BESIG Conference in Berlin

Fortunately I was able to attend the BESIG conference in Berlin in November - there were many very useful workshops and presentations, and it was great to be able to finally meet many of the folks I’m in contact with online.

Probably the most interesting session for me was David Graddol’s plenary talk on the future of business English. He made some intriguing points:

• according to his research, 74% of business conversations take place among non-native speakers
• as a result, there is a growing recognition that “intelligibility” is as important as accuracy
• employers are now less interested in exam scores and more interested in what the employee can do with English
• the number of people learning will English will peak globally at around 2 billion in the year 2010
• after 2010, the number of English learners will start to drop off, because national curriculums are starting English much earlier in primary school, and then moving into content classes (i.e. history class, but the language of instruction is English). Thus learners are reaching an advanced level (say, C1) by the time they enter university.

Much of this will be familiar to anyone who has read Graddol’s latest research, English Next, which was commissioned by the British Council. You can download the .pdf here.

Karen Richardson has a nice write-up of the conference for One Stop English.

I was also a speaker, and gave a presentation on “Web 2.0 as a Business English catalyst”. Lots of excellent questions after the talk. I spent some time pointing out how the new approaches to the web (”web 2.0″) correspond strongly with the principles of social constructivist learning theory, and how this relates to teaching business English. I then gave the audience a sneak peak of the English360 platform and showed how we have pulled those new approaches into a collaborative, web-based teaching tool.

(photo below) Here I was doing a brief overview to be sure everyone in the audience was on the same page regarding “social constructivist” approaches. It was interesting that many in the mostly European audience were unfamiliar with the “sage on stage” vs “guide on side” terms…maybe these terms are more common in the US?

(Photo below) Here I was showing the relationships between different approaches. The inner circle is the more traditional “teacher lecturer” model, which focuses on what happens cognitively in the brain (mostly remember and reproduce). The second, larger circle represents the communicative approach with a social constructivist foundation: the focus moves from the individual to the group, which works together on tasks involving info exchange. A key point is that the second circle doesn’t negate the first, it expands it…people can and do learn through “passively” absorbing a lecture (I also discussed this here, maybe a bit too aggressively!). But, then working with that new knowledge with others, to produce a result, will usually solidify that learning.

But much of this is classroom based. The third circle represents how web 2.0 approaches can pull this classroom-based activity into the real world, which is, after all, the whole point.

You can get the slides here off the BESIG site (I’m J4, way at the bottom, and -warning- it’s a heavy file download.)

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