponsored by different publishers so the seminars were more of a sales pitch (trying to sell their textbooks) than actual help, but they gave us free stuff and I got to wear a spiffy name tag which made me feel swell.

Some of the conference wasn't helpful and some of it was. It made me much more aware of things I should be aware of while I am preparing for my classes. They were things I knew, but it was a good reminder and made me more conscious.

Some of the lectures were more academic, looking at linguistic analysis or discussions surrounding understanding English as a Lingua Franca. These were super interesting but not too practical for me in my everyday work.

Some facts for you that I found interesting:

75000 - number of words in the English Language
7500 - number of words needed to make a speaker fluent
4500 - number of words that the average native English speaker knows
2500 - number of words that are used 80% of the time when speaking English
These stats were taken from a publisher selling a new dictionary that includes "core words," it highlights the most important words used in the English language

6912 - number of living languages in the world
80% - Percentage of people who speak English that are Non-Native English Speakers (In other words, only 20% of the people who speak English are native English speakers, wow)
12 - Number of verb tenses in the English language

I found these interesting, hope you did too.