Top 10 of 2010

December 7th, 2010

Top 10 of 2010

top-10-of-2010

Early December is not only a great time to look forward to goodies and overindulgence – it is also a great time to look back and reflect on the goodies that have already come our way this year.

We have looked at many new books this year and this is our pick of the heaving bookshelves for 2010. They can be grouped under different areas that help us all.

Some help us when teaching in specific contexts, some help improve our general teaching skills, one expands our role as a teacher and others give us great activity ideas for teaching language.

So, in no particular order, we give you our top 10 titles for 2010

Ta Da!

In the category of making us way more effective in general teaching skills, we have:

In the category of helping us expand our role as a teacher (and possibly being able to take new employment on board), we have:

In the category of providing great activity ideas for teaching language the winners are:

and finally….. in the category of sharpening our skills in teaching in specific contexts, we have:

We have reviewed most of these titles in our past newsletters and on our website and are confident enough to say that we did a damn fine job of extolling their virtues already.

So, to avoid unnecessary repetition, click on the title of any book you are interested in having a closer look at. You’ll get a detailed review AND the chance to look at sample units of most of them.

Happy browsing and, of course, a very happy holiday and festive new year!!

posted by Tania

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You are…where you sit?

February 2nd, 2010

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According to a very interesting article in the new Achieve IELTS Grammar & Vocabulary book, where you sit on a bus suggests a lot about your personality. A recent study from Salford University found clear patterns indicating that who you are determines where you feel comfortable placing yourself in the space you are in. In this study’s case, it was which seat was chosen and in which area of a double-decker bus, that showed if you were independent- minded, rebellious or a strong communicator, for example.

I find this connection between personality and spatial orientation fascinating and this article has rekindled my passion for some related informal research I have been doing for the past 8 years.

Back in 2002, my teacher training colleagues and I began to notice a strange pattern emerging regarding the seating choices of our trainees. We noticed that time and time again, where our trainees chose to sit in our input room directly related to how well they were doing on the course. We even found that when people’s progress on the course rose or fell, they also switched seats in the class to fit the spatial pattern we now clearly recognized. Eventually, we rather dramatically labeled one chair, The Death Chair, because if anyone sat in it for more than a week, they were usually a fail candidate.

Up to this point, our research wasn’t directly linked to any specific personality trait, it was merely a weird thermometer indicating progress.

However, some odd anomalies began to show up, which made me think this ‘chair choice = progress notification’ phenomenon had more to do with personality than I had previously thought.

Every once in a while I would be shocked to find that strong candidates sat in the ‘fail zone’ chair too. Initially I thought that made sense, after all, our observations couldn’t be perfect; it would be too weird indeed if every single struggler on every single course sat in the same chair.

Then I began to notice something interesting about this particular type of strong candidate. Although these people began the course as potential ‘A’ candidates, they, in fact, did not achieve much progress during the course. In other words, they came in with strong classroom management skills, but did not take on much of the methodology, depth of language analysis or insight into materials analysis. They paid us lip service, and could lead a class well, but essentially they were resistant and unwilling to take any feedback on board.

Since reading the article about personality and bus-seat choices, I believe even more strongly that my colleagues and I are on to something.

I am not in any way condoning the pigeon-holing of people; this is not about ‘labelling’ someone, but rather better understanding what issues are blocking their progress on the course. For example, if someone is unwilling to accept feedback, hours of repetition of concepts in different formats won’t help, but acknowledging the resistance will.  In my opinion, the more insight into how people are really feeling about their course, the easier it is to adapt your approach and feedback style for that person.

And now I don’t need to spend hours wondering why strong candidates aren’t progressing on the course.

All I have to do is pay attention to where they sit.

  • If you want to know which bus-seat choices reflect which characteristics,  buy the book :-)
  • If you want to know where the ‘death chair’ is, contact me.
  • If you want to do your own research in your teacher training institute, please contact me!

tania@englishcentral.net

posted by Tania

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Nova Scotia courts Vietnam for students

December 7th, 2009

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Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter has joined a provincial trade mission to increase relations between the province and Vietnam. It is believed that there is considerable potential in forging relations and building business with Vietnam in the areas of shipping, freight-forwarding and… education. As far as making the case for shipping and freight-forwarding, Nova Scotia is positioning itself as a gatekeeper to North America.

Education is a very different service than freight-forwarding and understandably it is being positioned somewhat differently. The Premier was quoted in the Thanh Nien Daily as saying:

Vietnamese students are interested in high school study, language programs, summer camps, and post-secondary study. There is also a lot of interest in adult training – short courses and distance learning. Atlantic Canada has a long track record for educating and training students from around the world and can respond to these areas of interest.

Posted by Nicole

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Learning English through Obama

December 4th, 2009

barack_obama

While Barack Obama’s popularity is falling in the United States, it is strong enough globally to have an impact on how people learn English. English through Obama is particularly strong in Japan. According to an article in the New York Times, a CD and accompanying book of the President’s inaugural address was released by  Asahi Press in January and has become quite popular:

The speech CD and its accompanying book have been a resounding success, selling 200,000 copies since its release in January. A compilation of President Barack Obama’s speeches has done even better, selling half a million copies since November, solidifying his role as Japan’s English teacher.

Publishers have since flooded the market with over a dozen language-learning titles, including “Speech Training: Learning to Deliver English Speech, Obama Style”; “Learn English Grammar From Obama”; and “Yes, I Can With Obama: 40 Magical English Phrases From Presidential E-mails.”

According to the New York times article, Communications specialist Professor Tadaharu Nikaido believes Obama is popular among EFL learners because of his clear pronunciation.

And this may be one reason why Obama is prominently featured on the home page of englishcentral.com, a language learning site that at the moment is concentrating on targeting the Asian market. I guess it is for this reason that I found the following blog entry (talking about englishcentral.com) from a Japanese learner interesting:

When I used youtube, I found this advertise. So, I heard balak Obama’s speech… There’re many kinds of video’s. You can select level and category. And, it’s……………………………………………………………. fleeee site!! I like Flee~.ww

It is great that Obama is helping to redeem America’s image globally to the extent where he is even motivating in the context of learning the English language.  What struck me, however, is the persistence of the problem with the “l” and “r” distinction, even in the spelling of Barack Obama’s name. I have always found it fascinating that this pronunciation problem is so great that it makes its way even into the writing of Japanese learners. I guess there were unrealistic expectations of Obama politically; linguistically, it is fantastic that he is helping to motivate a lot of English language learners, though unavoidably some problems will persist.

Posted by Nicole

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English Central’s Anti-Conference 2009: a dream come true

December 1st, 2009

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I generally have a habit of pushing myself to extremes with big new projects. Often I am driven by idealism and the need to see done that which I believe should be done.

Over the years, I have had numerous conversations with teachers, especially college and university teachers, who were dissatisfied with teachers’ conferences. The complaints were generally that most conferences were geared towards LINC teachers and were not useful to the EAP context. I have also heard a lot teachers come out of conference workshops saying that they knew more about the topic than the presenter.

So the existing conference offerings annoyed me. It would make sense that instructors in contexts other than LINC should have the opportunity for some useful input, and it would also make sense that the considerable knowledge and experience of conference goers be acknowledged and folded into the conference itself. So that is when I started dreaming of having an alternative Conference…. hence was born English Central’s Anti-Conference Conference.

I generally do not walk around filled with pride. However, on November 20th, I was so proud that the eyes got a little misty. We ran our conference and it was, from the feedback we have received from participants, a resounding success. We had great input thanks to our guest speakers, Joan McCormack, Adrian Underhill and Susan Barduhn.  The riskiest part of the conference was the Open Space Technology session, as it is very new to our context. However, this session was crucial to the mission of making the conference more participant-driven. I was relieved and thrilled not only that it worked, but also that most participants wanted the session to last longer (we will tweak this session for the next time… the important lesson this time is that it works).

Thank you to the almost 100 people who had enough faith in us to attend our first conference and for helping to make my dream a reality. And thank you to Seneca College and Garnet Education for their support. We will definitely do this again.

Don’t forget that you can see a lot of recordings from the conference on another page of our website.

Posted by Nicole

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Owning our Metaphors

December 1st, 2009

The concept of being influenced by our use of metaphor was first introduced to me through a fantastic book called, “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. They suggest  that “metaphors not only make our thoughts more vivid and interesting but that they actually structure our perceptions and understanding. Thinking of marriage as a “contract agreement,” for example, leads to one set of expectations, while thinking of it as “team play,” “a negotiated settlement,” “Russian roulette,” “an indissoluble merger,” or “a religious sacrament” will carry different sets of expectations.”

Then with my study of Carl Jung and his assertions that “What remains unconscious owns us”, the power of our unconscious use of metaphor seemed even more important.

These ideas fascinated me and I began to notice the effect of unconscious metaphor in the teacher trainees I was working with. The epiphany came when I realized that no matter how hard I tried to show my trainees the effectiveness of certain student-centred techniques, some trainees would never have the confidence to use them because they viewed their students as adversaries, not allies in the classroom.

Further to this was my constant frustration that so many teachers I observed and trained seemed very stuck on the idea that their role was mainly about choosing, setting up and running the ‘perfect’ activity. They seemed to be making decisions that belied an unconscious belief in the jug and mug model of education or the ‘lighting a fire’ metaphor first proposed by Plutarch and later by Yeats. Unfortunately, both of these perceptions of education ignore two key issues in providing students with stronger foundations for learning -- the motivating feature of creating the need to know in our students and the necessity of feedback on the language and skills that come from doing activities.

I found myself repeating over and over again that “Activities don’t teach -- their purpose is to highlight what students do or don’t know -- once we know that, then we begin to teach.”

I finally made a breakthrough when the idea that perhaps a new metaphor was needed. In the words of Keith Schacht, “When we see something unexpected it changes our understanding of the way things work.” My metaphor of the sundial was born and so far this has helped me illustrate to teachers and trainees how they can move  from the role of an authority figure and fountain of knowledge to the role of the facilitator who deals effectively with uncovering what it is their students need to know.

My pecha kucha presentation shows my journey and it is framed in one of my favourite extended metaphor formats -- the fairy tale. My hope is two-fold: movement -- in that it makes us all move a little more into consciously owning the metaphors we believe  (so we are less at their mercy) -- and inspiration -  create your own metaphors and try to express in a way that resonates best with you your own understanding of the world.

Posted by Tania

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In Defense of the Coursebook

November 27th, 2009

defense

In our upcoming December eNewsletter, we list Teaching Unplugged as one of our Top 10 favourite books in 2009. And although I think this book’s ideas have a definite place in our industry, I simply must express one of my biggest irritations about this approach.

I am reacting, not so much against the idea of ‘Dogme’ or the importance of student-centred teaching, but in looking at an unwarranted casualty in the embrace of this approach. My annoyance lies in the poor treatment of something I have long considered a friend and guide in my teaching career – the coursebook.

Some of the opinions backing the ‘Dogme’ approach, have slighted and criticized the role and importance of the course book – and I believe unfairly so. Dogme supporters advocate ‘teaching light’, and where almost all content is student-generated. OK – that sounds good to me too, but I have a few misgivings about this.

When I think back to my first few years of teaching, the coursebooks and teacher development and activity resources were the best way I could fill all those mental folders I now have of ideas, techniques and information that enabled me to gain the confidence and knowledge I needed to be an effective teacher. Having an initial structure gave me the confidence to experiment and some of those coursebook writers had some fab ideas.

So here’s my list to support coursebooks:

· It has always been easier to adapt materials that already exist than to create from thin air, so a huge bonus for me is that coursebooks save me time

· Coursebooks give students a clear record of what they have worked on – without the mishmash of dog-eared photocopies

· They give newer teachers confidence, structure and much needed guidance

· Good coursebooks incorporate current best practices and new ideas emerging from second language acquisition research – in fact, they are often the way teachers are forced out of old habits and into new ways of teaching

· Students value them – they provide an organized record of what was covered, allow recycling and revision of language and give students a sense of achievement and progress – all things often connected to meeting expectations and motivation levels

A colleague of mine once said, “The coursebook is a fantastic tool and a terrible master” and I couldn’t agree more. I don’t know any coursebook writer that would argue their book was to be used slavishly - where teachers go through activity and exercise after exercise without considering how it would be adapted, lifted off the page and made more relevant to one’s students.

Blaming the course book is like blaming a whiteboard for restricting information to a 2-dimensional plane. We have tools at our disposal (and frankly, if we are lucky!) and how we choose to use them is what teaching is. The real crux of the matter is being able to identify the underlying aims of the different activities in the book and then deciding if you can keep what is there or if you need to adapt, replace or supplement.

I want to spend the bulk  of my prep time figuring out best techniques for set up, student engagement, feedback, lesson structure and clarification of language, not in trying to reinvent the wheel.

Posted by Tania

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Testing: this may blow your mind

November 22nd, 2009

testing

About two years ago, we brought over Mario Rinvolucri to do some workshops for local teachers. In one of his workshops, he mentioned the work of Barry O’Sullivan, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Roehampton University London. As you can see from his profile on the University website, Barry is “particularly interested in issues related to performance testing, test validation and test-data management and analysis.” Unfortunately, I am not great at retaining details and so I have been retelling the anecdote – without any details – for several years. Earlier in the week, I decided to put an end to the vagueness by emailing Barry and asking him to fill me in on the details and he was kind enough to do so. Below is a retelling of his fascinating story that certainly highlights how poorly a test can actually evaluate language proficiency.

A while back, Barry was running a training course for the Ministry of Education of a Northern European country. He was shown a copy of one of the language proficiency tests that they give to immigrants and Barry suggested that he try writing it. They apparently laughed, as they knew he had no knowledge at all of their language. However, their mirth quickly turned to something altogether different as, by the end of the test, Barry had answered 80% of the questions correctly! He repeated the performance and the score with another version of the test, thereby depressing his hosts.

The questions, by the way, were all multiple choice or matching items and Barry assumed he had been writing a reading comprehension test.

A few years later Barry was doing a different training course for the Association of Language Testers in Europe and recalled the story. It turns out that in the crowd was a person who had been in the Ministry of Education group. This person embarrassingly told the group that the test had actually been a test of listening comprehension!

How is this possible, you may be wondering? Well, clearly Barry is an intelligent man. But he also knows how to “read” a test. He shared his strategies with me:

1. Match words in the stem and the options

2. Try to reduce my odds by identifying two options as possibilities (they seemed to be similar in some way)

3. Look for the longest answer if nothing else worked

This story has actually ignited an interest for me in testing and assessment. I am not sure that I have huge insights to share as of yet, but I would like to highlight two rather obvious morals to Barry’s story. The first is that preparing for an exam is, to a greater or lesser extent, about preparing for that specific exam. Students wishing to do well on IELTS or TOEFL, for example, need to study the format of those exams just as much as they need to improve their academic English. Furthermore, there are most definitely strategies or “tricks” for making good guesses when knowledge is lacking.

The second obvious point is that exams are far from perfect. As educators, we need to bear this in mind and take test results with a grain of salt. Furthermore, we should stop (or at least speak with) learners who decide they want to study for tests like TOEFL simply as a means of improving their English (if you have not met any such students, I assure you they do exist; I have met plenty of them in our storefront). Additionally, we need to keep in mind that not all tests are created equal and that they should be carefully examined themselves. I have always been a fan of the Cambridge exams (FCE, CAE, IELTS) because, though they are not perfect either, they are well enough designed that students preparing to take those exams will undoubtedly learn some useful English along the way. I am not so sure the same can be said about TOEFL and I find it worrying that there is far more information available about security than test design for the new PTE Academic. That is not to say that PTE Academic is not a good test as it is quite possible that it is. However, Pearson is largely marketing this test on the basis of its security measures. Security is a big enough of an issue for this marketing tactic to work. However, the actual strength of the test itself absolutely must be considered.

I am looking forward to the upcoming “The Cambridge Guide to Language Assessment”, of which Barry is an editor. He has a number of published papers (see link at the beginning of this blog) and you may want to check out an article of his in hltmag, which is available online.

Posted by Nicole

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Oxford Online Text Checker: a very handy tool

November 13th, 2009

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Have you ever had times when you have been planning to use a text in class but you were not sure if the language was too high for your students? Or perhaps you had settled on a text but were unsure of which words you should preteach?

Well, there is a great new online tool from Oxford University Press as part of their Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD) home page. The Text Checker allows you to type or paste in text. Once you have submitted, the Checker will immediately analyze the vocabulary for you, highlighting words that are specialist terms or not high-frequency. If you have a lot of highlighted words, then your text is advanced; if there are only a few highlighted words, then the text would be appropriate for lower intermediate learners.

For more details, to check it out and try it for yourself, go to the OALD home page.

Posted by Nicole

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What students (and he) ought to know

November 9th, 2009

You may be thinking that this video exposes that his knowledge of the make-up of our language and terminology used to describe it is a bit on the light side. You may also have noticed that his rant on “the general population [having] just stopped caring” is based on an irrelevant paradigm of what’s right and what’s wrong.

I did too. However, how this video spoke to me was, ironically, opposite to his point:  The way we use language, with all our spoken grammatical incorrectness, dichotomous pronunciation, relaxed speech patterns and word roots from the global kitchen sink, is fine.  In fact, it’s what students need to be more exposed to in order to gain competent comprehension and participate in meaningful interactions with native speakers.

Thoughts?

Posted by Tyson

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