Oh I love this.

Exploratree is a free web-based “thinking tool” for idea generation, planning, and many other types of cognitive activity that are fundamental to any kind of project. You select from a menu of frameworks that structure the thinking process, which are similar in concept to regular BE frameworks actually. Or, you can develop your own framework.

What’s neat is that you can easily see how you can use the different frameworks to work on specific language objectives, especially structures and functions.

• the Futures Wheel framework helps your students “Think through the consequences and impacts of an event. What are the knock-on effects?” and could be useful for practicing the conditionals. You’d set it up to by using a real business situation of the student or group, then work through the Future wheel framework using conditionals.
• The Reverse Planning framework is to “work backwards from an imagined perfect future to a feasible and possible present”. You’d set this up as if the group were actually in, say, 2010, and their plans had succeeded, and they relate the imagined “history” of 2008-10 that got them there, using past tenses and storytelling techniques.
• The Compare and Contrast framework should be pretty much self-explanatory for BE teachers.

Can’t wait to try this with some clients.

Hat tip to soulsoup.

Every year the New York Times puts out the “Year in Ideas” list: a list of short articles about new trends and ideas for the year; this time there are 70 articles. They are both interesting enough and short enough that they would be appropriate for most levels, and there is enough variety of topics that personalization is possible.

Downside: you have to register. Worth it though.

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.)

I might be back from near-6-month blogging sabbatical. I’m not 100% sure, but…maybe.

Abject apologies for not approving the 2 legit comments (out of about 700 spam - I’ve got to get a captcha set up or something).

Actually, I haven’t read any blogs either. To be honest, it has been a nice break, although I’m sure I’m irredeemably behind the times now.

I’ve been wondering lately about Business English teaching “material”: authentic vs. scripted, generic vs. personalized, business vs. general vs. fun (and to what degree are all these even valid distinctions?). I suppose like everything else it depends on the student and on the teacher, in terms of their unique learning styles, personalities, and the day-to-day situation. And I suppose a mix of the above is usually in order and “the art of the mix” is what we want from a skilled teacher with the autonomy to select material.

But still sometimes I wonder how much neuron-connection learning* actually happens with language that is unrealistic. By unrealistic I mean language that is unlikely to be encountered by a BE learner, because it’s irrelevant to their lives and job. Maybe the limited benefit of grammar drilling is largely because the students’ don’t know Mr. and Mrs. Smith and don’t care whether they go | have went | have gone to the grocery store. How much do the benefits of drilling increase when we personalize the drills to fit the Ss work challenges and interests - a little? A lot? Exponentially? Enough that non-personalized drilling should never happen? Drills are only the easiest example here and the concept would apply to some degree to all classroom language and activities.

I remember my one and only Spanish class when I first arrived in Buenoes Aires, and we were working with estar, and the exercises had the typical language examples, and this one will always stick with me: “The wine casks are on the burros” with a little drawing of a donkey with wine casks on its back. I don’t even remember the word for wine casks - maybe because the likelihood that I will hear, say, read or write that sentence is about zero? (Well, OK, I just did, but that’s meta). Of course with the generative power of language most exact sentences may never be repeated, but still…I couldn’t even imagine needing that language walking around downtown Buenos Aires. Of couse I needed the form…but why not teach it with language that matters? (Answer: Well, it’s a ton of work, for one thing….)

I was reminded of this by a cool grammar video on YouTube (from the always interesting Teacher in Development, via James Matthews at Crisp Reflective Dissaray). It’s a Roadrunner cartoon with some present continuous worked in, and yes I can see it being fun, but how much do adult students actually learn from language like this:

Q: What’s that coyote doing now?
A: He’s making a snow machine!

If it’s fun, then it is engaging, and we do need engagement for learning - but maybe engagement is a necessary but not a sufficient cause, and content needs to be both engaging and relevant for optimal learning to happen.

Some evidence for this “engagement is necessary but not sufficient” theory was in the news recently. Two activities that always “engage” the human brain are (you guessed it) sex and violence. Engagement is defined as “an orienting response, an involuntary directing of focused attention”. Our reptile brain, with its over-riding need to pass on its genes, recognizes that sex and violence** are how this happens. So media (TV, movies, music, etc.) wanting consumers always have a sure bet with sex and violence.

But here’s what’s really interesting: although engaged with images of sex and violence, evidently viewers don’t remember as much while watching. The article was in the New York Times (so, $) but here’s another source (.pdf). The authors summarize:

Results showed better memory for people who saw the ads during a neutral program than for people who saw the ads during a violent or sexual program both immediately after exposure and 24 hr later. Violence and sex impaired memory for males and females of all ages, regardless of whether they liked programs containing violence and sex.

So maybe it depends on what part of our brain is engaged - if it’s the “fight, flight, or romance” old brain area, students will remember less and learn less. If it’s the executive function frontal cortex that is engaged (via content relevant to real life and work) you get engagement plus relevance and without the memory problems inherent in purely old brain engagement.

Not sure where humor fits in…interestingly, the Roadrunner cartoon would score high in both humor and violence. Funny that those two are often connected.

Anyway, before this post careens even further out of control: my thinking is that engagement is not enough, that indeed some kinds of engagment are counter-productive, that relevance is critical, and that material selection/design and activities should follow the “relevant engagement” rule. For adult BE learners (and it’s dangerous to generalize), the relevant engagement rule supports what I think is the holy grail for BE: performance-driven learning, with a performance-driven syllabus, materials, lessons and tasks.

* redundant modifier, granted
** violence passes on genes through male competition/combat by individual and kinship groups

Interesting article in Science Daily explaining why culture is key to interpreting facial emotions.

The study reveals that in cultures where emotional control is the standard, such as Japan, focus is placed on the eyes to interpret emotions. Whereas in cultures where emotion is openly expressed, such as the United States, the focus is on the mouth to interpret emotion….Consistent with the research findings, the Japanese emoticons for happiness and sadness vary in terms of how the eyes are depicted, while American emoticons vary with the direction of the mouth. In the United States the emoticons : ) and : - ) denote a happy face, whereas the emoticons or : - ( denote a sad face. However, Japanese tend to use the symbol (^_^) to indicate a happy face, and (;_;) to indicate a sad face.

Readers from Japan: what do you think about this?

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Agree or disagree with his theories on language and cognition, you’ll always learn something by engaging with his thinking (well, I do anyway). Here’s the text of Pinker’s fascinating presentation at TED. Via Arts & Letters Daily.

In a previous post I wrote that John Gatto taught at the Albany Free School. In the comments to that post Ted Becker informed me that that is not the case. Thanks Ted for the correction.

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.