Why I don’t like Second Life (by Jacqueline Goulbourne)

Imagine a world where you can make a cartoon avatar of yourself and do whatever you like in an international community of English speakers.

Well, it already exists, in Taiwan where I have spent most of my career teaching,  it's called ‘World of Warcraft‘ and the mission of almost every parent of teenagers there to wrest their kids off of it!  But imagine if something similar existed, primarily for education, business and sex.  That exists too and I’m fairly certain that it’s nothing we’d really want to get students involved in.

I’m sure many of you disagree and are using Second Life in your practice to good effect, so my intent is not to disrespect your work, but to explain the problems I have with Second Life and other such virtual worlds.

I first experimented with Second Life in 2003 when friends of mine had set up an experimental teacher training space.  I didn’t really get interested.  More recently I came across Second Life in a wee teacher training course I’m doing.  I fought against my inherent tendency to not engage with things that don’t resonate with me and decided to ‘join in’ and not be such a negative Nancy.  Although I have an aversion to ‘virtual worlds’ and to speaking through machines in any way (I don’t use telephones) I put this aside in order to try and retrieve any babies in this bathwater.

I Googled up Second Life and was met with this screen:

[screenshot from https://join.secondlife.com/ ]

The user sees this screen with avatars that can be chosen.  Your avatar can be customised later on but I immediately took real exception to the prototype avatars that were presented for customisation.  These include a slightly scary rabbit, a robot and lots of white kids who clearly resembled extras from a 90s vampire film.  The only black woman present is wearing a short dress with a flower in her hair and high heeled shoes - a very different aesthetic to the white women presented.  One of the men has a shirt open to show rippling pecs but generally, the male figures are covered up.  For me, it doesn’t represent an acceptable aesthetic to present to students in my care, particularly young women.

There are two strands to my  misgivings: firstly the absence of ethnic diversity and secondly, the overt sexualisation of young women, in the Second Life avatar choices.   As a teacher joining in, I tried to choose an avatar that could represent my self without making myself ridiculous.  I’m 37, pretty fat, greying, and generally get dressed in the dark.  My choices ranged from avatars that mostly looked like a 14 year old version on myself: pale skinned, bone thin, and dressed in black with lots of eyeliner and it seemed undignified and self-abasing. 

I’m not scarred by the experience. But then I’m a confident, English-speaking adult.  I can articulate why I don’t want to be this 1990 version of myself and tried to change it.  Can we expect young, perhaps not so good at English students to raise their own misgivings to their educators or will they simply go along with what the teacher, or the authority wants them to do?  Thinking back to my time teaching junior high school girls in Taiwan, none of those prototype avatars is of Han Chinese or any other Taiwanese ethnicities.

What’s the message here?

White people (and the token African American) own English. You are different. Go get yourself a white identity to join our English-speaking world!

OK, yes, you can choose to brown/yellow/black up later if you want to, but that’s not the standard issue human in this community.

Don’t we want our students to come and sit at the table as equals? To join the English-speaking communities that they are passionate about?

In my Real Life classes, every kid is a beautiful prototype of the individual they want to become as they are: be they fat or thin, with braces, wearing unsexy clothes - with a wonderful inheritance of Chinese ethnicity, not something to be tagged on later, once they have chosen their ‘core’ avatar.

Am I over-thinking this?

Perhaps, but if we use these tools in the classroom, we are also raising the question of who ‘owns’ English.  We have to ask who funds a lot of these communities and to what business or political ends?  To promote ELT as a British, Australian, White American/European activity?  Why?

Is that congruent with our principles, desirable for our personal teaching contexts?

Cartoon images hurt as much as photographic images.

As a teacher I’m rarely didactic and I know I can’t change the world, but I am absolutely committed to making every child  in my care feel like they can be whoever they want to be and that includes valuing and celebrating every child’s individuality and identity and not promoting certain images as a norm within an educational context.

Jackie has been a teacher for 15 years, around the world,
but mostly in Taiwan.

English: time 4 a revamp?

Nothing so amazes me more than the fact, that despite so many other languages havie large governing bodies which analyze, stay on top of and make changes to their language in order to better fit the times, that English doesn't.

I think we should, especially as its reach extends across the globe.

If I could change the English language., then I would





- add an extra grammatical tense:  The "Ever Present" Tense

• it annoys me somewhat to tell students to use the present for "habits, permanence, facts." If it's for all time, then there should be a specific tense that refers to this because for most people, present = now.

- I'd add two extra pronouns to reflect gender reality.

• heshe and shehe

- I'd also love to revamp spelling entirely to make it better reflect the way words sound

• if the ch sounds like an sh, it should be an sh
• regular past tense endings are a waste of time teaching.  Why not write workt not worked, filld not filled - loaded can stay loaded.

What do you think?  Any bug-bears you've noticed while teaching our fair language?  What would you change if you could?


Best,
Karenne


image credit
Teaching an old dog new tricks by Fouquier on Flickr

Extrinsic "VS" or "AND" Intrinsic Motivation?

In the last couple of weeks prior to restarting classes, I've been watching a lot of television. The weather's not been particularly nice and I'm too poor to do anything else.  That's the downside to being a student at my age, I guess.  The upside is: imagine the best conference you've ever been to and think of one of the great presentations - one that has really had an impact on your teaching... now imagine that instead of a 45 minute session you get to have access to months of amazing lectures, group discussions and articles to read to follow up and challenge yourself with.  So, poverty is worth it, I guess.

But anyway, back to TV, one of the theme songs, from Weeds, has become a real earworm.  It goes, for those of you who don't know it,

"Little Boxes, little boxes, on the hillside, little boxes all the same

There's a green one and a pink one and a blue one and yellow one 

And they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same..."

The song makes me think about motivation, a lot.  Or maybe I was thinking about it before the song and it just drummed it in.  We all know that learning doesn't happen without motivation.  But what is it really?   Where does it come from?


Usually, it gets boiled down into three categories:


Extrinsic Motivation (external influences)
e.g. money, rewards, good grades, trophies, certificates, job position

Intrinsic Motivation (internal influences)
e.g. enjoyment of a task, passion, a drive to seek challenges, autonomy, inherent satisfaction

Intrinsic motivation refers to doing something simply because it is enjoyable while extrinsic motivation is more about getting a specific value or outcome based on what you have done (Ryan and Deci, 2000).

Amotivation is basically when you can't be bothered.




It has also been determined, through extensive empirical research by Deci & Ryan, Vallerand and others over the decades, that extrinsic rewards put a damper on intrinsic motivation.   I think though, that we have to be a bit cautious with this sort of thinking as it could very easily lead one into an assumption that extrinsic motivation is bad and that intrinsic motivation is best.  A dangerous position I feel, because for the most part, whether we like it or not, our adult language learners are more likely to come to us extrinsically motivated than intrinsically.

They want to learn English to integrate into society, to get a job promotion, to ensure job security, to get a better pay cheque, to speak to their foreign colleagues and close the deal.  If not this then they want to know that when they go on holiday, they won't get lost.  Sure, there are a handful of housewives who just fancy learning it, but usually because someone else told them it is the "thing" to do. And the teens mostly just want to pass the course, get the certificate, and get on with life.

So where it all gets a bit sticky for me, is that sometimes our extrinsically motivated learners really enjoy learning.  Why not, after all?  Sometimes we teachers can inspire them and sometimes their colleagues do and sometimes they develop an interest for the language - but all this interest and high from learning a second language does not take away their primary extrinsic goals.

In more recent research, Ryan and Deci have made a point of re-examining extrinsic motivation more closely, placing extrinsic motivation on a continuum and have created this taxonomy:

The idea is that learners can be in a state of external regulation (wanting rewards or avoiding criticism), or one of introjected regulation (constraints are internalized and set by the learner).  Identified regulation means that the behavior is thought of as being self-determined and finally the last type is integrated regulation - the person learns willingly because it fits in with the rest of the life activities and life goals (Vallerand, 1992).

Despite the fact that there is so much literature on extrinsic and intrinsic motivations and I'll continue reviewing it all, I really can't help but wonder if motivation is not actually something quite fluid. Can't you (or our learners) be one type and the next day, another?


But more importantly, if by categorizing motivation into boxes and then onto further hazy sub-boxes, might we be missing out on the fact that humans are infinitely complex creatures who can be both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated at exactly the same time?


What d'ya think?


Best,
Karenne

image credits:
plant fondo oscuro by eric caballero

References:
Ryan, R. & Deci, E. (2000). Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology. 25, 54-67.

Vallerand, R. & Bissonnette, R. (1992). Intrinsic, Extrinsic and Amotivational Styles as Predictors of Behavior: A Prospective Study. Journal of Personality. 60:3. 599-620.

Sweet Words vs Monstrosities

More than a century ago, Henry Sweet wrote The Practical Study of Languages and through it, criticized the existing methods of the day, much as we still do now.   The book's myth-busting objectives reviews phonetics, alphabets and pronunciation issues before diving into methods, grammar, vocabulary and texts. 

In fact, while scanning through the text, I honestly couldn't help but think I bet he'd have been a blogger if he were around today.  His prose is tight, easy to read and the language direct.

His obvious annoyance at the 'insufficient knowledge of the science of language' (1899:3) like my own, literally jumps off the page.  Given that this post is part 2 of No Evidence for a Fixed Aquisition Order, I'll hone in on this one quote which I wanted to share with you, for reflection, as it neatly wraps up the debate on authenticity vs manufactured texts:

...the dilemma is that if we try to make our texts embody certain definite grammatical categories, the texts cease to be natural: they become either trivial, tedious and long-winded, or else they become more or less monstrosities' (1899:192).

Really sounds like he was describing Headway long before it ever arrived to influence all the other copy-cat productions from then on and into today.  The question is though, will it influence tomorrow's or can we teachers at least try to stop it before it does?

Best,
Karenne

Image credit
Wikimedia commons, wolf in sheep's clothing

Reference
Sweet, H. (1899). The Practical Study of Languages.  London, UK. J.M. Dent & Co.
(Available for free online from Google Books)

Fixed Acquisition Order? = No Evidence

I'm busily packing up the stack of books I used for my MA assignment on Methods and Approaches while looking into authentic materials, yet before I take them on back to the library, I thought I'd share a little snippet I came across.

It's this:

"Very briefly, there is substantial research evidence to support the use in language learning of the linguistically rich, culturally faithful and potentially emotive input supplied by authentic texts. What is more, there is little evidence of a fixed acquisition order, which is the rationale for the use of phased language instruction and which is often used to repudiate the use of authentic texts for language learning.  (Mishan, 2005:11)

So not to harp on about all this again but what gets me when I read this is if publishers and textbook authors aren't simply churning out carbon copies of each other, albeit with ever glossier, shinier pictures than the last lot, then why do these tomes always start off and carry on virtually the same way?

Why do teachers teach the verb to be, there is/there are, present-tense followed by present-continuous, question words, prepositions of time and place and adverbs of frequency* and so on and so forth, ad infinitum?

And to top it all off, horror of all horrors, why do so many students think this must be the way to learn a language?


Did we come to this ideology because the holy books have logos on them, thus convincing us that there were at some point, a bunch of wise and saintly academic authorities who like monks in monasteries, researched language acquisition before writing up their commandments?  Who made this "order" - who publicized it? Who pushed it?  Where did it come from?


Have our beloved and not so loved at all textbook authors ever done any research into whether this "order" works or not, feel free to state your claim if so, or have they too assumed it to be so because their editor (or his boss) said so?  I do really want to know... if this phased language instruction has ever been tested scientifically, systemically, qualitatively, quantitatively, longitudinally and by whom because I'll happily eat my hat if you can prove it so.  Show me, please, where are the peer-reviewed research articles documenting the processes that occur and don't occur - why folks must learn just so?  Surely, truly, it can not be that with almost one third of the world now learning English and millions of others learning other languages that we still can't answer this rather simple and professional question? 

Or is our industry made up of snake-oil salesmen dancing in pale moonlight?

Of course not.  But nonetheless, I'm not kidding, be it down to good intentions or not, this billion-dollar grossing industry can not really have just been compiled on good faith alone, or can it?

Because it seems so.

Today, despite that I now have access to fields of journals I will tell you that not for a want of trying can I find one single verified report showing brain scans done on language learners proving on any kind of level that the brain receives and organizes grammatical structures this way.  Countless snoringly dull case studies and endless fascinating assessments to wade through that go into the depths of our practices and into what makes a good language learner and what doesn't, what strategies teachers can get students to employ, the effects of motivation, aptitude, age and gender studies and how there really is no best method, no there isn't... and yet, nope, nary a word on this so called fixed acquisition order, stage by stage and step by step, despite the fact that so many of us somehow continue to hail the god of grammar.



Were we sold a Brooklyn Bridge and made to sell it on classroom by classroom?

Time to wise up, folks, methinks.



K

Image credit:
The Brooklyn Bridge in New York City by Webfan29 at en.wikipedia

References:

Mishan, F. (2005). Designing authenticity into language learning materials.  Bristol, UK: intellect.
Prabu, N. (1990). There Is No Best Method - Why? TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 24, no.2.  161-176.

Other posts
Reasons I don't like textbooks

How did English become the Global Language?

One of the things I did today was comment on Scott Thornbury's blog post, O is for Ownership... and in my ramblings I talked about how sometimes ideas are out there, floating about in the greater Universe, simply lurking, waiting to be captured by he who listens and is prepared to act.  (It's that sort of day).

Those sorts of thoughts come, I guess though, from my youth when I was a NewAger and instead of being a reflective English teacher and practitioner or even a student,  I wrote NewAge articles philosophizing on the questions of one's path through life - instead of

"How do we learn?" "What is motivation?"
"How can the new technologies help us teach Speaking?' I wondered how we transformed from monkeys to... well, whatever we are now.



 
Even though it was a long, long, long, long time ago and many years have passed since those days of adventure, climbing up into volcanoes and knocking back beers while lying on Asian sandy beaches, curled up around men with long wise beards in front of dimming fires while arguing over the very nature of our beingness, the story, no matter how fantastical, of the 100th Monkey never really left me.

So today, through the rambling stroll of a streaming mind, the philosophy that we learn from those around us, consciously, subconsciously and through the trawling of multi-dimensional layered communications recorded in the shared higher consciousness, I am led to only this question:

How did English become today's one Global Language?

Okay, it's not completely, yet it surely is on the way.  By 2020, a prediction not a fact, a greater majority will speak it than those who don't, right?  It isn't the easiest language.  Nor the prettiest.  It is instead a messy code, made up of archaic irregularities, tortuous, nonsensical rules and ridiculous tongue-defying pronunciations.

So what on earth, or beyond earth, happened to set this particular meme into play?

When did the Tipping Point occur?

Who were the players, who washed the first sweet potato, who made washing it important? Who decided that English should take the place of Esperanto?  Was it life itself?  Was it a bunch of academics studying applied linguistics unraveling the codices of the brain and because they happened to be English speaking, while sharing the nature of our brains ability to learn, the onus was on English to prove the hypotheses... or was it the availability of native English speakers racing across a globe to have an adventure while earning a little cash?

Was it a curtain coming down or a wall falling down?  Was it the Almighty Dollar or Nike's abuse of children in factories? Was it Coca-cola's fault or a legion of British soldiers conquering a New World?

How did it all happen so fast?

We talk about our students' needs to learn English but somehow we don't ask how that need arose in the first place.

Does anyone have thoughts or theories?


Best,
Karenne
image credit: colobus monkey by garthimage

Does Gender-Segregation in Classroom Lower Second Language Acquisition?

(Guest post by Brittany Lyons)

For decades, proponents of gender-segregation in classrooms have argued that separation of children by gender fosters a successful learning atmosphere. However, recent studies have shown that segregating classrooms by gender impacts student learning negatively.

The negative effects of separate classrooms are apparent in linguistics especially, where girls tend to develop strong academic abilities earlier than boys. Establishing gender-segregated classrooms denies boys and girls the opportunity to learn from each other, and reinforces the long-ago debunked idea that "separate but equal" is effective in institutions of learning.

Research conducted at Tel Aviv University suggests that girls help foster a stronger learning atmosphere in classrooms, and that both boys and girls benefit from being in mixed gender classes. The study found that test scores were higher overall in many areas, including reading comprehension, science and math, when boys and girls were in mixed classes. Test scores increased for both genders, and a high ratio of girls was linked to enhanced learning.

This data is supported by older education studies, which found that girls tend to excel in language arts as young children, while boys consistently develop later. This difference is true of children in many countries, and from many different linguistic backgrounds—not just in English-speaking high-income families with parents who can afford the cost of further education, be this at home, sending their children abroad or even via a distance learning program such as an online PhD education.

Whether the disparities in language acquisition are based in the brain or in upbringing, marked differences do exist between boys and girls, especially in elementary school classrooms. Listening to their female peers speak and interacting with them during classroom and playground activities helps boys to develop stronger language arts skills.

Schools who have attempted to institute gender-segregated classrooms have often seen an overall decrease in test scores, which shows that gender-segregation in schools is not effective for either boys or girls.

Another chief drawback of segregated classrooms is that they do not allow children to share their knowledge and experience with each other, but rather perpetuate gender-based cultural disparities. Learning how to interact with different people is seen as a key goal of education, especially in early childhood. Children who are deprived of the chance to interact with peers of different genders may have trouble relating to or communicating with individuals of the opposite gender later in life.

Many psychologists who focus on child and adolescent development have voiced concern that gender-segregated classrooms impact the social skills of students well into adulthood. They perpetuate unfounded stereotypes about how men and women are different, and contribute to gender-based prejudice.

The effects of gender-segregated teaching can have an impact on older students as well. Decreases in test scores occur in single-gender classrooms in both middle and high school, and grade point averages in general fall. This decrease in GPA can adversely affect students as they apply for college and scholarship opportunities. Depriving students of their best chances to enter excellent colleges and secure funding does them a disservice. The goal of public education should be to prepare individuals for successful careers and successful relationships, both of which are harmed by gender segregation.

Many of the ideas that proponents of gender-segregated classrooms have introduced into public discourse are nothing but old prejudices in new forms. These individuals argue that boys and girls are inherently different, and that they should thus be separated in classrooms. They argue that boys are more aggressive than girls, and that girls can only learn in cooperative environments. As the American Civil Liberties Union has noted in lawsuits against school districts with sex-segregated classrooms, none of these beliefs have been substantiated by science.

• But what do you think - should boys and girls be separated? Why or why not?

•  Have you noticed any differences in the way that males and females learn languages?

Blog post author
Brittany Lyons aspires to be a psychology professor, but decided to take some time off from grad school to help people learn to navigate the academic lifestyle. She currently lives in Spokane, Washington, where she spends her time reading science fiction and walking her dog. 

Image credit
Wikimedia commons, Daytona School

#Twitterspam works because...

most people are actually,
                                                  deep-down, 

narcissists?

To be a spammer in 2011, you have to major in Human Psychology?

Practice makes perfect?

I mean there is a sort of cleverness in their approach, isn't there?

I seen a real bad blog about you. http://link2avirus

Have you seen this photo of you? http://going2wreckhavoconURcomputer

Check out this video with you in it! http://love2spam

Given the amount of people who spam me each week, because their accounts have been hacked BECAUSE they were silly enough to click through on one of these..  I think I've got to stop wondering how/why people are silly enough to fall for this trap and got to start slapping some kudos on the devious as they definitely know how to get folks caught in their webs.

If I can apply this to anything in terms of my professional development as an educator, then I'd have to say it really emphasizes my belief that learning has to be personal to prick, to stick.  

But anyway, folks, seriously, read and take note:

If you get this sort of message from someone you don't know, don't click on it.  

Wise up!

Karenne


Imagecredit
Narcissus by Archimadrill

Fossilization and then some Krashen

This morning's walk to classes was a half-hour battle with an umbrella against icy rain and I can safely say that winter is now upon us here in Manchester but at the moment, as the night closes in, I'm sitting in front of my computer with a nice hot-water bottle on my lap, my toes firmly ensconced in last year's Christmas present of sheepskin bed slipper boots. 

I hate cold so it's a good thing with all the articles the professors cook up for us to read that the heating's been turned up in my brain.
 

One of the tasks last week, for this week, was to think of what makes "a good speaker of a foreign language" and then to think of a particular challenge that you currently face or have faced when teaching Speaking.

We had to research the issue, select an article from Google Scholar and then come back into class to share what we learned.

I chose to look at fossilized errors, a subject I've written about before (but one also swallowed into the

dark-world-of-lost-posts-don't-even-ask-where-Google-put-it, I'll have to repost it soon)

because it's a subject that utterly fascinates me.

I mean why do some learners, despite a significant amount of comprehensible input, say the wrong thing over and over again, even when they are corrected over and over again?   Even when they are repeatedly exposed to the correct form via media, conversations with native speakers.  

You know the sort of errors I mean?  

e.g

"I stand up" instead of "I wake up"

The a - e - i mix up

 Trouble with filler words like, "well"

I suppose, at the end of the day, it comes down to L1 interference (first language getting in the way when producing speech in the second language) but why do some of our learners never go through this while others hit major stumbling blocks?  It isn't an age thing, if we're honest, now is it?  It isn't a gender thing... and sometimes, though not always, they are undoable...

e.g.

a) placing a picture of the difference between standing up and waking up on the table as a cue card

b) teaching a mnemonic device, Send Emails with your iPad from Apple

with others, only practice seems to do the trick, with others it doesn't matter what you do, that error has been fossilized like an insect stuck in amber.

So, thus with my interest pricked, I set off on a trawl through Google scholar.   The first article I came to was by a young lady in China who pretty much put it down to not enough concentration on form in the beginner levels of classes.  I pretty much agreed with her so moved on to see if I could get something juicier.   

This one led to one of those 

"oh.my.goodness.how.come.I.never.thought.about.this?"  

experiences.

Dr Han has compiled a list of the Five Central Issues in Fossilization in an article for the International Journal of Applied Linguistics and in it, along with discussing the sort of errors I'd been noticing, she also discussed the fossilization of level.  When the student ceases to make any further progress in the level attained.

Have you ever come across this sort of thing in your classes - when your learners, week upon week, year upon year, stay at more or less the exact same level?  

To be honest, I would probably name this state "stagnation" because I don't think it's necessarily permanent, it is very contextually and situationally dependent, don't you think?

Her article was a really good overview and a really good springboard to digging deeper, but like so many scholarly articles, there aren't concrete suggestions on how to deal with these issues.


Which brings me to the psychology module, where we had to read some Krashen.  For all you die-hard-the-man-is-a-god-folks, sorry... the article we had to read was, sorry-to-say-out-loud, rubbish.

Obviously he's contributed greatly, enormously, to the field of Second Language Acquisition, but in Comprehensible Output? for System in 1998, he seemed to suggest that Comprehensible Output (CO) is too rare to make any real contribution to linguistic competence...  (CO is when learners notice that they don't know how to say something correctly in the L2 or they've tried to say something meaningful but it all went pear-shaped and no one knew what they were saying, so they change it - make it simple/ ask for help and in modifying the intended phrase/structure learn something new about the language).. 

In this article, Krashen suggested that students don't enjoy being pushed to speak (hogwash, mine did... the issue is so level dependent - so culturally dependent - so classroom dynamically dependent -so why-they're-learning-English dependent - so how-did-they-learn-English-before-influenced etc) and then he went on to say that high levels of linguistic competence are possible without output - that basically, input is all a language learner needs!

Raised my blood pressure that article did - I mean - by golly, at least a million students all across the world who've studied languages, whatever language, were made to do so through readings and listening, year upon year, but did not get the opportunity to speak and, blanket statement of mine, they would disagree with this viewpoint.   I wonder, is it Krashen's fault that they are now mute because some textbooks authors thought he was right?   Hmm...

Also, I think I'd even go so far as to say: if fossilization occurs at any one particular stage in the learning process, then I'd be very tempted to pick a time when new language is obviously received, in that moment, the brain makes a use-it-or-lose-it-decision... and I'd lay the blame of error/level fossilization at not having enough freedom moments in class - at not being able to say things wrong in order to learn how to say them right.

But then, whadda-I-kno',


Best,
Karenne

Useful links
Scott Thornbury's written a cracking post with rich comments on F is Focus on Form

References (because I have to work out how to do them and even though this is not an academic paper, and merely just an opinion based personal blog post, I'm trying to be a good girl now and should...)

Han, Z. (2004) Fossilization: five central issues, International Journal of Applied Linguistics Vol14 no.2 pp. 212-239
Krashen, S. (1998) Comprehensible Output? System 26, pp 175-182

ImageCredit
Insects in Amber by Mila Zinkova

"The Dog Ate My Internet"

...was the smart retort from one of my professors, Gary, today when I gave a reason for not being able to do my required Blackboard discussion homework on top of the articles we had to read. 

In the last few weeks I've been using a pay-as-you-go-dongle and its bytes were being chewed up at a very costly rate... which, on top of the life-changing move, is why I've not been around much in the last couple of weeks: not on the 'net, not writing emails, not FBing and all that.   It was all quick in and quick out.  Also, alas, my grandfather died recently and I'll be heading to his funeral on Friday.

But anyway, yay! The Internet is now installed at home, I have finally got my bed from Ikea although I haven't put it together yet, I have curtains up instead of propped up pieces of cardboard, I have a schedule, I have lightbulbs...  I know where my highlighter pens are although I think I may have lost my glasses.

The course tutors have been piling on the work, reams and reams of articles, 25 - 50 pages long plus book chapters to read and I swear that when they list out what else they recommend reading that there could well be an evil-grin-glint in their eyes.

That part, because I'm so keen :-) you know, trying to read it all, (even some referenced articles mentioned at the bottom of assigned) ...  all wound up becoming a bit overwhelming and on Monday I ran on over to the disability office (I'm dyslexic) to say I was freaking out.  

Nice counselor there told me it was normal to freak out and I instantly stopped freaking out.

I think I need to take a more eclectic approach - but oh,oh,  it's so hard to choose - what if I miss out on something truly groundbreaking... complain as I might about pages of stuff to read, the truth is by golly, even with the articles I don't really like, that I want to simplify and break down into you know, English, teach so much.   

This old dog is definitely picking up some new tricks.

Beyond Approaches, Methods and Techniques

The most interesting work for this module that I read last week was perhaps Diane Larsen Freeman's concluding chapter of Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching.  She has a really good voice - easy and clear, and warming - she's a really-have-been-there-and-done-that-author.   In this chapter she discussed the changes in methodology over the years and provided a really good overview of the different approaches.

I found this particularly interesting laid out, like this, as I can't say that before now I have never actually thought about how much the way that an adult learner might have been taught previously might well affect the way he learns now or how he wants to learn now.  

I thought her statement "What makes a method successful for some teachers is their investment in it" particularly interesting - I wonder if dogme works in my classroom because I simply believe it does.  

Two other phrases which really caught my eye were "learners are very versatile and can learn well sometimes despite a given method rather than because of it" and "teachers who teach as if their practice causes learning, while recognizing that they are not in control of all the relevant factors, and that at the least they are in partnership with their students in this enterprise, can be true managers of learning."

I am not fond of the term, managers, managers are a little too much like a throw-back to the top-down boss effect.  I like coaches better.  I wonder if that's a sign of the times, of these times, 2011 influenced as we are by the Business gurus and their pop psychology.  But, I tend to think that a coach encourages, motivates, builds his team.  And a classroom pulling together needs a strong, warm lead.

Psychology of Language Learning

I'm auditing this class which means I participate as a guest and have to do the assignments but won't get assessed at the end.

I really would wish it could be one of my core modules but I'm planning on doing an ISS in year two and I need to save the credits.   Our Dutch professor is a very interesting character... a coach.  

He gave us an article by Susana V. Rivera Mills and Luke Plonsky called Empowering students with language learning strategies.  This is probably the most marked up of all the texts I had to read last week and the only one I read through more than once and then reread the comments in the margins again, prior to class. 

In class this morning, Juup had us critique and analyze some of her core points and terminology  and it was jolly good fun to give it a (respectful) bashing.  I highly recommend reading it, looking out for phrases like "instructors whose students posses misconstrued notions about language learning need to provide guidance to avoid their tendency to use less effective strategies" but don't expect any real practical advice on how to do that.

In her introduction she repeated a vital question raised by Dick Allwright in 1984 - a question I have been asking for years "Why don't learners learn what teachers teach?"  But her article was pretty theoretical, so I didn't walk away with any 'a-ha' moments.

Still it discussed things like how good strategies affect motivation and wound up reminding me of my own questionings on whether or not, the term I probably incorrectly refer to as "peer-induced-motivation," has any influence over the end-"product."

Evaluation and Design of Educational Courseware

I thought I was going to wind up in the quagmire... blinded by statistics and non-educational examples and too-much-for-the-brain-to-take-in-lists of principles, on printer-costly chapters from Dix and Norman, in the random pursuit of a main point or two.

However, the briefer Wilson, in Raising the bar for instructional outcomes, did serve one up and that is this: 

e-materials need to be 

efficient, 

effective 

and engaging.

He also talked about mythic story structure in e-design, referencing Joseph Campbell's journey of the hero (usually used in Hollywood -see my dogme post).

I really suspect I'll be reading more of his work and that I may well have more to say on this subject in the coming weeks/months.


Best,
Karenne

p.s.  For the next two years, Tuesdays are now going to be taken up with my self-reflective, what did I learn on my MA-EdTech&TESOL.  I hope you don't mind the diary style sort of entries and I might well waffle on a bit...  if you want to skip these, then Thursdays will be for the more lesson oriented stuff and Sundays will be the EdTech-SocialMedia comments/tips posts.  

p.p.s. For all you amazing folk who've sent your good wishes via blog and FB and Twitter and for your interesting comments here on the blog last week, so sorry - the dog ate my internet - I'll respond this week :-).

References
Freeman-Larsen, D.  (2000) Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  Ch.12.
Rivera-Mills, S.V & Plonsky, L. (2007) Empowering students with language learning strategies: a critical review of current issues.  Foreign Language Annals, 40(3):535-548 
Wilson, B. Parrish, P. & Veletsianos, G (2008).  Raising the bar for instructional outcomes: Towards transformative learning experiences. Educational Technology. 48(3), 39-44

Image credit
Caught surfing flickr by derekGavey on Flickr.com

How to Avoid Overseas EFL Teaching Job Scams

(guest post by Susan Taylor)

Vacationing in a foreign country is wonderful, but it isn't always fulfilling enough. You may visit a new place, completely fall in love with the land, the people, even the food, and want to experience those things on at least a semi-permanent basis. Teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) is one way to do that.

Unfortunately, many EFL teachers can find themselves victims of job scams, which can not only cause them to lose a lot of money, but can sour them on the entire overseas experience, causing them to speak out about their negative experiences. Complaints like this are especially frustrating because language instruction can be a wonderful experience, especially overseas. If you decide to pursue an overseas EFL teaching job, be on the lookout for these red flags.

Up Front Payment Required

It's very rare that you should have to pay any kind of fee for any kind of job, let alone an EFL job. You're the one applying to do the work in order to be paid. Why should you have to pay anything before you get there? Disreputable employers, or scammers posing as EFL employers, will tell you the payment is to cover your travel costs, or for an orientation you must attend before you can begin teaching. 

Sadly, this very thing happens to many hopeful job seekers. One such story involved a woman who lost $2,500 when she wired money via Western Union for travel costs and rent fees with the promise she’d be reimbursed by the employer. When they received it and then asked her for more money, she became suspicious, and found out it was a scam.

Huffington Post columnist and author, Julie Gray, wrote an article about a very similar experience in which she described how even though she considers herself quite savvy, she still fell for a scam. It can happen to anyone.  As the instances above illustrate, if you pay that money, you'll likely never see it again. And you’ll still have to cover your travel. Be suspicious of any company that requires payment up front when you apply for a job with them.

 

It's Too Good To Be True

It's not difficult to find out the average pay for an EFL teacher in your country of interest. That information is available from multiple sites on the Internet, such as EFL businesses, and EFL support sites and forums. Just like most other teachers of any subject, EFL teachers don't go into that career field to become rich. 

Part of the compensation is the opportunity to live in a foreign country, and to interact with the culture and people there.  If an EFL company offers you what seems like an outrageous salary, or one that's much higher than what other companies are offering in the same area, it's probably a scam.

 

Questionable Web Sites

Just about anyone can build a Web site these days with just a little know-how and a Web host. In the cases of Internet scams, it's become the equivalent of a layperson hanging out a shingle that claims they're a physician. Fortunately, there are some things to look for that will help you identify EFL scam sites. 

First, look at the URL. Does it end with an unusual extension you've never seen before? Not to say that all sites with those extensions are questionable, but it's definitely a something to examine a little more closely. 

Also, is the site well designed? Are there a lot of spelling and grammar errors? Is the domain name unrelated to EFL? Any or all of these factors should tell you all you need to know about that supposed EFL employer.

 

Poor English

Think about it. You're applying to English schools to teach English. Doesn't it stand to reason that the people who work there would be very familiar with the language, and would have excellent English skills? One or two mistakes are probably nothing to be alarmed about. You can find errors on a lot of Web sites or advertisements written by people for whom English is their first language. But if the materials you're looking at are rife with errors, there's something wrong. 

It may also help for you to be more familiar with the native language of the country you’re attempting to teach in. For example, if you’re talking with a school in Spain and are worried about the reputation of the program, send out some tweets to people in the area and check teaching groups on Facebook for more information. If you’re rusty on the language of the country, audio-based programs help quite a bit. In this scenario, brushing up on Spanish will help you communicate, be more aware and maybe even help your instruction.

What other advice would you give to a newbie TEFLer?

Thinking and Doing, Comparing and Contrasting

Today was a beautiful day in Manchester: the trees are just beginning to add touches of yellow in their edges and the sun battles to provide us with some last warmth.

In between classes, I sat on a park bench with a thermos of brought-on-over-from-Germany, sage and honey tea, to reflect on the learning provided in the morning session with our Dutch professor Juup Stelma.   He started off the course, Psychology of Language Learning, with one of those very popular psychometric questionnaires. 

The problem with this sort of test is they force you into answering YES/NO -and well, if you, like me, have lived, then you know that being forced into black and white answers can intimidate and perhaps irritate  -  too much of what we do and think is grey;  too much is

'MAYBE,'

'it DEPends,'

'er, when I'm hungry'  &

'aye, when I'm in a grand mood.' 

Or, worse, if you've any intelligence then you quickly notice the relationships between the different questions separated out by a few lines and despite the valiant attempt to be "honest and truthful to oneself" you wind up wondering if you may be being tricked (why do we so distrust the psychological) and thus, forced by the pressure and the immediacy laying in wait behind the stopwatch, the demanding YES or NO, you attempt to reply in exactly the same way each time, whether or not it is the "truest" answer. 

Anyway, the resulting results are that I am a pragmatist-activist.

Oddly enough, true. 

But not surprising news.   Of course, I like life and learning to be practical (I'm a teacher!) and to be immediately applicable (tick-tock!), that's why out of all the MAs in the world, I wound up here, doing this one TESOL with real-life applicable educational and technological aims!  

Juup then acknowledged the lack of contextual reference presented through the questionnaire and wrapped up the exercise with a drawing made up of stick figures walking across the whiteboard, challenging us to think about what and who we, as people, as learners, interact with and how those things directly influence our learning.

The interpersonal and intrapersonal aspects.  

He provoked us into thinking about how the results of this non-contextual questionnaire, by Honey and Mumford, could ultimately provide a teacher with enough data to then create contextual materials and hinted at the potentiality of separating learners according to 'type.'

I'm intrigued by this idea but not sure.

In fact, it forces me to mull back over the whole concept of individual learner types - you know the now tossed out, theory of folks being auditory/kinestic/visual learners?   (gotta admit I still subscribe in part,as I know I always learn so much more from a picture than a droned lecture) but I actually tried separating out my students this way and it never really worked.   Even in the small classes.   Noticing was one thing but preparing, presenting, teaching, working together, another.   What about you?

And what do you do if you're teaching 30 or even 60 as some of my Asian colleagues need to?

Apart from the feasibility, is it practical or even worth the effort, to divide up students into theorists, pragmatists, activists and reflectors?   Aren't we all different because it is through the cooperation and collaboration of our differing skills that we make the better, more dynamic whole?   If we separate our learners into groups, won't they become flat and one dimensional?

But then, later, as I walked home, crisping my way through the first batch of dead leaves which rustle in oranges on the concrete lanes, after my class with Gary Motteram, on the Evaluation and design of Digital Software, I began reflecting once more on the infinite potentiality for well-designed computer programs to cater to these issues - whether on the surface level or deep within our id, in areas we don't even know about yet…  and how this potentiality may soon be within the reach of technology  - to teach and treat each individual learner individually while we work collectively.

Best,
Karenne


Useful links related to this posting:

• Learning Styles
• Peter Honey Learning styles questionnaire
• Psych Press Understanding your learning styles

COMPARE AND CONTRASTING
I received an invitation from Anne to take part in her blog challenge, of finding two similar pictures.   Why did I choose these two and how do you think they discuss the text above?

image credits:
Buddhist monk in Sirikit Dam by Tevaprapas Makklay
Sri Mariamman Temple, Singapore by AngMoKio 

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