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The English Learner Notebook
May 11th, 2010
by Valentina Dodge
It seems Spring is full of conferences and as we reflect or share our thoughts on what makes a “good” conference, I know that for me it’s about the opportunity of meeting online “connections” face-to-face. There’s a great buzz from human smiles and human minds exchanging ideas. It’s wonderful to be able to bump into people you might otherwise never meet.
Although online conferences such as the Virtual Round Table - which has just hosted its second event - are powerful and save on travel time, there is less chit chat over morning coffee or time to sit down and speak to people individually.
At TESOL Spain, held in Lleida in March we bumped into Ken Goméz plugging his wonderful notebook, that was a meaningful start to a super event. Since then, I’ve kept in touch by email and would like to share an interview on the Enlano English Learner Notebook project that Ken introduced us to.
Valentina: What are the benefits for learners using English Learner Notebook?
Ken: The main benefit is that the students will have an organised and structured notebook, this will help immensely when revising for exams or when looking for specific material already covered. It also offers sections such as the vocabulary by topic spider diagrams which students may otherwise not bother doing, and which is an incredibly useful tool.
Valentina : What is the English Learner Notebook (ELN)?
Ken: As the title suggests this is a notebook for learners of English as a second language. The aim of the notebook is to help students take effective and organised notes. This is achieved by dividing the notebook into specific sections for the students to note down the relevant information using pre-designed templates.
Valentina: What are some of the ways in which the ELN differs from an “ordinary” notebook?
Ken: At first sight the obvious difference is that the English Learner Notebook is divided into sections each with its own pre-printed design and each page numbered. There is also a short reference section at the back (grammar glossary, verb tense overview, phonetics etc.) for students to consult.
Valentina : How do you see the English Learner Notebook fitting in with digital vocabulary learning aids e.g collaborative mindmaps or online flashcards?
Ken: E-learning is obviously here to stay and a very powerful tool which should not be overlooked even by the traditionalists. I see the English Learner Notebook complementing this process. The student has the opportunity to note down for future reference the most relevant information which they gain from the e-learning sessions, as in a traditional learning environment. The fact that the student has to physically write down information also helps with the retention of that information.
Valentina: Who is involved in the “Enleno” project?
Ken: Enleno is very much a personal project which I developed while studying a CELTA course at the Hyland Academy in Madrid. I saw the need for students to take effective notes and decided to do something about it. The content of the notebook is by Catherine Morley who was one of my tutors on the course. Some friends of mine, ZAC design, helped with the layout and design. I am now in the process of getting the product out into the market. The notebook was on show at the IATEFL conference in Harrogate at the English Language Bookshop and further details on the English Learner Notebook are available at http://enleno.com/
Copy Editing QA Job Vacancy
April 21st, 2010
by Valentina Dodge
You
You’ll have an ELT teaching background, copy editing experience - previous knowledge of conversion from print to digital would be an advantage - an eye for detail and will be something of a perfectionist. You’ll need to be competent, confident and comfortable working in a Web environment as the work involves on-screen editing and online communication - we don’t work with proofs and we mostly talk to each other on Skype. The projects and number of hours can vary, so you’ll be expected to be flexible and happy to take on new projects at short notice. We have a dynamic and communicative English360 team that you’ll be required to co-ordinate with, so you’ll need to be comfortable communicating and being contactable online. As well as being an active team member, you’ll also need to be able to work independently and take the initiative when required.
The job
The work is essentially copy editing and carrying out QA on ELT material that is published on the English360 platform. This involves ‘traditional-style’ copy editing (spelling, fonts, layout etc) as well as testing the interactive activities as a user (learner and teacher) to make sure that they work. Part of the editing process requires reporting any problems or issues promptly and clearly using the Web platforms that we have in place for this. You will also be required to document the work done and to keep the team up-to-date with project progress. Your role may also involve reporting on the quality and appropriateness of user-generated content. Liaising with the English360 team on all of the above is an integral part of the role. The work is freelance, with the number of hours dependent on the English360 workflow; however a minimum commitment of 25 hours per week is required initially. As the work can be done remotely, your location isn’t important – but a reliable, fast internet connection is.
Please send a copy of your CV and letter of application to jobs at english360 dot com - Closing date 1st May 2010.
Thoughts from the IATEFL ‘English in the Workplace’ symposium
April 16th, 2010
by Zoe Rose
I was lucky enough to attend the ‘English for the Workplace’ Symposium at IATEFL. All the speakers were wonderful, but it was a comment from Dr Amna Mohamed Bedri that caught my attention most.
According to Dr Bedri, the goal of English for Special Purposes is this: For the learner to acquire higher competence in their field of ESP than an average native speaker.
It’s an interesting thought, and one that has big implications for how English for the workplace should be taught. When a teacher teaches English for the workplace, he or she is always teaching English for Special Purposes as well - that is, he or she is teaching English for the Special Purpose of meeting the needs of that specific workplace. And the teacher will never know the needs of the workplace as well as the learners will!
For all that there are differences between workplaces, there are also cultural differences between the locations of different workplaces - Martina Mbayu’s insights, developed from her years of teaching English in Cameroon (where English is a minority language), were very different from Dr Bedri’s in Khartoum.
I was reminded of Nick Robinson’s excellent presentation on ESP from the previous day, where he explained good ESP practice as a collaboration between language specialists (i.e. teachers) and professional specialists (i.e. the learners). The teachers are (usually) not part of the same discourse community as their learners - Doctors and Lawyers, for example, have very specialised language systems that teachers don’t know. That’s why collaboration is so important.
At the Symposium, Dr Sofija Micic expanded on this idea. She presented on the development of a course in Medical English for Doctors training at Belgrade University, pointing out that Doctors needed to know technical, sub-technical, and layman’s terms for every type of medical condition - a far larger medical vocabulary than any average native speaker – or average teacher – would ever have!
- Martina Mbayu, Cleve Miller, Joseph Tomoh, and Dr Amna Bedri (Dr Sofija Micic not shown)
The question that all this raises for me is this:
If it is difficult for a skilled, intelligent, responsive teacher to teach English for the Workplace, is it even possible to create a coursebook specific enough to support them?
The answer, I think, is ‘no’. Coursebooks must by their nature be broad-ranging, and English for the workplace must by its nature be highly specific. However good the coursebook is, it will never be able to meet the exact needs of both a mining company in Sudan and a soft-drinks distributor in Cameroon!
All of this made me remember why I love working on English360. It’s the only tool I know where you can mix general coursebook material with very specific, specially made material. As Cleve Miller, the CEO of English360, explained in his presentation, you need a combination of both to meet the real, on-the-ground needs of learners, but just as importantly, you need both to meet the real, on-the-ground needs of workplaces. The workplaces are, after all, the ones who pay the bills!
If the best ESP teaching is a collaboration between teachers and learners, then maybe the best support for ESP is a kind of collaboration as well - a ‘collaboration’ between general, carefully structured, all-purpose coursebooks and specific, workplace-tailored content.
After all, just as learners know things that teachers don’t, so teachers know things that publishers don’t. And it’s wonderful to be part of a project that is setting that knowledge free at last.
Links:
Jeremy Day interviews Cleve Miller about ESP on the ‘Specific English’ blog:
Nick Robinson’s ESP podcast on PEO
Adding spokes to the wheel
March 4th, 2010
by Valentina Dodge
Here are some new features which have recently been released to help you develop and deliver your blended learning courses.
- You can create tests by enabling or disabling the “clear answers” function – this means learners can only submit their work once and the activity you create can be a test. Note that you can choose this setting at page or course level simply select “Allow” or “Do not allow” multiple attempts on course settings or when you publish a page. Do you allow learners to resubmit work or do an exercise again? What do you think is the best balance for self-study activities?
- You can now hide a folder if you are developing learning material within it and you are not ready to use the tasks or exercises with learners. If a folder contains only draft pages (i.e. there are no published items) then the folder will not show up for your learners – learners can happily get on with the activities that you have published while you prepare the upcoming tasks in private. Note: any co-moderators of the course will still be able to view the folder. Do you find that most of your courses are designed as you go along, to allow for a more flexible training program?
- The “open essay” item now has a toolbar! The rich text editor allows learners to add colour and different font types. Learners can also highlight words, or add an audio or image file from their hard disk. They can also add hyperlinks or videos, making essay submissions much richer, and appealing to a wider range of learning styles. Here’s an example:
There are many other small enhancements we have made, to make your experience smoother, and we will be rolling out some additional features soon. Hope you are enjoying the platform.
BESIG 2009
November 25th, 2009
by Cleve Miller
Attended the BESIG conference in Poznan last weekend, with fellow English360′ers Paul Colbert and Brian Anderson. As always it was great to actually meet with colleagues that had previously been only virtual: met Karenne and Anne face to face finally. Discussed an interesting new project that Cornelia and Paul have cooked up. Met with lots of folks that I only see once a year.
Vicki Hollett’s plenary and subsequent session were great. My take away was her discussion on teaching functional language for authenticity when establishing relationships, whether they be business or social relationships. Main point: those nice lists of functional phrases we have in BE coursebooks need an upgrade.
Another highlight was Jeremy Day’s session on “Results-focused ESP”. Jeremy gave us an observation that was new to me. I’m paraphrasing here but he was discussing the question “Who is the most important person in the learning process?” and we were all thinking “the student” (as opposed to teacher-centered, or materials-centered classes of course). Jeremy’s point was that another perspective, especially in ESP, is to see that the most important person isn’t even in the classroom. If we are teaching English for nursing, the most important person is actually the patient, who will be communicating with the nurse (our student). If we are teaching English for students who work in a call center, the most important person is the customer, who will need our student to resolve an issue with a product. This expansion of who we prioritize as stakeholders in the learning process is spot on.
“…this is it. The big one.”
June 17th, 2009
by Cleve Miller
NYU Professor Clay Shirky (via email from Diane Tucker):
“I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted ‘the whole world is watching.’ Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is really extraordinary.
Traditional media operates as source of information not as a means of coordination. It can’t do more than make us sympathize. Twitter makes us empathize. It makes us part of it. Even if it’s just retweeting, you’re aiding the goal that dissidents have always sought: the awareness that the ouside world is paying attention.
From Nico Pitney in The Huffington Post.
Collaboration and 360° content creation.
May 20th, 2009
by Cleve Miller
The traditional publisher model of expert authored, professionally edited language teaching course books is often necessary, but seldom sufficient for optimal learning.
Although they are a wonder of high quality teaching content, scope and sequence, and production values, course books have their issues. They may take 3-5 years from conception to classroom, and are usually designed for general appeal to a passive mass audience. They are expensive to produce. Authors are far from the needs of different cultures, different students, and different teachers. Contentious topics are avoided.
Thus, the problem is keeping content relevant, current and personalized. Today, slang, technology, and cultural references evolve more quickly now than before. Content and references have lost validity when they are 5 years old (and often when they are 5 months old). And they may have not been personally relevant to the student anyway, since a “common denominator” approach invariably leaves many students yawning.
So what’s a teacher to do? Well, most teachers have the solution: they supplement the core course book to one degree or another. They supplement with web resources, authentic material, teacher- and school-developed content, content from other course books and resources, and activities and projects that teachers come up with on the fly.
And, critically, they supplement (or, for the Dogme folk, replace) with content brought to the learning process by the students themselves.
If a teacher has the skills, resources, and experience, the result can be an optimal mix of pre-defined language content, and personally, culturally, and professionally relevant and engaging content.
But, it’s not easy. For most teachers, we’re talking analog: photocopiers, tape, manila envelopes and file cabinets. For other teachers it’s a mind-boggling succession of web 2.0 apps, user names, and passwords…each one cool and useful but scattered around in info silos throughout the net. What each approach has in common is a lack of time to implement it.
Today’s digital technologies will soon open up possibilities for meeting these challenges. Group authoring platforms and collaboration tools will allow groups of teachers (and students) to work together, pool their energy, and create materials and lesson plans that in terms of both quantity (definitely) and quality (optimally) were formerly only possible from publishers. Print-on-demand, e-learning, and PDFs provide a delivery mechanism that again was previously only available to large publishers.
Large-scale collaboration will lead to the same result in language learning material that Wikipedia brought to encyclopedias: a dramatically wider range of topics (Wikipedia has 10 times the articles of a traditional encyclopedia). This long tail of content will provide the custom course work that will result in radically personalized learning – we’ll have as many courses as we have students. And as we’ve seen with Wikipedia, it’ll be fast and it’ll be cheap. And most importantly, what it will be is open.
So, the coming collaborative content has many advantages: speed, relevance, flexibility, personalization, the capacity to mix authored, student-generated, authentic and web content into a more rounded approach. Through collaboration, this “360° content creation” adopts and adapts content from a wide range of sources, leading to learner-centered content that transforms passive learners into active, and a mass audience into personalization.
Community as curriculum: the “rhizomatic model” of learning
April 14th, 2009
by Cleve Miller
“In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning in the same way that the rhizome responds to changing environmental conditions.”
New blog find
April 14th, 2009
by Cleve Miller
Peter Thwaites in Oman has some interesting conversation happening at his (new?) blog: A Look at Language Teaching.
Capitalism 2.0
April 9th, 2009
by Cleve Miller
Interesting article by Nassim Taleb that would be great input for a class for financial English. And here’s a blog post discussing it.
Hat tip to Andrew. If you go to the Taleb article from his post you won’t need to register at the FT.