Carl Dowse 2012

Teaching: Encouraging learner autonomy

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:12:00 +0000

I've not posted for quite some time and thought I'd use a rewarding lesson experience yesterday evening as an opportunity to make my first post in 2010.

The activity

This was the last business English lesson of the current term for a group of business administration students, and as their next lesson won't be until March I asked the students to think of an action plan containing at least three ideas for things they can do to maintain their level of English during the interim. The ideas developed during the feedback session after the students had had time to think are not particularly new or ground breaking in themselves, but they do illustrate rather nicely I think how some relatively simple to use tools can be used to enhance learning and encourage learner autonomy.

As students described their plans I organized them into a chain and told them that they would be emailing each other in exactly a month's time to ask for a progress report on their plans and then replying with a report on how they were getting on with each of their three ideas (see below). To make sure that they did not feel totally abandoned or that I'd reneged entirely on my responsibilities as a teacher, I asked them to copy me in when they wrote to each other.

Students' ideas

Here below are five of the ideas the students agreed they will be working on as part of their action plans followed in each case with a brief account of the kind of report the students will provide in a month's time.

1) Reading for fun

When confronted with this kind of question students often vaguely suggest watching films and reading. A little unusually, the student who proposed this actually had four specific books in mind that she was planning to read, and still more interestingly she had a quite well defined notion of what she wanted to get out of this other than, of course, the pleasure of reading, i.e. being more active in noting how "English is used" and expanding her repertoire of language accordingly. We discussed the issue of using context to work out the meaning of unfamiliar words and expressions and the use of a dictionary where necessary to double check that her hunches had been correct.

As part of the report to her fellow student in a month's time she is going to add a list of the most interesting vocabulary she had made a note of, as well as a run down on the books read.

2) Flashcards

All three students had the idea of using flashcards to help with vocabulary expansion. So, for example, one student is going to review units worked on in the course book (Intelligent Business) and produce a set of cards for each unit using the online tool Quizlet. The wiki I have for the group has a tutorial showing how to login and use Quizlet, and as this student is a keen Blackberry user I suggested she download an application called Touchcards which would allow her to load a simplified version of the sets she produces in Quizlet to her smartphone. (The application works fine on my iPhone and it states that it's available for Blackberry too.)

In reporting back to her partner the student is going to provide links to the vocabulary sets produced in Quizlet, which of course should be a great help to the group as a whole when we pool all the resources in the group wiki once we get back together next term.

3) Online business magazines

Taking a closer look at business magazines was another idea that more than one student suggested and after discussing a number of publications that have online editions - The Economist, FT.com, Fast Company - one student decided to try out BusinessWeek as this is particularly rich in media - slideshows, audio and video - as well as the wide-ranging articles on business and economics it offers. Another student suggested that she combine this reading with the use of the Phase 6 educational software that produces vocabulary flashcards and has a system for automatically repeating the words until they are learnt. As this program costs around €30 to download the student agreed to download the demo version, use it with the new vocabulary from the her trial run with BusinessWeek.

In a month's time she will tell her partner how the experiment went and provide a first-hand report for the rest of the group both on the online magazine and the new vocabulary building tool.

Another student was already familiar with BusinessWeek and his goal is to provide a list of links to articles he had found of particular interest in the magazine and add a short review for each one.

The same student was very interested to hear that BusinessWeek also have a particularly good podcast and this led to a discussion about the usefulness of podcasts in their language learning and among those mentioned were:

Part of this student's report will be on which of these podcasts he subscribed to and found interesting enough to listen to regularly.

4) Videos on YouTube

One student expressed an interest in exploring YouTube more to find business related videos to watch. He had already found the Harvard Business Publishing channel in YouTube and was pleasantly surprised to learn that there was now YouTube EDU where many of the world's leading universities have channels. To make this viewing a little more active in terms of language learning the student will be producing sets of flashcards, again using Quizlet, relating to specific videos, and to add a little variety I suggested producing word search puzzles using armoredpenguin.com instead of the Quizlet sets from time to time

In reporting back on this idea to his partner in a month's time the student will provide links to the videos of greatest interest and to the related sets in Quizlet and word search puzzles that he has produced.

5) Written Assignments

One student will be writing one or two assignments in English for his MBA course. My suggestion here was to provide him with some links to online tutorials on academic writing and that he could explore these and make a note of sections that he used, or that he thought of particular interest.

When reporting back on this idea he will provide a review of the sites indicating specific areas that were of practical use to him in preparing his term papers.

The sites provided are:

Skills4Study
The OWL at Purdue
UEfAP
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
University of New South Wales

Thoughts

It'll be interesting to see what these well laid plans come to in a month's time. What was encouraging was the readiness with which the students accepted the idea and the enthusiasm shown in developing the action plans. The fact that my involvement in the discussions was kept to minimum also boded well for the success of this little experiment. As mentioned above, the ideas themselves are not revolutionary, but coupling them with the use of emailing provides peer support and motivation that increase the chances of success, and the use of one or two simple online resources and tools add variety and interest and ensures that the students have achievable goals in producing tangible products - flashcard sets, puzzles, a body of reviewed articles, podcasts, videos and websites - that will be of interest and benefit to the group as a whole. In the longer term, the students will have acquired, hopefully, one or two skills and a little of the mindset that will help them be more self-directed and self-motivated language learners.

Any additional ideas, comments, further suggestions, questions or indeed criticisms you may have would be much appreciated.

Interests: Social media: Victory for free speech and the web

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 07:41:00 +0000

Here's a quote from a recent article which points to the less frivolous side of Twitter:

Today was an important day. Today the internet lived up to all its promise. It began with an injunction on the Guardian by Carter Ruck, a law firm specialising in the media, which is very rarely referred to by its real name by those in the industry. The firm banned the paper from reporting on a parliamentary question from Paul Farrelly to justice secretary Jack Straw, published in today's House of Commons order paper. It's a measure of how acutely unfair, authoritarian and in league with the powerful Britain's libel laws are that a firm would even consider it possible to pursue this course of action. But yes, they asked for the public to be barred from learning about a question from an elected MP to a representative of the government, because it concerned their rich clients.

The question concerned issues with which I am particularly interested, but let's leave that aside for a moment. If it had stuck, a terrible precedent would have been set whereby the powerful gained a pivotal new power over the people of Great Britain: the power to turn their elected parliament into a shadowy body, as impermeable and hostile to them as the lobbies of corporate buildings.

Twitter went bonkers. Wonderfully so. So wonderfully, in fact, that a human rights lawyer was barely able to conceal his glee when I called him this afternoon. The #trafigura and #carterruck tags shot straight to the top of Twitter's trends, exposing Carter Ruck's clients to precisely the publicity they had hoped to avoid. By early afternoon, the injunction was lifted.

The article can be read in full here: Victory for free speech and the web

Interestingly, the article this comes from does not shy away from mentioning some of the less positive aspects of the Internet, but the incident described does, I think, illustrate the democratising power of tools such as Twitter and shows that it's not all the narcissistic, self-agggrandising "I'm having coffee and biscuits now" kind of froth that can also be found in social media.

Teaching: Culture & perceptions

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:16:00 +0000

I recently had the pleasure of attending a course on teaching culture designed and moderated by Barry Tomalin for International House London. This Business Cultural Trainer's Certificate course provided an excellent theoretical grounding, but what I found particularly impressive was the manner in which the theory was always translated into practical ideas for training managers with a view to providing them with the kind of working models and practical take-aways that business people find so appealing and helpful.

To give you some insight into what Barry terms the "narrative" of the course and to illustrate the collaborative nature of many of the activities and discussions, here below, Barry introduces the course in his own words and provides a brief commentary on two short video clips filmed on the last day:

Hi Everyone,

The Business Cultural Trainer's Certificate course teaches trainers how to research, design, market and deliver a cross-cultural training course for business. As part of the delivery, we demonstrate and discuss a number of training activities. Here are extracts from two discussions about synergies and differences and about culture and perception. In the first activity, we invite participants to identify three synergies and three differences between their country and the country they have chosen to discuss. In this extract Claire, Annette and Fei are discussing China.

As you can see the discussion opens people's minds to the idea that differences aren't always differences and synergies aren't always synergies!

As we see from this extract, cultural awareness is about changing the way you think about people as a result of understanding more about them. It's about changing cultural perception.

Thanks for watching. If you'd like to find out more, please visit the Business Cultural Trainer's Certificate page on the International House London website.

Barry

As well as training teachers to provide effective cultural training, Barry has himself helped many organisations around the world resolve their cross-cultural problems and is also co-author of the excellent World's Business Cultures: And How to Unlock Them, which I can thoroughly recommend to anyone looking to teaching cross-cultural communication, or planning to incorporate elements of cultural training into their language classes.

Resources

And lastly, here are some resources that Barry suggests for cultural research and training:

Theory

Bennett M and J, 1998 Basic Concepts of Intercultural Communication, London, NB Books
Gesteland R, 1999 Cross-Cultural Business Behaviour, Copenhagen, Copenhagen Business SchoolPress
Guirdham M, 2005 Communicating across Cultures at Work, London, Palgrave Macmillan
Hall E T 1990 The Silent Language, New York, Anchor Books
Hofstede G, 1994 Cultures and Organisations, London, Harper Collins
Trompenaars F and Hampden-Turner C, 2003 Riding the Waves of Culture, London, NB Books

Country briefings

Gesteland R, 1999 Cross-Cultural Business Behaviour, Copenhagen, Copenhagen Business School Press
Lewis R D, 2006 When Cultures Collide, London, NB Books
Mole J, 2003, Mind your Manners, London NB Books
Morrison T et al, 2007 Kiss Bow or Shake Hands, New York, Abrams Media
Tomalin B and Nicks M, 2007 World's Business Cultures: And How to Unlock Them, London, Thorogood Publishing

Language and Culture

Kramsch C, 1998 Language and Culture, Oxford, OUP
Stempleski S and Tomalin B, 2001 Film, Oxford, OUP
Tomalin B and Stempleski S, 1995 Cultural Awareness, Oxford, OUP

Online resources

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to add them here and either Barry or I will be happy to respond.

Interests: My favourite iPhone apps

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:46:00 +0000

I recently bought an iPhone 3GS and have started exploring the options available in the iTunes App Store for adding new functions to the device. To date my favourites have been:

1. Note taking: Evernote

Allows you to take notes in the form of text, photos, voice recordings using your iPhone and then sends them to your online account where they can be synchronised with and made available on other devices such as your laptop. Or, if you create a note in your online account or on your desktop, it will automatically be available on your iPhone. This Lifehack article suggests ways this app can be of help to you: 7 ways to use Evernote.

Cost: Free
User-friendliness: Very

2. M-learning: Touchcards

So far I haven't managed to track down any m-learning apps that could be used convincingly for language learning/teaching, except that is for Touchcards which allows the user to import flash card decks from sites such as Quizlet, Studystack or Google Docs. So, for example, you can create sets of vocabulary cards in Quizlet, such as this one on meetings vocabulary, and then provide your learners with a URLs to download them to their portable devices so they can practise on the go as well as online on the Quizlet site. Students can of course also be encouraged to produce their own flash card decks.

Cost: Free
User-friendliness: Very
Sample source URL to import to your iPhone: http://quizlet.com/export/981340/

3. Communication: Skype

Providing you've got access to a wi-fi connection you can cut down on your telephone bills by Skyping friends and colleagues using your iPhone. There's no conference call function (at least I can't find it!) and no video chat of course, but for one-to-one communication it seems to work just fine and you're contacts are automatically synched with those on your desktop.

Cost: Free
User-friendliness: Very

4. Micro-blogging: Tweetdeck

Perhaps because it's he Twitter browser I use on my laptop of the 3 iPhone Tweet apps I've looked at (Tweetie and Twitterfon being the other two) Tweetdeck is definitely the one I prefer and offers all the functions I need.

Cost: Free
User-friendliness: Very

5. Playing: Shredder

Much is made these days of doing exercises to keep your mind flexible and alert. For me playing chess (very badly) provides the mental gymnastics that experts say we need and the daily humiliation of being beaten by a device I can carry in my pocket does wonders for any tendencies towards arrogance I may have. Shredder is chess program that has many great features, such as making (all too) occasional errors to simulate human fallibility and increasing its playing strength in line with your development as a player.

Cost: $9.99 (I know, I know, but it is good!)
User-friendliness: Very (but doesn't let you win easily!)

6. Time wasting: Bloom

There are quite a few apps designed to eat into your time, but my current favourite is Bloom, which was co-designed by Brian Eno as "part instrument, part composition and part artwork" it allows you to interact with the programmed music machine to create compositions and visualisations. This YouTube shows you how it works: Bloom. It's very soothing and not a little addictive!

Cost: $3.99
User-friendliness: Very (but doesn't let you win easily!)

All the apps can be downloaded from iTunes on your computer or directly to your iPhone by clicking on the App Store button.

If you're a fellow iPhone user, what are your current favourite apps?

Interests: Blogging: How not to tag posts

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 11:23:00 +0000

As I'm currently moderating the online Cert ICT course for The Consultants-e, I'm even more on the look out than usual for good ICT-in-the classroom resources that I can pass on to the course participants. These days Twitter, which, with teachers and ICT enthusiasts from around the world sharing ideas and and links, provides a constant stream of ELT related articles, blogs, website suggestions, and Web 2.0 tools that occasionally throws up gems that will be of lasting value. It's in this way that I was reminded of Russell Stannard's award-winning site and its series of Teacher Training Videos.

Prompted by one of Russell's excellent tutorials, How to use Blogger (Google's free blogging tool), I decided to see what would happen when I added the "Label" gadget to this blog (in Blogger tags are known as "Labels"). This gadget shows the tags that have been added to the posts and indicates how many times each of these has been used. Clearly, the idea behind the Label list is to make the blog more user-friendly by providing the visitor with a quick overview of subject areas that the blogger has written about and how frequently these topics have been touched on in the blog as a whole. By clicking on any of the tags listed (see below right) the visitor can then review the posts in the blog relating to that area of interest.

My blogging, it has to be said, breaks many of the cardinal rules of good blogging practice. For one thing, I blog all too infrequently, and for another this blog has no real focus. Unlike many of the excellent teaching, ICT or other single issue blogs that can be relied upon to provide food for thought on a particular area - be it ELT, ICT in the classroom, young learners, or whatever - the only defining principle behind the posts here is that they reflect what has caught my interest in my work and private life. I see this blog as an online scrap book, which I enjoy adding to from time to time and which has no particular mission - social, pedagogic or otherwise. I do, however, refer clients or potential employers to the blog as a way of providing a little more insight into who they are dealing with, so in this sense it does have the function of a kind of online business card.

The haphazard, somewhat unfocussed and certainly unsystematic approach to my blogging was amply reflected in the enormous list of tags that was generated when I added the Label gadget to the sidebar here on the right. You may think it is unwieldy and eclectic now, but you should have seen it when it first appeared! But, rather than change my blogging style - sorry I like its haphazardness - I decided to overhaul the tagging instead and at least rationalize that so that the Label list would provide the occasional visitors the blog receives with a quick way of identifying further reading possibilities in the blog should they find something of interest.

Not having had a particularly well defined notion of why I was tagging posts, I had from the outset added as many tags to each post as I could in an effort to be as comprehensive as possible. This of course soon resulted in an accumulation of a great many disparate tags. I spent quite a lot of time yesterday pruning these tags down to the essentials, (in Blogger managing tags can be done with relative ease in the "Edit posts" page, accessed from the "Dashboard", by using the "Label Actions" menu.) and the result is what you see now. I'm not entirely sure if reducing the volume of tags has any bearing on traffic to the blog (does anyone know?), but it certainly does makes sense if you want to provide your visitors with the kind of easy access tagroll that Blogger's Label gadget generates.

Clearly, bloggers with a clearer focus than mine will necessarily use fewer tags than I have here. However, as a consequence of this experience, my advice would be to certainly tag posts if the blogging service provides this feature, but to put some thought into what tags and how many tags you use!

Your comments or advice concerning tagging in blogs would of course be very welcome.

PS As we're on the topic of tags, for those interested in Business English resources, below on the right, you'll find the tagroll for the Cert IBET Diigo Group with over 500 tagged resources.

People: Hector aka "Little Fella"

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 14:26:00 +0000

I recently met up with an old friend and together with a his son Hector spent a summery afternoon walking along the South Bank, taking a short boat trip down the Thames to Tower Bridge and then playing with the water jets in the pedestrian area outside City Hall:

The South Bank has definitely become one of my favourite areas of London and as the slides show they've created a great space around the City Hall complex - and Hector seems to agree!

Teaching: Legal English

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:55:00 +0000

I recently attended a World of Work Forum organised by the Cambridge ESOL examinations board, in which a number of business English professionals were invited to discuss their views on the future of technology in workplace English teaching, learning and assessment. We spent a lively and productive weekend discussing where we thought technology was going in language teaching and examinations.

For me, one of the big pluses of the event was meeting up with business professionals who have contributed to the development of business English teaching in very significant ways and who in many cases had a very different take on the role that technology should play in our work. For example, my own interest has primarily been in how technology has given teachers access to an ever expanding range of materials, and in how Web 2.0 technologies are allowing teachers with relatively limited technical know-how (like myself) to provide online learning environments - large (Moodle) and small (edmodo) - as a means of extending the learning process beyond the classroom and thereby giving learners greater opportunities to produce English in meaningful, engaging and motivating ways, always providing, of course, that this is appropriate to the learners' needs and circumstances. However, another perspective, which I found equally valid, is to look at how technology can be used to help us define what we actually teach. This was a point that was raised in particular by course book author and trainer Evan Frendo, who's main interest lay more in how the power of computers to process data could be used to collate and analyze language use in real business situations so that we can have a clearer understanding of what exactly we should be teaching our business English learners. These and other ideas that came up will be presented by Cambridge ESOL at the BESIG conference in Poznan later this year, and an open discussion with the panel members is also planned, so more about this then.

With so many experienced teachers, trainers and authors present, the event also provided an ideal opportunity to add to the series of interviews I have been recording for the online Cert IBET I've been moderating for The Consultants-e. One of the non technical trends that was mentioned on more than one occasion over the weekend was the move away from longer general business English courses towards "micro courses" and English for Special Purposes (ESP). Legal English lecturer and author Matt Firth, kindly agreed to share his thoughts on teaching ESP in this short interview:

Following on from the advice Matt gives on teaching legal English, here's some more information for those who are thinking of moving into this area of ESP teaching

Legal English Exam

An examination for learners, in this case lawyers working in international matters, that trainers moving into this area need to be familiar with is the International Legal English Certificate (ILEC) offered by Cambridge ESOL in collaboration with Translegal

Legal English Course Books

Introduction to International Legal English - for law students or newly-qualified lawyers and brings learners up to the point where they are ready to start work on preparing for the ILEC
International Legal English - covers general legal English topic and language (at B2+ level) plus ILEC exam preparation.
Legal Matters - Course book for German speaking learners
Professional English in Use Law
English for Contract & Company Law - designed for use with law students
American Legal English - provides an introduction to basic legal concepts in the U.S. legal system as well as helping to build communicative skills
Market Leader: Business Law - Reading and vocabulary activities

Training

You might consider further training and gaining qualifications in this area, in which case the following may be of interest:

Matt Firth, for example, is the course director of the Introduction to Teaching English for Legal Purposes course offered by the Pyramid Group in Germany. Another train-the-trainer possibility is the Teacher Education & Development Course run by the University of Edinburgh.

Online Resources

LETS - provides help with legal matters with summaries of areas of the law which appear in the ILEC examination and offers additional classroom materials to supplement the International Legal English course book
Mini Law Lectures - series of short videos from McGill University
International Legal English Vocabulary Trainer - series of online vocabulary activities offered by CUP as a supplement to their International Legal English course book
Online Legal English Research - series of activities designed to help learners develop research skills to solve the kind of linguistic problems they will encounter in their work
International Legal English - list of downloads from pdf geni.com with lots of ILEC related materials as well as other resources for teaching legal English
OneStopEnglish: ESP Bank Legal English - for access to most of the teaching resources on this Macmillan Publishers website you will need to subscribe to the "Staff room"
Common Law and Civil Law
What is a barrister?
Contract Law Questions
Types of business - simple explanation of the different type of business organisation, e.g. sole trader, partnership, etc.
Setting up a limited company - easy to follow explanation of setting up a limited company in the UK
The proceedings of the Old Bailey - contains 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court!

Reference

Glossary of legal terms (US)
Legal terms (UK)

This list of books and links to further information and resources is no doubt far from comprehensive, but hopefully it will be of some help. If you know of any other helpful links or books please add a comment to let us know about them.

Places: Veere & Middleburg

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 07:35:00 +0000

We made a spot decision over the weekend to get away for a day or two and hit on the Dutch coast as our destination. So, heading more or less due west in just over three hours we found ourselves in Veere booking into what appeared to be the only hotel:

View Larger Map

It was already early evening by this time - the trip was a spontaneous decision remember - after exploring the small town with its incongruously large cathedral (or is it a large church?) the lion's share of evening was spent enjoying a truly delicious (but quite expensive) meal with lobster and other treats!

The next day, after a sea-air induced great night's sleep, we went on a boat trip on the Veerse Meere - a huge lake created back in the '60s by building a dam connecting the island (see map) to the mainland. Here's a very rough 'n' ready video that gives some idea of the views (and the wonderful sky that cleared from dark grey and rainy to brilliant blue almost the moment we set off):

Once back in Veere, we took a walk round the main square, which by then had filled with tourists, and then set off to Middelburg some 7 km inland, where we spent the afternoon sightseeing and enjoying the beautiful 17th and 18th century architecture much of it mercifully left untouched by the bombing raids of the Second World War. There was a cultural event going on and we were lucky enough to be able to visit some of the houses. So, here's a quick slideshow of some snaps we took beginning in Veere and finishing up in Middleburg.

If you're wondering about the music - well that's just one of the tracks we played over and over again on our drive there and back!

So, if you live anywhere nearby, or you're planning to explore the Netherlands this Zeeland area is definitely worth considering for it's beautiful land/seascapes and cultural heritage

Teaching: How to Teach Culture

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:12:00 +0000

In this online presentation Barry Tomalin (see the Globalisation, Communication & the Workplace post below for more details) outlines a methodology for teaching culture, and before drawing some interesting conclusions concerning the role of the language teacher in providing cultural training, provides some extremely helpful examples of lesson plans for developing cultural awareness in the language teaching classroom:

A version of this presentation was first given at the IATEFL conference in Exeter and Barry has updated some of the information and added one or two new insights to his commentary. The new link mentioned at the end of the talk is to the Diverse Europe at Work (DEW) website where you can follow the progress of this EU funded project.

Finally, here is the direct link to the Business Cultural Trainer's Certificate (BCTC) three-day course that Barry mentions.

If you have any comments or questions feel free to add them here or contact Barry directly using the contact details provided in the talk.

Interests: English Acquires its millionth word!

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:25:00 +0000

Just in case this event has passed you by, here's a link to an article informing us that English now has one million words! Interestingly, the word in question has a lot to do with teaching. Can you guess what it might be?

English acquires its millionth word

Amongst the many interesting things the article tells us we have this:

... new words are entering the language at the rate of 14.7 words a day. The internet has also revived the possibilities for independent word-coinage in a way not seen since Shakespeare’s time, when the language was acquiring its modern structure and words were being invented faster than ever before. Of the 24,000 words used by Shakespeare, some 1,700 were his own inventions.

Plenty to keep us and our English language students busy for a long, long time to come then!

Teaching: How to use YouTube to teach English

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Tue, 19 May 2009 11:34:00 +0000

I am now moderating the second iteration of the online version of the Cert IBET teacher training course offered by The Consultants-e. Most of the course activities take place asynchronously, either in the course Moodle, or in the externally hosted password protected wiki set up for the course.

As explained in a previous post (see Performance-based Business English & ESP), the particpants and I also meet online in real time for video conferencing sessions that take place at regular intervals throughout the course. In the most recent of these we had as our guest speaker Jamie Keddie, whose site Teflclips was the British Council ELTons 2009 award winner for innovation. Jamie, who was recently Author of the Month on the Macmillan publishers' one-stop-english ELT resources site, has a keen interest in the use of media - images and video - in teaching and as well as running his successful Teflclips site, where he offers video clip based lesson plans free of charge, he has published a resource book with Oxford University Press that has over 60 image based language teaching activities: Images.

For his webinar with the current participants of the Cert IBET course, he chose to speak on how to use YouTube to teach English, and in particular, business English. Before showing us many interesting examples of the wide variety of content suitable for English teaching that is available on YouTube, Jamie provided many insights into how the emergence of YouTube as the third most visited site on the web has impacted on the worlds of business and media.

Jamie's detailed suggestions for making imaginative and engaging use of the material available on the video sharing site was followed by a look at some of the copyright and technical issues involved, and this provided many practical tips for teachers wanting to make use of this ever-expanding and readily available resource. The online presentation was followed up by a lively Q & A session, which unfortunately, for technical reasons, it was not possible to include here.

I very much hope you enjoy the webinar and please feel free to comment, ask any questions you may have, or add video suggestions using the Comment link below.

Use the full-screen icon (bottom right) for a better view of the slides.

For more about using video and about Jamie's work please use the following links:

OneStopEnglish: Author of the month
JamieKeddie.com
Teaching with video
TEFLclips.com

Other resources

Another site of great interest for video related lessons is Karenne Sylvester's marvellous blog Kalinago English.
For a selection of business English YouTube videos that I have compiled go to my Business English Playlist.

Teaching: Globalisation, Communication & the Workplace

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 16:21:00 +0000

As a feedback activity in the last week of the Cert IBET course I recently moderated, participants were asked to vote for their favourite module. The winner turned out to be the week devoted to tasks that explored the role of cultural awareness and sensitivity in business English teaching. Of the many resources used in this module one that the teachers repeatedly referred back to and found particularly helpful was a short article written by Barry Tomalin, who, amongst many other things, is the Director of Cultural Training and Director of the Business Cultural Trainer’s Certificate at International House London. The article, Culture - the fifth language skill, is one of a series of articles and lesson plans Barry made available as Guest Contributor to the British Council website TeachingEnglish.

What the teachers found especially interesting in this, and the related article Making culture happen in the English language classroom, was the simple, but no less effective idea of incorporating cultural matters in the business English classroom by teaching "a cultural skills set". In this way teachers can help learners develop skills they will able to use in the variety of real-life, inter-cultural situations they increasingly find themselves in the globalised workplace.

Just as this course was coming to an end, as you can see from my last blog post, I was in Florence attending the ICC conference. I hadn't checked the list of speakers, so I was very pleasantly surprised to see that Barry was scheduled to give a talk on Globalisation, Communication and the Workplace, which with his permission I filmed and have uploaded here.

In this talk Barry previews the training material he and his team have been busy producing for the Diverse Europe at Work (DEW) project. Although designed specifically for use to help people integrate into a foreign workplace, (e.g. people moving to the UK to work), I believe that both the "critical incident methodology" that lies at the heart of the material, which is nicely illustrated in the video, and the actual material itself will be of great interest to the business English teaching community at large.

I'm afraid I wasn't planning on recording sessions so I wasn't equipped with a tripod, so please bear with the shaky hand-held recording - it gets better after the first 2 or three minutes - promise!

The website for the DEW project is still under construction at the time posting.

Your comments concerning the talk, the incidents shown and discussed, or the question of teaching culture as a skil will be very much appreciated.

Teaching: Using wikis to teach

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 07:01:00 +0000

Last Saturday, I had the pleasure of running a short workshop at the ICC Annual Conference that this you took place in beautiful Florence. The workshop on using Wikis in English Teaching had the simple aim of

quickly introducing wikis to the audience of teachers with a view to then
giving them an opportunity to actually work with this versatile tool for perhaps the first time, and
experiencing just how easy it is to add content to pages and
produce an online space where they can interact with their students and where learners can interact with each other

The session went well, and although we had only some 35 minutes available for the hands on part of the session once we had solved the one or two minor connectivity issues, all of teachers present had by the end of the session learnt to

login to a password protected wiki
add text to a wiki page
add an image to a page
embed a YouTube video
visit another page and edit an error
leave a comment on a page

Routine though these tasks may seem to the seasoned Web 2.0 user, for most, if not all of the workshop attendees seeing just how easy it was to add content and interact online came as somewhat of an eye-opener, and the session provided a first experience for many of how the power of Web 2.0 tools can be easily harnessed and exploited for teaching purposes.

Here is the short introductory presentation that was used for the session:

ICC Annual Conference (Florence)

One of the highlights of the conference was a truly awe inspiring talk by Dr Sugata Mitra - currently of Newcastle University - who presented his Hole in the wall project. He showed how poor uneducated kids in India when provided with a computer (literally in a hole in the wall) taught themselves computer skills (and as a result English) without any assistance from anyone!

The children worked collaboratively in clusters around the outdoor computer screens and associated this activity with fun. In the wiki workshop, more by necessity than design, the 30 or so participants were arranged in similar clusters around the 10 workstations we had available to us. It was clear that this arrangement greatly added to the fun and effectiveness of the session, and one very important additional lesson learnt, for me at least, was not to underestimate the power and dynamism of collaborative learning environments. In fact, one or two of the teachers themselves remarked on how much they had enjoyed working on the wiki pages together, and thought that they had benefitted more from the session as a result of working in groups at each computer.

To view the wiki that was used for the session please click here: ICC Wiki Workshop and request access.

If you have any comments or questions, or would like to share similar experiences, please feel free to add your thoughts here.

Teaching: Using Second Life to teach Business English

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:51:00 +0000

It wasn't so long ago that Second Life was the web-based application that everyone was talking about. Articles appeared on an almost daily basis in the press with a more often than not sensationalist slant that highlighted improbable behaviour in the virtual world: "Wife Divorcing Husband Over His Gay Dungeon Sex in Second Life."

The current darling of the media in terms of web technology is of course the micro-blogging application Twitter . Stories that combine the current fascination with celebrity and new technologies, as this example shows "Online Twitter craze sweeps across county", appear all too frequently in the press at the moment together with headlines that give even technology a sensationalist slant "Surgeons send 'tweets' from operating room."

Educators, and it would seem the corporate world too, are beginning to explore ways of using this micro-blogging tool for their own purposes. Here is a link to a recent article that takes a look at this latest trend: Twitter as a learning tool. Really

However, although Second Life receives nowhere near the same media coverage as it once enjoyed, there is still, a tremendous amount of activity taking place in this virtual world that is of great interest to educators in general and to business English trainers in particular. And despite the current prominence of Twitter in the public eye many would argue that it is 3-D tools such as Second Life that hold the real key as to where the future of the Internet lies and how this future will be embraced by educators and language trainers.

Here below is an interview recorded in Second Life on the educational island EduNation that gives some insight into the teaching activity that is taking place at the moment in Second Life and provides some indications of the directions teaching, and in particular business English teaching, will take in the future.

Nik Peachey, the well-known learning technology consultant, writer and teacher trainer, who's Learning Technology Blog I would warmly recommend to all teachers, is joined by Gavin Dudeney, writer, teacher trainer, Second Life expert and co-founder of The Consultants-e, to be interviewed by colleague Valentina Dodge.

Apologies if unfortunately the recording qulaity is a long way from being perfect, but hopefully this, and the somewhat less than professionally sharp image quality will not prevent you from getting an insight or two into the state of language teaching in Second Life at the moment. Your comments and / or suggestions for further viewing /reading would be very much appreciated.

Click here if you have problems viewing the clip here.

Note that the interview forms part of the course material for the online Cert IBET course which I am currently moderating and if you would like further information on the course please click here: Cert IBET with the Consultants-e.

Teaching: Performance-based Business English & ESP

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:25:00 +0000

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am currently moderating an online version of the Cert IBET teacher training course offered by The Consultants-e. The course, for the most part takes place in the Moodle virtual learning environment specially created for the 10 weekly modules. We do, also use a variety of other interactive, mult-media Web 2.0 technologies on the course including wikis, social-networking, social bookmarking, and slide show sharing.

Most of the activities take place asynchronously, which allows participants time for reflection in preparing their contributions. This also means that there is a great deal of flexibility regarding task completion as participants are free to choose when and where to work on the series of mainly interactive activities that comprise the modules. However, we also meet in real time online for a video conference every two weeks. In the latest of these we were lucky to have as our guest speaker Cleve Miller, director of the business English learning platform English360.

In a previous session, Pete Sharma, author and teacher trainer, gave a talk on blended learning and he was also able to join us for this session to listen to Cleve explain the thinking behind the soon to be released updated version of the platform which is being developed in collaboration with the Cambridge University Press, and which Cleve describes as a "collaborative content" platform that brings together the best of professionally authored learning materials and teacher generated activities produced in response to the learner's specific needs and the company's strategic aims.

Anyway, here without any further ado is Cleve's presentation, which was recorded live, online, so apologies for any background noises, which I hope do not spoil your enjoyment of what I'm sure you'll find a wide-ranging and thought provoking talk which you can access by clicking on the link below:

Performance-based Business English and ESP

Please feel free to comment or add any questions that you may have in response to what you have seen an heard here. If you you would like further details concerning the Cert IBET course which formed the context for this talk, you can do so here: Cert IBET with the Consultants-e

Teaching: Globish

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:08:00 +0000

As I've already mentioned here I'm a podcast listener - it's a way of using the otherwise dead time I spend driving to different study centres to teach. One of the podcasts I subscribe to is the BBC's From Our Own Correspondent (FOOC).

A little while ago there was a particularly good show with a number of interesting reports including this report on English as a global language and the relatively new phenomenon of Globish, which, of all places originated in France. Here's the extract from the broadcast in question:

You can use this link FOOC or use iTunes to subscribe to this podcast.

Now, of course, the question here is to what extent to do you consider these new forms of English used by non-native speakers of English to be reductive. empowering or liberating. If you are a teacher of English, especially if you teach English for business purposes, what do you use as your paradigm? English as spoken by native speakers in the US, Australia or the UK? Or the non-idiomatic, non-culturally bound and narrowly delineated forms of English used with apparent success to transact business around the world? To a large degree, the answer to this problematic issue lies in the pragmatic needs and the aspirations of the client. But, on the micro level, does one correct something like "I'm very fine." as a response to "How are you?" or not? Clearly, the meaning here is not obscured by the error, but as an opening gambit from your client in a meeting with an important new American partner wouldn't it be better that you ensure he or she makes a better impression by at least getting this right? What do you think?

Teaching: Teacher of the month

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 07:51:00 +0000

Many of us in ELT will be familiar with the excellent teacher support site OneStopEnglish run by the publishers Macmillan.

As well as offering a wide range free as well as pay-for lesson plans and articles for teacher development OneStopEnglish also has an interesting author of the month feature. Past authors have included Adrian Tennant, Karen Richardson, and many more well known developers of teaching materials.

This month the featured author is the talented Jamie Keddie, who, as well as writing for OneStopEnglish has his own well worth visiting teacher's blog, and also runs the excellent teflclips.com, which offers a range of video clip based, ready-to-use lesson plans. These are predominantly for general English, but there is also material we can be used in a business English setting.

If you haven't already checked out OneStopEnglish or Jamie Keddie's blog or the teflclip site then take a moment or two now to have look!

Interests: Goodbye President Bush - Happy New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 14:04:00 +0000

As we eagerly await the coming of a new year and hopefully the dawn of new era in American foreign policy with the arrival of Barack Obama as the new US president on Jan 20, let's reflect on what we'll be missing once Mr Bush leaves office. Here's a special podcast from the Guardian newspaper's Guardian Daily podcast that looks back at the now lame duck President's legacy:

There's no need to comment - the special report says it all!

To subscribe to the Guardian Daily podcast click here or use iTunes.

Here's wishing everyone and very HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

Interests: Twitter or a cell phone?

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 20:12:00 +0000

In this Fast Company TV interview Guy Kawasaki poses interviewer Robert Scoble the question "Would you rather live a week without your cell phone or without Twitter?"

The question alone is indication of the phenomenal growth in use and influence of the micro-blogging tool Twitter. The sheer scale of some of the figures Kawasaki uses to illustrate its significance to him and his Alltop.com project gives you an idea not only of the popularity and power of the tool, but also of its potential as the kind of marketing "weapon" he alludes to.

Robert Scoble currently has over 45,000 "followers" on Twitter, while Kawasaki weighs in at just under 40,000. If you you'd like to follow them and see what you're missing, you can do so here Scobleizer and guykawasaki.

On a much, much smaller scale, of course, I've been using Twitter as a professional development tool that allows me to keep pace with what like-minded teachers are doing with ICT in the classroom. And I also use it to contribute from time to time to the pool of knowledge by high-lighting any new applications or resources I come across. So, as a tool for disseminating ideas and keeping track of things it's proving invaluable.

Teaching: ICT in the classroom

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 17:38:00 +0000

Until relatively recently, when teaching my undergraduate business English classes here in Germany, I've taken quite a dim view of students who use their mobile phones to check their text messages and so on. However, I noticed that while many were certainly doing this, they were also using their phones to check vocabulary either online (with the ubiquitous Leo bi-lingual dictionary), or offline with an application installed on their phone.

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that instead of trying to stem the tide of technology such as mobile phones becoming part of the classroom scenery, I should perhaps be looking for ways of turning technology previously thought to be distracting into teachology that is productive - but how?

Here's an extract from a BBC podcast - one of the many I listen to on my travels to and from our study centres (see previous post) - that begins to answer precisely that question for me. This item on the BBC's Digital Planet programme adopts a positive, but measured approach in which together with the advantages of incorporating ICT in teaching practices, some of the practical difficulties and social issues also find a mention.

Before looking at how a school in the UK has been experimenting with using mobile phones as a teaching tool in the classroom, Howard Rheingold of Stanford University is interviewed and he makes a number of observations about ICT in teaching that raise some interesting questions about the role of teachers in a world in which the need for them to convey information and for their students to memorise that information is becoming increasingly obsolete - or is it? Listen and see what you think.

Your comments would be greatly appreciated.

To listen to the complete podcast or for details on how to subscribe visit the Digital Planet website.

Teaching: Podcasts

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 10:43:00 +0000

Here's an anecdote that I think illustrates the usefulness of podcasts in teaching business English.

As is my habit, while driving to a study centre on Neuss to teach a lesson to a group of undergraduate business students I was listening to podcasts on my iPod. I had prepared a lesson the night before in which we would be working on three separate themes: finance, business ethics and the law. The lesson I should add would be 3 hours long, hence the many and various topics. I was a little unhappy with the lesson as it stood as I had been unable to find a idea that could link the different subject areas we would be working on and provide a unified structure.

And then, just 20 minutes away from the study centre a podcast documentary from the BBC World Service started playing called Failure and Fraud. The programme takes a closer look at the role played by financial irregularities in the crisis that is currently enveloping our world economies. It suggests that the behaviour of bankers such as the CEO of the now bankrupt international investment bank Lehmann Brothers, Dick Fuld, goes beyond the realms of irresponsibility into that of illegal practices. Perfect! Not the illgal behaviour, but the podcast. It provided just what was needed to introduce and tie together the different strands of the lesson: finance, business ethics and the law.

I didn't play the whole recording, but just used the first five minutes to start the lesson off, asking students to listen and make a note of the main ideas expressed, of any useful/difficult language, and of what interrelated aspects of business they thought the programme would be dealing with. I made it very clear that it was not necessary to understand every word of what was said as I had no time to pre-teach any of the vocabulary. In che class discussion that followed the themes that we would be working on that morning came out as did the relationship between business practices, social responsibility and the law.

This short story I hope illustrates what a wonderfully useful and flexible teaching resource podcasts offer teachers.

Here is the full version of the podcast:

If you have experience or suggestions for using ready-made poscasts or of producing podcasts with your students/clients please add add your comments. I'm sure they will be much appreciated!

Teaching: Cert IBET

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 08:00:00 +0000

Together with Nicky Hockly, co-author of How to Teach English with Technology, and co-founder of The Consultants-E I am working on getting the brand new online Cert IBET course ready for its launch on 09 January 2009.

This new course is jointly validated by English UK & Trinity College and participants will receive a Certificate in International Business English Training.

There's much work to be done, but an extremely sound base for the course was provided by Eric Baber (of BESIG fame and now with CUP), who designed the shorter non- validated version that The Consultants-E launched last year. A great deal of effort is being put into making this new, longer version still more interactive with an even greater range of mult-media and ICT training materials integrated into the package. It's challenging but very rewarding work and I'm certainly looking forward to moderating the course in January.

Teaching: Trainer's Guide for Blended Learning Courses

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:29:00 +0000

The trainer's guides that I wrote for the German publishers Cornelsen are now in print:

As the blurb on the inside cover says they are "Based on and dovetailed with PEP's interactive learning modules (ILMS) ... (and provide) ... a wealth of activities to use in the classroom and forum components"

What this means is that the guides comprise ten 90-minute face-to-face classroom lesson plans with a focus on structures, vocabulary and speaking activities combined with ten online forum activities. The classroom and forum activities in the guides, which also include detailed teacher's notes, form part of a blended English for business package put together by Cornelsen for sale to companies and language schools. So, unfortunately the guides will not be available to the general public.

For more information about the package and the other guides available you can visit the Cornelsen PEP web page. The page is in German, but what might be interesting for teachers (or learners) of business English is that there are free materials available on the page including an online interactive module on business meetings, a B2 level online interactive test and a downloadable extract of the Business for Meetings trainer's guide that forms part of the same series as my guides.

Interests: Language

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 08:04:00 +0000

Here's another talk from Ted.com, this time from the Harvard Professor and psychologist/linguist Steven Pinker on the subject of how language mirrors the way we think. The talk, given in 2005, is in fact a preview of his recently published book The Stuff of Thought. Although his style may be a little too "lecture-ish" for some the topic is of great interest. Of course, that there should be a link between language and the way we think is no great surprise, but it's the nature of the link that is so fascinating and Pinker's work offers a way into this which is of particular interest, I think to language teachers.

In this brief talk Pinker argues that human intelligence, or put another way, " the cognitive machinery with which we conceptualize the world" consists of

"- A repertoire of concepts (objects, space, time, causation, intention) useful in a knowledge-intensive species

- A process of metaphorical abstraction: conceptual structure bleached of its content, applied to new abstract domains"

As the title of his book suggests he then links this with the second "window on human nature" namely "the relationship types that govern human social interactions as reflected in language". As an example of this, he uses the example of indirect speech acts and bribery to illustrate the social function of "plausible deniability" and conclude that "the vagueness of language ... might be a feature of language, one that we use to our advantage in social interactions".

So, if I've understood this correctly, Pinker is saying that the way we interact socially is reflected in the very structure (grammar) of language - an idea that should hold interesting possibilities for language teaching!

People: Larry Lessig

noreply@blogger.com (Carl Dowse) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:34:00 +0000

Larry Lessig is a leading authority on Internet law and the creator of Creative Commons. He uses a beautifully crafted presentation structure based on “three stories and an argument” to "pin down" as the introduction to his talk on TED.com states, "the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws" and demonstrate "just how bad laws beget bad code."

To strengthen the case he makes for a new, more balanced approach to copyright issues - an approach that is that doesn't result in the criminalization of a significant number of Internet content producers and users - he deploys an original and highly engaging use of visual aids to tell his three stories and develop his argument, and concludes with a particularly hilarious example (involving President George W. Bush and the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair) of the kind of "remixes" younger read/write users of the Internet are producing with Web 2.0 technologies.

For more on Larry Lessig go here for brief biographical details and links to his websites, blog, wiki, etc.