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.)
Fortunately I was able to attend your presentation of the English 360 platform (I can actually see my back in one of the photos :))I’m bit of a curious case since I have just started exploiting the ways the Internet can be used in a BE classroom. Coming from Croatia I can’t actually say how much we are behind all the latest developments in the field (there are some educational institutions which keep abreast of the technology but my organization is more focussed on some other areas). However, there were several interesting points for me to take back home from Berlin (and your presentation):1) not many people attended it- was that due to the reluctance on the part of BE teachers to embrace the new ways or, in my opinion, a bit chaotic conference organization with so many presenters that you simply couldn’t see the forest for the trees??? 2)You were right in noticing that we were unfamiliar with the terms ’sage on the stage’ and ‘guide on side’ (I thought it was only my ‘problem’ toghether with some other I’ll be writing about in a bit). But I knew exactly what you meant by that. (I mustn’t forget to add that your presentation was extremely well-structured, which I wanted to tell you afterwards but you were ‘under siege’). 3)I flatter myself for being one of the youngest teachers in the audience but at the same time the least knowledgeable. This is maybe due to the fact that the generation of English-learners we deal with at our school is not so much used to using the Internet in general, not only as a learning tool. For new generations, this will be a much more natural mode of learning and interaction while we still feel most comfortable in the book and pen environement and face2face contact. My attitude to e-learning is also ambivalent to say the least: I’m atttracted by its novelty, vast opportunities it offers but at the same time intimidated by technology it involves(my IT skills are very poor). As a matter of fact, I was also supposed to present at BEsig and it was to do with how to use the Internet on a very basic level (a guide through abundance of sources available: just online editions of newspapers with articles, videos, quia…)Since the Internet thus became my area of interest, I attended Pete Sharma’s workshop as well but what I got was just a load of information , just more trees in my forest. I heard of moodles but it was all too rushed for me to be able to grasp what is this actually all about. The fact that this is the first time that I opened the site http://www.english360 speaks for itself. (There are so many other issues that I have to deal with in my everyday teaching life). I started exploring moodles as well and I think some things started to dawn on me. A few years back I attended a one-day seminar in creating on-line materials held by a Canadian professor, they kept talking baout WebCT and I suppose it was a very bad start for me that scared me (other participants came from IT background).
I apologise for this chaotic spout of writing and my English which has deteriorated from teaching lower levels, but I thought some feedback is better than nothing and you definitely deserved at least this.
I will continue exploring the platform in my free time and I’m sure I’ll learn most by doing something (as in that beautiful story about a pottery class).
Best wishes
Branka, Zagreb, Croatia
Comment by Branka — January 4, 2008 @ 6:12 am
Hey Branka! Thanks for commenting. If you get a minute send me a message in e360…I’d like to touch base with you on the platform.
Comment by clevemiller — January 7, 2008 @ 3:00 pm