Chia Suan Chong

Chia Suan Chong blogged for English Teaching professional for 8 years, every fortnight, writing her final post back in September 2019. During her time as a blogger, she wrote 173 blog posts, writing from 5 different cities – through holidays, through changes in her career, through 3 periods of maternity leave. She took on different roles as she continued to blog as a teacher, a teacher trainer, a communication skills trainer, an intercultural skills trainer, a writer, a freelancer and an educator and her blogs reflected those experiences as well as discussing controversial and topic issues in ELT and reporting back from conferences. Fascinated by the interplay between culture, language and thought, Chia is now an intercultural skills trainer, materials developer and author. She continues to write for Pavilion ELT’s magazines and had a long-running column in ETp called "Not Only But Also". She is also the author of Successful International Communication (published by Pavilion Publishing and Media, 2018), and is now based in York.

Give yourself a pat on the back

As we approach the beginning of a new year, our personal stock-take of the previous year can sometimes be full of regrets, doubts and self-criticism. Chia Suan Chong, our ETp blogger, offers us eight important questions we can ask ourselves to help us give ourselves credit for the things we’ve done, no matter how small they may seem.

How do you choose to spend your students’ time? (considering ELF)

What do we do with the limited time our students have in our classrooms? What do we prioritise? What do we consider more important? Chia Suan Chong urges teachers to consider ELF when making those decisions.

Top ten tips for writing notes

Expanding on her column in Issue 117 of ETp, Chia Suan Chong offers us ten tips of how we can take better notes - a skill that will come in handy both for teachers and for students.

The role of a TEFL teacher

Are TELF teachers inflexible and prescriptive when it comes to waxing lyrical about the role they should fulfill..?

Meta Communication – Communicating about communicating

We talk about how we use language to our students but do we talk about how we communicate? How can communicating about communicating help our students in their lives beyond the classroom?