Anne Hodgson's EFL blog

Anne Hodgson is originally from the USA but now resides in Germany.

When I looked last, she had written about Jonathan Meiburg of Shearwater. I quote from Anne's blog which is aimed at EFL teaching, and a whole lot more; The Island Weekly





"Jonathan started out as a natural scientist and has reworked his travels into a very interesting concept album (and media package) on remote islands. He says he first thought he should become a scientist. “But I kept noticing that the questions that most interested me are things you can’t really investigate with science, like why the fragments of an older, wilder world I’d glimpsed seemed so full of a strange meaning and energy that’s completely foreign to the technolopolis where we mostly live now, or why islands seem to have such a great hold on our imaginations, whether we’re talking about Lost or Homer.” One album review (link) compares Shearwater with Brian Ferry. Most of the tracks are quietly intense, but from time to time they produce interesting loud dissonances that keep things from getting too melancholy. Pretentious or great? Shearwater is in Munich on 2 March."

Video Jonathan Shearwater

One of our host families, the Northey's, who live in Canada, also enjoy nature and wildlife.
Quoting from their host family profile, "we love to be outdoors, in the summer we go for hikes, we love horses, swimming, camping, water sports. In the winter we stake, ski and do some snomobile riding. We love to read. We don't have TV Cable, only 2 channels, so we rent family appropriate movies and have family time (eating popcorn, hot chocolate) and play board games."

Sounds wonderful!

Promoting your language business on XILFEE

XILFEE is about to have a new front page which will enable us to promote host families, language schools and homestay tutors by featuring them with case studies.
If you would like to be included, email me through the site.
www.xilfee.eu

New front page

We have updated the front page to hopefully, make the site easier to explain what we do.

To start with we would like to attract English host families or families how want to host and teach or tutor English. As I mentioned in a previous post, there are over 600,000 students who visit the UK annually to learn English; what better place to learn or improve your English than to live with an English family?

For more information on how to find work by joining for FREE! see www.xilfee.eu

Hosting a foreign student

Its that time of year again when normally we would be rushing around checking which host families are or or not able to host again next year for us.

However, today I have sent them all an email wishing them a happy Christmas and New Year as we are no longer directly involved in organising any trips or students ourselves.
We have made some great friends over the eight years of taking students (some years we 'processed' over 1000 students) but it was hard work physically and emotionally demanding.
Apart from being very time consuming. I'm not sorry to not be doing these trips any more.

Also, by the time the language school had taken their fees, then we have to take some out (otherwise what would we be doing it for) the host family is left with very little and they are the ones who have to feed the children.

Now that host families have the option of signing up to xilfee, they can earn more, quite a bit more as it happens.

Likewise, if you are looking for an English teacher, or a language teacher of any sort really, lessons will be less expensive as you don't have to pay a chunk of your hourly rate out to a third party.