Showing posts with label Vicki Hollett. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vicki Hollett. Show all posts

Conference Report: BESIG 2009

Last week, the annual Teachers of Business English conference was held in Poznan, Poland. I made the trek all the way there to have a look at what’s been going on in my field of teaching English to adult learners.

Poznan is a gorgeous city and having arrived early in the morning, I got the chance to have a wander around the city and even bought myself some lovely Polish amber.

On Friday evening, there was an official reception and the opportunity to meet up with folks I’ve mostly only spoken to virtually on Twitter, Facebook and in the various yahoo!groups.

Some of my friends from ELTAS were also there so I wasn’t completely alone: Daphne Klimmek and Krystyna Key, Kenny Christian, the English Profi, and Shelly Terrell as well as Laura Hudson, busy manning the impressive Macmillan stand.

Watching Shelly Terrell and Carl Dowse compare i-phone apps probably sums up the running themes throughout this technology driven conference … oh we geeks do love our gadgets… and ha, ha! it turns out that Heike Philp and I have the same wee little blue Acer netbooks… remember that misguided poem I wrote dedicated to this no.1 love-in-my-life LOL… well, I’ll have you know he’s still the very best thing I ever bought.


It was a lovely treat to meet Barry Tomalin and Petra a.k.a @TEFLPet in person – she’s just as sweet and pretty as she is on Twitter and Barry is wonderful and warmhearted.

The Plenary


Saturday’s event kicked off early with a presentation from Vicki Hollet and it was, undoubtedly, the highlight of my journey to Poznan to meet Vicki in real life.

I’ll let you in on a secret… the first time Vicki wrote on my blog I thought one of my colleagues was playing a trick on me! However, bit by bit over these months, I’ve gotten a chance to know her better - through her blog and on various social networking sites so finally hearing her live and finding out how generous and nice she is as a person - not just as a leading author and trainer - was, well, fab!

Vicki’s plenary was called Relationships Matter and she put forth an argument about the way we teach ‘relationship’ language in Business English.

In this world of cultural differences where what we say to each other counts, she talked to us about things like how we give directives (orders, suggestions, requests) saying it’s not just about the form we use or who is saying what, but how things are actually said. She introduced us to the concept of whimperatives – the questions we ask when we’re pretending the other person has a choice.

Would you mind opening the window as opposed to Can you open the window; Would it be possible to use your phone instead of May I use your phone / Do you mind if I use your phone? When these instructions are given by a boss or a superior, we know precisely it’s an order no matter how softly or carefully given.

Oh, those are for my son’s classmates in response to My, those biscuits do look awfully delicious, helps save the face of both parties and allows the greedy one to be gracious with a How lucky.

Our students often ask what is a more formal way of saying something or how to be more polite yet it’s really not as simple as that - it depends so much on the context and culture – and this is often ambiguous. What do you think?

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Ambiguity, Vicki also explained, in our communication with each other can often make a person more likeable and despite the fact that we teachers tend to think that directness and clarity is a better route in communication, and teach this, it often causes our students to come across as being impolite, stern, bossy! Tentativeness is what makes people more approachable, more likable and what causes others to contribute more, therefore making a team more effective and it’s necessary for this sort of language in contextual frameworks to appear in our teaching texts.

I’ve been thinking about her points all week and it’s already been creeping into my lessons!

This week I had to explain the difference, the subtlety in, rather than the grammatical differences of I’ve already done that, I’ve done that already and I did it already discussing potential implied tones.Tough one huh?



Workshops


After Vicki’s plenary and a couple of cups of coffee and some yummy Polish biscuits I headed off to attend my first workshop. This was with Anisoara Pop from Romania who presented a case study based on her work with university students.

Anisoara wanted to find a way to narrow the gap between what students need, her schools’ requirements and to engage her students in captivating, memorable lessons. She did a thorough study on the functional language they require, became a webhead: looking for flexible asynchronous tools and thinking about things like motivating less proficient users, creating a safe environment for her learners and on how best to maximize writing and speaking skills.

She created a wiki, which is now public, where she’s able to give students instructions on things like how many articles to write, netiquette issues, copyright and also asked them to create their own blogs, 10% of whom still post!



Using Voxopop, a voice based message board, her students were also able to discuss real issues with people all over the world and linked up with another university in Spain.

By the way, the next free training session to become a webhead starts December 4th.



After this session, I trundled on over to see Heike Philp and Holly Longstroth talking about the use of 2nd Life in Business English and their Avalon project.

avalon business lesson by graham stanley
This was a pretty interesting session. I’ve visited 2nd Life a couple of times but to be honest, haven’t really explored it as an educational tool - the truth is my current students aren’t much into it - still it was very interesting to find out more what goes on there and I’m hoping to attend Language Lab’s session on the same subject in Harrogate next year.



After lunch it was time for Cleve Miller and the opportunity to learn about English 360. Cleve and I have had a pretty long-standing joke… I thought his avatar looked a bit like Seth Godin back in the early Twitter days… but actually, in RL, he doesn’t!

However he is as innovative and brave and as dynamic a presenter.

To be honest, bogged down with my blended learning platform plus our supportive wiki recording emergent language - where I’ve got my students becoming co-creators of all the materials we need in true dogmesque2.0 fashion… (huge fun, an engaging learning environment but a lot of work) …after seeing what English 360’s got on offer I must confess this just might have been a much simpler option!

Cleve’s thang lies in the creation of playlists and his concept is, I’m convinced, the future of coursebooks – I love the idea of a book being broke up into parts where I’d have a say (based on my students’ interests) in what is done and when.

English 360 is an online space where TEFL teachers are able to do just that and create, share with others, discuss ideas and learn from each other. It’s an active, user-generated content platform combining your own work plus, this is the wow factor, previously published materials from Cambridge University Press - all of which can be integrated and even branded as per each teachers’ /language institute wishes!

To find out more visit the English 360 website or read the interview with Cleve Miller on Jeremy Day’s Specific English.


World of Work Panel
Then it was time to head off for the World-of-Work forum with Evan Frendo, Matt Firth, Carl Dowse, James Schofield. Due to personal reasons, Eric Baber was beamed in live from the UK.

Matt spoke to us about the impact technology has on the development of courses and their curriculum… it was a bit odd watching him do this presentation, constantly seated in front of his Mac… I kept wondering if he was filming himself as part of a webinar.

Evan chatted about how the use of technology is principally age-driven and related some of restrictive problems from the corporate perspective (not being able to access youtube or other sites) and glitches (what Thornbury calls faffing about).

And then the most shocking thing I ever did see… occurred in this room.

Well, passions were high – any discussion discussing the use of technology in the classroom is bound to raise the blood pressure…

SI852133

James threw a book on the floor, stomped on it… I mean he jumped up and down on it, really, then picked it up again, waved the tome in hands and said: See, good as new, I can still teach with it. Books are permanent.

Then he turned round towards the innocently seated Carl and asked if he could have his i-phone. Good lord, I thought I’d faint. So shocked was I, that I’m not even sure if I can tell you what the rest of the session was about.


No, not really.

Carl gave us the point of view of teachers, showing us a wide range of twitter quotes he’d collected and then James, the book stomper (who is actually a very talented author - my students love his readers… surprisingly(!) they can actually use technology and read books too…;-)), gave us the author’s perspective and brought up issues like how money is going to be made in this age of free (digital books do sell) but also more importantly how to let students know what they’re doing incorrectly.

An issue I have had issues with on my Ning – 35 blog posts in one go can sometimes mean a lot of correcting: I’m trying to teach them awareness and an ability to find their own errors.

Here’s a short video from the World-of-Work forum in July explaining a bit about what they’re doing, there’ll be a virtual conference next year.



The next day

I found myself, accidentally, in one of those, oh-dear-what-was-I-thinking sessions so I won’t bother to add notes on that one… whoops… I simply left as fast as I could then met up with a publisher about a project I may well be working on soon.It was a good meeting…a very good meeting….more later.

Finally, I headed off to the last session: the closing panel which was great but again, technology related, a discussion on the future of learning.

SI852146

Petra Pointer supplied us the teachers’ perspective – she works at a very well-endowed university in Germany and is a tech enthusiast herself but mainly has found out that her students don’t like using technology for technology’s sake.

Fair point, but I do remember not liking writing essays for the sake of writing essays nor memorizing random dates for the sake of memorizing dates… so not much has changed really ;-), learners want to learn stuff that’s useful and practical and all teachers should pay attention to that, innit?


Ian McMaster, Business Spotlight editor, went next updating us on the commercial point of view: that the learners are the deciders - businesses will provide whatever it is they are actually purchasing and so far, to date, at BS only about 10% are downloading their audio tracks. He also pretty much told us that we shouldn’t simply follow the latest bandwagon - while the industry does need its “visionaries” - somewhere between those that see the future and those that are the end-purchasers, the publishers will adapt and stay afloat…I hope he’s right.




Cleve restated his position on crowd-sourcing and collaborative content: the future’s in personalized materials. I feel in my bones he’s right. Shiv Rajendran, of the Language Lab, described the situation rather sensibly: learners want to learn in the way they want to learn – whatever topic, whenever – adhoc lessons on their own terms.

Eric interrupted from the Skype beam (he was very much in the room with us, I tell ya) with a Henry Ford quote “If I’d have asked the customer what he wanted, he would have said a faster horse” which made us all laugh -Pete Sharma then made an equally witty retort, something to do with apples and oranges but unfortunately I didn’t type it up… so I can’t tell you exactly what he said!

Bryon Russell believes there will always be a call for Publishers, for Editors: his point being that teacher generated materials can sometimes be unprofessional in appearance. And he’s right in part but in part, c'mon, the last time you made a game which wasn’t all cool-bananas, it worked didn’t it? Target language practiced?

Perhaps learning and teaching isn’t really about perfection and shiny covers.

Vicki chipped in with the fact that although we’re all using the internet and it’s great for supplementing our lessons, our students mainly want to speak: they want to talk , to commune-icate and often, pretty much… about themselves.

As this is my no. 1 mantra, the theme if you like of my blog, it was good to hear it from someone I respect so highly - it truly amazes me how many publishers and teachers miss out on taking advantage of the narcissism (not sure that's the right word) driving language acquisition.

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Then the discussion raged: teachers asking about the time to learn all these tools, are we losing focus, what’s the pedagogy behind the use of technology – and I thought to myself was it like this when we switched from chalk to whiteboards? Why do we keep blaming the tools, why would the pedagogy all of a sudden go out the window - because we’re sexing-up the lessons? Odd. Na ja, I expect that discussion isn't going to go away soon.

And then but, where’s the money, is there any money, are teachers going to be paid more? Yes, I piped up rather too directly (did I learn nothing from Vicki’s plenary) there is…

So many students don’t want to learn with technology - they’re tired of looking at computers after a hard day’s work – they said. Haven’t noticed this myself and again thought, did we complain about using textbooks and notebooks and pens when students were spending all day dictating letters to their secretaries?

One member of the audience added that she serves up her Business English classes at the kitchen table with lovely cups of tea as they go through projects and proposals and powerpoint slides and noddingly, understandingly, we celebrated the diversity which exists in all of our approaches, the variety of subcultures present within each of our different classrooms’ contexts and the BESIG conference came to its end.

See you next year!
Best, Karenne

To reuse any of the photographs in this posting for your own teaching associations' articles, websites or blog postings, visit the set on Flickr where they are creative commons licensed.

Jeremy Day on Vicki Hollett's Opportunities & Objectives

The ‘she in ELT’ who has had the biggest impact on me – Vicki Hollett.


I’ve never met Vicki face to face, so I’m afraid this piece will be more technical than personal. As you’ll see, I’m a bit obsessive about two of Vicki’s books: Business Objectives (BObjs) and Business Opportunities (BOpps).

Forgive me if I go on a bit about them …

Over the years I’ve met a handful of fellow BOpps and BObjs obsessives – people who rave about them at length. But most teachers remember them simply as “Yeah – great books”, but without the passion.

I think those teachers just didn’t get it.

It took me a long time to get it, too. In my first year or so of using the books, I saw them as nice, straightforward ways of getting students to talk about interesting business topics in English. The functional language syllabus was excellent – that was easy to spot straight away – with just the right amount of phrases for meetings, presentations, socialising, etc.

The section on telephoning in BOpps was the best of any I’ve used, with its lovely role-play map. The section on business writing at the end of unit 4 contained a rich bank of essential writing phrases, all contextualised and presented over a super-efficient three pages. What’s more, the topics were ideal for the students I was teaching in various factories (but perhaps more than they would be for, say, marketing types or bankers). So I liked them a lot, but I was still missing something …

I spotted it one day when I was pondering a minor mystery in unit 4.

There was a nice little role-play activity on p39 about managing the environment. Students played the roles of directors of a manufacturing company who had to weigh up the suitability of a range of proposals for making the company greener. The proposals ranged from “Tell our suppliers to provide less packaging with their products” to “Install a large fan on the hillside to blow away pollution” (great idea, by the way).

business opportunities oup vicki hollettIt was a nice role-play, but at the bottom of the page was a strange little activity: “Now compare your decisions with your colleagues from other groups. Find out which proposals they decided to implement and why”. What’s the point of that, I thought?

Did you spot it? What language were they using to make their decisions?

“I’ll do that if you like”; “I’ll leave that to you”; “Shall I do that or will you?”. And what language should they be using to compare answers with other groups? Aha … it’s will vs going to. Making decisions vs talking about decisions. So actually the follow-up was the key to the whole activity. (Or would have been, if only my students had been aware of the language they were expected to use – mine just used will all the time until I worked out what was going on.).

It kind of made sense.

There’d been a presentation on will and going to earlier in the unit, back on p35. But why wait til p39 for the practice? I decided to take a closer look at the nice reading/speaking activity on pages 36 and 37. Exercise 1 was a harmless little quiz on cultural differences in international meetings, with some good vocabulary. Exercise 2 was a compare-with-your partners speaking, and exercise 3 was a here’s-what-the-expert-says reading. At least, that’s how I’d treated it, but a closer look at exercise 1 showed me it was will again:

“You’re putting forward a proposal that several people at the meeting disagree with. How will you handle the situation?

a. I’ll stick to my guns;
b. I’ll drop the proposal;
c. I’ll do something else”.

And exercise 2 was going to! (“What are you going to do with the working papers?”)

I then looked ahead to the writing activities on pages 41 to 43. As I said above, these were a brilliantly concise everything-you-really-need-to-know guide to standard phrases for business writing. Surely Vicki wouldn’t also squeeze in practice of will and going to? But she did!

In exercise 1 we had to read the letters and discuss with a partner which ones are urgent and how to deal with them. In exercise 2 we had to explain our decisions to a new partner. Exercise 1: will. Exercise 2: going to.

Amazing.

And that’s the point.

The whole unit was practising will and going to. But it did it in such an interesting way that it was actually very difficult to see past the topic or the work on other skills to see the practice exercises concealed beneath. And it’s the same in every unit of both books. They’re full of grammar practice exercises which look like something else!

(There’s an obvious concern here: if the grammar practice was so well hidden that teachers didn’t spot it, it meant that most users of the books missed out on their greatest strength. This was something I asked Vicki about when I interviewed her at the Virtual Round Table here.)

Anyway, unit 6 of BOpps is the best unit of any book I’ve ever used for practising the difference between 1st and 2nd conditionals.

On page 60 we have a fantastic role-play about dealing with shrinkage (losses through theft). Students discuss a list of suggestions using great functional language they’ve been taught throughout the unit (“We’d better …”; “No, that’s simply not feasible”).

The intro to the exercise gives some examples of things to say: “Proposal 1 is a good idea. If we position tills at the exits, it’ll make it more difficult to steal. I don’t like proposal 2. The staff would object if we issued uniforms with no pockets”. Did you spot it that time? (OK, I primed you to make it easier).

1st conditionals for proposals we like; 2nd conditionals for ones we don’t like. How elegant is that!

Now, you may disagree with me on this, but I think intermediate and upper intermediate business students need a lot of work on grammar accuracy.

Many of them already have the fluency, especially the ones who use English every day at work. They come to English lessons to tidy things up. But most business English books (including the most popular ones today) barely touch on grammar, or if they deal with it, it’s not systematic. There’s never enough practice.

Now, if I want to give my business students reading texts from the business press, I can get them from the business press – I don’t need that from my course book. What I need from a course book is the stuff that I can’t create myself in 5 minutes before the lesson.

That’s what BOpps and BObjs provided.

I’ve taught plenty of advanced-level students, high-powered business leaders who can talk with wonderful fluency but who are desperate to fix their grammar problems. And I used to put them all on BOpps – even though it was supposed to be only upper int. And it worked.

(I say used to because I’m no longer a manager – a fact which has nothing to do with my choice of course books, I hasten to add).

business objectives oup vicki hollettI haven’t said much yet about Vicki’s other classic, BObjs, although that too did some pretty cool things.

For example, in the unit on Business Travel there’s an exercise called Future Possibilities where students have to match sentence halves. We end up with sentences like “If you haven’t met before, how will you recognize him at the airport?”, “If you have to be there by ten, you’d better hurry up” and “If she wasn’t on that flight, she’ll be on the next one”. In other words, conditional sentences about the future which break free of the traditional rules and formulas of first conditionals.

In fact, out of 12 sentences, only 1 fits the classic IF + PRESENT SIMPLE formula taught by all other books since the beginning of time. Only 1! And this is for A2/B1 students, many of whom will never have learnt about conditionals before.

So Vicki tells them, right from the start, “don’t worry about formulas – there’s nothing scary about conditionals. Just use normal tenses!” I wish all course books at this level were as brave as that, but unfortunately I’ve never seen this approach in any other book.

As a course-book editor, I’m obsessed with two things: aims and flow.

Each unit has to have an underlying structure – a series of sections linked together naturally in a logical order so as to provide the right amount of context, language input and practice at just the right time to really achieve the unit aims. Each section and sub-section can itself be analysed in the same terms, so a perfect unit is like a wonderfully intricate mechanical device – cogs within cogs, all perfectly aligned.

The units in BObjs and BOpps were (almost) all like that.

Let me take you step-by-step through unit 10 of BObj, which is about Progress Updates, to show you what I mean. We start with a personalisation task (“Who services the equipment and machinery in your company? And who fixes it when it breaks down?”) to lead in to the topic of the first section: a situational dialogue between two managers at an office equipment repair company.

The first focus is on the content – comparing call-outs in October with those in September, but then we get to the language focus, present perfect, with examples of the structure pulled out of the dialogue. Contextualised presentation.

On the next 2-page spread, we have a new context – a profit and loss account, for a couple of very controlled practice exercises of present perfect, one spoken (explaining what has happened to the figures) and one written (completing the chairman’s report).

Finally there’s a personalised practice activity, talking about your own company or department.

Most course books would leave it there – or they wouldn’t even bother to provide this much practice of present perfect. But Vicki keeps going.

The next page focuses on another new topic, staff changes, with some vocab work (e.g. sack, recruit) to take us off in a new direction, but then we come back to more written and spoken controlled practice of present perfect using this new context and language.

Then we get another freer-practice personalisation activity: “Have you taken on any new staff recently?”. Another topic: targets, with contrastive practice including an information exchange to focus on the difference between past simple (“How many units did they sell last year?”) and present perfect (“How many have they sold this year? They haven’t achieved their target”).

Do you think our students have mastered present perfect yet, after six pages and four contexts? Again, most course books would assume so, but of course as teachers we all know that A2/B1 students really take a long time to master present perfect.

So the more practice the better, as long as you can keep the topics interesting and the activities varied and personalised.

So on the next spread we have a cycle of activities (personalisation – controlled practice – freer practice – role-play) on present perfect with yet. And on the final spread, we listen to the business news (guess which tenses we’ll hear) and do yet another information exchange, this time on share performance, and yet again using present perfect.

So the whole unit practises different uses of present perfect (contrasted with other tenses).

But it’s never boring or repetitive because it’s also excellent fluency work, vocab work, listening … and it’s all personalised and contextualised.

Anyway, I did warn you that I’m a bit obsessive. I guess what I’m trying to say is: through these books, Vicki taught me a huge amount about how to teach business English, how to write courses and how to edit other people’s books.

If you’re serious about teaching grammar, business English or ESP, if you write courses or books or would like to in the future, if you care about aims and flow, I suggest you get hold of copies of these two old classics and learn from the master.


- 0 -

Vicki Hollett is the author of textbooks like Tech Talk, Business Objectives, Business Opportunities, Quick Work, Meeting Objectives, In at the Deep End and the soon to be Lifestyle. Vicki’s special interests are business English, sociolinguistics and pragmatics.

British by birth, she’s currently based in the US where she’s writing more courses, teaching at the University of Pennsylvania and Learning to speak ‘merican: http://www.vickihollett.com.

She'll also be giving the Plenary at BESIG in Poznan, Poland, November 20th 2009.


Jeremy Day is Series Editor of
Cambridge English for ESP a series of short courses.

He has written two teacher’s books on legal English (International Legal English and Introduction to International Legal English), both for Cambridge University Press, as well as major ESP courses for the British Council and International House. He also has several more books in the pipeline. He teaches general, business and legal English at the British Council in Warsaw, Poland, and is passionate about grammar. His new blog, Specific English, is aimed at teachers of ESP.








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Vicki Hollett on Cristina Whitecross

She-in-ELT series - 2

Karenne, there are so many inspiring women in TEFL, what about all the ones you're bound to miss?

But, actually, I think I have your winner!

I am proud to know the most inspiring woman, or person for that matter, in the field of English Language Teaching.

Her name is Cristina Whitecross.



Cristina's big and small: a huge intellect, a vast store of knowledge that she's constantly sharing and a gigantic personality all packed into a tiny 1.64m frame. She's Argentinean and was an English teacher there until life took a tragic turn.

In 1976, under the Galtieri dictatorship, Cristina and her husband were imprisoned for six months for harbouring Chilean refugees. Argentinean prisons were filled with intellectuals who tried to find ways to share knowledge and keep going on.

Thankfully Cristina and Richard survived and were freed, but they were exiled. Many years on one of her sons, inspired by the political injustice suffered by his parents, co-directed the movie The Road to Guantanamo with Michael Winterbottom.

Once Christina was in the UK, she worked behind the scenes at Oxford University Press in the UK, heading up the professional English and applied linguistics list, along with the ELT Journal.

She has also volunteered for Amnesty International and similar organizations, helping refugees in the UK to access support and ELT training. Sadly Richard has now developed Alzheimer’s so she spends a great deal of time visiting the hospital.



Did I mention she has super-human time management skills?

We’ve all wondered how she managed to do so much but now she's freelancing and doing even more. She still edits, exercises, sings, she takes courses and here's Dougie, the puppy she's training for Dogs for the Disabled.



Here are a few of my personal reasons for nominating Cristina:
  • Over the years, she has sent me countless inspirational articles and sources of ideas – sometimes an in-flight magazine she picked up, a newspaper cutting - little packages arriving out of the blue just in case something might help. Writers wonder what they did before Google. I had Cristina.
  • Cristina has sound, sound publishing judgment. Her colleagues say it's instinctive but I think it stems from a deep understanding of both theory and practice.
  • Cristina would allow me make 'one last change' to a manuscript many, many times. But she also knew how to wrench it out of my hands at the right time.
  • Cristina sticks her neck out. She's championed groundbreaking research and publications in English as a Lingua Franca, regardless of the political furor they've stirred amongst her peers. If you're fighting to do some good in the world, you'll never find a more loyal supporter than Cristina.
  • Cristina gave me kicks up the backside when I didn't do things well, and there have been a good few. I remember her giving me a dressing down after a poorly angled talk. Donald Trump and Alan Sugar are wimps in the board room compared to Cristina. But I never left feeling abandoned, and I've always understood why I needed to do better.
  • Cristina cares deeply about the development of the people around her and she's given me great advice over the years. Lots of other authors feel the same and her colleagues too. It may seem like publishers have a glamorous job, but they scrape by, in my experience - much like ELT teachers. For the most part, they're working very long hours for not a lot. Cristina takes a personal interest in us all.
  • One last curious thing about Cristina. She can't read a newspaper without a pen in her hand. Even though it's been published, she's making corrections to the text. My take on it is she can't stop. She'll always be trying to make the world a better place.

Vicki Hollett is the author of textbooks like Tech Talk, Business Objectives, Business Opportunities, Quick Work, Meeting Objectives, In at the Deep End and the soon to be Lifestyle. She attributes their success to imaginative students, her patient family and friends, and Cristina Whitecross. Oh and history – if anyone waits long enough they’re bound to come back into fashion again!

Vicki’s special interests are business English, sociolinguistics and pragmatics.

British by birth, she’s currently based in the US where she’s writing more courses, teaching at the University of Pennsylvania and learning to speak ‘merican. http://www.vickihollett.com.


She'll also be giving the Plenary at BESIG in Poznan, Poland, November 20th 2009.




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