Which Five TEFL Trends Will Still Be Around In Five Years’ Time?

The TEFL Logue is nearing its one year anniversary, which means over three hundred days of posting and nearly 850 posts full of my own unique variety of TEFL Logue cheer.

Had someone told me just over one year ago that today I would be a blogger with that many posts under my belt, I would never have believed it. But even one short year can hold a lot of surprises.

TEFL itself is a field where methods and, yes, also teachers, come and go at the drop of a hat.

So which TEFL trends will still be around in five years’ time?

• Headway will remain a mainstay. While the development of new series of coursebooks will slow as learners use more and more technology, I predict Headway will remain more or less the same but will still inspire a loyal following. Incidentally, I also predict even more texts about Seamus from Scotland with thirteen jobs (I believe he now makes an appearance in Cutting Edge as well – can anyone confirm?)
• The Asia rage – Korea’s demand for native speaker labor will continue, though a plateau seems inevitable. I also envision a dramatic turn of events: perhaps involving a blogger who will stop at nothing in his/her quest for truth? Or maybe even “contract” killings of teachers in the last month of their contracts, arranged by schools looking to get out of paying the bonus? Ultimately, this will result in at least some labor law reform.
• Full-time, salaried work, with benefits and no split shifts will become the norm around the world, spurred on by the mission of tefl-trade’s Sandy to secure better working conditions and pay for EFL teachers in the UK. Schools which do not agree to these more normal conditions will understandably have a harder time attracting long-term teachers. As a result, a handful of innovative entrepreneurs will create a round-the-world EFL “trip”, where gap year students known by the new acronym TEFLAYTRTW (teach English as a foreign language as you travel round the world) can work for one month at each of twelve (language) schools which prefer this kind of labor. For better or worse? You be the judge.
• The TEFL Logue will be going strong – you’d better believe it! By that time I will have reached about, oh, around five thousand posts, and there will be a blogroll of TEFL Bootsnall blogs (maybe even some TEFLAYTRTW blogs!). I’ll probably be posting from somewhere “unique”…like… Antarctica or somewhere.

What do you think? I’ll be taking out the crystal ball again soon, so get ready for my five year predictions for some well-known EFL bloggers.