I agree with Admiral Stragbasher. One of the main reasons I like forumosa is that it is an escape from the Chinglish and boring simplified English that surrounds me in normal Taiwan life.
If Taiwanese come across this site by themselves, then fine. But we don’t need all the teachers inviting their students.
Or Chit-chat dot com!
CK
Bu Lai En wrote:
“I don’t want to be the leader of a suicide cult, for obvious reasons.”
[quote=“Screaming Jesus”]they should be sure to understand what each forum’s topic is, and read other people’s posts and not just “blunder into a conversation.”[/quote]Oh I don’t know, it might be more fun to have them first chug a six-pack and then burst into IP, guns ablaze…
SB is on the money.
Anything that brings more hot single Chinese babes to the happy hours is fine by me.
Wait, you’re saying this isn’t a place to practise English? Too bad, there goes my best excuse for being here during my worktime. 
I agree with stragbasher.
I totally agree with stragbasher. I spend 10 hours a day teaching English and the other 4 waking hours immersed in Mandarin. Forumosa is one place I like to spend some of my free time, letting my brain go back to thinking and using real English without worrying about the speed with which I use it or the difficulty of the language I use. Why should SJ exploit this site and its subscribers for his own business purposes? There are probably a thousand different websites set up for this purpose distinctly (or Yahoo Taiwan chat if you’re really desperate). Why interfere with the atmosphere of this site by flooding it with your students? Yay, for wanting to give them authentic input. Boo, for doing so by invading the space of people who have not invited the idea.
Note the subheading for the site is “Taiwan-oriented online community”…not “Screaming Jesus’ Online English Learning Lab”.
ImaniOU wrote:
Whose fault is it that you teach? People who want to post here who may not have the English skills you crave to read?
Your occupation and time have nothing to do with the freedoms to post here. The rules don’t say anything about students being prohibited or a certain level of English.
If they post something that can be considered against the rules (either because or in spite of their limited English) then they can be eliminated.
If it is discussion, fine; if it is “The rain is raining,” “Bob is the tall boy from Canada,” then it is not.
I suggest all of us English teachers set our students loose on the China-Rising.org forums.
Not only would it be fascinating to see the dialogue generated, it may be good for a laugh as well!
I favor letting the students post.
I am no english native speaker, but I happened to be in conversations like this:
Taiwanese (T): “do you drink Coca Cola all the time?”
me: “what? … well, only when I have digestive problems…”
T: ???
me: “only when my belly makes problems”
T: “your … what…???”
me: “my… yes, I drink coca cola all the time.”
T: “I knew it, I knew it !”
Please feel free to find mistakes in my grammar.
So it could be fun here!!!
You can tell your students about Forumosa, that’s fair enough, it isn’t a secret club or anything, but, I strongly object to encouraging them to participate out of a desire to practise their English, especially if their English isn’t good enough. Forumosa shouldn’t be promoted as a place to practice English, ICRT has a chat room and forums for that. Those that have good English skills seem to find their own way here OR are introduced by another 'mosan. That and we have enough banner exchanges for people to find their way here by themselves.
I completely agree with others who say that teachers should not encourage their students to post on this site. After all, unless the student has a certain degree of fluency in English, how is posting here suppose to help them at all? ( I think the same results could be had if they were simply to go find an empty bathroom stall and post their comments there).
Actually, SJ, you are in some ways subjecting your students to getting a verbal beating because you certainly know that if they happen to write something that others here feel is stupid, they are most likely going to be told that they or their posts are stupid. (As a writing teacher, I would doubt that you would ever give a student back a corrected paper in which you would use certain terms to describe their paper, but here in forumosa you know that posts can be attacked quite frequently. Especially in the IP forum 
). So why force students to possibly endure such comments? Again, how will this help their writing skills at all?
Also, I have no desire, as others have mentioned, to be inundated on this site with posts by people who simply want to get a free English lesson, or because their teacher wants to look like he is doing something but doesn’t want to take the time to have students do any in-class writing that the teacher will then have to read and correct. Forumosa is one of the very few places in Taiwan where foreigners can congregate and discuss ideas with people who can actually hold intelligent discussions in intelligible English.
Still, I go back to my original question: how will posting here be of any use to your students? I really don’t understand the point of your assignment at all.
Philosophically speaking, I don’t have an objection to Taiwanese english students participating in Forumosa. I do think however that there be firm ground rules established by the instructor and also by the Forumosa admins.
From the instructor point of view, I think it would be helpful if the students learned what and why Forumosa is. Learn what is appropriate and what is not appropriate when posting. That includes the instructor telling the students what are the forums, the tone and tenor of the posts, and a summary of the types of people one would encounter in the forums. I would also urge that they are encouraged to read first and not comment on the Forumosa forums. Instead, comment and write to the instructor who introduced them to this place. Then the instructor can do some good hands-on teaching based on that. After the instructor has pre-screened the students and determines he or she has the right level of english comprehension and writing, then oversee student’s participation. When it’s time to encourage active participation, the instructor should pre-screen the post first, make corrections and suggestions before the students posts. A lot of overhead on the instructors yes, but if you’re going to use Forumosa, then you need to do your homework as well.
As for the Forumosa side, I guess a can of worms has been opened. The powers that be should say either (1) yes, english students participation is welcomed or (2) no, english students are not encouraged to participate at any level.
With choice (1), Forumosa can do a number of things like:
a. shunt them to special forums just for those people.
b. allow their posts but actively monitor the posts by either deleting, floundering or whatever to preserve the quality of the site. Downside of this is that this really stresses out the volunteer folks and would be an abuse on people’s good graces.
c. work with instructors and/or schools on the parameters of usage and charge accordingly. If Forumosa is instrumental as a language teaching/learning forum then it should be compensated for it. Of course, that doesn’t address the people here, but individuals can always ignore.
This was bound to happen eventually and I think we should all take good care to make sure that Forumosa isn’t over run but by the same token make sure that we don’t give a bad impression of the “expat” community to the locals.
My $0.02.
krashen’s i +1 theory … methinks this may be i + more than 1?
why not set up a blog site, and invite guest writers (maybe some of the people here) to contribute once in a while? getting ready to do the same for once of my intermediate classes. this would give them some authentic input, and you could keep it at a level that your students could reasonably be expected to understand.
I’m not too worried about SJ’s students. Not oen of their posts made enough sense or had enough merit to stand on its own, so they all got floundered. If one of their posts does have what it takes to make it, then great. We have more than a few non-native English speakers here, and that’s great. (Some of them are even moderators!) But we don’t need to stoop to pander, IMO. Welcome if you can cut it, but if you can’t, off to www.E-Zchat.com.tw you go…
But to be consistent, we’d have to flounder most of ac_dropout’s posts too then.
Brian