Category: English Central Blog

Researcher Ross Finnie recently wrote in the Ottawa Citizen that the most important thing to teach in post-secondary education – in order to make the investment pay off as far as graduates’ employability is concerned – is “to better understand the more general skill sets that open a range of employment opportunities and career paths over time.” And what is he talking about? Transferable skills such as critical thinking, teamwork and numeracy.

These transferable skills are just as important, if not more so, for international students as there is a cutural dimension to these skills and a lack of awareness and competency will set them even further back.

Read the article here.

Get the Transferable Academic Skills Kit.

A study recently found that 41% of students outside the UK no longer found it to be a desireable study destination because of the recent Brexit vote. The most popular alternative, according to The Independent, was Canada with 32%. Germany came in second with 21% and 20% would chose either the US or Australia.

Read more gory details here.

We were recently contacted by a potential customer who wanted a copy of a specialist, backlist book. We didn’t have it in stock and had to order it in for him. When the book arrived, we contacted him to tell him it was ready to ship, at which point he told us that he had in the meantime purchased the book online and was going to scan every page and post it online because “information should be free”. We debated whether we should reply to this man and give him an education. We eventually decided against it because he seemed to be quite self-righteous and a little unhinged, and there is no talking to people like that.

It made me more sad than angry, to be honest. There have been no shortage of teachers who have told us that they photocopied a book off a friend, or that they bought one student book and endlessly photocopied it for their students because the school had no resources. As an aside, I would like to point out that these schools that don’t have materials for the classroom and are thus the worst for violation of copyright are invariably goverment-funded. It is no surprise that the govenment has never made it a priority to to enforce copyright laws! The other thing that made me sad was how self-serving this man’s argument was. The book that he had ordered was Campaign: English for the Military. Macmillan spent a lot of money developing that course and the authors spent quite a bit of time writing it – all for a limited market. Presumably they thought there was enough potential reward to merit the investment, but I assume the payoff would have been modest.

People love to villainize – or simpy not care – about educational publishers. I will admit that I often am amazed at their poor business sense, but they are deserving of respect. They take (or perhaps “took” is more apt at this point) risks and published materials that are the base of the classroom and students’ learning. They are all hurting right now, though, and anyone photocopying books right now should know that by not paying publishers for their work, they are ensuring there will be fewer and fewer quality books to photocopy in the future. Teachers and schools complain that books are expensive, but so are salaries. A teacher without a course to teach is not a terribly effective teacher, so it just makes sense that some money would be invested in the course materials as well.

Add into all of this the recent changes in copyright law in Canada, and there is good reason to drink. Reently, lawyer Richard Owens wrote an article for the Financial Times about how fixing Canada’s copyright laws are essential if we wat to keep educational publishers from dying. We are all part of a team – teachers, students, schools, publishers – and we need good content to continue to be produced. Even if I haven’t ignited the flame of passion for this issue, please imagine that it is sexy (and know that it is important) and read Fix Canada’s Publishing Laws before it puts Publishers out of Business.

Oh, and just as an FYI, ESL textbooks are all workbooks and therefore EXEMPT from copyright agreements. It is always illegal to photocopy an ESL textbook, even if your school has bought a copying license.

 

In a recent column on the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario’s blog, researcher Sarah Brumwell points out that the recent attention to character education in the K-12 sector should be a lesson to the post-secondary sector. Post-secondary institutions are increasingly seeing their function as being to prepare students for the workforce, and therefore they must focus more attention on the transferable skills – such as teamwork and critical thinking – that are key to success in the workplace.

Take a look at the blog post and then, if you are further convinced of the need to teach these transferable skills, take a look here.

It would seem to be one of the questions that we have been asking forever and have never really been able to answer: what makes a good teacher? In all likelihood, this will continue to be the case – we will always ask and there will never be a definitive answer. However, this may be one of those situations where the journey itself is the destination: asking the question and reflecting on it is a valuable exercise in and of itself.

It was in this spirit that we enjoyed reading “What Makes a Good teacher?” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. We recommend having a read.

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.