Great graphs for business English teaching

Via TED I came across Gapminder Human Development Trends 2005, a cool resource for teaching a wide range of language to adults (maybe kids too). The interactive graphs show various economic, demographic, and health related data, nicely presented.

But what really rocks is the interactivity - you can move sliders to cover trends year by year, historical and projected, from 1970 - 2015 (a great example of this is at the end of section 1).

So this could be a really useful class resouce for BE teachers, for two reasons:

+ With the slider you can focus on a wide range of language - you could target a variety of tenses (pasts, futures, “what has happened since”), verbs of increase and decrease, adjectives/adverbs to communicate degree of change (”dropped sharply”), and all the target language BE teachers know and love (?) when it comes to helping students explain graphs.

+ The subject matter is the human condition in all its inequality. The regional comparisons of poverty trends 1970-2015 bring into focus the gains of Asia, the mixed record of Latin America, and the tragedy of Africa. Adding in some photos from Flickr to connect the graph numbers with real people, and some quality discussions could develop, as students will exchange feelings and ideas about the human condition that the data (partly) represents. (Caveat: We’ve probably all had students get upset during discussions like this -I know I have- so tailor it to your individual situation.)

2 Comments

BE class activity: business culture & intonation

For our web application build we’ve got a distributed team: Miami, Washington, Canada, and Venezuela. So I’m always on the lookout to acquire better virtual collaboration skills, and The Bumble Bee is a new resource I found after they wrote a manifesto in Seth Godin’s Change This (actually, I think Change This passed into new hands recently). I love Robin Good and Change This always has great content for BE teaching.

Anyway, the BB enters my aggregator every morning now, and today there’s a post that will make a great class or class activity on intonation and meaning. Off the cuff, I see one possible staging like this (read the post first for this to make sense):

1) a warmer discussion on company culture, or projects and team autonomy, etc.

2) whiteboard the sentence and talk about what it means for a bit without getting into the word stress issue

3) have individual Ss say it: T, group, or partner notes which word is stressed. You will probably need to contextualize the sentence with some scenario, so that it’s not artificial

4) do the “stressed word” vs “what that means” as a jumbled text activity - lots of good vocab should come out

5) go back to the notes on what word each Ss stressed - discuss

6) discuss if this whole thing is valid…what do the Ss think? In real life would a NS actually stress “do”? (seems to me infrequently). If the word “can’t” is stressed, does that reflect concern over “beliefs and values”… or “ability”? (seems to me the latter).

+ Option (regarding validity): if you work in a school, go around and record fellow teachers saying the sentence. Which word do they stress? Discuss.

Lots of different options here and I think lots of cool language could come out of this. Very Ss-centered as well - much discussion is about their personal beliefs, business or otherwise. You could do it with a fluency, vocab, or intonation work focus - I’d probably blend all three by digging up a few more intonation / word stress examples. And I think you could tweak this to make it successful at any level except beginner - higher elementary and up.

What do you think?

No Comments