Heads up to our friends and readers who have volunteered to try out our new needs analysis module:

1) thank you all for your interest and enthusiasm, and…
2) it’s not working yet.

I’m getting some flack from our developers for overenthusiastically announcing too early. We’re still in the middle of the internal test phase, which is hair-raising, because it really doesn’t work very well yet, and when you actually use (semi-) working software, you look back at design decisions and wonder “what was I thinking?”.

But I’ve been told by more experienced folks that this is normal, and in a week or so we’ll be ready to let friends and family in. So, thanks for your patience and I’ll be sending out user names the week after next.

This one’s new for me, so thought I’d share: here’s a useful new blog called Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds of Apple. The blog’s new, so there aren’t that many posts, but what’s up so far is excellent. He’s got an analysis of presentation styles by renown presenters such as Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin, and even some authentic audio clips…I haven’t listened yet, but I’ll bet they’ll be great for our BE students.

And better yet, on Garr Reynold’s personal site, an exellent resource section on presentation building. It’s really strong on slide styles and design (just what you’d expect from an Apple guy). That won’t help our students who suffer from the curse of multinational company presentations, the PowerPoint deck, sent pre-formatted from HQ. But even decks often have some wiggle room and students can slip a slide or two of their own into the deck - here’s how to make ‘em count.

Here’s a nice short text suitable for an email writing class or two.

Here’s a 3 minute L/C segment that’s extraordinarily cool for a couple of reasons:
+ It’s by Dave Weinberger, who’s a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, web 2.0 thought leader, and an all around brilliant dude
+ It’s about tagging, which should be interesting for most Business English students (and teachers)
+ Dave’s post has links to the audio, plus a transcript
+ Most importantly, it’s a example of excellent communication - clear, simple, to the point, and with examples. Your students will understand the essence of why tagging is important, and know how to try it (which you could do in class). As a communicator, I know I have a tendency to overcomplicate things and try to say too much…this mini-presentation is an example of how not to do that.

Via Matt at Signal vs Noise, an amazing article about an amazing person, social entrepreneur Bill Strickland. His story struck home with me on so many levels that by the time I finished reading it I had outlines for 8 different posts scribbled on a piece of paper. So here’s the first post in the “Strickland Series”.

Any way you cut it, social entrepreneurship is about the coolest thing going (here’s the wikipedia article). It’s a mix of pragmatism and idealism that pulls together two conflicting camps: the “That’s reality: deal with it” camp vs the “But this is how reality should be” camp. There’s a grain of truth in the over-generalized caricature of the mercilessly effective cut-throat capitalist and the pompously pontificating academic liberal who can only manage words, not deeds. (There. I’ve pissed off everybody.) Sometimes people try to simplify the complexities of life by filtering events through a one-sided advocacy of one camp without acknowledging any virtues of the other. Social entrepreneurship takes the best of both camps by not only getting things done, but getting the right things done.

What does this have to do with language teaching? We’ve been kicking around the ‘teachers as free agents” meme over the last few days (AJ’s original post that started the idea, me, Aaron, Scott). The idea I want to propose is that free agent language teachers working abroad have (literally) a world of opportunity to engage in social entreprenuership.

How? There are many types of social entreprenuership, so there are many different ways. One approach that comes to mind is for teachers to partner with corporate sponsors to teach less-advantaged kids. One of many possible scenarios would involve, say, an ex-pat Business English teacher doing in-company classes somewhere in Latin America.

Probably some of our hypothetical teacher’s BE students are in marketing, and therefore have access to the marketing budget, and may be open to sponsoring an after-school English program taught by our teacher in a public school. Our teacher would then work out the English program with the English teachers of the public school so that it complements the curriculum, and set up a Dekita exchange with kids in a school in our teacher’s home town (if they need a PC with internet access, then get the sponsor to help.)

Our teacher is paid for the classes by the corporate sponsor, perhaps less than an institute would charge, but perhaps more than our teacher would make working for the institute (if our teacher is in a position to donate his or her time for free, that’s great, but then we’re moving towards philanthropy and away from social entrepreneurship). The corporate sponsor gets publicity for being a good corporate citizen. In my experience most companies do want to do good things and if the market rewards them by buying more of their product, well, that’s OK. My thinking is that anytime you can move marketing money away from TV ads and into education, that’s a good thing for everyone.

Two years ago while I was teaching in Caracas I came up with a project, similar to this but at a much larger scale, and to my surprise got a corporate partner almost immediately. We started the project but later put it on standby - I profoundly underestimated the complexity of the technology I had proposed to build, but we’re slowly but surely pulling our resources together and hopefully we’ll have some news in a few months. I’ve got another project just barely in the planning stages here in Miami, and it’s too soon to tell if it’ll go anywhere, but I think it’ll be really fun if we can pull it off. We’ll keep you posted on of both these projects as they progress.

I had made a vow not to link to AJ for a month or so, but his latest post makes this impossible. Why? Because his take on teachers as free agents is exactly why we’re building our software.

The education field is beginning to resemble the sports world. Teachers can be free agents too. Forget the days of tenure. Forget the days of working 20 years for the same sorry bureaucracy. While some bemoan the loss of “job security”… I see this as a very positive development. Sure, the mediocre clock-punchers are losing “security”. But great opportunities are also opening.

These opportunities boost the demand for and the power of passionate, engaged, interesting teachers…As I survey the TESOL field, for example…I find it almost laughable. The standards are incredibly low. The established field of public and private programs is ripe for destruction. How much longer will boring, grammar-translation based, unpleasant, and ineffective programs be able to survive?

The passionate and engaged teachers that AJ points to are exactly who we’re building the English360 web application for. The learning, teaching, and admin support in our application will allow independent Business English teachers to nurture learner autonomy, connect with P2P communities of practice, and support improved on-the-job language performance by their students. One of our goals is that the English360 application will emancipate these teachers from mediocre schools that take half the fees the client company pays, yet add no value to what happens in the classroom (or, more commonly, actually hinder teacher performance). Another of our goals is that it is free for teachers.

I was discussing this vision with a group of independent BE school directors in São Paolo last year, and they were concerned about the role they would play in this new world of bureaucracy-busting technology. One director asked “but if your application will do all this, what will teachers need us for?”. I said “Take a minute and think of what you do that directly helps your teachers help your students, and that’s your answer. And there’s a need for clients to have a single point of contact. But if your primary role is sales, administration and infrastructure, you’re history”.

So what’s the timetable for our software? We’re hoping for a beta launch of the complete, 5-section application for early 2006. Right now we’re knee-deep in interface design for the second of the five sections, and finishing up the back-end coding for the first. That means we’ll have a working version of the first section in about two weeks. It’s a needs analysis, the first step when designing an effective business English program.

So I’d like to take this opportunity to recruit a few teachers to try out the English360 needs analysis. If you’d like to be the first to test drive some cutting-edge learning technology, then drop us an email, and we’ll send you a user name and a password. In October you’ll spend an hour or so playing with a very cool web app, finding bugs, and telling us what you’d improve.

In a previous post we discussed teacher roles, and in a great comment to that post Bee has shared a nice resource for my ongoing quest for a “unified theory of BE teaching” which as of today mostly consists of questions I pose to myself (hopefully I can work out some answers via this blog). Bee is part of the triumvirate that launched the wonderful Dekita P2P for ESL community.

Anyway, Bee suggested checking out the Indiana State University site on instuctional design and teaching styles. The resource summarizes clusters of approaches/roles:
+ formal/authority
+ facilitator
+ demonstrator
+ delegator
It’s well worth a look. Something that struck me was the emphasis on learner training as a defining characteristic of facilitation. That’s logical, seeing as how facilitation focuses on the process rather than product, but I hadn’t made the connection strongly enough until now. So thanks Bee for that.

In this context: can anyone suggest a favorite resource that explicitly compares teaching language skills vs. teaching a “subject” (such as science or literature)? Specifically, I wonder how the constructivist approach could be modified to address the difference of domain. SLA isn’t the same as acquiring knowledge of, say, science: how does the constructivist paradigm address this? I could start by re-reading through Rod Ellis, but aside from that, any ideas?

There! Got your attention didn’t I? That’s because after millions of years of natural selection our brains are hardwired to react immediately to a chance to reproduce and pass on our DNA. Studies show that when thinking about sex our brains explode in a frenzy of neurotransmitters.

What does this have to do with language teaching? The always brilliant Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users explains in this post (her example is teaching IT systems):

So instead of, “… then the enterprise component will stay synchronized with the underlying persistent store…” I might say, “if you don’t do it this way, you could be a victim of the dreaded Lost Update problem and… that means you could lose the entire record of Suzy’s last Victoria’s Secret purchase.” Then I let them make the one final leap to, “the boss screams at me, it shows up on my performance eval, I don’t get that raise, and that means… less sex.” (And yes, there’s a reason I said “Victoria’s Secret” and not “lose the entire record of Bill’s Office Supplies purchase…”. It’s almost biologically impossible to not have at least some tiny chemical reaction to the phrase “Victoria’s Secret” that simply doesn’t happen when you’re talking about pencils and staplers. And remember, it’s that chemical reaction that leads to attention and memory. It’s that chemical reaction that tells the brain that this is important! Pay attention and record!

If we all acknowledge that we need to make our classes relevant and meaningful to adult learners, what better way than by acknowledging something so essentially human? We need some neural re-wiring for second language acquisition, and neural activity can spark that. AJ Hoge’s recent post at Effortless Language Acquisition (again, a must read for language teachers) writes

If “content is king”… if “fascinating topics” are crucial…why are we still reading boring articles in class? I imagine that thought is going through every one of my students’ minds who reads this blog.

I’ve thought about that question alot and I can’t think of a reasonable answer other than, “I was afraid to go all the way with this idea”. But that fear is evaporating and I realize I’ve got to do more than write or yammer about these ideas.

Another problem is that it’s not necessarily easy for me to know what fascinates most Thai University girls aged 18-22 (the bulk of my students). It has taken me some time to figure this out.

My conclusion is that the number one topic of fascination is relationships & dating. Romance, heartbreak, the differences between girls and boys, dating challenges, love, etc. seem to fascinate most of my students. Whenever I ask a class what TV show they’d like to watch in class, “Sex and The City” is always the big vote winner. Romance movies are equally popular.

OK, time to go spice up the content of my “English for Accounting” course.

As I mentioned before the workshop and presentations on corpora were the highlight of the EuroCALL 2005 conference for me. Other than a few sessions using a concordancer, I went into the corpora activities as a beginner, and, thanks to some great teachers, I came away with a fascination for the potential that corpora and data-driven learning have for fostering learner autonomy and improving materials design. Over the next few months I’ll be testing some ideas to see how they work for our learners.

Corpora: the short and sweet explanation (for beginners like me)
Basically to make a corpus you collect a number of real, authentic texts (written or spoken) that are representative of a language as a whole, or of a specific genre of that language (say, business email). A smaller, specialized corpus might have 1,000,000 words (equivalent to about ten 300-page books) and the BNC corpus has over 100,000,000 words (depending on your purpose, smaller corpora can be fine). By aggregating many, many examples of real language (from newspapers, novels, magazines, interviews, debates, talk shows, gossip, small talk, email, etc. et. al.) you have a nice sample of what really happens when people use the language everyday.

Then, you label each word according to the part of speech it represents (called POS tagging). This process can be automated with software.

Now you can use other software to do all sorts of cool statistical stuff, such as analyzing the most significant words in Business English, and concordancing. Here’s part of a KWIC (key words in context) concordance I made with the phrase “moving on” using the web-based concordancer created by Mark Davies that uses the BNC. I limited the register to “spoken” to try and extract “moving on” used as a discourse marker showing a transition to a new topic (typical BE target language). Each line is a separate “hit” from a different text:

we ought to be thinking about er Yeah. er moving on. Do you think that is about right?
say, an hour and three quarters. Erm moving on a l a little bit, what was your
in the surrounding streets. Mhm. Moving on, erm in te you know obviously you must
That’s how they were dealt with. Erm moving on a bit now, er er I mean,
crimes to prostitution? Well I think you’re moving on now to a sphere where perhaps
does that. That’s right. Er anyway moving on, just a couple more things were on this
when they empty it now? Yeah. Yes Moving on from the, the dredger back to when you
shift again. Pump that one in and kept moving on. Mm. They got the roof secure,
four one is the number to call. Erm moving on and talking about the subject of the
anyway, I’d like to consult you about moving on and getting in the next four motions
sensible way forward. Moving on, another suggestion is that we should ballot our

One implication for teachers: teaching authentic language
So you can see with this abbreviated example that, with the register limitations I used, “moving on” is used quite frequently in authentic speech to signal a change of topic. This isn’t surprising…most BE texts teach this phrase. But, let’s look at some of the other phrases that BE texts teach as discourse markers used to change a topic, and note down the frequency that each is used within the BNC spoken sub-corpus. (Example phrases from a popular BE coursebook on presentation skills from a major publisher, released in 1995.)

“That brings me to…” or “That brings us to…”
Total examples: 7
Used as discourse marker: 7

“Now we come to…”
Total examples: 7
Used as discourse marker: 6

“Let’s go on to…”
Total examples: 2
Used as discourse marker: 2

“…move on to…”
Total examples: 2
Used as discourse marker: 0

“Moving on…”
Total examples: 59
Used as discourse marker: 38

So if we are teaching BE learners how to produce (or understand) a transition in a presentation, which one of these phrases would be more useful? That the answer to this question is now obvious points to the promise of corpora and data-driven learning, and how it can impact materials design. (Disclaimer: corpus analysis can be tricky, and I’m far from being qualified to do it. So this little example above may be riddled with mistakes and the conclusion therefore wrong. My first question would be the appropriateness of the BNC corpus for identifying authentic business language…it might be interesting to use a more genre-specific corpus like Mike Nelson’s. Any readers who can point out other problems get a post of their own.)

It’s hard to summarize all the emotions that arise from the catastrophe in New Orleans…heartbreaking, shameful, and infuriating come to mind first off. This is a professional blog, not a personal blog, so we’ll leave it at that.

If you’d like, you can help out here.