How would this correspond to the language acquisition vs. language knowledge distinction?

Here’s a response to Why We Hate HR discussed in this post. It’s a strong rebuttal (but as a teacher, I’m an HR guy, so I’m not 100% objective).

What elements should we consider when thinking through an upcoming class? Are we training, or supporting learning? What about metalearning?

All this and more in a great post from Marg O’Connell.

The post isn’t specific to language teaching, but is 100% applicable to our field, and outlines a general context, with the how-to’s for the next installment.

BE professionals all have to read Why We Hate HR. Not just read the ideas in the article, but ponder, re-hash, debate, and reject or accept (obviously I vote for the latter).

Why? Three reasons:

First off, most of our clients are training managers or HR departments. The article explains why HR sits at the kid’s table, while marketing, finance, and production call the shots. That our clients are marginalized within their organization should be of concern to everyone involved with BE.

Second, we need to take into account the internal dynamics of our client companies. HR has less clout than other areas. What does that means for us? It means that we must bring the line managers to the table. Since most of the time we design the language program structure, we must include line managers (not just HR) at every step. Needs assessment, course planning, attendance reporting…all must flow through line managers as well. Our students feel accountable to their direct manager, not HR. At English360, when we started pushing for active line manager partication in the programs we designed and delivered, program success improved considerably.

Finally, and most importantly, we need to constantly ask ourselves “how can we best impact our students’ business?”. It’s the lack of perceived direct impact of HR on business results that this article laments. For BE to contribute to business results, we need to design courses and activities around actual performance events such as presentations, meetings, and email, instead of page 42 of Market Leader (nothing against Market Leader by the way).

Of course many BE teachers do this already. But several years ago I observed about 40 different classes and dozens of teachers for a client, in 9 countries, and I was dismayed at how few of the teachers strayed from the book. Some weren’t sure what their students’ jobs were…even in individual classes. In the follow-up interviews, it was clear that these teachers (and their schools) understood that, for most of our students, English isn’t an end in itself, it’s a means to an end. They just weren’t teaching that way.

The purpose of Business English teaching is to improve business performance (through more effective communication). Focusing on that end requires, whenever possible, a dogme approach, an emergent syllabus, and classes primarily based on preparing for learners’ actual on-the-job language performance. I’ll be discussing these ideas on this page, as they summarize the English360 approach.

(Full disclosure: my BE experience is from Latin America, and I’ve spent some time in Eastern Europe. Why We Hate HR is is right on the money in LatAm and the US, but I’m not sure how applicable it is to the rest of Europe and Asia. If you have experience there, please chime in.

Via Global Voices, an interesting post from Macam-Macam. CNN reports that

Indonesia will require overseas people seeking work permits to master the local language if their jobs involve regular interaction with Indonesians, an official has said.

I had a client in Buenos Aires, an enormous US multinational, and several of the senior managers for the Argentine branch were from the States. One of these expat managers didn’t speak a word of Spanish, despite having lived in Argentina for over 10 years. He lived in a English language bubble of family, work, and mostly expat friends. I always felt bad for him and the poverty of his self-imposed internal exile.

Here’s a useful article from Steve Pavlina on eliminating verbal pauses: the “err”s and “ahhh”s that can derail your students’ presentations.

These no-content fillers are tough to eliminate for native speakers, especially given the pressure many people experience when speaking in public. And as every Business English teacher knows, it’s even tougher for our students, who often need to be mentally scanning (consulting the monitor) for vocabulary or a structure. Here are two ideas that we’ve used to help our students:

Idea #1: Build awareness
Pavlina emphasizes that the first step towards reducing this tendency is speaker awareness of these pauses. He notes that in his Toastmaster group one person in the audience is designated the “ah counter” who gives every speaker the number of fillers used. He says that the aahhs in his presentations have dropped from 10-20 down to 0-2 since the measurement started.

So, 2 points here for BE teachers:
1) The management truism “what gets measured gets improved”: when practicing a presentation with a student, count the aahhs.
2) Learner awareness is key. As a part of learner training, performance awareness is critical to progress and learner autonomy.

Idea #2: Get help from the audience
I know about these fillers first-hand from delivering presentations in Spanish. My Spanish is just under an ALTE C1 (at least on good days) and I’m more fluent than accurate, but I still get hung up with certain structures or searching for the right phrase when making presentations.

When this happens, I have a technique I use (and have recommended successfully to many students): I ask the audience for help. When I notice that I’m pausing to think of a word or structure, I ask the audience immediately for the translation (so far there’s always been someone in the audience who can provide it). The audience is delighted to help and the communicative rapport is strengthened. We move from a speech to a two-way conversation; the audience is participating and energy goes up.

Caveats: This can’t be over-used. It doesn’t replace true “conversation” in a presentation. Watch carefully to assure positive audience reaction. It’s only appropriate for less formal presentations with audiences up to 50 or so. It won’t work with every presentation “style”.

If you try these techniques, let us know how it goes.

Via Anne Davis via Ewan Mcintosh: two .pdf files that offer teachers an overview of how to use Del.icio.us from David Muir and how to use Furl by Jim Wenzloff.

Here’s a quick read on goal setting using the well-known SMART system.

We use this approach when helping learners set up their program, objectives, and timetables (see “Roadmap” in our glossary). I even have a lesson plan somewhere with a step-by-step guide - I’ll track it down if anybody asks.

In our experience SMART goal-setting can be a invaluable metacognitive tool for adult language learners.

Always-worth-reading George Siemens bucks the trend and makes the case that most learning is not social.

Now it’s pretty clear that language learning is a special subset of “learning” in general, and that the communicative essence of language learning pushes it way over towards the social end of the learning spectrum. Given.

But as language teachers we limit our effectiveness by overplaying the “social learning” card. This can happen in two ways:

1) Just because an activity is somehow “social” doesn’t mean it’s automatically good. “Let’s get our students in a chat room and they can communicate across borders!” is not necessarily going to be a productive use of our learners’ time because it’s social in nature. Activities such as this require careful preparation and set-up. Cultural factors may undermine effectiveness, as may student expectations (Paige Ware offers a fascinating diagnosis of what can go wrong, and why).

2) And if an activity is not “social”, then it’s not automatically inferior. AJ Hoge has some nice stuff on extensive reading and its value to acquisition (here’s the first one I could dig up). Self-directed solo activities can be immensely rewarding; reading, browsing the web, watching movies, listening to music…all provide rich input and are a wonderful component of any course.

This is not an argument against the social nature of language learning. The point is that we should select, design and deploy activities carefully, based on their intrinsic value, not on an easy fit into a over-generalized social learning paradigm.

Well, we’re online with our new website redesign…you’re looking at it. We’ve still got a little tweaking to do, mostly with the text, but we’re pretty much there.

A big round of applause for our website team is definitely in order:

+ Cameron Moll for his design wizardry. Cameron led the project and really delivered, combining attention to design detail with a big-picture perspective. And I love the new logo he designed for us.

+ David, Manuel, and Vito of Venecorp in Caracas for their brilliant back-end engineering (you’ll see much more from them in our upcoming web application).

+ Carson McComas of Frogbody, for his adroit project management skills. Carson combines web savvy and solid tech skills with a get-it-done practicality that is exactly what we need to keep us in line at English360.

They did a great job. And you’ll be seeing more from the team really soon, when we start beta testing our online needs analysis application.