Author: Nicole

Why did your team put this material together?

In recent years there has been increasing demand for bridge materials at lower levels. In other markets, EMI curriculums are being introduced for increasingly lower level students, where students need much more support to access and process the materials. So we sought to fill this need with an academic series that has more linguistic support.

 

How does this series support lower level students having to work in an academic setting?

Well, there are many obstacles which prevent lower level students from participating actively. First of all, many students struggle with underdeveloped listening abilities. In addition, notekeeping skills need to be developed. The ability to write down notes from a lecture is something that even highly proficient learners struggle with.

Lastly, students with more discourse level support, to help them summarize, or make comparisons and contrasts and so on.

 

How does this series do this?

Well, for listening support, we have a section that focuses on reduced form English. For notekeeping support we have a section that introduces some tactic to help students take notes more quickly using short forms and symbols etc. For discourse level support, we have students take notes using the Cornell Note-taking system, then from this structured set of notes, we have students follow a template to help them summarize, compare or contrast.

 

How were topics chosen?

A wide variety of topics were chosen to present students with a wide variety of academic vocabulary. Topics include International Relations, the Environment, Space, Anthropology, Fine Arts, Education, Psychology, Education and so on.

 

Does the book help students do academic presentations?

Each unit ends with a section where students need to talk about a subject that they’ve studied without any linguistic support. Students are asked to talk about a picture, a graph, a table and so on.

Students thus have to make short presentations about each topic that they’ve studied. In addition, each unit finishes off with some suggested project work, so students can have an opportunity to research a related topic and then make a presentation in class.

If you have any questions about Acaedmic Listening and Speaking, please get in touch with us!

 

International students inject much needed funds into cash-strapped education institutions, across the board from primary to post-secondary levels. It would only make sense, then, for school boards to cooperate in attracting international students… and in retaining them for long periods of time. That is just what Simcoe County in Ontario, Canada has just done. The Simcoe County District School board, Lakehead University and Georgian College have recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding, signalling a commitment to work together to attract international students.

read more in The Barrie Examiner.

In Inside Higher Ed, George Greenia and Jacob H. Rooksby argue that if international students do not drop their digital routines, they risk missing most of the value of living overseas.

It may not seem like a revolutionary argument, but it is an interesting acticle with thoughtful considerations.

These are dark days, my friend. The rumour last week was that Oxford University Press had just gone through a fresh round of layoffs, dismissing 100 people globally. That is only what we heard – we can’t confirm, but reviews of OUP USA on Glassdoor have comments such as these:

Lifetime of work down the drain.

Pros: After the latest round of layoffs, there isn’t much good happening right now. Trying to think of one thing — oh, I still have my job at least until the next round later in the year.

Cons: We have the Brainless ones,the Cowardly one, and the Heartless one all running the show with their overmatched collective talents. Add in the Wicked Witch who flies around the building wreaking havoc and you have an accurate picture of the business. Morale is at an all-time low.

A research team at Brock University has found that using drama and theatre techniques can dramatically improce students fluency and smprehension skills in English. The study followed a group of 24 teens over four months in an English language program in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The students who learned through the traditional communicative classroom did not improve as much as the students who learned through drama.

Interestingly, one of the authors commented, “Some have argued that there’s a connection between success in second language learning and your ability to see yourself as someone else.”

Read the press report.

The number of “A” grades has tripled over the past seven decades, to the point where it is now the most common grade awarded by American post-secondary institutions. What is the cause? Entitled students who demand better marks because they paid for them? The general whittling-away of educational standards? Affirmative action? Changes in the philosophy of pedagogy? An interesting opinion piece in the Washington Post looks at “The rise of the gentleman’s ‘A’ and th GPA arms race.”

Is anyone else out there a Globe and Mail reader? We read it almost every day and almost every day for the past little while it has seemed like there has been at least one story claiming that after months of battling one goverment agency or another, they finally have gotten access to some very important information that someone was trying to conceal. It is like they want to make themselves out as the forces behind the Panama Papers, but in a Canadian context.

Anyhoo, something they have revealed is a Citizenship and Immigration Canada report – which the government was trying to keep secret – that states that the work program designed to encourage international students tos spend their education dollars at Canadian post-secondary institutions has actually created a pool of cheap labour from which Canadian businesses can exploit. The majority of those employed on work permits are in low-skilled jobs in the service sector and have median eranings that are less than half of other rececent graduates.

Read the full article in the Globe and Mail.

The title says it all, but we would like to congratulate the publishers of products in our catalog that have been nominated:

In the Innovation in Learner Resources category, Express Publishing has been nominated for the Explore our World CLIL Readers and Helbling Languages has been nominated for The Thinking Train series of children’s readers. Congratulations!

See the full list.