Are you fluent in “corporate-speak”

September 24th, 2008
by Cleve Miller

Here’s a cute online game that points to the empty sloganeering of corporate PR folk.

Might be a fun activity for some business English students. You could put them in groups and have each group discuss/decide on an answer, then compare/explain answers, then check actual answers. Then have them make on for their company or for their department or position. For fun they could do a ambiguous “sloganeering” style (like the examples) then maybe a direct and clear explanation.

You could contextualize it as a writing task to practice the “clear” and “concise” goals of biz writing/email writing.

Sadly, I got 7 of 8 correct.

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The “mysteries of teaching in all its variety”, and corpora questions

September 22nd, 2008
by Cleve Miller

Nice series in the New York Times Magazine yesterday on different perspectives on teaching today.  There’s a nicely-detailed article on a multi-cultural negotiations workshop, and another on lectures on YouTube.

There’s also an interesting William Safire article on changing trends of slang expressions on campus.  Evidently “hot” isn’t hot anymore, and “fierce” is.

Fast-changing slang usage made me wonder…do corpus researchers limit date ranges when doing statistical modeling of lexical frequency?  I ask because I’m (very) peripherally involved with a project re-purposing a “corpus-informed” coursebook for online delivery. The corpus influence on the coursebook series is actually very well done and useful, but I wondered about a section titled “Posting to a website”…do 22-year-olds post to a “website” (more importantly, do they say they do)? Or do they post to a MySpace “page”, or a “forum” or “thread”, or their Facebook “page”, or their “blog”?

I wonder about the relative frequency of these collocations, and how this frequency changes over time, and how the the corpora analyses are time-bound to follow fast-changing language about uses of technology and slang.

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Authenticity + teachers-as-learners = action research

September 3rd, 2008
by Cleve Miller

This morning’s blogroll had a lot of good stuff, but Will Richardson was the highlight for me.

Will’s frustrated with our profession. In addition to voicing the need for teachers to catch up with the rest of the world, he points out two issues that are obsessions with me: authenticity and teachers as learners.

On authentic learning:

That’s not to say that there aren’t more silos or islands or whatever metaphor works of teachers and classrooms with teachers who are letting students do real work for real purposes and real audiences.

…”real work for real purposes and real audiences”   …hallelujah.

On teachers as learners:

For most educators, “back to school” means “back to teaching.” And that can be good work, but it remains obvious to me that very few see it as “back to learning.” For themselves, that is, along with their students. I’m not seeing much change since I wrote this two years ago.

I hate to generalize, but the thing that seems to be missing from most of my conversations with classroom teachers and administrators is a willingness to even try to re-envision their own learning, not just their students.

This is why we designed the English360 platform with a single interface (or view): students and teachers all see the same thing. We want to keep everyone on the same page, so we only have one page. Teachers have needs assessments as well and, like students, the teachers’ needs assessment sits front and center on their dashboard. The point is: we are all learners.

Regarding Richardson’s point about authenticity: with e360 we’re working hard to connect the students’ learning with actual, real life language performance. Since our students are adults learning English for professional and career purposes, these “performance events” are usually the normal on-the-job use of English: conference calls, training courses, negotiations etc. Nothing new here really.

But if we also have a strong commitment to “teachers as learners”, in a flattened (or at least dynamic) hierarchy, then what would our teachers’ “performance events” be?

It seems pretty clear that for a teacher, performances happens in the classroom, and that, for a teacher, a performance event is a class.  And for a community of teachers working on the e360 platform, collaborative, peer-based learning using performance events (classes) as input…what does this mean?

It means collaborative action research. So one way of looking at the e360 platform is as an action research community.

This is the logical overlap of Richardson’s emphasis on authenticity and teachers as learners.

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