There isn't much I want to write about just now, for reasons I may return to. Now, normally when I've got nothing to write about I don't write - years can pass this way - but I thought I might finish the year with some sort of trivia thing. All the papers do it, don't they?
I borrowed these questions from an auto-interview by/with the wonderful Efler blogger 'Lathophobic Aphasia', written by someone with a better turn of phrase and more of a gift for creative grumbling than most of the people you meet in the staffroom. No apologies for borrowing, though, as Mr Aphasia himself borrowed the questions from an interview that EFL demi-god Jeremy Harmer did with Professor Deborah Cameron, another bright light of the ELT industry. And jolly good questions they are too. Borrow them yourself. Maybe we can make it into a meme.
What three adjectives would you use to describe yourself?
Creative, disorganised, passionate.
What is your greatest achievement?
You ain't seen nothing yet.
What’s your favourite smell?
The sea, windfall apples lying on winter mud (smelt that on Moushold Heath this morning), cut grass, a clean cat, rain in the desert, burning seasoned oak, mangoes, coffee.
What is your favourite taste?
Liquorice, mint, pineapple.
What’s your favourite piece of music?
Umm, don't know. I'm ignorant about music. I'm most comfortable with baroque type things - they have a pattern that I can just about manage to get my head around, and they resolve. Bach and Handel kinda thang: I haven't evolved as far as Romanticism. At one time in my life I went a fair bit to opera with someone who knew a lot about them (that was in Italy) and I remember the first one I went to which I enjoyed all the way through without a minute's boredom or inattention. It was Cosi Fan Tutte - nothing but the best, eh?
What book would you like everyone to read?
Just one? Impossible.
Books I tend to recommend to people I like: Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall ditto, Mary Renault's historical fiction, The Once and Future King (TH White), Middlemarch
What website would you like everyone to visit?
Not a clue.
What is your favourite sound?
Cat purring. Wood fire crackling. Rain outside. The sea.
If you were an animal, what animal do you think you would be?
Cat in a comfortable home, or small wild cat in a well-protected jungle. But then, I love to swim, so maybe otter or seal or one of the catlike prehistoric critters that went back into the water and became seals or whales or something. Or a Lake Van cat - they swim.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
'Spare' is a bit of an odd concept for me... as indeed is 'time' - perhaps that's why I have trouble getting things done. I don't have a telly, but when I watch dvds (or, rarely, when I watch TV away from home) I feel a need to fidget. In the last few years I've started to deploy this in making things - beads or jewellery, and lately, patchwork. If I watch enough films this year I will finish a patchwork quilt bedspread.
How many languages do you speak and why?
Well, I'm still struggling with English after 51 years. I learnt Italian quite well - I lived there for 6 years, though after 4 I no longer felt I was improving - after the age of 28 and with a history as a 'failed language learner'. It remains the only foreign language I ever got really confident and contented in, although I doubt I ever spoke it perfectly at my best. I'm fairly rusty now, though I still read it with pleasure, and recently have dreamt in it. I can read French and Spanish, but can't claim to speak either. French feels like a failure as I spent years being taught it without actually learning it, and now my 'default language', if I'm not speaking English, is Italian. I learned Anglo Saxon (or Old English if you prefer) per force at University for a year and was frustrated that I could not translate the poems well enough to do them justice: I felt they were wonderful but was not good enough - or indeed keen enough and hard-working enough - to make my versions adequate. I lived in Thailand three years without really getting to grips with Thai, but last week I watched a Thai film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives, and was surprised how much I could catch - but it's at the level of words rather than sentences and meanings. Same with Arabic.
What do you like most/least about your job?
I like the students who make this enormous courageous leap to living and studying in a different language and culture, and who make many small leaps of courage in order to communicate and approach each other and me. I like feeling that they are becoming ever more able to express more of their own meanings. I like getting to know people who do or will do such amazing and interesting things in life and who come from such varied and interesting countries: in what other profession would I meet Kurdish agriculturalists and Laotian ministers (who went to school in a cave and speaks Russian as a second language) and lawyers from the Ivory Coast. I like the strange and varied people who work in EFL too.
I dislike the insecurity of zero hours contracts, the tedium of meetings, and the odium of the occasional embittered colleague one meets who seems to dislike students on principle.
What would heaven be like if you were in charge?
Bliss. Warm sea, flying, music. Everyone I love around.
When and where are you happiest?
Lathophobic A's answer is pretty good: 'in a warm bed on a cold morning when I needn’t get up'. But also sitting in a tree, or on a hillside in summer. Riding a motorbike alone in Thai mountains. Sitting on the bottom stair in my nightie to listen to The Hobbit on my Dad's radio when I was 8. Writing something yesterday that seemed like it was working.
Something you are never without.
Something to read or to write on/with.
What is your most appealing habit?
Not sure I have any appealing habits.
And your least appealing habit?
Gloom.
What is the trait you most dislike in others?
Dropping litter and crap in beautiful places. Seriously. You go somewhere lovely - or even somewhere just passably pleasant - and defile it?
What is your most treasured possession?
Hmmm. My brain, I suppose. I would struggle to save the laptop and my mum's ring, and her diaries.
If you could have a supernatural power, what would it be?
Three, please, and they need not be supernatural at all - just very good technology indeed. I want
a time machine
a cloak of invisibility
and
a Babel fish.
This last was Douglas Adams' invention - a fish that swims in your ear enabling you to understand all languages in the universe and be understood. It would make my job obsolete, of course. But think of the evesdropping! Think of the history! You could settle all arguments about when people first started using language, for a start... and so much more.
What words or phrases do you overuse?
Like most Brits I swear a lot.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
An income I could rely on.
How would you like to be remembered?
I don't expect to be remembered by anyone, unless I write and publish something really good.
What music do you enjoy listening to/playing most?
Can't play anything. I've enjoyed singing in choirs and want to do more of it, and better. Most perhaps was a piece of music Barrie wrote (and I wrote some of the words for) and Stephen arranged for the Al Ain Choral Society, in which we both sang: Blue Carol. Listening... see above.
What did you dream of being when you were younger?
Writer. Trying to stop dreaming and work on it instead.
What were you like as a student at school?
Space case, then later on enveloped in impenetrable gloom enlivened with sarcasm. I stuttered, could not choose between two words of apparently equal meaning (would say 'tan' or 'kin' instead of tin or can) and could not concentrate on anything.
How do you cheer yourself up when you are feeling down?
I was very influenced by TH White's book 'The Once and Future King'. There's a point in which Merlin says that the one thing that never fails is to learn something - and then goes off into a long speech about the different things there are to learn and how many lifetimes it would take you to learn them all.
But learning is quite difficult to do, so a lot of the time I just read. Which feels similar, but is not quite the same.
If I hadn’t been a teacher, I would probably have been a...
writer sooner.
Who has been the best teacher you have ever had?
Richard Holmes, the biographer. You could sit in his seminars and feel your brain expanding gently under his influence.
Something that few people know about you.
I can't drive a car - never have learned - but I can ride a motorbike.
If you could travel back in time where would you go and why?
All over the place! Specially if I get my cloak of invisibility and my babel fish too.
What’s your best learning memory from school?
Walking in the park after midnight thinking that I understood 'Middlemarch'.
Are you a tidy desk or a messy desk person?
Exceeding messy. It hampers me.
What’s your favourite thing to do when it rains?
Sit by the fire with a warm cat and a good book.
A poem you know by heart.
Afterwards, by Thomas Hardy. This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin. Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll
What would you like to learn to do next?
Write!
What question would you have liked me to ask you?
‘Can I publish your next book for a large sum of money? And can you do a sequel, please? And, how about film rights...’
What would have been your answer?
Yikes! But yes, by all means.
Showing posts with label learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label learning. Show all posts
Friday, 30 December 2011
Thursday, 17 November 2011
Things autumnal
Ah November, season of damps cramps colds and most of the birthdays in my family. It was B's yesterday, and - apart from having to go to work to pay for it all - we had a pretty nice day and some great pizza and wine at Pizza Express - still our favourite place to eat in spite of my not winning their invent-a-pizza competition (I came second. To be fair, the winning one was delicious, but I could have done with the prize money).
It hasn't been very cold but it has been quite damp: not raining, but foggy and condensation-y all over. And most days have been dark, too, overcast and foggy all day, with a few stunningly beautiful exceptions.
We put our clocks back two weeks ago, making the mornings lighter - although that did not last for long - and the evenings set in an hour earlier. As I type, at ten past three in the afternoon, it is too dull indoors not to have the lights on and it feels the dark is closing in. On some days now, we go out in the morning twilight and come home in darkness. It feels very Northern (though I suppose it could equally feel Southern, only in 6 months time). It also feels as though we should be spending much more time asleep than we actually do. The instinct to hibernate has always been strong in me (I may be closer to our burrowing ancestors than most people you'll meet), but I notice that the cats are sleeping much more (even) than usual.
The other things this time of year brings include colds and coughs. It's our second autumn back in England and only the first cold for both of us, so we've done pretty well, but it was a goodie. I blame the students.
Seriously, I do. In every class there is at least one student, and often three or four out of 16, with a massive cold but no hanky or tissues, and no idea that a rhythmic snuffling every 5 seconds gets tiresome after the first few hours. I'm considering inventing swine flu/bird flu/elephant flu/cat flu rumours to encourage everyone to wear those hygienic masks popular in Japan. I've read that the masks are not actually that useful but I don't care - it gives something to catch the.. ahem.. effluvia.
Richard II was said to be a pretty useless king of England. Shakespeare portrays him as vacillating, self-pitying and feeble in the play of the same name. Richard's cousin Bolingbroke certainly thought so, and decided he would make a much better king himself. He got the crown and sent Richard off to Pontefract, where he may have been stabbed or may have been starved, but in any case rapidly became unfit for consideration due to being dead.
But Richard is supposed to have brought the handkerchief into use in England and for that alone he deserves a statue... possibly one placed in every language school in the country, where students can observe, mark and follow his example.
If they won't, I wonder whether Pontefract castle still has dungeons? Just a thought.
It hasn't been very cold but it has been quite damp: not raining, but foggy and condensation-y all over. And most days have been dark, too, overcast and foggy all day, with a few stunningly beautiful exceptions.
We put our clocks back two weeks ago, making the mornings lighter - although that did not last for long - and the evenings set in an hour earlier. As I type, at ten past three in the afternoon, it is too dull indoors not to have the lights on and it feels the dark is closing in. On some days now, we go out in the morning twilight and come home in darkness. It feels very Northern (though I suppose it could equally feel Southern, only in 6 months time). It also feels as though we should be spending much more time asleep than we actually do. The instinct to hibernate has always been strong in me (I may be closer to our burrowing ancestors than most people you'll meet), but I notice that the cats are sleeping much more (even) than usual.
The other things this time of year brings include colds and coughs. It's our second autumn back in England and only the first cold for both of us, so we've done pretty well, but it was a goodie. I blame the students.
Seriously, I do. In every class there is at least one student, and often three or four out of 16, with a massive cold but no hanky or tissues, and no idea that a rhythmic snuffling every 5 seconds gets tiresome after the first few hours. I'm considering inventing swine flu/bird flu/elephant flu/cat flu rumours to encourage everyone to wear those hygienic masks popular in Japan. I've read that the masks are not actually that useful but I don't care - it gives something to catch the.. ahem.. effluvia.
Richard II was said to be a pretty useless king of England. Shakespeare portrays him as vacillating, self-pitying and feeble in the play of the same name. Richard's cousin Bolingbroke certainly thought so, and decided he would make a much better king himself. He got the crown and sent Richard off to Pontefract, where he may have been stabbed or may have been starved, but in any case rapidly became unfit for consideration due to being dead.
But Richard is supposed to have brought the handkerchief into use in England and for that alone he deserves a statue... possibly one placed in every language school in the country, where students can observe, mark and follow his example.
If they won't, I wonder whether Pontefract castle still has dungeons? Just a thought.
Monday, 17 May 2010
A Mistake
When I was but a sproggette, I was good at reading. I enjoyed it, too, partly because we were a bookish family (my father's study, lined with books and dark red curtains, is in many ways my ideal room) and heavily into words, read to and rhymed at and recited over from the earliest ages.
Plus of course every Sunday we got together in a large building with many of our neighbours and spent an hour or so repeating responses, listening to readings, singing hymns, hearing sermons and reciting prayers - some of which were in Latin (my father's missal was bilingual: Latin and German).
Being able to read, and then reading a lot, and then reading about reading and writing about what I had been reading seemed to be pretty important things to do. Everybody I met seemed to agree on that.
Eventually I fetched up at university, only negatively by choice - the careers advice at my school consisted of what university might accept us to do what subject-and naturally I chose to read my "best" subject at school: English. I really enjoyed it, and through reading, discovered
Philosophy, Politics, Criticism and such like exciting stuff.
All that time, as I did my BA and then my first Masters Degree, it seemed as if there was nothing so important, nothing so valuable as to read and to read well, to discuss what had been read with others who had read the same, to fine tune one's critical apparatus, to read what others had written about what you and they had read .... and there would be no end to it, but that was fine, that was what CULTURE consisted in, that was the cutting edge of what it's all about, and we were on it.
And now, 30 years later, it has become apparent that I was completely wrong.
The cutting edge, the place where our culture is making itself, is science, much of which is expressed in a language that I and most of my literary chums can barely read: maths.
I feel a bit of a twit now - though I'm still glad I read most of those books (if I had my time over again, as Woody Allen said, I probably wouldn't read The Magus).
Not that there's anything wrong with being able to read stuff and understand it, but never again will I be able to confuse reading a lot with the cutting edge of culture.
Plus of course every Sunday we got together in a large building with many of our neighbours and spent an hour or so repeating responses, listening to readings, singing hymns, hearing sermons and reciting prayers - some of which were in Latin (my father's missal was bilingual: Latin and German).
Being able to read, and then reading a lot, and then reading about reading and writing about what I had been reading seemed to be pretty important things to do. Everybody I met seemed to agree on that.
Eventually I fetched up at university, only negatively by choice - the careers advice at my school consisted of what university might accept us to do what subject-and naturally I chose to read my "best" subject at school: English. I really enjoyed it, and through reading, discovered
Philosophy, Politics, Criticism and such like exciting stuff.
All that time, as I did my BA and then my first Masters Degree, it seemed as if there was nothing so important, nothing so valuable as to read and to read well, to discuss what had been read with others who had read the same, to fine tune one's critical apparatus, to read what others had written about what you and they had read .... and there would be no end to it, but that was fine, that was what CULTURE consisted in, that was the cutting edge of what it's all about, and we were on it.
And now, 30 years later, it has become apparent that I was completely wrong.
The cutting edge, the place where our culture is making itself, is science, much of which is expressed in a language that I and most of my literary chums can barely read: maths.
I feel a bit of a twit now - though I'm still glad I read most of those books (if I had my time over again, as Woody Allen said, I probably wouldn't read The Magus).
Not that there's anything wrong with being able to read stuff and understand it, but never again will I be able to confuse reading a lot with the cutting edge of culture.
Monday, 1 June 2009
so much to blog, so little time
The pace just gets quicker, with teaching and grading, testing and final presentations all galloping faster and faster to the end of the week. Something in my brain goes dead and I find myself sneaking peeks onto the net...
And answering emails. There has been an email-based debate about teaching vocab here - basically, what when and how.
The background to it is that on the course I teach, a new target is for students to "learn" - which means they must be assessed - on the Academic Word Lists, the top frequency words in Academic writing.
This came in for the first time 2 years ago. So one of my big jobs last year was devising assessments... which we now have a bunch of.
Oddly, the requirement for the course was that students should demonstrate passive understanding of 65% of the list and active production of 60% of the list... I suspect the figures should be rather different for realistic language learning (I'd guess 75% passive recognition - 50% active production would be more likely, though I don't know any research on the figures).
Anyway, devising an instrument that assesses production is quite hard, and the freer the production the harder it is.
There is now the suggestion that some of the AWL should be devolved down onto the level below.
However, the problem I notice most is not with students learning an academic word list (they are good at "learning" - in the sense of "memorising the translation of" lists of words). It is with the more basic vocabulary - what is often called the basic 3,000 words.
Plus they suffer difficulties with forming sentences and word forms (as in history - historical - historian) - it seems hard for students to recognise what a plausible sentence of English looks like, even into their 2nd year. Obviously, this affects their writing, but it also affects their reading.
A lot of exam reading comprehension consists of recognising parallel expressions (so in a text which mentions "eyesight" the question might ask about "vision") - one expression might contain the Academic list word but the other will use a paraphrase.
Students sometimes say "I know what this means in Arabic" but being unable to find other English words is a barrier (and it also encourages students to plagiarise... another can of worms).
Personally, I think that more lists would be pretty deadly - another move, as if we needed more, towards the "memorise-test-forget" cycle a lot of our teaching seems to aim to emulate. I would like more reading - more extensive reading and more focused reading with vocab support. But it's harder to measure the benefits of that.
I even proposed a test - some students in Foundations doing the AWL earlier, and some doing extensive reading with vocab support - then see who does better in the AWL in Year 1, and in everything else.
I'd be willing to bet money the readers would not only learn the AWL's better, but score better in reading and writing....
And answering emails. There has been an email-based debate about teaching vocab here - basically, what when and how.
The background to it is that on the course I teach, a new target is for students to "learn" - which means they must be assessed - on the Academic Word Lists, the top frequency words in Academic writing.
This came in for the first time 2 years ago. So one of my big jobs last year was devising assessments... which we now have a bunch of.
Oddly, the requirement for the course was that students should demonstrate passive understanding of 65% of the list and active production of 60% of the list... I suspect the figures should be rather different for realistic language learning (I'd guess 75% passive recognition - 50% active production would be more likely, though I don't know any research on the figures).
Anyway, devising an instrument that assesses production is quite hard, and the freer the production the harder it is.
There is now the suggestion that some of the AWL should be devolved down onto the level below.
However, the problem I notice most is not with students learning an academic word list (they are good at "learning" - in the sense of "memorising the translation of" lists of words). It is with the more basic vocabulary - what is often called the basic 3,000 words.
Plus they suffer difficulties with forming sentences and word forms (as in history - historical - historian) - it seems hard for students to recognise what a plausible sentence of English looks like, even into their 2nd year. Obviously, this affects their writing, but it also affects their reading.
A lot of exam reading comprehension consists of recognising parallel expressions (so in a text which mentions "eyesight" the question might ask about "vision") - one expression might contain the Academic list word but the other will use a paraphrase.
Students sometimes say "I know what this means in Arabic" but being unable to find other English words is a barrier (and it also encourages students to plagiarise... another can of worms).
Personally, I think that more lists would be pretty deadly - another move, as if we needed more, towards the "memorise-test-forget" cycle a lot of our teaching seems to aim to emulate. I would like more reading - more extensive reading and more focused reading with vocab support. But it's harder to measure the benefits of that.
I even proposed a test - some students in Foundations doing the AWL earlier, and some doing extensive reading with vocab support - then see who does better in the AWL in Year 1, and in everything else.
I'd be willing to bet money the readers would not only learn the AWL's better, but score better in reading and writing....
Monday, 20 April 2009
Turn-up for the books
"No Miss. I don't deserve it."
I've never had a student argue for a lower mark before, but it happened today.
The student's reason was not having done as well as expected (as expected by both of us, frankly) in this assessment.
I thought the mark I gave was fair (well, naturally I would think that) and, true, it would have been good for some students but was rather disappointing for this one, who is normally excellent.
It's an odd reaction, but it reminds me of going into my university exam in Anglo Saxon thinking that I hadn't prepared hard enough and really deserved to fail (actually I did OK - not great, but OK). But part of me felt I deserved to do much much worse.
Seems to me there are two issues here. One is the basic feeling that performance and result, or effort and result, should match up, which most teachers (and students) would agree is a Good Thing generally.
Now, while performance should match result (in a sense the performance is the result) it isn't necessarily true that effort matches result. I have known students who speak virtually like native speaking teenagers but made no attempt to learn anything more since leaving their English-medium high schools, and I have known many students who valiantly struggled to improve from a very low base, and who made it to a high level of achievement.
The other issue is what the criteria for success or failure are.
When I went in to translate some bits of Anglo Saxon poetry my personal criteria was to produce a good English poem which would catch the meaning and some of the spirit of the original. Fat chance: I was nowhere within a million miles of that sort of ability or knowledge - but what I had managed was clearly good enough for the examiners to give me a creditable pass. (I still feel that wasn't good enough, but it may now be too late to go back and try to out-Seamus Heaney Seamus Heaney).
My student's criteria for success seems to be, to be able to express her ideas clearly, 100% accurately and (very important to her, this) in a totally original and amusing way.
This, needless to say, is way beyond the exam criteria.
But it is absolutely lovely to have a student who has that kind of approach.
This is the student who called me over during a reading exam and pointed to a sentence in the text. My heart sank, as I was sure she was going to ask me for help - which of course I would have to refuse. Instead she said "Miss, I LIKE this sentence." Two days later she could still recite it by heart.
I've never had a student argue for a lower mark before, but it happened today.
The student's reason was not having done as well as expected (as expected by both of us, frankly) in this assessment.
I thought the mark I gave was fair (well, naturally I would think that) and, true, it would have been good for some students but was rather disappointing for this one, who is normally excellent.
It's an odd reaction, but it reminds me of going into my university exam in Anglo Saxon thinking that I hadn't prepared hard enough and really deserved to fail (actually I did OK - not great, but OK). But part of me felt I deserved to do much much worse.
Seems to me there are two issues here. One is the basic feeling that performance and result, or effort and result, should match up, which most teachers (and students) would agree is a Good Thing generally.
Now, while performance should match result (in a sense the performance is the result) it isn't necessarily true that effort matches result. I have known students who speak virtually like native speaking teenagers but made no attempt to learn anything more since leaving their English-medium high schools, and I have known many students who valiantly struggled to improve from a very low base, and who made it to a high level of achievement.
The other issue is what the criteria for success or failure are.
When I went in to translate some bits of Anglo Saxon poetry my personal criteria was to produce a good English poem which would catch the meaning and some of the spirit of the original. Fat chance: I was nowhere within a million miles of that sort of ability or knowledge - but what I had managed was clearly good enough for the examiners to give me a creditable pass. (I still feel that wasn't good enough, but it may now be too late to go back and try to out-Seamus Heaney Seamus Heaney).
My student's criteria for success seems to be, to be able to express her ideas clearly, 100% accurately and (very important to her, this) in a totally original and amusing way.
This, needless to say, is way beyond the exam criteria.
But it is absolutely lovely to have a student who has that kind of approach.
This is the student who called me over during a reading exam and pointed to a sentence in the text. My heart sank, as I was sure she was going to ask me for help - which of course I would have to refuse. Instead she said "Miss, I LIKE this sentence." Two days later she could still recite it by heart.
Thursday, 16 April 2009
Conference workshop
For a while now I've been posting mainly about moggies, which may have given the impression that I do nothing but play with the kitties (while waiting for my manicured nails to dry and in between making the maid's life a misery). But no, I do a bit of work for my keep from time to time (only when I have to, y'understand), don't have a maid, and must have the least manicured nails in the country, if not the region.
So ... one of the things that has been happening here has been a conference on Cultivating Real Writers. Due to my neurotic urge to volunteer for things that seem interesting without considering whether they are feasible, or indeed wise, I stuck my neck out to run a writing workshop for student participants. A lot of the workshops and presentations were very pragmatic - aimed at finding out how you could improve your IELTS score in writing, for instance - so naturally I wanted to be the light relief.
The workshop uses an idea I saw someone demonstrate about 5 years ago at a NILE (Norwich Institute for Language Education) event, done by a very good chap whose name, I'm embarrassed to say, I have totally forgotten. He was a writer and teacher, and it went down very well, so I borrowed the idea - ie stole it. I'm sorry not to remember his name - I would credit him if I did - but at the time I was too interested in what was going on to make a note of it.
Anyway, the basic idea is that, if you can get someone to write a single line, then you can get them to write another single line, and then another. I use similes (as the original geezer I saw did) and try to take it through the different senses of sight, sound, taste, smell and touch, in roughtly that order.
The great thing is that neither I nor the students know what to expect, but usually (I've done this a few times in a few different contexts) what comes out is terrific.
I did the workshop twice, first with a group of lads from one of the big cities, then with a group of girls from a smaller place. Neither group had the choice of what to attend, which was rather worrying to me - they had been signed up for the workshop willy nilly.
Some of the images that came out were fantastic.
How about: "...darkness that burns until I look for a hand of light to pull me out of it"?
"Sorrow is grey like an old TV program"?
"Shyness is like a little flower in a huge heaven./When I feel shy I want to hide/so nobody will pick me."
I mean, wow! Images I would never have thought of in a million years.
They were not brilliant English speakers BTW, though some of them were pretty good, but the point is that they were using all and any of their language resources to write something fairly simple, but full of meaning.
If I have a point of view on the native speaker/non native speaker thing it is that a language belongs to anyone who uses it, perhaps especially for those who use it well, and to do that you need to play.
Also, most people told to write a poem would feel pretty shy, but writing one line - that's different. The poem is the result of the process, not the start of it.
So ... one of the things that has been happening here has been a conference on Cultivating Real Writers. Due to my neurotic urge to volunteer for things that seem interesting without considering whether they are feasible, or indeed wise, I stuck my neck out to run a writing workshop for student participants. A lot of the workshops and presentations were very pragmatic - aimed at finding out how you could improve your IELTS score in writing, for instance - so naturally I wanted to be the light relief.
The workshop uses an idea I saw someone demonstrate about 5 years ago at a NILE (Norwich Institute for Language Education) event, done by a very good chap whose name, I'm embarrassed to say, I have totally forgotten. He was a writer and teacher, and it went down very well, so I borrowed the idea - ie stole it. I'm sorry not to remember his name - I would credit him if I did - but at the time I was too interested in what was going on to make a note of it.
Anyway, the basic idea is that, if you can get someone to write a single line, then you can get them to write another single line, and then another. I use similes (as the original geezer I saw did) and try to take it through the different senses of sight, sound, taste, smell and touch, in roughtly that order.
The great thing is that neither I nor the students know what to expect, but usually (I've done this a few times in a few different contexts) what comes out is terrific.
I did the workshop twice, first with a group of lads from one of the big cities, then with a group of girls from a smaller place. Neither group had the choice of what to attend, which was rather worrying to me - they had been signed up for the workshop willy nilly.
Some of the images that came out were fantastic.
How about: "...darkness that burns until I look for a hand of light to pull me out of it"?
"Sorrow is grey like an old TV program"?
"Shyness is like a little flower in a huge heaven./When I feel shy I want to hide/so nobody will pick me."
I mean, wow! Images I would never have thought of in a million years.
They were not brilliant English speakers BTW, though some of them were pretty good, but the point is that they were using all and any of their language resources to write something fairly simple, but full of meaning.
If I have a point of view on the native speaker/non native speaker thing it is that a language belongs to anyone who uses it, perhaps especially for those who use it well, and to do that you need to play.
Also, most people told to write a poem would feel pretty shy, but writing one line - that's different. The poem is the result of the process, not the start of it.
Tuesday, 10 February 2009
Random thing
Well here we are again, back at the chalk face (ahem, the white boards) after the mid-year break.
A student said to me this morning "English isn't really about anything, is it?"
I had to agree with her.
Topics we've been talking about in the last 2 weeks include
imports and exports
labelling of products
the incense route
smells we like and what they mean to us
the trade in spices
Christopher Columbus and the discovery of the Americas
bushfires in Australia
A student said to me this morning "English isn't really about anything, is it?"
I had to agree with her.
Topics we've been talking about in the last 2 weeks include
imports and exports
labelling of products
the incense route
smells we like and what they mean to us
the trade in spices
Christopher Columbus and the discovery of the Americas
bushfires in Australia
Sunday, 14 December 2008
Reflections of ELSS part 1
Top of the head phrases
- is there anybody there? said the traveller (in cyberspace)
- what if they gave a collaborative working exercise and nobody came?
- the natives (cf Prensky) are not nearly restless enough
- the sound of one blog blethering
This really started to emerge for me during week 3 when it seemed that the tumbleweed was blowing through the deserted alleyways of the VLE. Then, when I signed up to follow all the participants' blogs that I could find, I noticed that only Patsy was following anyone else's blog.
It's early days, I thought, and sure enough Marion found her way to mine, (welcome Marion! - a 100% increase in readership already), but other blogs remained unvisited.
This connected for me with a suspicious feeling I have about much of the Internet, that there are an awful lot of talkers and precious few listeners.
In the context of the course, and especially when getting ready to work collaboratively, it played right to my insecurities.
I'll say something positive in a later post, but I want to get this feeling in focus first, as it coloured my experience of the course considerably.
- is there anybody there? said the traveller (in cyberspace)
- what if they gave a collaborative working exercise and nobody came?
- the natives (cf Prensky) are not nearly restless enough
- the sound of one blog blethering
This really started to emerge for me during week 3 when it seemed that the tumbleweed was blowing through the deserted alleyways of the VLE. Then, when I signed up to follow all the participants' blogs that I could find, I noticed that only Patsy was following anyone else's blog.
It's early days, I thought, and sure enough Marion found her way to mine, (welcome Marion! - a 100% increase in readership already), but other blogs remained unvisited.
This connected for me with a suspicious feeling I have about much of the Internet, that there are an awful lot of talkers and precious few listeners.
In the context of the course, and especially when getting ready to work collaboratively, it played right to my insecurities.
I'll say something positive in a later post, but I want to get this feeling in focus first, as it coloured my experience of the course considerably.
Thursday, 4 December 2008
Playing Catchup
Well here we are at the end of Week 4 and I'm just getting to grips with part of Week 2, playing with Delicious. Most of what I've bookmarked has been folkie videos (simply because some friends I'm in touch with over Facebook keep sending me stuff that I wanted to keep... the problem with this internet business is how one thing leads to another...)
I can see the benefits of developing a group resource or reading list: one of the goals for the students I teach is to broaden their horizons, develop awareness of what's going on in the region and the world.
Also it would perhaps help with the ever-present problem of plagiarism, if students know that the resources they are using are already available to the instructors - although most of the plagiarism we have to deal with is not that sophisticated: a basic google search tends to come up with anything suspicious immediately.
Have also been doing some reading - the Franklin and van Harmelen piece was interesting.
Think I can see plenty of opportunities in students creating a Wiki... students often have to work as a team to research a topic and present their findings in report form - a wiki might be a good option.
One thing I have noticed as an English Language teacher with student writing is that, even with word processing, once things have been put into a given written form, they tend to stay that way... corrections and re-writes tend to focus on the rather superficial elements - "surface errors" rather than serious structural problems.
I wonder whether wikis would encourage more flexibility of approach to drafting and re-drafting? Also of course another way to create a shared reading/resource list.
Well... I hope to find out!
I can see the benefits of developing a group resource or reading list: one of the goals for the students I teach is to broaden their horizons, develop awareness of what's going on in the region and the world.
Also it would perhaps help with the ever-present problem of plagiarism, if students know that the resources they are using are already available to the instructors - although most of the plagiarism we have to deal with is not that sophisticated: a basic google search tends to come up with anything suspicious immediately.
Have also been doing some reading - the Franklin and van Harmelen piece was interesting.
Think I can see plenty of opportunities in students creating a Wiki... students often have to work as a team to research a topic and present their findings in report form - a wiki might be a good option.
One thing I have noticed as an English Language teacher with student writing is that, even with word processing, once things have been put into a given written form, they tend to stay that way... corrections and re-writes tend to focus on the rather superficial elements - "surface errors" rather than serious structural problems.
I wonder whether wikis would encourage more flexibility of approach to drafting and re-drafting? Also of course another way to create a shared reading/resource list.
Well... I hope to find out!
Saturday, 22 November 2008
On programming the video recorder
I did the BBC's 2005 online quiz about whether I was a digital citizen or not.
Well, the questions I knew the answers to, I knew.
And some of those I didn't know rather gave it away with their confusers - Christopher Wren has not been designing anything much recently - not since St Pauls and many beautiful churches, and Richard Rogers only does buildings (question 3).
Are we seriously expected not to have heard of them?
The other questions I had no clue about, but undoubtedly most of the information has been superseded over the last 3 years.
My score was 7 and the verdict was "probably still have problems programming the video recorder."
On the contrary.
I don't have a video recorder - or a TV - so I have no problems programming it.
It's not incapacity but lack of interest in almost everything that gets broadcast. (I do watch DVDs on the laptop).
I know the quiz was just a bit of frivolity, but why so insulting?
And, given that most of the information will by now be long out of date, what is it doing on this course anyway?
A classic confusion between the medium (the high tech equipment involved and the no doubt complex skills required to press the right keys on the remote control) and the message (in this case, the drivel that passes for 95% of TV output). Oh well, it's the Beeb so they're probably rather in favour of the drivel they broadcast...
Heyho.
Just call me an old fogey and have done with it - but it doesn't inspire.
Now, where did I put me cosy cardie?
Well, the questions I knew the answers to, I knew.
And some of those I didn't know rather gave it away with their confusers - Christopher Wren has not been designing anything much recently - not since St Pauls and many beautiful churches, and Richard Rogers only does buildings (question 3).
Are we seriously expected not to have heard of them?
The other questions I had no clue about, but undoubtedly most of the information has been superseded over the last 3 years.
My score was 7 and the verdict was "probably still have problems programming the video recorder."
On the contrary.
I don't have a video recorder - or a TV - so I have no problems programming it.
It's not incapacity but lack of interest in almost everything that gets broadcast. (I do watch DVDs on the laptop).
I know the quiz was just a bit of frivolity, but why so insulting?
And, given that most of the information will by now be long out of date, what is it doing on this course anyway?
A classic confusion between the medium (the high tech equipment involved and the no doubt complex skills required to press the right keys on the remote control) and the message (in this case, the drivel that passes for 95% of TV output). Oh well, it's the Beeb so they're probably rather in favour of the drivel they broadcast...
Heyho.
Just call me an old fogey and have done with it - but it doesn't inspire.
Now, where did I put me cosy cardie?
Friday, 21 November 2008
A Question of Citizenship
The course materials include a 2001 article by Mark Perensky which talks about having "digital citizenship" or being a "digital immigrant".
A curious choice of metaphor (are no immigrants citizens?).
I wonder whether I could be described as a "digital refugee", or with a nod to the tabloid press, a "digital bogus asylum seeker."
If we have to play that game I would hope one day to consider myself a "dual nationality holder", with one passport from the digi-realm and the other from the world of what I'd like to call "heritage technology" - ie books, pens, paper, etc.
Well I suppose it was just a modish sort of terminology, but I prefer the driving license metaphor.
I don't actually hold a car driving license either, and only a fraction of an ICDL, but at least it clearly refers to skills which are either acquired or not acquired.
In the meantime, another aspect of illiteracy strikes me every time I open this blog. Because of where I am based, the front page always appears in Arabic first. I can read a couple of words of Arabic (generally when I already know what they mean: it's the same with Thai).
I've now located where the "change language on this page" point is. There is no icon but I can remember the place - which will be fine, until the site gets revamped.
This is part of the problem most users face, and I'm sure "cut off dates" (Perensky's sensitive euphemism for age) will not make any difference.
No matter where people come in on this thing, they will constantly have to be relearning and unlearning as things get changed, "upgraded", and generally superseded by other things.
Of course the older we are the harder it is to learn new stuff - but that applies to everything else as well.
A sixteen-year old relative of mine has been grumbling about the changes to the Facebook interface...
A curious choice of metaphor (are no immigrants citizens?).
I wonder whether I could be described as a "digital refugee", or with a nod to the tabloid press, a "digital bogus asylum seeker."
If we have to play that game I would hope one day to consider myself a "dual nationality holder", with one passport from the digi-realm and the other from the world of what I'd like to call "heritage technology" - ie books, pens, paper, etc.
Well I suppose it was just a modish sort of terminology, but I prefer the driving license metaphor.
I don't actually hold a car driving license either, and only a fraction of an ICDL, but at least it clearly refers to skills which are either acquired or not acquired.
In the meantime, another aspect of illiteracy strikes me every time I open this blog. Because of where I am based, the front page always appears in Arabic first. I can read a couple of words of Arabic (generally when I already know what they mean: it's the same with Thai).
I've now located where the "change language on this page" point is. There is no icon but I can remember the place - which will be fine, until the site gets revamped.
This is part of the problem most users face, and I'm sure "cut off dates" (Perensky's sensitive euphemism for age) will not make any difference.
No matter where people come in on this thing, they will constantly have to be relearning and unlearning as things get changed, "upgraded", and generally superseded by other things.
Of course the older we are the harder it is to learn new stuff - but that applies to everything else as well.
A sixteen-year old relative of mine has been grumbling about the changes to the Facebook interface...
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