The ESL training system begins

I've just spent the Easter long weekend away in Denmark (the town, not the country), one of the most beautiful and relaxing South-West towns I know. It helps that my parents-in-law have a house down there, so accommodation is not an issue, even for the weekend when the 5000 population of Denmark swells to 25 000! One shop owner told me that she does a great deal of her annual budget over the weekend.

Anyway, with little desire to do any sightseeing, I spent the weekend writing all the ideas about teaching that buzz around in my head and, when I had finished, I realised not only that what I was actually doing was writing a training system for ESL teachers around the world, but that, as far as I know, there isn't such a system.

CELTA, the intensive four week program that gets people ready to step in front of an ESL class, trains teachers in methodology, but not content. Teachers pick up the content as they go, gleaning tips, tricks and resources from Murphy's, Swan, the university presses, websites and their colleagues.

But what if there were a single document that provided teachers with everything they needed to know about how the English language works? I started to get very excited! Such a system would take a teacher from words to clauses via punctuation to sentences, including tenses, conditionals, modals, gerunds, infinitives, noun and verb types, sentence structures, articles, phrasal verbs, common verbs and their forms (work, get, have, take, make, go), prepositions, relative clauses, conjunctions and everything else.

Of course, it would cover structures, not necessarily vocabulary, although there would be some included.