Specific English

Aviation English part 1: The purest form of ESP?

2011-12-04T18:51:00.001+01:00

In a much earlier post on this blog, I raised the idea that there are basically two approaches to ESP course design: English for … and English through …

Just to recap, with an English for … approach, we are teaching learners the specific language and skills they need in order to function effectively at work in English. The starting point is the needs analysis, which generates a series of situations where the learner may need to use English, whether in speech or in writing. There’s a strong emphasis on functional language presented in context and skills work, especially role-plays, to practise it.

With an English through … approach, on the other hand, the focus is on developing learners’ level of English, and the ESP field simply provides the context. Such a course might be built around, for example, a traditional grammar syllabus, but the examples and practice sentences could be related to the ESP field. There’s a strong emphasis on learning vocabulary and reading articles about the ESP field.

Because the books I’ve worked on have all been skills-based, I’ve tended to stay around the English for … side. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with an English through … approach. I think there’s a place for both.

In fact, what I’ve come to realise is that it’s better to think in terms of a scale, with extreme English for … at one end, and extreme English through … at the other, and most ESP fields, and therefore courses, somewhere in between. Not long ago, I wrote a blog post about Financial English, arguing that there’s not much you can do with it apart from vocabulary and reading texts, so I’d put Financial English somewhere near the English through ... extreme. Of course, surely there’s still some useful functional / situational stuff you can do, but it's hard to argue that Financial English is a proper genre.

Further out on that wing, I’d say, is English for Oil and Gas, which is a great topic for vocab and reading texts, but I really can’t imagine any situations that both an oil rig engineer and an oil trader might both find themselves in, and therefore much in the way of functional / situational language to include in such a course.

Legal English, on the other hand, is out towards the other wing. There’s plenty of functional / situational language shared by all lawyers, and this especially true when it comes to written legal English, especially the language of contracts, which is a recognizable genre of English, with its own grammar rules (wherewith and all that) and style.

Where’s all this leading? Well, for me, as an English-for guy, there’s one ESP field that beats all the others: Aviation English: the language that all pilots and air traffic control officers (ATCOs) use to communicate with each other around the world. The language is English in the sense that it uses English words, but it also has its own very specific grammar, vocabulary, spelling and pronunciation rules. Or, to echo the title of my blog, it's a really specific English.

Take a look at the numbers 0–9 in aviation English: zero, wun, too, tree, fower, fife, six, seven, ait, niner. Wun, too and ait are pronounced as normal numbers, but the spelling is designed to discourage pilots and ATCOs from trying to pronounce them the way they are spelled. Tree is easier to say than three. Fower (which rhymes with flower) also avoids a tricky vowel sound. Niner has an extra syllable to avoid confusion with five … sorry, fife. Cool, huh?

The grammar of aviation English is also a bit quirky: ‘Request taxi for departure’ is not an imperative (Please can you request a taxi) but an actual request (I am requesting permission to use the taxiways to get to the holding point for departure). In a way, it makes sense to mark a request by starting with the word request, but when you first come across it, it’s pretty weird.

One final example: here’s a weather forecast, which all pilots and ATCOs would understand immediately:

METAR KBUF 121755Z AUTO 21016G24KT 180V240 1SM R11/P6000ft -RA BR BKN015 OVC025 06/04 A2990.

I won’t go through it all, but 121755Z is simply the date (the 12^th) and time (17.55 GMT). 16G24KT is the wind speed: 16 knots, gusting (G) to 24 knots. 1SM is the visibility: one statute mile. And -RN BR describes the weather conditions: light (-) rain (RN) and mist (BR).

So … it really does seem to be a different language, which is why in my title I’ve called it the purest form of ESP. And it’s also why I had a bit of an identity crisis: how could I call myself an ESP all-rounder when, never having taught or studied aviation English, I had such a big gap in my ESP portfolio.

So that was why, about two years ago, I couldn’t turn down the chance to co-author the teacher’s book for Flightpath: Aviation English forPilots and ATCOs, which came out earlier this year.

Fortunately, my co-author was Philip Shawcross, a world-class expert on aviation English, and the President of the ICAEA (International Civil Aviation English Association).

So it meant my main job was ask Philip thousands of really stupid questions – the sort of questions that a new teacher of aviation English might be expected to ask. This was a technique I’d perfected while working on my legal English teacher’s books, but it still meant a year of very very hard work for all involved. But I’m very proud of the finished product.

Now all I need to complete my ESP portfolio is something on oil and gas … only kidding.

Related posts:
Two approaches to ESP course design
Financial English - if such a thing exists
Where was I?

Assessment in ESP

2011-07-30T16:50:00.000+02:00

A few weeks ago, I was asked an interesting question by an ESP teacher called Rosa in Algeria. The question related to an ESP course Rosa was running as part of her research for her doctorate. She'd conducted a careful needs analysis and designed her course based around those needs. But then the course had stopped unexpectedly before its scheduled end, which meant that there was no way of assessing if the course aims had been achieved. The question was: is the research still valid.

Well, let me start of by admitting that I’ve never been involved in the academic side of ESP. My experience of ESP courses has always been either in-company (where the employer pays) or with mixed groups of professionals and pre-experience students at the British Council (where the students themselves or, occasionally, their parents, pay).

The reason I bring up the grubby subject of who pays here is that it has a big impact on assessment. The person paying for the course has a large say in what the aims of the course should be, and therefore what constitutes a successful course. Whenever I ran an in-company ESP course, I (or my colleagues in sales) had to justify it to the customer in that company. In other words, in my experience, assessment is a service for the employer (usually represented by the HR department) and/or for the student (and his/her parents). The student is also paying in another way – in terms of time invested in attending the course and self-study.

Now, of course, when we get to the public university sector, we have a different customer: the taxpayer. Is the taxpayer getting good value for money out of the education they are paying for? It’s an interesting question, and I sometimes wonder if teachers in the public sector realise they’re doing a service for me as a taxpayer. Of course, individual taxpayers aren’t in a position to check the effectiveness of the courses they pay for, so responsibility is delegated to the government, the universities and ultimately the English teachers themselves, who are expected to provide evidence that they’re actually teaching and that the students are actually studying and even … learning something useful.

OK, so let’s look at Rosa's question first, and then we’ll step back to look at some broader issues. First of all, the problem with courses stopping before they’ve finished is, unfortunately, very common. If assessment is an important part of your course, don’t leave it all to the end. You can actually get a lot of assessment done during the course – not just in formal tests, but also by assessing role-plays, listening activities, written work, etc. You can conduct assessment as part of your regular teaching, to check how much they’ve learnt during the lesson, but perhaps it’s more useful to assess in a later lesson, to check how much they remember. For example, if one of your course aims is to teach your nursing students to conduct a patient admission, you could teach it and practise it in a role-play in one lesson and then repeat the role-play a few weeks later, in controlled conditions (so you can grade it properly) – perhaps without warning the students that there’s going to be a test.

It’s important to think carefully about your criteria for assessment – should everything be based on your course aims? A good way of planning aim-based assessment is by writing your course aims in the form ‘By the end of the course, students will be able to …’. This will then form the basis of your assessment: can they do it or can’t they. Ideally, break each aim down into several sub-aims, so you can give a detailed and objective assessment of how well each student can do things, rather than just an impression mark or whether they can do it or not.

But this then raises the next question. Have they learnt this ability during the course, or could they already do it pretty well before the course? In other words, have they actually improved? To assess this, you’ll need to do some benchmarking at the beginning of the course to identify the starting point.

Of course, not all assessment needs to be aims-based. You can also assess their general level of skills – reading, writing, listening and speaking. For this, I’d recommend using professionally created assessment materials, such as practice tests for Cambridge exams (FCE, Advanced, BEC, etc.). This obviously won’t be connected with the topics you’ve studied in your course, but it can still be valuable to check for and measure improvement in, say, general listening comprehension skills.

In other words, assessment is a complicated business, and to do it properly, you’ll need to do lots of it. But then … will you have any time left to actually teach the poor students? Too much assessment can demotivating for learners and a huge drain on your time both in the classroom and away from it (marking!!!).

This was something that used to bother me when I was teaching at the British Council. We had a wonderfully sophisticated assessment system, with all sorts of assessment events scheduled throughout the semester, which generated a page full of statistics that could be combined into scores on a range of skills for each student. The problem was, there wasn’t really time both to complete the assessment regime and to teach, so some teachers (dare I admit I was one of them?) invented some of the figures in order to prioritise teaching.

You see, I guess I need to come clean about one of ESP’s guilty secrets. We claim to be very sophisticated with our detailed needs analyses and carefully designed courses, but we’ve actually got very little control over what our students take away from the course. For example, you may be doing an exercise with the aim of developing their reading subskills, but what they’ll actually get out of it is some new vocabulary (which you didn’t even notice) or a deeper understanding of some grammar rule, based on the way it’s used in the text. In another lesson, your garbled explanation of a grammar point may fail to teach your students much about the grammar point in question, but they’ll become aware of some nice expressions and idioms for giving explanations (or for apologising for failing to explain something). In yet another lesson, while you are arguing with your students over why answer X from the listening exercise is right, and answer Y is wrong, you may be helping their negotiation skills more than their listening skills. (Note that this only works if the class is conducted in English).

(This is connected with a concept I call the leaky pipeline, which I’ll have to explain in a separate post, along with the related concept of obliquity – achieving great things by not trying too hard to achieve them.)

That’s not to say that our needs analysis and course design is a waste of time – far from it. We need it as a starting point for our teaching, and it needs to appear relevant, interesting and useful in order to motivate our students to engage with it. We also need to include a wide range of language and skills work in our courses – they’ll certainly benefit from it, but perhaps not in exactly the way that we planned. A strong syllabus also provides a focus for their study: a list of good words or useful phrases to learn, for example, is surely beneficial. But we’re kidding ourselves if we think this is all they’ll get out of our lessons, or even the most important thing.

So what does this mean for assessment? Well, on the one hand, it means assessment is less important than we make it out to be. But on the other hand, assessment can be extremely useful in motivating students to learn. Customers (by which I mean parents, employers, taxpayers and others who pay for the courses) also have a right to expect some measurable results from the course. And we mustn't forget that not all teachers are as competent or conscientious as those who read this blog - there are lazy, incompetent teachers out there (apparently), and assessment is perhaps the only way of keeping them on their toes.

So we definitely should assess, both formally (in mid-course and end-of-course tests – including writing, role-plays, etc.) and informally (during the course). But we also shouldn’t take the results too seriously. By the end of the course, a good teacher should know which students are good and hard-working and which are clueless or lazy simply because you have spent time getting to know them and their English (including plenty of time hearing them speak and reading their writing). The formal assessment should simply confirm what you already know.

Does this answer Rosa’s question? Not really. If I were her professor assessing her research, I guess I’d just discuss with her if she thought she’d achieved her aims. I wouldn’t worry too much about missing end-of-course tests. But perhaps that’s why I’m not a professor. I guess ultimately it comes down to each university’s policy on what counts as valid research, and my common-sense approach doesn’t really have much bearing on individual universities’ policies!

So sorry, Rosa, for not really answering your question - although you've given me lots to think about. Perhaps some readers of the blog can add their opinions.

Related posts:
Exams: Financial English ... if such a thing exists
Needs: English for Nursing
Syllabus design: ESP consultancy, Cyprus

Where was I...?

2011-07-06T23:22:00.000+02:00

It’s been a long time since I’ve written for this blog, or at least anything more than the briefest of posts. So it’s about time I talked about what I’ve been up to. It’s been such a crazy couple of years that it’s difficult to know where to start, but perhaps two years is a good time to go back. That’s roughly when my life went from being seriously busy to unbelievably crazy. It’s also when I started seriously neglecting this poor blog.

This time two years ago, summer 2009, I was in a kind of ESP heaven. I was teaching loads of legal English, and getting pretty good at it. I was finishing work on two books for my series, Cambridge English for Nursing Pre-Intermediate and Cambridge English for Marketing.

In addition to my role as series editor, which was pretty much complete for those two books by summer 2009, I also had some additional work on both books. I edited the free online teacher’s notes for Nursing Pre-Int and wrote a series of grammar worksheets, one for each unit of the book. You can find both the teacher’s notes and the grammar worksheets here: …

For our Marketing book, I wrote the online teacher’s notes myself. It seems like a little job to write online teacher’s notes, but it’s a good couple of months’ work, just as hard as writing a full teacher’s book. In fact, the only difference is that printed teacher’s books generate more money – the workload’s the same.

I was also getting into technical English in a big way: I did a lot of work on an award-winning webcourse called e-Xplore Technical English, an online course developed by the HTWK University of Leipzig. (It won its awards before my involvement, I hasten to add).

The course already existed and was very good, but my job was to dramatically extend of the materials without adding new content. For example, for every reading or listening text, where there were, say, 5 comprehension questions, I wrote another 20. This meant that the computer could select 5 from the bank of 25 (using clever algorithms), so that every person taking the course had a slightly different set of questions, which eliminated the possibility of cheating (which had been a big problem earlier). I also did my usual editorial stuff on the course, fixing things that I didn’t like and suggesting improvements and extensions. Good fun and very satisfying, but a lot of work. But I learnt a lot about technical English on the way, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of e-learning.

Oh, and I was also doing my regular work for Professional English Online: 2 activities (lesson plans) per month, 2 financial English jargonbusters per month, and a quote of the week every week. So I can add financial English to the legal, medical, technical and marketing English I was working on at the same time. And of course I was also teaching at the British Council.

So that’s our starting point, late summer 2009: life was seriously busy, but not yet unbelievably crazy. This poor blog was a bit neglected, but not yet abandoned.

That’s when I got not one but two dream job offers, neither of which I could possibly turn down.

The first one came as a result of a combination of sheer luck and hard work – the usual combination in this business. A year or so earlier, I’d received an email from one of the Grammar editors at Cambridge University Press: she’d noticed my name on the International Legal English teacher’s book, and wondered if I was the same Jeremy Day that used to work with her in Krakow, about 10 years earlier. And of course I am. She remembered that I’d been into grammar in a big way back then, and had always written worksheets and done training sessions for other teachers, so she gave me the chance to do some odd jobs for the Grammar team at CUP. Brilliant – it goes to show that you can never predict which people from your present life will turn out to be useful contacts in the future.

Anyway, those odd jobs included lots of reviewing and evaluation work on Grammar for Business – a very nice and useful book, by the way. And I managed to get a mention in the acknowledgements, which was nice.

I was then asked to write a series of revision units and end-of-unit tests for level 1 (elementary to pre-intermediate) of a new three-level grammar series for teenagers. It was a great break but a huge amount of work: there were 14 revision units and over 70 tests to be written – a substantial fraction of the whole book, in fact.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I slogged away at that for many months, and finally, about three years later, in early 2011, the book finally emerged: Active Grammar Level 1. Series editor: Penny Ur, one of my ELT heroes. Anyway, I got a small mention in the thanks pages of both books.

But here’s where it gets really interesting: as a result of my hard work on Active Grammar Level 1, I was invited to submit a sample unit to be a co-author of Level 3 of the same series, the advanced level. This was, as I say, towards the end of summer 2009 – the dream job I’d been waiting for all my career. (Yes, it’s true. Much as I love ESP, I’m at heart a grammar guy, and I’ve been obsessed with grammar since the day I started teaching).

So, there I was, September 2009, waiting to see if my sample unit for that project would be approved. Around the same time, I gave a presentation for the British Council at the IATEFL Poland conference, on ‘My favourite grammar structures’. At the end of that presentation, I was approached by one of the editors from Pearson Longman, who asked me if I’d ever thought of writing a book! Again, to cut a long story short, I was invited to submit a sample unit for a general English course for teenagers preparing for their school-leaving exams (e.g. the Polish matura exam). Actually, they were looking for someone to co-author the second edition – the first edition has been a best-seller here in Poland and elsewhere for several years. How could I turn down a chance like that?

Amazingly (and to cut two long and stressful stories short), my sample units for both books were accepted, so I found myself co-authoring a major new grammar book for Cambridge and a major coursebook for Pearson. As I described in an earlier post, writing for two publishers at the same time is never easy: you can’t turn round to one and say ‘sorry, I can’t meet your deadline because I’ve got a more important deadline on my other book’. You’ve just got to work harder than ever before, and sacrifice other parts of your life. That’s around the time I really stopped writing for this blog.

Again, that grammar book has just come out: Active Grammar Level 3. It was a fantastic experience and I learned a huge amount. What I like best about Active Grammar is that it’s a CLIL-based course, which means that you learn about all sorts of things (geology, arts, chemistry – but always in a fun way) at the same time as you’re studying grammar. I certainly learnt lot and probably enjoyed writing it more than any other book I've been involved with.

The Pearson coursebook, New Success Upper Intermediate, was very slightly easier, because it was the second edition I was working on, so we could follow the general plan of the original edition. But it’s still plenty of work to keep you busy for a year – my editor warned me at the beginning to make sure I had a clear schedule (!) to work on it. Anyway, it’s out next year. I’m also really proud of the work I did on it – again, some really interesting topics and I was able to be a lot more creative than with my other books. Also, writing for teenagers is very different from writing for adults, so as usual, I learnt a huge amount along the way.

But that’s not all. My role as Series Editor can’t be switched on and off depending on what other projects I’m working on, so that rolled on at the same time. We commissioned the next two books in the series, Cambridge English for Scientists and Cambridge English for Human Resources, around the same time (late 2009), so for well over a year I was working on four big writing projects at the same time, plus all my other little projects. Anyway, Cambridge English for Scientists came out a couple of months ago, and it’s looking really good. I think that one deserves a separate blog post, which will come soon.

Cambridge English for Human Resources came out a couple of weeks ago, and I’m also really proud of it. Again, I promise to blog about this properly soon.

The downside of working on those four books (Active Grammar 3, New Success Upper Int, Cambridge English for Scientists and Cambridge English for HR) is that they should all generate income for me in the coming years … wonderful, but not much use to me as I try to feed my family and pay my mortgage now. So in addition to all of these, I also needed to take on plenty of other writing jobs, especially as the work on the four big ones was coming to an end about a year ago – summer 2010.

So what did I take on? Bizarrely, I received offers to write or co-write four teacher’s books, all around the same time (a year ago) and all offers I couldn’t resist. The first was Dynamic Presentations, written by another of my ELT heroes, Mark Powell.

Again, my trainer’s notes are online, so no nice book to put in pride of place on my shelf, but still a lot of work and a great opportunity to be involved with such an excellent and important book. The book came out late last year, in time for the BESIG conference (where I was delighted to find myself sharing a taxi with Mark Powell himself – see my blog post here for a report on that conference).

The second teacher’s book was Flightpath, a new course for pilots and air traffic control officers (ATCOs).

Aviation English had been one of the big gaps in my ESP portfolio – I’ve done something on all the other big ESP fields (except maybe IT English), so this was my opportunity to plug that gap. I was invited to co-author the teacher’s book, together with Philip Shawcross, the author of the Student’s book and the president of ICAEA (the International Civil Aviation English Association, ), which was very reassuring. He provided the expertise, while I asked all the silly questions (and got wonderfully detailed answers) and made sure it worked in terms of methodology. As with everything else, I’ll have to come back to this topic later. The books are out around September 2011.

The third teacher’s book was the new edition of International Legal English.

Having written the teacher’s book for the first edition, I wasn’t going to let someone else re-write my masterpiece (!), so I had no choice but to take that on too. That’s out later this year too.

Finally, there’s the online teacher’s notes for Cambridge English for Human Resources, which I co-wrote with George Sandford, the author of the Student’s book. As with my work on the Marketing teacher’s book, it doesn’t look like much work when you just have a URL to show for it, but it was very hard and time-consuming. (Actually, I haven't even got a URL or image for the teacher's notes - I guess they'll be up on the resource site in a few days).

Oh, one other thing. I also ended up writing ~~two sets of worksheets for the new edition of~~ … [sorry, but I guess that’s still top secret for the time being].

Is that all? Well, I also co-wrote a short handbook, An Introduction to Teaching English for Specific Purposes, with Mark Krzanowski, the co-ordinator of IATEFL’s ESP SIG and a very important person in the world of ESP. It was only a little handbook, so not much work (for a change), but it’s still nice to have that on my CV. You can download the handbook for free here.

In the meantime, I also left my job at the British Council, and have now actually stopped teaching. As I mentioned briefly before, I’m now working for English360, which I think has got to be the future of ESP (and possibly the whole ELT industry).

One project there that has dominated my time with English360 recently has been the trainer’s notes for the TKT (Teaching Knowledge Test) course, which I was asked to write as part of the deal to put the TKT course online the platform. It’s been a huge project for me, and extremely time-consuming, but I’m very proud of it. I’ve just finished off the trainer's notes this week, so they'll appear on the website very soon I guess. That'll be the last of ten books that I was working on at the same time for most of the last 12 months.

Another book I’ve finished off this week (today, in fact) is the trainer’s notes for Communicating Across Cultures, an innovative new course by Bob Dignen. The course is part of Cambridge’s new Business Skills series (along with Dynamic Presentations), and will be really useful for anyone who needs to work in an intercultural environment. (The book will be out soon, and hopefully I'll have a URL and image for the trainer's notes in a couple of months).

Of course there are more books on the way: I’ve started working on one more already, with several more on the horizon, including some really exciting ones. But I can’t say more. I’ve probably already said too much anyway. So I’ll end now with a summary of the past two years, more for me than for you: I can’t believe I’ve done all of this in two years (publication/completion dates in brackets):

As editor / series editor:

(2009) Cambridge English for Nursing Pre-intermediate
(2009) Cambridge English for Nursing Pre-intermediate (Teacher’s Notes)
(2009) Cambridge English for Marketing
(2011) Cambridge English for Scientists
(2011) Cambridge English for Human Resources

As teacher’s book author / co-author:
(2009) Cambridge English for Marketing (Teacher’s Notes)
(2010) Dynamic Presentations (Trainer’s Notes)
(2011) Flightpath (Teacher’s Book – co-author)
(2011) International Legal English 2nd edition (Teacher’s Book)
(2011) Cambridge English for Human Resources (Teacher’s Notes – co-author)
(2011) The TKT Course (Trainer’s Notes)
(2011) Communicating Across Cultures (Trainer’s Notes)

As consultant / writer of supplementary materials
(2009) Cambridge English for Nursing Pre-Intermediate (Grammar Worksheets)
(2009) e-Xplore Technical English
(2009/10) Professional English Online (Activities and Jargonbusters)
(2011) Active Grammar 1 (Review Units and Tests)
(2012) XXX (sorry – still top secret)
(2012) XXX (sorry – still top secret)

As co-author:
(2011) Active Grammar 3
(2012) New Matura Success Upper Intermediate 2nd edition
(2011) An Introduction to Teaching English for Specific Purposes

Sooooo … that’s where I’ve been for the last two years. I hope that explains my absence from the blogosphere for so long. (I could also add that over the last two years my work has taken me on about four tours of Poland, plus Germany, the UK, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Cyprus, Switzerland, Bosnia and Serbia). I promise I’ll come back and blog about everything properly as soon as things calm down … if they ever do.

Jeremy Day, July 2011

Related posts:
Back from BESIG 2010
All change
Good to be back

Cambridge English for Marketing - Book of the Month

2010-12-09T21:24:00.001+01:00

I know I only use this blog these days either to apologise or to blow my own trumpet, but I can't resist feeling a bit smug. I've just got my latest copy of the EL Gazette and the newest book in my series, Cambridge English for Marketing, is Book of the Month. Excellent.

Here's the review:

New English360 video

2010-11-27T07:55:00.001+01:00

Some time ago, when I got my new job at English360, I promised to explain what it is and how it works. Predictably, I've been far too busy to blog (still am, but I'm hoping to be a lot less busy in the new year), so I never had the time. Fortunately, though, this nice new video has just been released which sums it up pretty neatly.

I'll be back in the new year with solid evidence of the work I've been doing - ten new books, at last count, mostly due out in 2011 - to prove I'm not just a lazy blogger!

All change ...

2010-07-13T10:46:00.000+02:00

Well, so much for 'Good to be back!'.

No sooner had I promised to be a good blogger from now on than I found myself even deeper in deadlines than before. So sorry especially to thise of you who commented during my latest absence. I promise I will respond ... as soon as I get through my latest deadlines.

Actually, my current deadline is a bit artificial - I'm off to Ireland for a week in the middle of nowhere tomorrow, with no internet access, no TV, no nothing. It's going to be great - enforced absence from all my online commitments. But it means I've got to get everything done tonight!!!!!

Anyway, I've called this post 'All change', because I've gone and got myself a new job. I'm now an editor for English 360, which is very exciting (I mean the fact that I got the job - editing itself isn't all that exciting, although I do find it strangely relaxing).

I'll post properly about my new job soon, I promise. (Although, judging by recent performance,'soon' might be a bit of a stretch). In the meantime, you can read my interview with Cleve Miller, the man behind English 360, which I did last year. It's strange how things work out, isn't it!

My other commitments haven't changed. I'm still very much Series Editor of Cambridge English for .... Book six in the series, Cambridge English for Marketing, is out this week, which really is exciting. To find out more, check out Nick Robinson's new blog, English4Marketing. Nick is the author of Cambridge English for Marketing. Again, I'll blog about it properly soon, but I did actually mention it here back in February.

On the subject of new blogs, another great ESP writer, Virginia Allum, has set up a blog called English for Nursing and Health, which should be really useful for teachers of medical English.

Anyway, now Cambridge English for Marketing is out there, it means I'm officially only working on four books at the moment, although there are a few more in the pipeline. Easy life ...

Right, better get on with some work. Thanks for your patience, and hopefully I really will be a more conscientious and reliable blogger one day ... if I can just get these books finished!

Good to be back!

2010-04-27T23:34:00.000+02:00

After a month away from the blogosphere, it's good to be back.

I've spent the past month (well, longer, to tell the truth) deep in deadline hell. For clarity, let me define deadline hell as 'being badly behind schedule with at least two major projects, such that any time spent on one project inevitably leads to the other one slipping ever further into long-overdueland. And all the time you have to keep ressuring both parties that their deadline is your absolute number one priority. Nasty.

The worst thing is that I can't even hint on this blog as to the projects I'm working on. I suppose it wouldn't be giving too much away to say that there are exciting new titles for my series, Cambridge English for ..., on the way. But all I can say about the others is that they're big, exciting (for me at least) and top secret.

So, taking my inspiration from Karenne 'n' Maslow's Pyramid of Needs, here's my own set of needs (inverted, so my top priorities are first).

1. Mortgage stuff - teaching and other work that pays the mortgage while I'm waiting for the exciting stuff to bear fruit.
2. Deadline stuff - big exciting projects that might make me rich one day, but which probably won't, knowing my luck.
3. Spending a bit of time with my wife and kids, at least so that they remember who I am, but it'd also be nice to spend enough time with them so my kids could at least speak English.
4. Blogging obligations (blogligations?) like writing a post from time to time, responding to the people who've heroically commented on my recent posts and waited ages for a sign of acknowledgement from me, venturing out into the blogosphere to see what other people are up to ...
5. Relax. Watch TV. Go jogging!

I've been meeting needs 1, 2 and 3 recently, and I'm almost ready to move to need 4. Need 5 will have to wait for the summer.

So ... last week I met two of my biggest, most overduest deadlines ever (if you can 'meet' such deadlines). Huge relief. And I allowed myself three days with the kids. Very nice. There's still a scary amount of work to do, but it's a lot more under control than it was a week ago.

A few highlights from the past month:

1. The wonderful IATEFL conference in Harrogate. I was only there for about 48 hours, so not much time to do things. I had two big meetings related to my exciting projects. I gave my joint presentation with Virginia Allum on Results Focused ESP (covering some of the same points as my recent post on English for Nursing). I met up (albeit briefly) with some of my favourite people from the blogosphere/discussion groups. I made some new useful contacts. And I even made it to a couple of sessions (5 in total).

My joint session went well. It was my first experience as a joint presenter, but Virginia (nurse, writer and all-round expert on English for Nursing) was very professional and knowledgeable.

The nice thing about our session was that it was tweeted live by Karenne, so our audience of around 30 was boosted by about 2000 of Karenne's followers, hanging on her every tweet, no doubt, and all rushing out to buy the books. Possibly. But anyway, much much much appreciated, Karenne.

This was my favourite tweet:

It's true - I felt uneasy last year at the idea of having a unit in English for Nursing Pre-intermediate on dealing with terminally ill patients. You can't include stuff like that in coursebooks ... but then I realised that we absolutely had to include it.

The issue of roleplays on difficult subjects also came up in Natasha Jovanovich's great presentation on ESP course design. It was a really thought-provoking session, centred around Natasha's experiences creating a course on English for Human Rights. She'd included some incredibly powerful materials in her course, including a very emotional video about infant mortality and a case study / role-play on abortion rights.

As with my nursing course, my first reaction was 'wow - this is a bit too heavy for an ESP course', but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that Natasha was right to include them in this particular course. Human rights advocates and lawyers and specialists need the language to discuss and work with highly emotive issues like these.

I might come back to this idea of different people's reactions to roleplays in a later post.

The lowlight of the conference for me was losing my bag on the way there, so that I arrived in Harrogate with only my suit on a hanger and the scruffy clothes I'd travelled in. No laptop, no presentation, no shirt, no toothbrush, no memory stick, no phone recharger, no clicker, no printouts of urgent work I was planning to be getting on with, no socks, no shoes ...

Fortunately my wife pointed out that I could buy most of those things in shops. Sometimes it takes someone else to point out the obvious - I suppose that's why guys like me need wives. My colleagues from Cambridge provided a copy of my presentation and a laptop, so the only thing that was missing was my shoes (which I couldn't bring myself to buy just for one presentation), so I wore trainers with my suit. Hope no-one noticed. At least Karenne didn't tweet about it:
Of course when I got back to the hotel after the presentation, my bag had arrived, rushed there by courier and now completely unnecessary (apart from my laptop and memory stick, of course).

#specificenglish #iatefl OMG jeremy's trying to be cool in a suit and trainers. LOL!

2. (Yes ... this started out as a list of highlights of the past month, remember) The second highlight of the past month was a visit to my business English upper int class from Vernon Ellis, the brand new chair of the British Council, i.e. the new global big big big boss. Vernon Ellis used to be Chairman of Accenture and is also Chairman of the English National Opera. In other words, a very experienced and knowledgeable businessman. And on his first visit to a foreign country on taking over from our previous chair, Neil Kinnock, he came to Poland to see me teaching. Well, that wasn't the main reason for his visit, I suppose. But it was great for my BE students to interview him about his business experience. I might blog about that one of these days too - it was a nice way of spending a class.

Anyway, I'm sure there were more than 2 highlights of the past month, but that'll do for now. If I don't finish this post tonight, it'll be the end of April before I get round to it.

Right ... I promise to be a good blogger from now on. I'll start working back through the comments and replying. And I'll post a lot more regularly next month. Honest ...

English for nursing

2010-03-29T22:17:00.000+02:00

I was sitting in the staffroom between lessons this evening and one of the teachers asked the room, 'What's the name of that thing nurses wear on their heads?' No-one seemed to know, and then someone suggested, "Ask Jeremy - he's got two books on English for Nursing".

Well, yes. But there weren't any hats in either book, as far as I remember. Not a priority. As far as I'm concerned, the thing nurses wear on their heads is called a nurse hat. Perhaps a kind reader could fill me in on the proper name, although I'll admit now that I'm not really that worried about not knowing.

The point is this: what do nurses (or any other sets of ESP learners, for that matter) need English for? To explain the various parts of their uniform? Or to deal professionally and symathetically with patients in crises or high-emotion situations and with other medical professionals in situations where accuracy may make the difference between life and death?

In our new book, Cambridge English for Nursing Pre-Intermediate, we teach nurses and nurse trainees how to speak with patients who have suffered embarrassing situations (like incontinence). Just stop for a second and think how you would help someone maintain their dignity in that situation ... and then try doing that in a foreign language ... at pre-int level.

We also teach them how to reassure patients who are about to undergo unpleasant operations, such as having a tube inserted through their nose into their stomach. Again, stop and think for a second how you'd deal with that.

We've got a unit on communicating with terminally ill patients.

Last week I had a phone meeting with Virginia Allum, one of the authors of our nursing books (together with Patricia McGarr). Virginia's a hugely experienced nurse and nurse educator (as well as being a great English teacher and writer). She told me that every single dialogue in both books was based on real situations she'd been through as a nurse. Incontinence, tubes up noses, dying patients, everything. It was quite moving hearing her talking about her experiences, and how absolutely important language skills are - for native speakers as much as for foreign language speakers.

Sometimes they were great experiences where she'd done everything right. Others were based on failures, where she'd later analysed what went wrong and what she should have done.

It's easy to lose sight of the fact that we're talking about real-life situations here. This isn't just about teaching people to talk about their holiday palns or to use future perfect instead of future continuous or whatever. It's about making a real difference to the lives of our students and, in turn, to the lives of the people they'll deal with in English.

As I've said before, the most important person in the classroom may not actually be in the classroom. It may be a patient with a tube up their nose or worse.

I hope users of the books go on to use the language and techniques from them. If, as a result of this book, a patient is treated with extra dignity and tact, is reassured when scared, is listened to when they need to talk ... well, for me, that's what it's all about.

Financial English ... if such a thing exists

2010-03-20T22:21:00.000+01:00

I'll explain my strange title in a minute. This post will be a bit of a mish-mash of my thoughts on financial English. First some background.

This time last week I finished a series of presentations around Poland on Financial English. One week, 4 cities, 8 presentations (and I still managed to do two days' teaching too).

Why me? Well, a few years ago I was asked by my colleagues at the British Council to prepare 3-hour presentations for the two new Cambridge ESOL exams, ILEC (International Legal English Certificate) and ICFE (International Certificate in Financial English). So I went a bit wild with the Powerpoint and created the presentations - basically talking teachers through the exams, with guidance on how to prepare students for each task in each paper.

Then last year I did a tour to promote ILEC around Poland, using a whittled down version of my monster presentation. This year it was ICFE's turn. I had to squeeze my 150-slide masterpiece into 45 minutes. Not an easy task. I actually quite liked the big presentation, so it was quite distressing to have to delete so many slides.

The point about the ICFE is that it's an English exam, not a finance exam. It's designed to provide an accurate assessment of a candidate's skills and level of English in a financial context. It doesn't test their knowledge and skills of finance itself. With that important proviso, I think it's a pretty good exam. Maybe one day I'll offer deeper thoughts on ICFE and ILEC.

For the ICFE tour, I was also asked to do a second presentation in each city (Wroclaw, Krakow, Warsaw and Gdansk), this time on behalf of my other main 'employer', Cambridge University Press. (I should point out that I'm not actually employed by either the BC or CUP, but almost all my work is for one or the other).

I was promoting the new CUP Financial English course, called, er, Cambridge Financial English. It's designed as a blended learning course, based on the idea that many finance professionals are busy and stressed and in need of a flexible learning solution.

I've never used the materials to teach, but they look excellent. What I like best is the bank of 40 short video clips - a mixture of functional/situational dialogues (i.e. finance people doing their jobs, interacting with colleagues or clients in English) and informational listenings (e.g. news reports, interviews, etc.). The course looks very thorough, professional and useful.

I won't explain the whole course now - there's a nice demo video on the website. And I won't try to sell it to you!

But I did spot a great business opportunity, which I was very tempted to keep to myself and make a fortune ... if only I had time to exploit it. So here's the lowdown (don't tell anyone).

I think the site, http://www.financialenglish.org/, must get a lot of traffic (since it's also the site for the exam, and plenty of finance pros and students are likely to visit). Interested clients go to the site and want to register for the course, so they check the 'list of tuition providers'. And here's what they see:

Yes ... that's the complete list as of today. One in London and one in Kiev. So my idea was this: I could put the name of my language school here at no cost to myself and wait for the customers to come to me, knocking on the door and desperate to give me their money. No cost, no risk. The only problem is that I don't have my own school, and I don't really have the stomach to set one up and manage one. I prefer writing.

Anyway, I promised I wouldn't try to sell you anything (and I swear I'm not being paid to promote the course now), but if you've got a language school or you want to attract customers for financial English, I think this is too good an opportunity to miss.

Right ... I promised I'd explain my strange title. You see, I've always felt a bit uneasy about Financial English, and I'm not 100% sure it actually exists. My own main ESP area, legal English, has many grammatical and stylistic features that make it different from all other Englishes, as well as all the specialised vocabulary. The same could be said of Technical English (especially technical writing, i guess), Aviation English, Shipping English, Marketing English (especially the language of advertising). The same goes for Medical English: the skill of speaking with patients in delicate situations is probably unique to that set of professions. (My talk at the IATEFL conference in a couple of weeks is focused on the language nurses use - a fascinating topic that I'll blog about soon).

But financial English? Of course there's plenty of jargon. In fact, my main contact with financial English is the Jargonbusters I write twice a month for Professional English Online. (In case you're not familiar with them, they're lesson ideas based around a hot new vocab item, mainly from the world of finance.) So I know all about CoCo bonds, Clawback provisions, Legacy loans, Moral hazard and Quantitative easing, for example.

But I also know that finance people don't spend all day discussing terms like these, and that, interesting as they are, they're only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what finance pros need.

So what exactly do they need? Hmmm ... here's where I get to my strange title. My gut feeling (based on no evidence whatsoever) is that finance people need lots of generic business skills (speaking, writing, negotiating, reports, meetings, etc.), plus a bit of finance vocab. Of course specific branches of finance, like banking or accounting or insurance or whatever, may have other exciting needs, but I'm thinking about needs that unite the whole spectrum of finance people. And all I can come up with is ... business English in a finance context.

Even within a sub-field like banking, surely the front-office staff have radically different language needs from the back-office staff. And those back-office staff in turn will have different needs depending on which particular back office they work in. Retail banking is different from investment banking, which in turn is different from the world of national banks.

So my question to you: am I missing something? Does financial English exist or not?

Perhaps it doesn't matter to you: of course you can create great courses for your own individual students and groups, and you'll find plenty of language needs so you can prepare great courses. My own crisis comes from my job as an ESP editor: I have to find common threads for each of the ESP fields that are taught in my books, beyond easy things like jargon and generic business skills.

Anyway, I'll leave it there. I'd be very interested to hear your opinions, espcially if you have more expereince in financial English than me (not difficult, as I have next to none).

A lesson in the psychology of learning languages (part 2)

2010-03-12T23:43:00.002+01:00

A week or so ago, I posted the background to a problem that I think all teachers, including ESP materials writers, need to address, namely the psychological barriers that prevent people from using English in real-life situations and that prevent them from admitting they don’t understand.

In this posting, I’ll work through a lesson plan to tackle that problem. I won’t say solve the problem – I wish I had a magic wand, but this is actually one problem we can’t solve for our students – they have to overcome it themselves.

There’s a related linguistic problem which is perhaps easier to solve. They may not actually have the language they need in order to interrupt effectively and check information in English. Let me demonstrate that these aren’t as easy as they sound with another example using me as a case study in how not to do it.

I have two sources of paranoia when I’m in a large group of people speaking Polish and I sit quietly rather than getting involved in the conversation. Firstly, by the time I’ve thought of the right words to say, the conversation has moved on and it’s too late. What I need is the Polish equivalent of “Shut up for a second while I think of what I’m going to say”, which is normally expressed more politely in English as “Could I just say something here?”

My second source of paranoia is the panic that even though I understand 90% of what I hear, that 10% might make the difference between success and humiliation. At an integration day at my company several years ago, we had a nice session where we all got musical instruments and the trainer got us to create group music. At one stage, he asked (in Polish) for volunteers to be bell-ringers, so I thought that’d be fine for me and went forward … only to realise, to sniggers from around the room, that he’d put the feminine ending on the word for volunteers … so I made a fool of myself in front of 120 people.

Now, no amount of language could have helped me there, but in smaller gatherings, it’s important to be able to pinpoint misunderstandings. Rather than simply blurt out “I don’t understand”, our students need to be able to ask “Sorry, what exactly do you mean when you say ‘volunteer’?” or “Sorry, you said you’d liked what exactly?”

So … so far I’ve got two aims, a psychological one (learner training) about understanding that we all have crises like these and we need to get through them, and a linguistic one of teaching useful phrases.

Before we go any further with the lesson plan, it’s important to note that the aims come first. Very often, we find a good text or video clip, plan some exercises around it, and only then think about aims (to give reading practice, to give speaking practice, to teach some nice vocabulary). Don’t get me wrong, those are all very important aims, and certainly nothing to be ashamed of. But as I’ve said elsewhere, they’re not enough. The difference between a course and a series of lessons comes down to the aims you start with.

Once you’ve got aims, the next thing you need is a context. Now, because I’m doing this not actually as part of a course, I have the advantage – or disadvantage – of having the whole range of ESP topics to choose from. I’ll make an arbitrary decision to focus on English for Marketing, since that’s a field I have some knowledge of, and also because our new book, Cambridge English for Marketing, is out in the coming weeks. (Look out for it – it’s great!) And within that field, I’ll go for the marketing budget, simply because I remember there was some tricky vocab there.

OK, so now we can start planning stages. Since we’re actually teaching something in this lesson, I think we need an input stage, an analysis stage and an output stage. You could call that presentation-practice-production if you like, but I prefer my own names for the stages, which I think are better descriptors.

What could we do about input? Well, we really need to see or hear some characters doing things badly and/or well, in order to provoke some good discussion and also to model the language for later. I’m going to use Xtranormal for this. I’ve never used it before, but I’ve been very impressed when I’ve seen others use it. I hope it works for me.

Anyway, here’s a dialogue to illustrate how not to do it. I’ll show you the second part in a moment.

Remember, my aim here isn’t to give listening practice, so I think this is a very valid way of presenting a script. For more ideas on this sort of listening activity, see this posting.

I’d better point out at this stage that I’m building a toy lesson. If this were a real lesson with real students in mind, I’d check my facts more carefully and probably make the dialogues longer. But I just want to talk you through the stages in the process here.

So … we’ve got some dialogues. Time to start lesson-building. Three rules are worth remembering at this point. Firstly, personalise. So start with a discussion lead-in based on your students’ experiences … of what, though?

The second rule is: content before language. The language focus (as well as the learner training) will come after the listening. At the beginning, we need to focus on the story – what they’re discussing in the dialogue, in this case, marketing budgets.

The third rule: contextualise. Before we listen, we need to have a good idea of what we’re listening to and why.

So let’s start with a lead-in discussion:
- Have you ever been involved in planning a marketing budget?
- What did you do?
- If you haven’t, what stages do you think it involves?
- What different approaches might there be?
- How difficult would it be to get the relevant information?

And so on.

It’d be good here to do some work on the theory of marketing budgets, such as matching six popular approaches with explanations. This is actually a task in our Marketing book, so I’ll leave you read up on it here.

Now we need a first listening task. We’ve already personalised and contextualised to some extent, so we can focus on the actual interaction here. Perhaps first get students to predict who the two people might be, at what stage in the development plan they should discuss the budget, which approach they should choose and what sort of data they’d need to collect. Then watch the clip to compare it with their ideas. I nearly said ‘watch to check’, but that would imply that my answers are somehow more valid than theirs, which is unlikely given that they’re probably marketing pros and I’m an English teacher who’s making it up as he goes along.

Lead-in, predict answers, watch to compare.

Now we’re ready for the meat. At the end of the clip, the woman asks ‘What’s the problem?’, so let’s turn that into a class discussion. This is where all my psychology comes in (see my previous article). Get them to tell anecdotes about times they sat in silence instead of admitting a lack of understanding, or share your own stories of foreign language paranoia (or you could tell them some of mine). I won’t go too deeply into the discussion for two reasons. Firstly, this kind of open-ended discussion can’t really be planned too deeply – as long as you know the key points you want to cover (see my article), you’ll be fine. Secondly, I’ve got another lesson on exactly this topic, which I wrote some time ago for Professional English Online. It’s not been published yet, so I don’t wan to pre-empt it, and in the meantime I don’t see much point in reinventing the wheel.

OK, now we’re ready for language work, so we’d better watch the second clip. But … remembering the rule about content before language, we need comprehension questions first.

How about these:

1. When the woman talked about competitive parity, what did the man think she was saying?

2. Why did the woman start talking about golf?

3. Why did the woman talk about the standard of his work?

4. What exactly is competitive parity?

Right. Now we really are ready for the language work. An old favourite here is a gapfill. Students predict what could go in each space and then watch again to check. Here are the gapped sentences.

I’m sorry. I don’t know _____ _____ _____ _____ the word ‘party’ in this context.

I’m sorry. I don’t know _____ _____ _____ _____. I don’t play golf.

_____ _____ _____ there’s something wrong with my work?

I’m afraid I still _____ _____ _____.

Now we can elicit some more ways of checking information, of pinpointing the exact word that’s causing problems. Perhaps we could also focus on the language the woman uses to explain the concepts. Also, I haven’t done anything on interrupting and all those other functions I mentioned at the beginning – let’s save those for next time and do them properly.

Perhaps there’s room here too for another discussion: in both parts, the man looked a bit stupid. But in which part did he look more stupid? In which part did he overcome the problem?

Then we just need a role-play to bring it all together. You could follow my procedure for instant role-plays (here), but make sure you elicit before you start some really tricky vocab that can serve as the focus of the role-play. (But remember my lesson when this policy went wrong). Tell students they have to use the techniques and language from this lesson (including phrases that they generated themselves).

So students do the role-plays in pairs. Perhaps they could swap roles and do it again. A nice bit of feedback and discussion. Homework: use the techniques and language at work some time before the next lesson and be ready to tell us how you got on.

The end. Simple as that. Try it out, let me know if it works or falls flat, or if you improve my rough ideas into a polished lesson. Good luck.

Related posts:
A lesson in the psychology of learning languages (part 1)
Listening: What’s the aim? (part 2)
Instant role-pays

A lesson in the psychology of learning languages (part 1)

2010-02-27T23:40:00.000+01:00

This post is in response to a blog carnival hosted by Kalinago English. The theme of the carnival is LESSONS, but I thought rather than providing a lesson plan here, I’d tell you a lesson I learnt while observing a lesson. Actually, I’m not sure that’s allowed – the rules of the carnival say it has to be a lesson plan (bah!), so I’ll have to follow this up with part 2, a lesson plan based on the lesson I learnt during that lesson I observed, if that makes any sense.

The lesson was a bit unusual. I was at the European Patent Academy (EPA) in Munich to learn about patents – how to apply for one and how to fight for or against one in the event of a dispute. The idea was that I’d then use this knowledge while writing a new course for the British Council, English for European Patent Attorneys, sponsored by the European Patent Office (EPO). For more on my experiences with that course, see my article on needs, wants and lacks here.

Anyway, the lesson. I was watching a group of trainee patent attorneys preparing for their EPA exams. The trainees were French, but the lesson was in English. The lesson involved a letter from a client, of which the following is a fragment:

Two weeks before mention of grant in the bulletin we filed third party observations in view of annex 5. Our remarks were ignored. Should we argue that the first examiner will be biased against us?

The discussion went something like this:

Professor: Any thoughts?
Class: [Silence]
Prof: Come on … it’s not difficult. What do you know about third party observations?
Clever student 1: They’re not binding, sir. According to protocol XYZ dated blah blah blah … [OK, so I don’t remember the details, but you get the idea]
Prof: Excellent. So … was the examiner biased or not?
Class: [silence]
Prof (getting exasperated): Look … the third party observation isn’t binding … is the examiner biased or not?
Class: [silence]
Prof: OK, here’s an easy question. Why were the remarks ignored?
Clever student 2: Because everything’s frozen. It’s frozen 7 weeks before mention of a grant.
Prof: (relieved) Absolutely. So there’s the answer. Third party observations aren’t binding, so the examiner doesn’t have to act on them. Everything is frozen anyway, so it won’t make any difference. There’s nothing the examiner can do. So is he biased?
Class: [silence]

…

Sheepish student 3: Sorry, sir. Could explain what ‘biased’ means?

What did I learn? A few things, actually.

Firstly, and least interestingly, we must teach vocab, vocab, vocab.

Secondly, never assume. Never assume they understand, even if they are nodding their heads and pretending to understand.

Thirdly, and most importantly, a significant part of teaching and learning English has nothing to do with language. It’s about psychology. I’ll give you a couple more examples and then explain more.

I used to teach a successful Polish businesswoman, deputy head of accounts in a large factory (owned by Germans). Her English was fine in class – strong upper intermediate. But she was afraid of speaking English at work, so she always had a translator or relied on her boss in important meetings. She was terrified of making mistakes and looking stupid, but the irony was that her solution made her look much less competent (both in English and in business) than she actually was.

Her boss had no idea how good her English was, because he never heard it. As far as he knew, all the money and time that was going into her English lessons was being wasted because she still couldn’t string a sentence together. Except, of course, that she could.

So the focus of my lessons ended up being on psychology – trying to break down the barrier that was stopping her from speaking English in public.

Another situation: another Polish student in another factory complained that he was embarrassed by his English and intimidated by the wonderful English spoken by his boss, an Argentinean. Well, it’s hardly surprising his boss sounded impressive – about half of English’s sophisticated vocabulary is the same in Spanish. And the Spanish tense system and rules for articles are far more similar to Spanish than they are to Polish.

And you know what … I also taught the Argentinean boss. And he too was intimidated by his own boss’s English. His boss, a German-speaker, used wonderful phrasal verbs and really sophisticated grammar all the time. Again, no surprise there, since there are really close parallels there between English and German.

Now, I didn’t teach the boss’s boss, unfortunately, so the last part of the triangle is pure speculation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the German speaker had also been intimidated by the wonderful English intonation of some of the Poles in the factory. Again, nothing odd there – speakers of different first languages all have different strengths and weaknesses in English.

But human nature is such that we tend to focus on things that others can do and we can’t. My Polish students once told me they were impressed that the German speaking big boss seemed to use present perfect all the time. But that was actually his problem – he really did use it all the time, and was probably impressed that the Poles used past simple all the time.

One last example. Many years ago, I was part of a team of half a dozen native-speaker English teachers based in a cigarette factory. We were all around post-beginner level with our Polish, so we clubbed together to get ourselves a teacher. (There were no organised lessons in that place at that time. Courses in Polish for foreigners are still a bit of a rarity, and were much more so back in those days).

I remember sitting in our training room (a pub) with all the other teachers, listening to the teacher speaking much too fast, and barely understanding more than half the words in each sentence. It kind of made some sense at the word-level, but I had no idea what he was talking about at the sentence-level. Word soup. But all the other teachers on either side of me were nodding confidently and smiling and laughing at his jokes. I felt a bit foolish and … intimidated. So I did what everyone else was doing, in the hope no-one would notice I was bluffing.

But then the word soup stopped suddenly and I realised he had asked me a question. I was completely destroyed, and had to admit it had all been a bluff. The teacher was a bit taken aback, and asked the next teacher … who, it turned out, had also been bluffing. And so on round the whole group. We’d all been doing it. A group of professional teachers who really should have known better, all pretending to understand.

Soooo … What I’m trying to say is this: the most important lesson many (but not all) of our students will ever learn is how to break down the barrier that stops them from speaking in English in public, and stops them asking for clarification or help when they don’t understand something.

That’s what I mean about psychology. If we understand what causes that barrier, we can help our students to understand it. Four important things we can teach our students:

(1) Most people suffer from this barrier but most people hide it – all those nodding heads may just be bluffs.

(2) If you try to avoid looking stupid by avoiding speaking, you end up looking far more stupid. And failing to do your job properly. (And making your English teacher look incompetent, I might add.

(3) We’re all intimidated by what other can do that we can’t, but we must remember that other people are probably intimidated by us! It might even be the same people! We tend not to notice the things that we can do (that others can’t) – again, because most people are so good at hiding their weaknesses and insecurities.

(4) As a bilingual speaker of English, it is absolutely ridiculous to feel intimidated by monolingual native speakers. If you’ve made the effort to learn and use their language, the least they can do in return is to use non-idiomatic vocabulary and to pronounce things properly. If they fail to communicate successfully, that’s their failure, not yours. No need to feel ashamed.

So, yes, we need to be a counsellor, a therapist, a life coach, a shrink, to persuade our students to go for it, to take risks. And of course we also need to teach them some language strategies and useful phrases for interrupting, for clarifying, for pinpointing specific problems (and not just saying ‘I don’t undertsand’) and for managing the conversation (including getting the other person to speak more slowly or clearly).

And when I get time, I’ll turn all of that into a lesson and post it here …

Related posts:
First steps in course design
Thoughts on blogging
Needs, lacks and wants

My first and worst legal English lesson

2010-02-21T23:35:00.001+01:00

We all have bad lessons from time to time, and I've certainly had my share of truly dreadful ones. My top five would definitely include my first lesson on the CTEFLA course (shaking like a leaf) and the last one (when I was told it would have to be perfect or else I'd fail the course ... and it was even worse than the first one).

I'd also have to include my first lesson with teenagers, having taught adults confidently for seven years, I was totally unprepared for their lack of interest in my lesson). And my first - and last - lesson with little kiddies. That's one I've blanked completely from my memory. Never again. Ooooh no.

And then there was my first lesson with lawyers. (Apologies if you've heard my story before - I guess I'm a bit hung up on it).

I'd been asked to write a legal English course for the British Council to prepare students for a new exam, TOLES Advanced. For lesson 1, I'd created a Starter Unit, a kind of get-to-know-you, get-to-know-the-exam lesson.

So there I was, facing a pack of 12 highly intelligent and demanding students who had paid a lot of money to learn from me ... A recipe for disaster.

One of my exercises involved students working in pairs to come up with examples of legal English vocabulary - the idea being that they could share their expertise with each other and I'd facilitate it and it'd all be nice and collaborative. A five-minute throwaway activity.

Problem was, my round-up activity generated more questions than answers, and I was totally out of my depth. For exmple, the students wanted me to explain the difference - the legal difference - between renting, letting and leasing. They wanted me to tell them how to pronounce pupillage (rhyming with village or camauflage?). Is it HARRassment or haRASSment? And so on and so on.

All I could do was write the problem words up on the board and bleat that I'd deal with them all in the next lesson. But every word that went onto the board seemed to generate another half dozen. It was awful. My students could see me for what I was, a clueless fraud, and I just wanted the floor to swallow me up.

Here's a selection of the words I was expected to explain or to pronounce and couldn't (or rather, not to a group of professionals):

Somehow I made it to the end of the lesson.

Anyway, before the next lesson I spent a few hours crashing round the internet, finding the answers to all those questions. In case you aren't familiar with OneLook.com, I heartily recommend it for tasks like this. It has links to all the online dictionaries, so you can be sure to find a specialist or generalist explanation of just about any word, plus pronunciation, etymology, everything. Usually.

As an example, I searched for "escrow" (any guesses how to pronounce that one?) and was offered 58 dictionaries, including one from law.com's great dictionary. And Encarta, where I heard it pronounced. (I know I could also subscribe to TransLegal's new dictionary, which has all the information I could possibly want on legal English vocab. But I'm too mean.)

Then I turned it all into a worksheet, or rather two worksheets, one for each of the next two lessons - there was too much to cover in one lesson. Here's the first one - sorry it's too small to read, and also my IPA has become Greek for some reason. But you get the idea.

And somehow I got away with it. I started my second lesson with a warmer to match the words with the definitions - using my old cut-up-slips-of-paper trick. And it was good fun. I was able to explain the subtle differences, with help from other students. And the students learnt something that they didn't know before. And the rest of the course went fine. Phew!

But ... I learnt never to expose myself to such a situation again. As an ESP teacher, take control of what's going to come up in lessons and what your students are likely to ask you to explain. Open-ended vocab generation exercises are bound to end in tears, unless you really know most of the vocab already. Open-ended discussions are great, though - if you're left with four or five tricky items to come back to next lesson, I'd say that's healthy. Any more than that, and you're in trouble.

Anyway, the point of this post, if there is one, is to reassure teachers who are considering going into ESP (like my new friend Neil, for example), that although it can be scary, with a bit of common sense - and learning from others' mistakes - it's actually not too bad. Lesson 1 may be a disaster, but as long as lessons 2 and 3 are better, you're on your way to becoming a great ESP teacher.

Related posts:

Free online teacher's notes

2010-02-10T23:21:00.000+01:00

This is a post I wrote back in early December, in a hotel room in Klagenfurt, Austria. I didn't have an internet connection there, so this post has been sitting on my computer since then, waiting for me to have time to tidy it up. Well, I still don't have time, but ... here's the post.

If you’re wondering why I’ve been a bit quiet recently on the old blog (don’t say you didn’t even notice!), it’s because I’ve been working flat out writing a teacher’s book for our new course book, Cambridge English for Marketing. I finally got my teacher’s notes finished and sent on Monday this week, which was a huge relief. Now I can start dealing with all the other urgent jobs that I’d had to ignore while I was trying to stay focused on the big job.

The student’s book itself is due out in early 2010, and, as you can see, the author is Nick Robinson, who also has the honour of being the first follower of this blog. I’ll write more about the new book soon, but I wanted to talk here about teacher’s books, specifically the free online ones that we’ve made available for the Cambridge English for … series.

I’ve always been a bit dismissive of teacher’s books. So many of them just provide obvious instructions and not much more. Like many teachers, I gave up using them years ago. So when I was asked to write the teacher’s book for International Legal English, I wanted to do it properly, and create a resource that would really make a difference to the teacher’s experience in the classroom (and, by extension, the student’s experience).

Since then, I’ve been a bit less dismissive of teacher’s books (especially ones I’ve written myself), but I know many other teachers still don’t bother with them. I think in ESP that’s something you can’t afford to do, especially if you’re fairly new to either the ESP topic or to teaching. I’m not saying all teacher’s books for ESP courses are excellent, but in general I think this is one area where teacher’s notes come into their own.

I’m writing this from a hotel in Klagenfurt, Austria, where I’ve just been doing some teacher training on two of the original books in my series. This morning I was showing a group of teachers Cambridge English for Engineering, and then after a break I moved on to Cambridge English for Nursing.

My brief for today’s training sessions was to explain a bit of background to the series and these two books in particular, and then walk the audience through a unit of each, making full use of the materials in the online teacher’s notes.

When I checked those notes, which are available for free download here and here, I was a little bit blown away by how good they are. That’s not just me blowing my own trumpet. Even though I’m series editor, I was involved only peripherally in the teacher’s notes for those two titles – most of the editing work was done by my friend Sara Harden (who I’m delighted to see is one of the newest followers of this blog).

And of course the writing work was done by the course book writers themselves. I only wrote one of the original sets of teacher’s notes, for Cambridge English for the Media. The other three were written by the same people who wrote the student’s books.

Anyway, as I was saying, there’s some great stuff available online, and it’s all free to download and use. Here’s a screenshot from the Cambridge English for Nursing site.

As you can see, in the top left-hand corner there’s a complete glossary (with audio recordings of every word), a list of abbreviations, a text on medical technology for every unit and vocabulary games for every unit. The teacher’s notes themselves contain instructions for teachers, answers, suggestions for extra activities and background information. Actually, I think the background information is the best part of the teacher’s notes – if you read them carefully and follow the links, you’ll be much much better prepared for teaching nurses.

The notes for Cambridge English for Engineering are also really excellent.

The screenshot shows only two things in the top left-hand corner, the teacher’s notes themselves and a series of case studies, but that doesn’t mean there’s less content. It’s just that more of the content is integrated into the teacher’s notes. So we have around three or four extra worksheets per unit, plus lists of useful vocabulary and background notes with web links. Plus of course all the ideas for little extra activities.

I could go on … I’ll tell you more about what I wrote for the teacher’s notes for Cambridge English for the Media and Cambridge English for Marketing another time, but suffice to say I put a lot of thought and effort into both of them. And of course Colm Downe’s teacher’s notes for Cambridge English for Jobhunting are also excellent.

So … what are you waiting for? Did I mention that they’re free? Check them out, and I hope you find them as useful as I do.

PS I think all that work on the teacher’s notes for Cambridge English for Marketing must have had a bad effect on me. One of the sections was on SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing), and I’ve also spent weeks crashing round tons of marketing websites from Google searches, where the sites that come top of the search are the ones that use these techniques best. And now I’m doing it … look how many times I mentioned my series above. Not healthy …

Related posts:

Listening: What's the aim? (part 2)

2010-02-05T23:54:00.001+01:00

In a posting last year, I listed what I consider to be five valid aims for listening tasks in ESP courses. To recap, these are:

To provide listening practice.
To teach listening skills.
To provide an interesting topic for discussion.
To present useful language in context.
To serve as a model for speaking activities (and, by extension, for real-life situations).

In that posting, I tried to deal with aims 1 and 2, and I promised I'd come back to the meatier ones later. So here goes with aim 5.

What about 3 and 4, I hear you cry? Well, aim 5 happens to be the one that was very prominent in my ESP Consultancy in Cyprus last week, so I thought I'd deal with it while it's fresh in my mind.

So ... listening as a model for speaking activities. It's a bit of an odd aim, since it's not really a listening aim at all. But here's why I think it's important:

I believe a key part of ESP is situational, i.e. training learners to cope with real-life situations that they are likely to encounter and that are likely to cause them problems in their professional lives.
If we're going to train them for those situations, we need to provide functional language input and opportunities to practise in controlled and less controlled activities.
Rather than providing that functional language input in isolation and out of context, I believe we need to provide good models of successful communication in those situations. The models should include not just useful language, but also communication strategies (e.g. the importance of interrupting or clarifying) and professional skills (e.g. active listening or empathy skills).
The models can be presented as a written script, but it's far more satisfying to hear people actually acting out that script, or even watch them on video or live.

Before I go any further, I need to say that of course there's far far more to ESP than that, and that teaching functional language is not the be all and end all. It's a messy business, as I'll explain in another post soon.

Anyway, if you're with me so far, we need scripts and we need them to be performed. Tricky. There are three potential sources.

Firstly and ideally, we'd find a ready-made script tailored to our students' needs somewhere in a coursebook. That's actually one of the big reasons my own books are so full of listenings and situational dialogues - because I think they're important and because I think they're hard for ESP teachers to find or create by themselves.

Secondly, we'd find some useful clips online. This is actually quite tough, even in these days of YouTube. It seems most of the videos you can find online seem to be non-situational, i.e. they don't represent the sorts of situations our learners are likely to find themselves in. There are plenty of interviews with experts, plenty of talking-head monologues, plenty of clips with not much useful language at all ...

But you can find them if you try. A year or so ago I set myself the challenge of finding something on YouTube for each of the first four books in my series. This was a bit superfluous, since I already had all the scripts I could want for those four areas in the books themselves, but it seemed like a reasonable challenge. Here are the results.

For Nursing, I found a clip from a BBC drama series, Casualty, which is about doctors and nurses in a hospital. I can't say I've watched the programme (I'm not one for TV dramas, I'm afraid), but it's worth remembering that there are plenty of dramas around. Of course, you might not find a drama series relevant to your ESP learners, but it's worth a try.

For Engineering, I searched YouTube for "cool engineering demonstration", and found this one, which indeed is really cool. The point is, the presenter is using the same type of language that real life engineers need to use when explaining their gadgets. There seem to be plenty of light entertainment programmes with engineers explaining things too, like Robot Wars and Brainiac (search YouTube if you haven't seem them - they're nerdy but excellent).

For Jobhunting, I searched for "funny job interview", and found all sorts of examples, including one from Monty Python, but the one I chose was a brilliant interview for a job with a box manufacturer ... which has been removed from YouTube. Shame. Anyway, here's another one. Comedy series in general are great for how-not-to-do-it, and often contain some great functional language, although the really funny ones always seem to contain some strong language (which I'll leave you to discover).

To help me get over my disappointment at finding my favourite Jobhunting video missing and the other good ones full of swearing, here's another great ESP/HR video from Big Train, this time about losing a job.

Finally, for English for the Media, I wanted to find an example of a debriefing meeting at a TV company, and came across this clip from a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Again, documentaries can be a great source of authentic situational language.

So ... there's stuff there if you look hard enough for it, but ... it's a bit hit and miss. There's no guarantee the clips you find will match your course aims in terms of content and target functional language. And of course there's the next problem: transcribing the useful language and making exercises out of it. I've tried that a few times recently, such as this lesson on recycling televisions - useful for engineers explaining what's happening in different parts of a factory, etc. But it's hard work.

So I'm coming to the conclusion that it's better to write and record your own scripts ... which is the long-awaited "thirdly" in my list of three sources. But that creates its own problems. And since it's now very nearly midnight, I'll have to save that for another post.

Related posts:

ESP Consultancy, Cyprus

2010-01-29T17:46:00.000+01:00

I'm writing this from my hotel room in Nicosia in northern Cyprus, where I've just finished a week's consultancy on ESP course design. It's been a fantastic experience, and hopefully useful for the teachers I've been working with. ESP course design is usually a solitary job that I do by myself on the computer. Even my editing work is almost all done via email, so it's been amazing to actually manage a team creating a course out of nothing.

On Monday, we worked through a very impressive needs analysis that one of the participants, Serif, had done with the potential students - middle managers from two ministries. In case any of you are unfamiliar with the situation in northern Cyprus, the taxi driver put it well when I arrived: "It's complicated". The island has been divided into a Greek-speaking south and a Turkish-speaking north since 1974, as has the capital city, Nicosia. The northern part of the island has been very isolated from the outside world, and the border has only been open for a couple of years, after the two sides came fairly close to reaching an agreement on reunification.

The reason I'm talking about this is not to get involved in the political rights and wrongs of the situation - it's far too complicated for me to have an opinion. But what's interesting is that the two sides mainly have to use English to communicate with each other - Greek/Turkish bilingualism is much less common than it was before the split. So in order to negotiate and make progress on settling this issue, the governments have to speak to each other. In English. And the Turkish-speaking side is taught English by the teachers I've been working with this week. Which is why those teachers need to know how to write ESP courses.

So although my work this week is insignificant on the grand scale of things, it's nice to think it's at least making a tiny contribution to getting people talking to each other.

Or am I getting carried away?

Anyway, over the course of the week, we got an incredible amount of work done - it was like being the manager of an ESP factory. There was a real sense of energy and teamwork. The courses are still a long way from being finished - even an ESP factory can't work that fast, but it was still enormously satisfying.

So I'm feeling tired but happy. The people I've met here have been incredibly kind and enthusiastic.

Now I've got to go back to the Polish winter tonight. I took this photo on my phone in the taxi on the way to Warsaw airport on Sunday night, to prove that the temperature really was minus 18. (It actually got even colder while I was away).

And here's a photo I took a couple of days later in Nicosia. 21 degrees in January. Lovely. Ah, it's hard work being a consultant!

Wordlists in ESP

2010-01-20T10:05:00.005+01:00

I spent most of yesterday creating a wordlist for one of the books in my series, Cambridge English for the Media. I should be working on the wordlist right now too, but I needed a break. Creating a wordlist isn't exactly exciting. But it's important, I think.

Just to clarify, a wordlist is simply a list of words that apear in a course. There's one at the back of International Legal English, for example, with all the key terms defined in alphabetical order. (OK, so it's called a Glossary there, but you could equally call it a mini-dictionary). My students use it all the time, especially when they want to check my dodgy explanation of a tricky word. Here in Poland, we're lucky to have a bilingual version, which you can download for free from the Cambridge website (which also has plenty of other great wordlists).

There's another wordlist in the workbook for Business Benchmark. Yesterday, one of my students used it to demonstrate that my explanation or agent and distributor had things the wrong way round.

A different approach is to put the wordlist online, as we're doing with my series. For example, there's a unit-by-unit set of wordlists for Cambridge English for Nursing. The advantage here is that space is less of an issue. Even more importantly, you can listen to all the pronunciations by clicking on the icon on the pdf. (Before you print it out, I mean - technology's still not ready for that to work with the printouts). That's a huge benefit with all that hard-to-pronounce medical terminology. If you've ever wondered how to pronounce dyspnoea, apnoeoa and tachypnoea, check out the wordlist for unit 2. Again, there's a bilingual version on the Polish website ... perhaps your local Cambridge website also has a blingual version.

So what can you do with all these wordlists? Well, most obviously, you can use them as a reference, as my business student did last night. Students can also use them to manage their vocab learning. A student preparing for the ILEC exam (International Legal English Certificate) could learn 10 words a day from the wordlist and thereby (sorry) master the whole list in around a month ... and then use these words in his/her exam. Or in real life, of course.

As a teaching tool, they're also really useful. I've already mentioned my cut-up-bits-of-paper game on this blog. That's so easy to do with a printed out wordlist.

I mainly use wordlists to play "blockbusters", a teaching classic that I'm sure many teachers already use. For those of you who don't know it, you have a honeycomb grid, with a letter in each block.

There are two teams, reds and blues. Choose a letter to start with, and read the definition for a word starting with that letter. If students know the answer, they put up their hands (no shouting out, please!). If it's correct, it goes their colour and they can choose the next letter. The aim is for the reds to make a connection from top to bottom and the blues to connect side to side. They can go any route they choose, as long as they end up making the connection. Of course, they end up blocking each other, which is why it's called blockbusters. Good fun ... and of course it's just a vocab test in disguise.

(By the way, I have wonderful interactive whtieboards to make it look great, but I played it for years on ordinary whiteboards and flipcharts - just draw a grid and away you go.)

There's a shorter version of the game too, which doesn't involve a grid. Again, teams (not necessarily two teams) ask for letters to get definitions of words starting with that letter. If they get it right, write that letter on the board in that team's column, and they can choose the next letter. The aim now is to collect enough letters to make a word ... probably best if it's more than 3 letters long. Ideally, the word should be connected, however tenuously, to their ESP field, but that's up to you to decide.

One complication: some letters might not have many words starting with them. My legal English students soon work out that Q always leads to quorum, so they don't wait to hear the question. In that case (and also with Z and X), tell them you're going to ask for a word starting with, say, S, but if they get it right, they still get the letter they asked for. This allows you to focus on words you want to test, rather than the same words over and over again.

Anyway, I could go on all day - I'm really into vocab revision, but this wordlist isn't going to write itself ... I'll let you know when it appears on the site.

Related posts:
Vocabulary revision with a table and a guillotine
Fun with contracts
What do words actually mean?

Two approaches to ESP course design

2010-01-18T16:10:00.001+01:00

Another brief posting ...

There are basically two types of ESP courses, which we might call English-through and English-for.

English-through means teaching English through the lens of an ESP field. The aim of the course is to bump your students up to a higher level of global language proficiency (e.g. from CEF level B2 to C1). That means teaching all the grammar, vocab and pronunciation that all other language learners have to study. And making sure your students understand the language structures at that level and can use them as well as others of the same level. It also means working on the four skills - to improve reading speed and listening comprehension, spoken confidence and written style. All that sort of thing.

In other words, it's just like any other English course. The only difference is that everything is done in the context of the ESP field. So you teach present perfect through examples from that field and practise it with a field-relevant role-play, or whatever. You work on their reading skills by giving them increasingly challenging things to do with texts about their field. The ESP field exists in the the course primarily as a means of keeping the course interesting and relevant. If you work in finance, for example, you might get more out of a report-writing task on the causes of the credit crunch than on the pros and cons of fox hunting. Or whatever.

English-for is different. This type of course focuses specifically on the language and skills that are directly relevant to your students' present and future work situations. It's all needs-based. Crucially, it ignores the non-essential language or skills and focuses exclusively on the target language. So if Nurse X never has to write reports for work in English, it doesn't need to be in his/her course. If Engineer Y only ever has to read and write technical English, and never needs to speak, why worry about his/her fluency or pronunciation?

In many ways, English-for is more short-term. It's about giving the students the language they need right now to do their job. Longer-term things, like what they'll need English for in 5 years, is not a priority.

Now, of course in real life, we tend to mix and match - I can't imagine many courses fit the extremes as I've portrayed them. But I think it's important to plan, right from the start, what sort of ESP course you're creating, (mainly) English-through or (mainly) English-for. Which would be more useful for your students right now and in the long run?

English-through courses are quite easy to create. You basically get your syllabus - created by you, the language expert - and find materials to fit it. OK, that's not exactly a piece of cake, but it's doable.

English-for courses are much more challenging for the course designer. You need to get a really deep knowledge of your students' field and somehow find out what language and skills they will need in their jobs. You can find out a lot by asking them, but very often they themselves don't know what they need until it's too late. Very tricky.

(That's one of the big reasons, by the way, why the books in my series, Cambridge English for ..., focus much more on this tricky side - to save teachers the hellish job (or at least reduce it) of finding out for themselves what language people need in particular professions. But I didn't plan this post as an advert for the series, so I'll stop going on about it!)

Anyway, I've got my terminology now, so I'll probably use those labels in other posts too. I'm sure I'm not the first person to come up with the distinction, but I wonder if anyone's used the labels before ...

Related posts:

Freer practice

2010-01-10T23:28:00.001+01:00

First of all, sorry for the prolonged absence. As always, I've got far too much work on, and my deadlines finally overwhelmed me before Christmas. I'm working on two huge career-milestone projects at the moment, plus four or five smaller ones, none of which I can even hint at on this blog. Very cool but pretty frustrating.

So with that in mind, I'll mark my return to the blogosphere with something short and sweet.

Last week, with my Upper Int Business English group, we were doing second conditionals. (For those of you who don't 'do' cliches of English grammar like that, please forgive me. I made sure it was business-contextualised and communicative, and my students claimed to find it useful. As adults who've mostly learnt by doing rather than studying, it was new grammar.)

And I'd better admit it ... it was the next thing in the book.

After the little presentation in the book (some contextualised examples, which we analysed) and a few short written practice exercises, they were ready for a bit of freer practice.

I'm not sure if that's a universally recognised term - I use it all the time, but just in case, it's the type of practice exercise that bridges the gap between controlled practice (gapfills, transformations, drills, dull stuff like that) and free practice (role-plays, debates, simulations ...). The problem with free practice, as I'm sure you all know, is that students promptly forget to use the target language, being so engrossed in the task itself.

So the trick with freer practice is to make the task not quite engrossing enough for them to forget the aim of the exercise, which is to use the target language - to take risks with it, to play with it, to experiment with it, to get their heads around it in the heat of semi-fluent speech. I think those are valid aims.

Usaully, it's enough simply to tell students to use the target language, and also to get them to police each other (e.g. by asking questions with the target structure, or insisting on some risk-taking from their partners).

The exercise in the book didn't sound very promising. Discuss with a partner: If you set up your own business, what would it be? What problems would you have? It's a fine context, but I could see those questions lasting about a minute at best, so not much of a discussion.

So before we started, I drew/elicited a mind-map onto the board. In the centre, I wrote 'own business', and then there were arms coming out of the centre saying 'name', 'type of business', 'location', 'premises', 'clients', 'competitors', 'source of finance', 'number of employees', 'business philosophy', and so on.

This turned the activity into a proper interview. From two questions we now had around a dozen. The interviewer had plenty of questions to ask, making it more of a dialogue than the monologue it could have been. In fact, the interviewer probably practised the target language (second conditionals, don't forget) more than the interviewee. But that's fine - everyone had a chance at both roles. And it generated tons of target language. Bucketfuls. Very nice.

(Whether they'll go on to use the language in free practice and then real life is another question, but we teachers have to be optimistic, I suppose.)

As a final flourish, I asked them to feed back to the group, but not about their own business plans, but about their partners'. That made the feedback session much more interactive and engaging - and also very funny, as the feedback included the ridiculous or silly ideas, not just the ones that survived the discussion.

In the next lesson, I did my cost cutting worksheet from Professional English Online, which demonstrates and practises the real business benefit of being able to distinguish between first and second conditionals when discussing proposals.

Between them, I think my two freer practice activities did actually go some way towards convincing them that the language is useful and not too difficult, and helping them to get their heads round it and feel a bit more confident about using it. And we had fun in the process.

Natives and non-natives - justified discrimination?

2009-12-15T16:25:00.004+01:00

Recently the BESIG discussion forum has exploded into life, which is a very welcome development. I belong to three such forums, BESIG, IATET and EULETA, and all three seem to come and go in waves, usually until someone complains about "all these messages cluttering up my in-box". I've never been able to work that one out - surely an active discussion forum is infinitely better than an inactive one, and even the apparently irrelevant postings sometimes generate wonderful debates.

(I also come and go with the forums - sometimes I read everything, get involved in discussions and look forward to the next nuggets of wisdom; other times I'm too busy and barely have time to delete all the stuff cluttering my in-box - but that's more about me and my workload than the quality of the discussions.)

Anyway, a week or so ago on BESIG there was a great little debate about natives and non-natives that came out of nowhere - someone had posted a job ad that specified it was for native speakers only. And the floodgates opened. I didn't get involved in the debate because I was deep in deadline hell (still am actually), but I do need to get some things out of my system, so here goes.

I've spent almost all my teaching career in the natives-only sector. When I started here in Poland in 1996, there was a stereotype that Polish people couldn't teach English as well as us. Apparently Polish teachers of English were too obsessed with grammar; they explained rather than elicited; their lessons were boring and ineffective.

That at least was the message I got from my employers and my students. No idea how accurate the stereotype was. At the time I didn't question it. I'll come back to the issue of stereotypes later.

Then in 2003 I moved to International House, where I was briefly Director of Studies. (I left after 4 months because I was told there was no money to pay me from May to September - this being just after my daughter was born. Not a good time). Towards the end of my time there I was interviewing a teacher for a position in the school. She was wonderfully qualified and experienced, and very impressive. (I discovered today, by coincidence, that's she's become a sucessful course book writer).

But my boss (Polish) vetoed my decision to give her a job. Because the teacher was Polish. The customers won't like it. They have certain expectations, you know.

Again, I accepted that. The customer's always right. Can't argue with the market, and all that.

Next I moved on to the British Council (doubled my salary and had no responsibility - good career move). Another institution dominated by native speakers, but also one that takes equality and discrimination very seriously.

In my first year I attended a conference in Glasgow for BC teachers. One of the sessions I attended was entitled I want a proper British English teacher. The presenter explained that some clients had complained about non-white teachers in the teaching centre (I think the teachers in question were British of Asian origin), so the centre manager explained to the client No, we will not change your teacher. It's alright - all our teachers are fully qualified native speakers.

In other words, the customer isn't always right. The presentation was about standing up to discrimination. Hear hear!

But that got me thinking. The manager (rightly) came down hard on racial discrimination. But he replaced it with discrimination based on nationality. On the surface, the manager was being thoroughly modern and liberal and anti-discriminatory, but under the surface, his message was No, don't worry, they're not nasty foreigners. They're Brits (or Americans or others from the inner circle).

In other words, criticising one type of discrimination while indulging in another. No wonder the client was confused, perhaps.

Before I get into trouble, I'm absolutely not saying one type of discrimination is less bad than another, or one type justifies another type. I disagree with all kinds of discrimination. Discriminating against British non-whites is wrong, and so is disciminating against non-British non-whites. And so is discriminating against non-British whites, for that matter.

It's also illegal, by the way. Probably - good ol' Wikipedia assures me that discrimination based on nationality is covered under anti-discrimination law. (I can't been able to find any evidence of this in actual statutes, but I haven't looked very hard).

You could argue that this is politcal correctness gone mad, and some people have argued exactly that. Surely if you want to learn a language, a native speaker is better than a non-native? Stands to reason, right?

Well, not necessarily. For me as a learner of Polish, I'd probably be better off asking a non-Pole to explain the grammar. For most natives, their own grammar is too deeply entrenched to be available for analysis and explanation. (OK, I know I should get over my obsession with grammar - but that's just what I'm like as a learner). Non-natives have the bemefit of knowing the language from the outside - how it works, what's difficult to get your head round, etc. They also have experience of learning the language. And, very often, they know their learners' language too. Some pretty big advantages.

The much more important issue, however, is that we're dealing in stereotypes. I said a non-Pole might be better at explaining Polish grammar to me, but I can't say all non-Poles would be better than all Poles. That'd be ridiculous.

Equally, perhaps there are many non-native English speaker teachers who have poor English (perhaps) or who can't teach according to a particular methodology.

Perhaps ...

Even if that were true, it would be wrong to deduce that because teacher A was born in country B and not country C, she can't teach English as well as teacher D (who was born in country C).

You can't judge individuals based on stereotypes. Treat each individual on their own merit.

The teacher I wanted to recruit at IH had wonderful English and a better grasp of methodological theory that I did at the time. The only justification for not employing her was the stereotype.

And what of the customer being always right? Well, they're not. We don't tolerate racist customers or pander to their prejudices (I hope). And I think we need the guts and the confidence to stand up to customers who demand a particular flag on their teacher's passport.

Sure, you might lose a few customers. Maybe lots of customers. But if you have a strict policy of recruiting absolutely the best teachers, whatever it says on their passport, you may find the customers who stay are happier and recommend your school to other potential customers.

Anyway, I'm aware this is a hornets' nest, so very much looking forward to your comments.

How did PPP become a dirty word?

2009-12-02T13:33:00.000+01:00

Recently I’ve been doing quite a lot of walk-throughs – presentations which involve guiding an audience through a unit of a course book to explain the deeper methodology behind it, to show how exercises build up to achieve a sub-aim, sub-aims build up to achieve aims and aims build up to create a coherent section in a coherent unit. Another reason for these walk-throughs is to elicit ideas for how to use the materials in class – supplementing, personalising, adapting, that sort of thing.

The first time I did it was in my analysis of Business Opportunities and Business Objectives, and a couple of weeks ago I walked through a unit of Introduction to International Legal English (see photo below, taken by one of the co-athors of that book, Matt Frith). And I was at it again at the BESIG conference, walking through our wonderful new book, Cambridge English for Nursing Pre-intermediate. This afternoon I’m flying off to Austria for a training event in Klagenfurt tomorrow, doing yet more walk-throughs for two of the books in my series, Cambridge English for Engineering and Nursing Intermediate+.)

But there’s something worrying me in the back of my mind as I’m talking about the wonderful methodology. I feel guilty every time I mention or even hint at the idea of presentation-practice-production – the famous PPP model that we were all taught on our initial teacher training (like my CTEFLA, or the CELTA as it is now).

On my diploma course we learnt that the PPP model is actually extremely naïve and something to avoid at all costs. It’s as if these staples of English teaching methodology are an embarrassing relic from the bad old days.

Or at least that’s the message I took away from my training – perhaps my trainer was les extreme and I got overexcited.

So is PPP dead? Well, certainly, the purest form of PPP would be a disaster. Teacher stands at front of class and gives a presentation. Students do a solitary practice exercise. Students do a freer productive task to demonstrate what they’ve learnt, but … ooops, they haven’t learnt anything.

But does anybody really teach like that? And just because the pure form is rubbish, we shouldn’t dismiss the model. We just need to fix it.

If you think about it, PPP, if done properly and sensitively, is a completely logical way of going about things. Of course many teaches make a hash of it (as I’ll explain below), and of course there’s much, much more to teaching than PPP.

But as long as there is actually some sort of input involved in teaching (and it’s not all student-generated self-teaching), that input needs to presented somehow. It needs to be practiced somehow. And students need a chance to use in a more natural situation. And … er … those three steps need to be in that order.

(Before you start spitting at the screen, I’ll deal with that issue of order in a second when I mention TTT).

Imagine you want to learn to paint, or to be a belly dancer, or whatever. You go along to your evening class and what do you expect? Well, perhaps someone to show you what to do, then a chance to analyse it and master it, and then a chance to apply your new skills in as natural, integrated situation.

(My big sister’s a world-class belly dance instructor – I’ll ask her one day if that’s how she does it).

So what’s wrong with PPP? Let’s look at the stages in order, starting with the presentation.

I once observed a lesson taught by a very nice but rather inexperienced teacher. The lesson started with her drawing all sorts of wonderful timelines on the board (past simple and past continuous, if I remember correctly), with plenty of example sentences and counter-examples. I got a lot out of it, but I’m not sure if the students did. The teacher forgot (a) to find out what they already knew – perhaps they already knew all of this already, and (b) to involve them in the presentation. If the teacher had done those two things, she could still have done the same presentation but it would have been much better. The students would then have been happy to be confirming what they knew – even showing off to the teacher about how good they were, and much more ready to ask about things they didn’t understand.

A presentation doesn’t have to be teacher-led, and it doesn’t have to involve timelines. Everything we teach, be it vocab, phrases, pronunciation techniques, business skills, collocations, learner training skills, whatever – there’s always some form of presentation.

One of the simplest techniques involves teaching useful phrases from an audioscript. After they’ve listened, students read the script to underline useful phrases. Or you could give them the phrases with the words on slips of paper to sort. Or present them as a gapfill. It doesn’t really matter. There’s useful language in there, and it’s the teacher’s role to make the students aware of it. Ideally, the student should be fully involved in discovering the useful language and selecting whether it is in fact useful. But they still need support and guidance from the teacher.

What of TTT (test-teach-test)? This is often presented as an alternative to PPP, but it’s not – it’s just a sensible extension of it. The initial test could be a role-play or exercise or game or discussion, where the teacher has a good laugh at how badly the students perform the task. Or sees that the students can already do the job really well, and therefore abandons the presentation and pulls plan B out. (Stick a video on, perhaps). The test informs the presentation, practice and production – in other words the teach and test stages. So TTT is just TPPP.

The second P is practice. My diploma trainer used to say PPP stood for piss-poor practice. (He was much more vulgar than me – sorry about that). But of course that’s incredibly easy to fix.

Er … just do more and better practice. Loads of it. Not just gap fills and error correction but controlled speaking, less controlled speaking, moving-bits-of-paper-around games, moving-students-around games, vocab revision games, …

The key is this: as long as the practice activities are useful and varied and fun, you can do no end of them. You can also do them in a non-linear way – so when you’re in the middle of unit 4, you can go back and do more practice from unit 1 and unit 3.

Moving on to the third P, practice. (I feel like I’m doing a conference presentation … there’ll be time for questions at the end).

As a new teacher, I was always disappointed when students completely failed to use target language in their free practice activities (discussions, role-plays, simulations, etc.). As soon as they relax, they fall into their old bad habits, their lazy, safe, easy ways of speaking. Simple tenses, simple vocab, simple phrases (“I disagree”, rather than “I’m not sure I completely agree with you”).

Well, that’s just one of the hazards of teaching, and we need to get over it. We’ve absolutely got to provide lots of practice opportunities, and we’ve got to encourage students to use target language (if, of course, it really is useful to them, which is a completely different issue – but a very important one). Tell them explicitly that you’ll be listening out for the target language during the production task, or get them to listen out or each other. Praise the students that use the target language, and gush about how wonderful it sounds. And keep noticing it, praising it and nagging about it in all subsequent speaking tasks.

One of my old favourite games is to print the target phrases on slips of paper. Before the speaking exercise, students have done something with the slips (like sort them into categories according to function or level of formality or whatever). Then during the speaking activity, they have to use as many of the phrases as possible. When they use one in an authentic way, they can take the slip of paper from the desk. At the end, the one with the most slips is the winner. Of course some students will be silly and overuse the phrases, but even so, the results usually sound great. Again, praise the students – tell them how nice it sounded, even though it was only a game.

So, to recap, PPP is fine, as long as it’s done intelligently. In fact, as long as there’s still some teaching involved in teaching, it should be a staple tool for all teachers.

BESIG 2009 - part 2

2009-11-27T21:55:00.000+01:00

Day 2 of the BESIG conference started very badly …

I’d been very sensible. Only one beer at the Cambridge meal the night before. Resisted the temptation and persistent persuasion to go dancing with the king and queen of legal English, Amy Krois-Lindner and Matt Firth. Sensible early night because I had my big presentation at 9.45. Alarm set for 7.

I woke up at 8.45, looked at the clock and felt that churning-stomach feeling that it’s all about to go horribly wrong. I knew I had to choose between breakfast, preparing for my talk and showering. I chose the shower. Then I pulled on my suit, packed my suitcase and dashed to the conference venue with a luxurious 7 minutes to spare.

Actually my talk went pretty well. I was talking about English for Nursing (not coincidentally, the latest addition to my series, Cambridge English for Nursing Pre-Intermediate, is coming out in early 2010).

Unfortunately no-one in the audience taught nurses, so it was all a bit hypothetical. I wanted to relate what I was saying to ESP in general – the presentation was called Results-Focused ESP – and I think I got away with it. The audience were very responsive and got involved with plenty of great ideas, which was exactly what I was hoping for.

By the way, I’ll explain my talk in a later post.

Straight after my talk, I had an interview with Carl Dowse. He wanted a film of me giving advice for new ESP teachers. I was surprised how easy that was … probably because I’d already had a chance to think everything through by writing this blog. You see, that’s another nice thing about blogging – it’s great for getting your thoughts straight.

From the interview, I sneaked into Mark Ibbotson’s session on English for Engineering, only a few minutes late. Mark’s session was excellent – he really does know his stuff, and, more importantly, made it all sound really easy and really interesting. At one stage he was talking about the technical vocabulary connected with racing cars, and just kept going deeper and deeper into the vocab. The point he was building up to was that engineering vocabulary is huge and extremely specialised. But … much of it is also generic. The same ideas keep popping up in diverse fields. So instead of despairing at the sheer volume of words, we need to prioritise the vocab we teach.

After Mark’s session, I grabbed a handful of biscuits … a late and not especially fulfilling breakfast. And headed for the last session, the panel discussion on the future of teaching and learning. It was a bit similar to the WOW panel discussion from the first day, but different enough to keep it interesting.

After lots of going round and round with panellists and audience members saying method X is better than method Y, the comment was made (Pete Sharma, I seem to remember) that we’re comparing apples with oranges. Sometimes one’s better, sometimes the other, but it doesn’t make any sense to make absolute comparisons. Eric Baber also made a crucial point: the kind of teaching most of us are involved in is not typical of the majority of language teaching and learning that goes on around the world. Sure, it’s great to have a long chatty one-to-one lesson with a subject specialist, but for most learners that’s simply not an option. The choice for most learners isn’t between face-to-face and computer-based learning. It’s between computer-based and nothing.

[Sorry, Eric and Pete if I’ve misrepresented you – this was the message I took away from the session, and may not have been exactly what you were trying to communicate.]

And that was it … the conference then kind of stopped. It would have been nice to have a closing ceremony, even a closing plenary, a chance for us to thank the organisers with a standing ovation and say good-bye until next year. Apart from that, it was a perfect conference – great sessions, great food and great networking. BESIG is the best conference of the year, and I’m looking forward to the next one.

Epilogue

I had a couple of hours before my train back to Warsaw, so I agreed to go with my friends from Cambridge for a bit of lunch. I was pretty hungry, so it seemed like a good idea at the time …

But by the time we’d ambled down to the city centre, found a nice place to eat and ordered our food, I realised I was cutting it incredibly fine with my train – which was at 3.30. It was already after 2.30. I calculated that I’d need to leave at 3pm at the very latest to have a chance of catching the train. The food finally arrived at five past. I bolted a few mouthfuls, grabbed my coat and suitcase and started running.

OK, so it was only 1.7km (about a mile?), which a top athlete could do in 4 minutes. But top athletes don’t do it on a full stomach, wearing a thick winter coat and dragging a suitcase across cobbles. I had 20 minutes … 16 … 12 … OMG I feel awful …7 … I feel sick … 3 … gotta keep going … 2 … there’s the station … 1 … there’s my train …

Well, somehow I made it. I spent the next hour sweating, panting, groaning. Fortunately I found a Milky Way in my bag, a gift from Vicki Hollett, brought all the way from ‘merica. Best Milky Way I’ve ever had.

So a bad start and a bad finish, but overall a great day and a great weekend. The worst thing was getting home exhausted and realising that it was Monday tomorrow …

BESIG 2009 – part 1

2009-11-24T10:57:00.000+01:00

[Saturday 21st November] If I were a proper techie, I’d be blogging live from the BESIG conference, which I’m currently attending in Poznan, Poland. But I’m not, so I’ll write this up the old-fashioned way and post it when I get home.

Actually, that’s the most striking thing about this conference – the number of people filming, tweeting, typing and doing all those touch-screen rock-and-roll moves on their iPhones. I feel old.

Last night (Friday), at the excellent welcome event, as I was doing a bit of face-to-face networking (mainly people I’ve got to know online over the last 12 months) I got the impression I was the last, sad individual to resist the urge to tweet. But this morning I felt a bit better: in Nick Robinson’s session, he asked the audience how many of us were on twitter, in case we’d like to tweet while we listened. And no-one was on twitter! So it seems I’m not the only one.

But not for long, it seems. This afternoon I ended up sitting in while Karenne Sylvester was teaching Vicki Hollett how to tweet and how to organise her tweetdeck. I’ll confess, I was expecting the tweetdeck to be a piece of hardware … but now I know what it looks like and how it works. So I guess I’ll have to join the twitterverse …

A quick round-up of the sessions today: Vicki Hollett’s plenary presentation was very nice, focusing on the importance of politeness strategies and whimperatives in building relationships. It seems we don’t ever say “I disagree” or “I propose XYZ”, but rather use long-winded constructions to avoid being too direct. The key question is whether our students need the long-winded version or the simpler version. Corpus linguistics suggests the former. ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) might suggest the latter, but as Vicki said, even in international business communication between non-natives, relationships matter, so the long-winded versions really are important. Food for thought.

After that I went to Nick Robinson’s talk on financial English. He was promoting Cambridge’s new blended learning course, Cambridge Financial English, which looks very impressive. He was also focusing on the way ESP courses need to be not just needs-based but also means-based, i.e. the best medium of instruction will vary from student to student. That’s something I need to think about, and I’ll come back to it in this blog.

I was delighted to see Nick had borrowed one of the slides from my wish-list presentation for his presentation! The cheek of it! Well, actually, it was a nice surprise. This conference has been great for my ego. When I flicked through the EL Gazette in the conference pack last night, I was delighted to see my name on the front page (an advert for my BESIG talk!), a fragment from one of my Jargonbusters on the back page (with a not very difficult competition – you’ll find a clue to the answer by following the link to my Jargonbuster) and a great almost-centre-spread featuring a big extract from Cambridge English for the Media and a big image of the six books in my series – the first time I’ve seen them all lined up like that. Nice.

But the best thing for my ego came from Amy Krois-Lindner’s talk today. She put up a couple of quotes from ESP experts, and the third one was from me! How cool is that? (OK, maybe you're less excited about it, but I found it cool anyway!)

Amy’s talk was really interesting – she was talking about the importance of transformations in ESP. By transformations, she means, for example, listening to a university lecture and turning it into notes, or turning those notes into an email or a spoken explanation to a classmate. When you think about it, these transformations are everywhere, and we should perhaps focus more on the skills involved.

I’m getting out of sequence. Between Nick’s talk and Amy’s, I went to a presentation by Heike Philp and Holly Longstroth – two ladies I’ve met through their wonderful Virtual Round Table service. Today they were talking about their experiences with their Avalon project in Second Life. It’s looks intriguing … certainly a lot of potential, but it looks as though teaching on Second Life needs a pretty radical re-think from traditional methods. The clip Heike and Holly showed was of two ladies having a discussion about the euro. The picture was mainly static because the ladies were too busy concentrating on their English to experiment with moving their virtual hands, let alone flying around their virtual world. So my first impression was “Why bother with Second Life?”. But as I say, there is a lot of potential – but it needs a lot of thought. Maybe I’ll wait a year before I get myself an avatar and learn to fly. I'll learn to tweet first.

After Amy’s session I watched Cleve Miller’s session on English 360. I thought I knew quite a lot of it already, after my interview with Cleve, but I was still a bit blown away by it. I think it was Cleve’s enthusiasm and passion for the project that did it for me. A very funny and well-informed presentation – the best of the day for me. I was sitting next to my friend Andrew, who spent the whole presentation whispering “Oh wow!”, “Brilliant!” and “Yes, yes, yes”. I think he was impressed.

The last session of the day for me was the panel discussion for the Cambridge ESOL World of Work Forum. There were half a dozen members of the WOW forum reporting back on what they’d discussed earlier in the year in Cambridge concerning technology in teaching, learning and exams. It was very interesting … but a bit long. The half dozen presentations all merged into one for me … but perhaps that says more about my muddled brain after a very long and inspiring day. That's my excuse, anyway.

[Tuesday 24th November] That’s all I had time to write up before heading out for a very nice evening meal with the Cambridge crowd. I’ll add my thoughts on day 2 soon.

One last thing – I joined twitter last night. My user name is specificenglish (not very creative but at least I’ve got a new photo for my profile). Looking forward to learning how that works and following some of the people who follow this blog.

PS If you went to the BESIG conference too, I’d love to hear your comments below. Cheers.

Interview: Cleve Miller

2009-11-17T08:36:00.025+01:00

A few months ago I became aware of English360, a blended learning product aimed specifically at ESP and business English, and I decided to check it out. Since then, everyone seems to have been either talking about it or working on it. So I thought I'd better speak to Cleve Miller, the man behind the product, to see what else I could find out.

Enjoy the interview and please add questions and comments at the end.

For years I’ve been wondering how to connect ESP teachers around the world. Many of us end up creating our own materials for our own students because our fields are too specific to make them attractive for publishers. If only there were a way for us to share our materials and benefit from each other’s expertise. Is English360 the answer to that problem?

We hope so! That’s certainly the idea. The beauty of web platforms is that they allow people to find each other and work together, while at the same time collapsing any distance between them. You’re right that much of ESP is too specific for traditional publishers, and by providing a self-publishing and collaboration platform, we hope to fill that gap by bringing niche ESP fields together into online communities of practice. We envision teachers working individually or, especially, together in groups to share, exchange, discuss, and publish digital content that can be delivered online or used in class.

Could you explain what English360 is, and how it’s different from other learning management systems (LMSs)?

Well, there is some LMS functionality in English360: organizing courses, recording student results, scheduling, admin privileges, and the like. But compared with the LMS-based products in ELT, English360 is a very different proposition, for several reasons.

First, English360 is open. Other products are basically course delivery systems, while English360 is a course creation system. We’ve opened the platform up so that teachers can create their own content with our authoring tools, as well as adapt and manipulate the Cambridge material, mixing the two into truly personalized courses, delivered in class or online. Basically, we don’t make the courses, our users do, because we believe that teachers know the needs of their students best.Second, English360 is easy to use. It is a powerful platform, and there is a learning curve of a couple of hours. But a school can register, upload their logo, invite their teachers, create courses, and invite students, all in one morning.

You don’t have to install anything on your server, deal with hosting or HTML, or pay any upfront costs. Many schools are under pressure to have an online component … we’ve made that process simple and quick so that you can focus on teaching.

Where do the course materials come from?

A variety of sources. First, we’ve “disaggregated” over 25 books (with more coming) of Cambridge content – basically digitally cut them into separate pages so they can be searched for and re-combined, and manipulated into whatever sequence the teacher needs. A large majority of these are actually interactive, self-scoring tasks, many with multi-media, not static PDFs.

Second, the material comes from you. You can upload your own content – exercises, audio, video - into the English360 templates as interactive tasks, or as static PDFs. You can add any file from your hard disk without changing the format, or you can copy and paste into interactive templates provided. You can associate your material with the collaborative features of the platform such as course forums, page comments, and teacher or peer feedback options.

Teacher-generated content is where it gets interesting, because of the wide range of sources that teachers use for content. English360 excels at adapting authentic material: from the web, from your students, or from your company clients. Recombining this adapted authentic content with a core of Cambridge content is where we see a lot of value.Third, content can come from the English360 community. While many schools and teachers choose to keep their material private, others decide to share their content with the community. That’s a wonderfully rich source. We have some nice quality rating tools on the way that push the best material to the top of the search results.

In this respect, English360 is a self-publishing platform. Whether the material comes from Cambridge, a school, or a freelance teacher, all content contributors are compensated, and compensated at the same rate. Royalties are paid out according to pageviews, so popularity defines compensation. If you share a great series of lessons on, say, reading clinical studies in medical English, and they become popular, then the income might get interesting. It all depends on how many students are on the platform, but with a BE/ESP market in the tens of millions of students, we believe there is potential for English360 to create tremendous value for teacher authors.

English360 is aimed at the Business English and ESP markets. Could you explain the rationale for focusing on those markets?

We’re focusing on these markets for two reasons, one trivial and one important. The trivial reason is that I’ve been in the BE field for 20+ years, so we’re doing what we know best.

The important reason is that we are firmly in the “all ELT is ESP” camp. Every learner has specific purposes, from a 40-year-old researcher writing scientific abstracts, or a 17-year-old listening to song lyrics from her favorite band. “General” English will move into a new era when it can accommodate this level of personalization for 25-student classes. The collaborative web is going to make this possible: every student will have their own personalized coursebook, with common learning objectives but bespoke input and output.

This is already the reality with BE and ESP, in that many teachers already customize the curriculum based on the needs assessment. Teachers do it now with analog tools – paper, scissors, tape, a photocopier – and English360 pushes this one step further by providing digital tools and online delivery.

But it is of course easier with in-company classes, smaller groups and individual classes. So we are starting there. But we’ll get to general English as we grow, I assure you.

I teach at the British Council, an organisation where many decisions are made centrally and where big changes have to be justified in terms of cost and impact. I can imagine my bosses’ reaction if I suggested switching to blended learning: fewer contact hours = less income. How could I persuade my bosses?

Well, with your permission Jeremy, I’ll dispute the “blended learning = less income” equation! The flexibility of a blended approach delivers unsurpassed revenue opportunities. Physical infrastructure (i.e. classrooms) is the one critical constraint for income in the bricks-and-mortar world; with blended learning that constraint disappears. For example, say you charge €100 for twice weekly classes, versus €65 for “once-weekly + online component” blended course. In terms of physical space you can now double the number of students, increasing income by 30%. Or, you can add a purely online product as a follow-up to a f2f course, adding revenue with minimal cost. Or you can charge €120 for twice-weekly classes, plus an online component. The possibilities are endless.

The problem is that we are stuck in the old “e-learning replaces the teacher” paradigm. Some e-learning companies actually still use this as a sales pitch. We take the opposite view: English360 was made for teachers, and by teachers, and delivers tools to teachers so they take charge and do what teachers do best. That will deliver tremendous value to learners and that value will come back as income.

Another argument is differentiation. By using English360 as a custom curriculum engine, you can create a unique, premium product that delivers competitive advantage in your market.

A final argument for the British Council overlords is that if they don’t do it, someone else will. The reality is, to remain competitive, blended is not an option. Our students are twittering away and updating their Facebook page off their mobile at the back of the class. Our in-company BE students are using collaborative knowledge management tools on the job. Schools that embrace the technology of our students’ everyday lives will thrive. Those that don’t will fail.

What are the practical issues? I mean, how do we join, how much does it cost, and when can we start?

Teachers and schools can get a preview right now by registering here. You’ll be enrolled in a preview community hosted by my colleague Valentina Dodge, who’ll answer any questions you may have.

We formally launch in January. At that point student access is based on a monthly subscription per student account. The cost per student varies by the volume of students, but an average school would see approximately €6 per student per month. There are no set up costs or up-front fees, and there is no fixed cost; you pay for only the students enrolled each month. For this you’ll have an advanced online platform, branded with your school’s logo, accessed off your school’s website, with student access to your own online content and online access to over 30 titles from Cambridge (and more on the way).

Teacher, school, and school admin accounts are free; to maintain a school account, which allows full branding with school or training company logo, there is a minimum monthly commitment of ten student subscribers. We’ve worked hard to keep it as inexpensive as possible; our goal was under €10 per month, and we’ve achieved that and then some.

Finally, could you tell us something about the man behind the product? Are you a software guy or an English teacher?

Far more the teacher. While I did do much of the top-level design of the software user interface, I’m not a coder. But I’ve been in the BE field since the late 80s, teaching and doing corporate consulting and linguistic auditing, and what I could see was how the new collaborative approaches to the web could be employed in a language teaching and mat dev context, and how that should work and how that would add tremendous value to the BE and ESP community. We’re excited the platform is finally built and we’re able to invite everyone in.

Listening: What’s the aim? (Part 1)

2009-11-03T15:26:00.001+01:00

In home-made ESP courses, listening tends to be the neglected skill. It’s easy to make text-based lessons – just find something on the internet and turn it into a lesson. Easy peasy. Speaking is also easy to do – as long as you’re happy with spontaneous discussions. Role-plays are a bit harder to set up, but they’re still a piece of cake. Writing … well, you need to come up with some tasks, but after that, the students do all the work for you.

But listening … that’s a different matter.

For many years, my preferred technique for incorporating listening into home-made courses has been SLTTTSE – Students Listen To Their Teacher Speaking English. Somehow, by some sort of osmosis, students get better at listening by interacting with their teacher.

Actually, it’s not such a crazy idea – we do learn by doing, and in many ways a teacher is infinitely better as a source of practice than an audio CD, because the teacher is interactive. That means students can learn real-life strategies for dealing with communication breakdowns (e.g. “Sorry, could you speak more slowly, please?”, “Sorry – I didn’t catch that last word” and “What?”). Those techniques won’t get you very far with a CD.

And that's how I've always justified it to myself as a teacher.

But I got caught out with this technique earlier this year. I was doing reports at the end of a course I was writing and teaching for a group of students from the National Audit Office, and I needed to give a mark for “listening”. So I used one from a BEC Vantage practice test book. Not especially relevant to their jobs, but at least it’s a scientific (?) assessment of their listening skills, which is what I wanted.

Most of the students did quite badly – it seems I hadn’t prepared them during the course with the listening skills they needed to complete the task. And afterwards, one of the students said to me, “Jeremy, it’s so nice to hear real English for a change. Can we do more of this?”

And she was right. I don’t speak real English – I speak teacher English. (Of course the actors on the CD weren’t speaking real English either, but you get the point.)

So it made me think again about how I should be integrating listening skills into my home-made courses. (I keep saying home-made, by the way, because the published courses I’ve worked on have always been stuffed full of listenings, for reasons that I’ll make clear later.)

As I see it, there are five valid aims for listening activities. The best activities should achieve (or at least support) more than one of these aims.

To provide listening practice.
To teach listening skills.
To provide an interesting topic for discussion.
To present useful language in context.
To serve as a model for speaking activities (and, by extension, for real-life situations).

Now you know why I called this posting ‘part 1’. There’s plenty to say about each of those aims, so here I think I’ll confine myself to 1 and 2 (even though in ESP I think the real meat is in aims 4 and 5).

So … listening practice. As I said above, it’s not unreasonable to assume that students get better at listening if they get lots of practice. It’s not very systematic, and it’s not really teachable or measurable. At the end of your lesson, you can’t tell whether your student is any better as a result of your lesson than before, which may or may not be a problem (depending on how you have to report progress). But it’s still a valid aim.

And if that’s your only aim, there are all sorts of ways to achieve it. SLTTTSE, for example, or BEC Vantage practice tests, or indeed listenings from regular course books. (Obviously you wouldn’t want to photocopy pages from those books – here at the British Council we have class sets of 12 copies available for such activities.) There’s also the internet, of course – YouTube being the obvious example, but also many news sites (e.g. BBC) often have short films to accompany topical stories. The list goes on … listen to songs, watch films or TV programmes, with or without subtitles, etc etc. You don’t me to tell you that.

But the point is, it’s not very systematic. It’s important and it’s hugely better than nothing (or than SLTTTSE by itself), but I think we can go beyond that. That’s where the other aims come in.

And what of aim 2? By listening skills, I’m referring to micro-skills that we can try to focus on in our lessons, which may be a bit more measurable than just ‘listening practice’. They fall into three broad families:

Top-down processing: The idea here is that if you know enough about the context / topic before you listen (contextualisation), and if you can relate it to your own knowledge / experiences / attitudes (personalisation), you can understand a huge amount, even if you miss plenty of individual words. The brain fills in the gaps.

That’s why we do so much pre-listening work – discussing the topic, relating it to our own ideas, predicting based on pictures and titles, etc. And it’s also why we tell our students not to get hung up on the meanings of difficult words, but instead to try to get a general understanding.

It’s also one reason why pre-teaching vocab may be valid. It’s a way of doing a bit of predicting and avoiding the hang-up issue at the same time.

As teaching techniques to enable students to understand a particular listening text better, these are all invaluable little tools.

But I’m not just talking about these as teaching techniques. Can we teach them as a life-skill? Something they’ll start doing more outside the classroom as a result of our lesson? Well, yes and no. I think most top-down processing is done subconsciously – you don’t usually decide to predict something or to relate it to your own experiences. It’s difficult to decide not to get hung up on something. It should come naturally.

But sometimes it’s difficult to spot something that should be obvious. Some people do need to be told not to get hung up on every word, or to read the questions on the exam paper before the recording starts. So for some students in some situations, I think this is a valid life skill to teach.

Bottom-up processing: This is the opposite set of skills – the idea that you hear particular patterns of sound waves, which your brain turns into phonemes, which are then assembled into words, which in turn are processed as chunks of language with meaning. If you think about it, there must be a lot of this going on. If top-down processing fills the gaps, bottom-up processing provides the gapped text itself.

Can we teach it? Yes, I think we can. Most obviously, we can do things like dictation exercises (and related activities where students write what they hear). Not much fun, perhaps, but good for bottom-up skills. Especially at lower level, we can work on helping students break down a continuous stream of noise into discrete words. But at higher levels, I think it’s more a question of building up their vocabularies – a huge job.

Communication strategies: These relate to the idea that real-life listening is usually more active than classroom activities. I’ve already mentioned a few phrases for dealing with communication breakdowns, but there’s lots of work we can do here on clarifying and checking information, active listening skills, asking the speaker to speak differently, etc.

We can also teach (or at least advise on) psychological techniques, e.g. the fact that it’s actually acceptable to ask for clarification, that it’s better to look a bit silly by asking questions than to look like an idiot by failing to understand an important instruction or by attending a meeting where you have no idea what’s going on. Easier said than done, of course, but simply by telling students that they’re not the only one with these crises, you’ll take the first steps towards breaking down the barriers.

Anyway, I guess that’s enough for now. I’ll deal with the other three aims soon, but for the time being, I’ll summarise by saying that (a) STTTSE isn’t enough by itself and (b) listening for the sake of listening practice is fine up to a point, but we can be much more systematic. That said, even the techniques I’ve suggested won’t guarantee quick results. There’s no quick fix, but at least we can try.

Why do we do it?

2009-10-29T16:32:00.002+01:00

I’ve just got involved in a little discussion here in my staffroom. One colleague was describing how his classroom discussion about TV had fallen a bit flat because so many of the students claim not to have time to watch TV. No-one’s that busy that they can’t find time to watch TV, he said incredulously. That’s when I chimed in – I’ve been too busy to watch TV for six and a half years.

That’s neither a complaint nor a proud boast – it’s just a statement of the facts. I enjoy watching TV when I can, just as I enjoy drinking beer, but life seems to be an endless procession of scary deadlines. (I have about 4 hanging over me right now).

It reminded me of a question I had this week from my friend Natasha: why do we do all this extra stuff on top of our teaching? Natasha is one of the most active members of cyberspace that I’m aware of, always writing messages to discussion groups, mailing lists, forums and the like, and getting involved in countless extramural activities. Natasha and I jointly hosted a grammar week earlier this year, which turned into a grammar fortnight. (You need to register with the site in order to read all the amazing discussion that went on that week, or you could just take my word for it.)

I also seem to be the busiest person I know – I often look at my colleagues in the British Council staffroom and wonder what it’d be like to do just one job, to have time to watch TV and drink beer more than once a month, to earn a regular full-time salary 12 months of the year. (I resigned as a full-time teacher last year to devote more time to writing and editing – so now not only do I work harder but I also earn much less!)

It also relates to something I was going on about last week when I was giving presentations in Czech and Slovakia: the idea that we, as ESP course designers, can go the extra mile and create really polished courses. But why bother? Why not just do the bare minimum?

So why on earth do we do it?

About 4 or 5 years ago, I was working really hard for several months on my first legal English course (for the British Council). All my colleagues thought I was mad. “Why are you wasting your time and energy on this course, when you're not being paid properly for it and you could be spending more time relaxing?”

My honest answer was simply that I enjoy working on new challenges. I get satisfaction from learning new things, and I find that to be more fulfilling than the alternatives (a quiet but repetitive life). But I also had a vague feeling that it might lead to new opportunities ... who knows what?

And of course that's exactly what happened. Thanks to my British Council Legal English course, I ended up getting involved in the Cambridge University Press course, and everything else that's followed.

The point is, I've been doing extra things like this for years. Of course I've done plenty of other extra things that haven't led anywhere, but come to think of it, things usually do come out of them eventually.

Just after my daughter was born (2003, i.e. a very difficult time for me), I spent 6 months writing a course for International House on Marketing, which I assumed had just disappeared without a trace. (I lost contact with IH shortly afterwards). But this year I met the ex-boss of IH (who this year became one of my big bosses at the British Council) who had commissioned that course. He told me that my little course had served as their model for a whole series. Fantastic. And now I’ve got a very good relationship with one of my big bosses.

I could go on: so many presentations have led to new contacts, new friends, new opportunities. (I’d love to tell you more, but it’s top secret). Voluntary teacher training looks fantastic on the CV and again leads to new contacts, new knowledge and new experience.

It’s a form of leverage: if you’ve done this little project here, you’ve got a much better chance of getting involved in that medium-sized project there, which will create the possibility that you could be in charge of that huge project over there.

I guess what I'm saying is that if you volunteer and go the extra mile, it very very often comes back to you eventually, usually in completely unexpected ways.

But that's not why we do it. We do it because it's enjoyable. I like helping people, and I like the good feeling it gives me. It also does wonders for my ego to realise that I can actually help people.

And what's the alternative? Work just for the money? Sit around watching TV? Nah!

PS What about you? Why do you do it?

IATET event for technical English trainers

2009-10-20T22:24:00.001+02:00

Just a quick message before I jet off to the Czech Republic and Slovakia for four days of presentations in four cities. I almost certainly won't have internet access while I'm on the road, so apologies in advance for anyone waiting for a comment to be approved.

Anyway, I've just received notification of a very interesting event organised by IATET, the International Association of Technical English Trainers.

The event will be held in Stuttgart at the end of November, but it'll also be available online, an idea which certainly appeals to me. I can't imagine I'll find time in November to fly to Stuttgart (as I already have two big events that month), but I'm very much looking forward to watching the sessions online.

Anyway, I'll post the complete invitation below. For more on IATET, see my interview with one of its co-founders, Paul East, or go to the new IATET site. IATET has recently been officially recognized as a proper association, and seems to be becoming much more active, with teacher training, exams and events all on the way.

They've even got a cool new logo, which I hope they won't mind me using below:

Just to clarify: I'm not a member of IATET (yet), although I am a fan, so please contact the organisers, not me, for information. Anyway, here's the invite:

You are invited to attend the first event day of the International Association of Technical English Trainers (IATET) featuring eight 15-minute presentations followed by a 15-minute Q and A session with the audience in the room and online chat.

We will be recording the sessions so those who cannot attend on the day will have the opportunity to view the presentations on the same day or later at http://iatet-events.ning.com/.

This first event day is to promote IATET which was founded on 28 March 2009. We would like to thank ISD GmbH www.isdgmbh.eu for kindly making their facilities available to us. Thanks go to the presenters for dedicating their time and sharing their expertise with us.

There will also be a small publisher exhibition.

If you have any questions regarding the event, please contact Cornelia cktrans@t-online.de or Paul paul.east@t-online.de

Event details:
Date: Saturday 28 November 2009
Time: 09.30 - 17.00
Venue: ISD GmbH, Alexanderstr. 42, 70182 Stuttgart, Germany, http://www.isdgmbh.eu/

Attendance fee:
- Attendance of presentations on the day is free of charge for IATET members. Attendees will be asked to make a small contribution for coffee and cold drinks.

To join IATET and request an application form, please contact our treasurer Andreas Büsing 169645@gmail.com

Places for attendance on the day are limited so register asap. IATET members have priority.

- Attendance fee for non-members: € 25 (to be paid on the day) - lunch not included in fee
- Online participation: free of charge for members and non-members. Online participation of future IATET events will be for members only.

Registration:
- Registration for attendance on the day: please send an email to Olaf Kaufmann okauf@web.de
- Sign up for online participation http://iatet-events.ning.com/

Schedule and program

9.30 – 9.45
Introduction

9.45 – 10.15
Session 1:
Acquiring technical vocabulary
Acquiring vocabulary is an important point in technical English as each sector has technical terms aplenty. This workshop will present an approach on how to use company resources to teach the vocabulary students need, using specific examples from Liebherr Verzahntechnik.
There will be time for discussion at the end.

Dipl.-Ing. Stefan Schratt has a degree in engineering at the Technical University in Munich. Certified translator & interpreter, CELTA. Freelance English teacher and translator, main field: technical English.

10.15 – 10.30
Break

10.30 – 11.00
Session 2
Pumping Engineers
Technical people are often not very talkative about their work – even in their own language. They feel more comfortable with handling objects than with using words. But this characteristic can be an obstacle for them when they try to communicate in a foreign language. Frustrating for them; and difficult for the trainer to elicit language for analysis and feedback. In this talk we will look at ways to draw out technical people and to help and encourage them to use the language they already have or are learning.

Richard Phillips is an English trainer at ISD GmbH, teaching adult learners from various professions in Germany for over 22 years; specialising in Technical English; author of two Technical English coursebooks.

11.00 – 11.15
Break

11.15 – 11.45
Session 3
English for Engineers – Behind the scenes of the Magazine Approach
Finding suitable material for engineering students can be challenging – especially for non-engineers. The magazine 'engine' will help you with this search. It offers articles from all engineering disciplines, dictionaries, technology basics and vocabulary and grammar lessons. Naturally, each issue can only cover a small selection of engineering topics. Therefore, we like to share some of our sources and help you research content relevant to your students. The talk will present a few (internet) resources for texts as well as audio and video files on engineering subjects.

Matthias Meier is editor-in-chief of 'engine', freelance technology writer and also a mechanical engineer. In 2003, he developed the concept for a language magazine tailored to the special needs of engineers.

11.45 - 12.00
Break

12.00 – 12.30
Session 4
How engineers work
Engineers and technicians are a different breed than linguists. However, it's not enough for us language people to adopt, use and teach technical jargon, but we also have to take a different working and learning style into account. In this workshop, we will analyse what makes engineers and technicians tick and how we can customise our courses accordingly to ensure effective learning.

Marion Karg is a freelance language trainer; she has a Masters degree in English and French studies. Speciality areas: business and technical English. Occasional author, advisor and coursebook presenter.

12.30 – 13.30
Lunch

13.30 – 14.00
Session 5
Plain English – analyzing and improving texts
What is formally called "Plain English" is simple, clear, easy to understand, and to translate. There are some specific rules and guidelines, which we can learn and learn to teach. Attendees are asked to bring some examples which we can work on (please send in advance by email).

Graham Tritt is from New Zealand, an information and communications specialist (B. Sc. Hons. (Math, Chemistry), Dipl. In Computer Science, Master in Engineering Science. He has considerable experience in moderating, public speaking, writing, and teaching of technical English.

14.00 – 14.15
Break

14.15 – 14.45
Session 6
Tech Talk – the practical approach to learning technical English
What is so unique about Tech Talk? It is practical. It features a practical approach where students can discuss how things work, explain specifications, and troubleshoot defects. Tech talk has been designed with busy, technically oriented workers in mind, so they can relax, have fun and be creative in class, including games, interesting visual materials, humour and purposeful communicative activities. In this workshop, we will explore ways in which its highly dynamic and communicative syllabus provides skills students can pick up and use immediately at work. Technical English you can take to work today …

Specializing in games and interactive activities for adult education, Allison Antalek has extensive experience as an FLT teacher and teacher trainer, and is author of the Cornelsen Short Course Action Packs. In 2009, she took on the position with Oxford University Press as Senior ELT Consultant for Germany and Austria.

14.45 – 15.00
Break

15.00 – 15.30
Session 7
Putting the "T" into Technical English
When teaching technical English it is of primary importance to define the needs of the learners. Not only the language of the specialist field must be taught, but in some cases technical aspects must also be explained. This talk will describe an in-company blended learning course. The task was to teach the technical English required by those staff who needed it: clerical staff from sales, finance and customer support, with little or no technical background, together with quality control and production staff, conversant in their own discrete fields of technology.

Ann Claypole is a former committee member of ELTAS with a long experience as a translator and freelance teacher of professional English in Germany. In addition to designing materials for in-company training, she also acts as editorial consultant to ELT publishers and lectures in ESP at Pforzheim University.

15.30 – 15.45
Break

15.45 – 16.15
Session 8
A content-based approach to the teaching of technical English
There is a growing need for a more formalised approach to the teaching of technical English. In this connection, I will for the first time set out a series of principles for which I have coined the acronym, COLT (Content-Oriented Language Teaching). I will highlight how this concept differs from CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) and from ESP (English for Special Purposes) and illustrate how the principles involved can be implemented in the day-to-day teaching of technical English.

Maurice Claypole has over 20 years experience as language teacher and developer of course materials for a variety of specialised subjects. He has taught technical English in both corporate and tertiary education contexts. He is also a technical translator with a broad client base including companies in the automotive, mechanical engineering and precious metals sectors. He is the author of numerous publications and a regular contributor to various ELT periodicals.

6.15 – 17.00
Closing, discussion

If you have any questions regarding the event, please contact Cornelia cktrans@t-online.de or Paul paul.east@t-online.de

http://www.iatet.com/

Vocabulary revision with a table and a guillotine

2009-10-17T22:57:00.003+02:00

This is my absolute favourite technique for vocabulary revision. I use it all the time. It's almost certainly been 'discovered' thousands of times already - it's hardly revolutionary, but I think it's the simplicity that makes it so cool.

(I've made a little 5-minute film using Jing to show me working through the process, which means I'll explain a bit superficially here and then hopefully it'll all make sense when you watch the film at the end. The technique involves creating a table with MS Word, adjusting column widths, tidying up borders, deleting columns, sorting alphabetically, etc. I discovered on a recent training course that I was running that many teachers don't know how to do these things, or are unaware of many of the time-saving tools on MS Word. So as well as showing you my teaching technique, I'll also use this post to showcase the wonders of the Tables and Borders toolbar - one of my top three toolbars.)

First the old version - the one I used to do. I've been making vocab revision worksheets for years - using the 'tables' function on MS Word to create a 5-column table (with 20 to 30 rows for the actual vocab items). In column 1 you type the word, or the beginning of the collocation, or whatever. In column 5 you type the definition, or the end of the collocation, etc. In column 2 you insert numbers 1 to 20 (or however many rows you've got) and do the same with letters in column 4. Column 3 stays empty - it's for students to draw connecting lines from numbers to letters.

The next step is mixing up the two halves of the sentences. The quickest way to do this is to cut the last column and paste it somehere else. Then use the 'sort' function to sort it alphabetically (don't worry - I'll show you how in the film). Then you just paste it back in its original position. Hey presto, a matching exercise. You still need to adjust the column widths to make it look pretty and all fit on one page, and clear the borders in the middle column (so students have space to draw their lines), but once that's done, it's ready to print.

As I say, that's what I used to do. It's good for revising vocab, but it's not much fun to do in class, so I used to find my students wanting to do it as homework, which kind of defeated the object. (Which was, of course, to fill up some class time).

So I had the brainwave one day of cutting it up and turning it into a 'sort-the-slips-of-paper' exercise. Now this is a vast improvement. Where before students were working alone, in silence, a bit bored, now they were working in teams, standing up, moving around, racing to be the first team to complete the challenge. It's communicative! It's kinaesthetic! It's a change of focus! It's fun!

There were still a couple of teething troubles. the slips of paper were too small and fiddly, so I found a quick way to make them bigger (see my little film). Students preferred to have something to take away with them, so I started printing a class set of non-cut-up worksheets for them to keep. This had the additional advantage that early finishers could start matching the words on their complete worksheet while the slower groups were still messing around with slips of paper - so nobody is sitting around bored or feeling cheated because they didn't have enough time. Of course the second time they match the words (on the worksheet) it's much easier - that's because they've learnt something. There's even a chance for a third time: they fold the worksheet vertically (through column 3) so they can only see the beginnings and then test themselves or a partner to try to remember the endings.

And that's the technique. It's useful (vocab revision is one of my key obsessions), it's fun (a challenging team game), it's great for classroom management (when they're looking a bit glassy eyed, you can pull out the game) and, best of all, it takes about ten minutes to make.

(If you're really clever, you can plan carefully to save time at the guillotine too. If you make sure all the rows are the same height and all start at the same point on the page, you can slice up a whole set for one group (say, 4 or 5 pages) at the same time - no need to sort them into separate little piles afterwards. I've got some good techniques for guillotines, but I can't work out how to film that on Jing, so you'll have to take my word for it.)

Anyway, here's the film (it's my first attempt at film-making, so excuse me if it's a bit "experimental". You may hear my son playing in the background!):

By the way, the text I used was one from Management Today on 'Offsetting'. If someone tells me how to insert the actual documents into a blog post, I'll upload those too. Cheers.

In defence of course books

2009-10-14T13:20:00.007+02:00

The blogosphere seems to be buzzing at the moment with reasons for not liking course books – most notably coming from Kalinago English (here, here and here), but also this wonderful parody of Headway on the TEFL Tradesman (although I’d warn sensitive readers that the humour is very close to the edge). Now, of course there’s plenty wrong with many course books, but that’s the same with any market for goods or services – there are good items and less good items, items of mixed quality and some truly dreadful items. But that doesn’t mean the whole concept is rotten.

Of course I would say that, wouldn’t I? – I’m an editor and writer and I’m seriously hoping course books will one day pay my mortgage and enable me to spend more time at home with my kids (and less time with other people’s kids). But I also think this is very true for me as a teacher … especially as a teacher of business English and ESP.

First of all, there have been some great books. You can read my article about two of my favourite old classics, Business Opportunities and Business Objectives, both by Vicki Hollett, here. What I liked about these books was the way they approached and practised grammar in a very systematic way, with plenty of personalised discussions and role-plays designed to practise whatever grammar point was the focus of the unit. The functional language syllabus was also excellent.

Secondly, and this relates closely to my debate on non-experts in ESP, certain course books have opened up new fields of ESP to non-expert teachers. The best example here is International Legal English, which really did transform the teaching of LE for many many teachers. Where before we had to make do with home-made materials of variable authenticity, quality and usefulness, now we had a solid syllabus and authoritative answers to guide us as teachers. Even more important, we now had realistic situational dialogues to listen to and to use as models for our students’ speaking.

Of course there are flaws in the book (just as there are flaws in BOpps and BObjs) – things that I would have done differently, exercises which don’t work as well as they could, but overall this is an incredibly important book. (Again, I don’t want to sound like a salesman – I know I have a kind of vested interest, having written the teacher’s book – but as a teacher I can’t help comparing the standard of my teaching of legal English before and after ILE was published.)

That was the guiding principal behind the Cambridge English for … series, but again I’m wary of sounding like a salesman.

Now I’ll be the first to admit there’s a lot to be said for course-book-free teaching. (I’ll avoid calling it dogme, because I use this technique as part of a course-book-led syllabus, which I’m sure goes against the dogma of dogme). I had a one-to-one student earlier this year who thrived on long discussions about her work, with error correction and spontaneous input from me. It was very satisfying for both of us. But it only worked because she was an expert in her field (IP law) and a naturally talkative person (also, I humbly admit, it helped that I knew more or less what she was talking about, thanks to my experience in this field, and was able to interact intelligently). It also helped that I always had plenty of teaching materials in my bag ready to use if and when the conversation dried up or stopped being useful.

But that wouldn’t have worked with my other students – my less experienced lawyers, my less talkative one-to-one, my low level group ...

Earlier this year I had two business groups that I was teaching without a course book. For the first few weeks, it was wonderfully liberating for all of us. I had plenty of texts and discussions and home-made exercises and student-generated exercises. But then the courses started to drag … and we all wished we had a course book.

Anyway, for most of my teaching, I need a course book to provide:

expertise;
listenings – semi-authentic situational dialogues;
language input;
a springboard for discussions – even lesson-length discussions that go off at a wonderful tangent;
ideas to practise the language;
a sense of progress – both for my students and for their employers;
a sense of structure – a psychological crutch that we were having a course, not just lessons (see my thoughts on DRIFT here);
and, last but not least, a fall-back, a safety net, for when the ideas run out and you still have 20 minutes to fill.

OK, that last one may come as a shock to certain wonderful teachers, but I’ve had the sick-stomach feeling enough times. My wonderful worksheet, intended to see me through 60 minutes, has limped on for 40 and the students have had enough. Or it was too difficult. Or too easy. It’s at times like these that the trusty course book pops up like a loyal Saint Bernard to rescue you from the deepest, snowiest crevasse.

(Oh no, I’m getting into metaphor. I’m really sorry about that. It won’t happen again.)

Anyway, I’m glad dogme is recognised as a legitimate and solid approach / technique / methodology. I was getting sick of trying to justify to observers and even some students why all my lessons started with about half an hour of student-generated discussion and language work. But I think course books have their place, and would be sorely (Soar-ly? … Oh no, it’s ELT puns now!) missed.

Legal English blogs

2009-10-08T16:05:00.000+02:00

There are a couple of new legal English blogs that I've become aware of in the last week of so.

The first one is called Legal English Teacher, and it's been created by my old friend Andrew Nathan. (Observant readers will notice this is the same friend I mentioned a few weeks ago in this post as an example of someone who has become a real expert through years of teaching in a particular ESP field). Not one to shy away from the big issues, Andrew has kicked off with a piece on the plain English vs legalese debate. If you thought that debate had been long settled, think again.

Andrew's blog led me to this one from Wayne Schiess on Legal Writing. This blog seems to be aimed at native English-speaking lawyers and law students, but it has plenty of lively and pertinent ideas useful for those of us who teach the same skills non-natives.

Another new blog that I've just become aware of is Jeremy Wheeler's Anglaw Budapest. Jeremy is in the process of setting up a new centre for legal English in Budapest, and promises to keep us informed of the joys (or otherwise) of getting the school off the ground, as well as tips for teaching legal English. Sounds great.

Also, Translegal has a new Legal English Blog, which seems like a great resource. As well as building our vocabularies (and our students'), we'll find out about common mistakes, drafting tips, recommended reading, and things like that. I noticed this week that Translegal have also launched their own online dictionary for non-native learners of legal English. Excellent ... although there's an annual subscription fee to access all the really exciting content.

I've already mentioned in a previous posting Margaret Marks' nice blog for legal translators, Transblawg.

Finally, I can't forget the trusty old EULETA discussion group. Although it's not a blog per se, it's still the best source for LE tips, lively debates and gossip. Well, perhaps not the gossip, but you never know ...

Please do let me know (in the comments section) of any more good LE blogs. Cheers and happy surfing.

Instant role-plays

2009-10-06T13:57:00.003+02:00

Here's a quick technique I used last week with my business English students. We're using Business Benchmark (CUP), just getting to the end of unit 1, where there's a BEC-style speaking task:

Your company has decided it needs to provide more training for staff. You have been asked to help prepare a staff training programme. Discuss the situation together and decide ...

And there's a few pointers to guide our discussion. This is, as I say, a typical BEC speaking exam task, so the author is right to leave it very open. But I wanted to make it less exam-oriented and more structured.

So ... before the role-play, I wrote the following on the board:

Country
Company
Products/services
Employees
Problems

... and then started eliciting. A few years ago when I tried this technique before we ended up with an Icelandic company which made ice-cream. This time it was less exciting: a Spanish company making big trucks and fire engines. Their employees, according to my students, included sales staff, technical staff and production staff. The company's problems included poor quality, cheap overseas competition (guess which country) and poor staff morale.

OK, so with that quick elicitation done, my students are ready for a much more productive and entertaining role-play. It always works well and often generates lots of laughs.

Why I love teaching (part 1)

2009-09-30T22:41:00.001+02:00

I seem to spend a lot of time moaning about teaching, dreaming of the day when I can give it all up. Last week I was feeling miserable because our new semester was about to start ...

But sometimes I have a great day and feel that I make a difference to people's lives. Sometimes. I've just had a good day, and I thought it's worth sharing.

My first class tonight was a group of 10 pre-int adults. They really are seriously low level, so I have to work hard to keep everything graded and tight ... but I love it. It's real learning and real teaching. They know things today that they didn't know a few hours ago ... they can do things they couldn't do before.

My second class was legal English. The 10 students seem to come from every field of law there is, and between them they know the whole system. Between them - and that's the point. So the lessons are all about sharing that wealth of knowledge and experience around the classroom. It's wonderful. And as I mentioned in this posting last week, I'm also feeling much more comfortable than ever before teaching legal English, more confident that I know what I'm talking about and that I can add value. Very satisfying.

So ... yeah ... teaching's OK.

PS Don't worry. I'll be grumpy again soon.

Can non-experts teach ESP? Part 2: It all depends … but on what?

2009-09-27T23:08:00.005+02:00

A few months ago, I wrote a piece about non-experts in ESP. To use myself as an example, I teach legal English but I’m not a lawyer. So I’d class myself as a non-expert in the subject of law. Should I worry about that? Should I leave it to the ‘experts’? Would I be a better teacher if I had a law degree? Am I ripping off my students by pretending to be something I’m not?

These are all important questions, and I won’t be able to answer them fully in this (hopefully short) post. Today I just want to move the discussion forward slightly. I was also planning to do a review of the various reactions I got to my initial discussion – there were plenty of great ideas, which I want to bring together on this blog. But I’ll save that for a later post (I want to do it properly and not rush it), and concentrate here on clarifying the slippery concepts of ESP and non-experts.

Seeing other people’s thoughts on this question really brought it home to me how diverse ESP is. I’m not just talking about the range of ESP subjects (Legal English, Technical English, English for Biotechnology, English for Counter-Narcotics, etc.), but also the range of teaching situations that we work in (e.g. in-company courses, open courses at private language schools, 1-to-1 lessons with practising professionals, ESP modules in vocational training courses, university degree courses, etc.).

The primary distinction here seems to be whether the aim of the ESP teacher is to develop general English skills (using the context of the students’ subject simply because it’s more interesting than talking about chimpanzees, for example), or whether there’s some element of CLIL (content and language integrated learning, i.e. teaching the subject and English at the same because in many ways the two are inseparable). Subject expertise is clearly more important in the latter than in the former.

There’s also a wide range of sources of course materials that we use (published course books, home-made courses written by the teacher, institution-made courses written centrally, dogme-style student-generated courses, etc.). Here I’d say the relevant distinction is between courses written by the teacher and those written by another person, an expert. It’s one thing to teach well-written materials created by someone else, someone who has decent subject knowledge and awareness of the learners’ professional needs. It’s quite another thing for an EFL teacher to try to write such a course from scratch.

My confidence as a teacher of legal English comes in a large part from the fact that I use a book written by lawyers and tested on lawyers. Five years ago, when I was using course materials I’d written myself, I was on much shakier ground. So although I’d spent six stressful months writing and teaching Advanced Legal English for the British Council, as soon as International Legal English (CUP) was published, I ditched my own course and used the one written by experts.

(I’ll explain one day how I came to write the teacher’s book for that course, despite my non-expertise at the time. In fact, I think being a non-expert really helped me with that book, because it meant I asked and researched lots of stupid questions that more experienced teachers would think were obvious, like “what does tort mean?”).

So my not-very exciting answer to the question “can non-experts teach ESP?” is “it depends”. But the rather more interesting follow-up is “but what does it depend on?”. When I write a blog posting to review other people’s thoughts on this topic, I think the two distinctions above (general English skills vs CLIL; teacher-written courses vs expert-written courses) will help to organise all the ideas.

There’s also, of course, a considerable grey area between the extremes of expert and non-expert that I described in my earlier post. When I called myself a non-expert earlier, I don’t mean I’m completely clueless when it comes to legal English. In fact, after five years of teaching legal English and with two books published on the subject, I’m very often treated as an expert (which can be quite scary, given all the questions I can’t answer off the top of my head). People tend to assume that because my books contain so much knowledge, I must also have that knowledge! In fact, I just copied it off the internet and forgot most of it straight away.

But last week I started unit 1 of International Legal English with a new group – the fourth time I’ve taught that unit in the last 6 months. And you know what? I did know all the answers. I predicted my students’ questions and was able to take the discussion off in new directions, confident that I knew what I was talking about. I also knew exactly how to make the exercises more communicative and fun. But all of this came from (a) having taught the book so many times recently and (b) having a great teacher’s book to support me. (Sorry for my lack of modesty, but the teacher’s book does make life so much easier for teachers.) So I actually felt like an expert – much more so than six months ago, let alone two or five years ago. And this time next year I’ll be further along the non-expert–expert gradient.

To take another example, I have a friend, Andrew, who has been teaching legal English full-time at the highest level for nine years (and who is a follower of this blog, so I’d better watch what I say). He’s also a partner in a legal translation company, so he knows all the right jargon and can speak intelligently on pretty much any law topic. Whenever I speak to him about the law or lawyers’ needs or legal writing or whatever, it’s blindingly obvious that he’s an expert. Partners in the top law firms in Poland trust his expertise and experience. But … he doesn’t have a law degree, so some people might argue that, on paper, he can’t be an expert. (I’d say expertise is about what you know and can do, rather than what pieces of paper you have.

An important point to make is that expertise and experience grow over time, so all experts started out as non-experts. My first legal English lesson was dreadful, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Andrew’s was not-so-hot either.

So my message to would-be ESP teachers is this. There’s no need to feel ashamed about lack of expertise. I’d advise you to start off with skills-based ESP rather than CLIL, and to use a course book rather than write your own materials, if at all possible. You’ll also need to manage expectations carefully (I’ll expand on this in a later post). But if you work hard and learn from your students (two very big ifs), you can move along the grey-scale from non-expert to become a real expert.

PS For more on this issue, see this great article by Alex Case.

Conferences and Presentations - autumn 2009

2009-09-19T22:41:00.042+02:00

My life seems to be revolving around conferences and presentations at the moment, so I thought I’d share some ideas from the conference I’ve just attended, as well as look ahead to some events coming up soon.

Last weekend we had our IATEFL Poland conference, which I try to attend every year. It was a great event as usual, with some fantastic entertainment, great networking and inspiring presentations. My own presentation was a very simple affair – My Top Ten Grammar Structures. No methodology, no theory, no ESP, no course design, just me talking about my favourite bits of grammar. I was a bit apologetic about the title before the conference, especially when I saw all the sophisticated things that everyone else was going to be talking about. But I got a huge audience (the 200-seater lecture hall was full!) and they really seemed to appreciate the talk. And I got a huge ego boost!

So now I feel like a proper presenter, I’ll share my top 5 tips for presentations.

1. Get a clicker. In case you don’t know, a clicker is like a little remote control that enables you to control your PowerPoint presentation without having to keep dashing back to the computer. I did a series of presentations back in May, and for two of them I managed to borrow a clicker, but for the third I didn’t. It was like the difference between walking and flying. So I went to my local computer store last week and bought my own … well worth every penny. I’ll never present without it again.

2. Don’t rely on YouTube. I watched one presentation fall flat because the computers at the conference centre had the wrong version of Adobe FlashPlayer installed, which meant that the presenter’s chosen clip wouldn’t play. (She then spent the next 10 minutes trying to download Adobe Reader while the audience groaned, “it’s the wrong program! And you’re not allowed to download onto these computers anyway! And we don’t really care about the clip!”) Apparently, it happened in other presentations at the conference too. So if you’re planning to present at this year’s BESIG conference, which is in the same location, don’t say I didn’t warn you!

3. Don’t despair if there’s only one person in the audience. OK, it’s easy for me to say, with my audience of 200 (sorry for going on about it!), but I was really impressed by a presentation on English for Biotechnology by Tomasz Rączka from Warsaw University of Technology, where I was the only person (apart from three conference organisers) in the audience. Everyone else was at Raymond Murphy’s presentation in the main hall. If I’d had an audience of 1, I would have seriously considered giving up, but Mr Rączka just got on with it and did a great job. Very impressive. I learnt a lot about this interesting topic. The point is this: if you get a very small audience, it’s still worth giving your presentation.

4. If you want a big audience, keep it really practical. One of the keynote speakers (and I’m sorry for forgetting which one) said that some people attended conferences because they wanted WISDOM, but most attended because they wanted WICDOM, or “what I can do on Monday”. So theory is fine, long words will make you sound clever, but tips and tricks will fill the room with eager attendees.

5. Remember – presenting is a performing art. If you’re passionate about your topic, let it show. If you’re not, pretend you are. Also, practise, practise, practise – with an audience. The more times you do your presentation, the better it’ll be. You’ll also learn what gets a laugh and what falls flat. The most memorable presentation I saw at last weekend’s conference was Bethany Cagnol’s session on English for the Performing Arts. It was a great performance and a fascinating topic. The thing that had never occurred to me was that we perform all the time, and the techniques used by actors, opera singers and comedians are also incredibly useful in everyday situations.

Anyway, the next event on my conference calendar is the ESP conference on 26th September in Ulm. I’m disappointed not to be attending myself – it looks like an excellent event, with some really interesting sessions on a very wide range of topics. According to the website the conference is full, so I won’t say too much about it. But don’t forget there’s my interview with Paul East, one of the conference organisers, here on this blog. I’ll really have to try to go next year … but Ulm’s such a difficult place to get to!

Much easier to get to, at least for me in Warsaw, is this year’s BESIG conference, which this year for the first is being held in Poland, between the 20th and 22nd November. As I mentioned above, it’s in Poznań, in the same venue as last weekend’s IATEFL Poland conference. It’s a very nice venue, with great facilities, in a lovely city. The list of presentations also looks very impressive.

My own presentation will be a new one, Results-Focused ESP, which will use the context of English for Nursing to show how to help non-natives cope in high-stress professional situations even without an especially high level of English language skills. I haven’t written the presentation yet, but I’ve asked Virginia Allum to help me, so hopefully it’ll be OK! Virginia is one of the authors of Cambridge English for Nursing, and she’s also a very experienced Registered Nurse, Lecturer, Nurse Facilitator and teacher of English for Nursing. So if anyone can help me, Virginia should be able to.

Also in November, I’m presenting the new legal English course, Introduction to International Legal English, at the 3rd International Legal English Conference in Warsaw on 14th November. Matt Firth, one of the authors of that course book (and a founder of EULETA, the European Legal English Teachers’ Association) will also be presenting at that conference.

This week I also registered for next April's IATEFL conference in Harrogate. I hope to do a similar talk to the one at BESIG, but this time with the support of Virginia Allum as my co-presenter. I've never co-presented at a conference before, but I'm looking forward to it. I'll be a lot happier talking about English for Nursing with a real nurse there to support me. Fingers crossed that my talk is accepted.

But before all that, in October I’m off to the Czech Republic and Slovakia for a 4-city tour to promote my ESP series, Cambridge English for … (Surely I don't need to remind you that the series is on proud display down the side of this blog?) I’m very much looking forward to that. I’ll take my clicker and hopefully, by the fourth presentation I’ll have got the timing right with my jokes.

Anyway, if you’re off to the Ulm conference this month, enjoy it. And I hope to see some of you in Poznań in November.

First steps in course design

2009-09-09T21:51:00.002+02:00

One of the biggest dangers in ESP, and indeed any courses where you don’t have a course book, is DRIFT. The teacher plans from lesson to lesson: an interesting text here, a bit of work on present perfect there, some useful phrases for emails over there … but where is it all leading? Are the students actually making any progress towards a goal? How can that be measured? Is that even the right goal for them?

Don’t get me wrong, lesson-by-lesson planning is fine up to a point, and I’ve recently found myself slipping into it quite often, but I always get the uneasy feeling that I should be doing more to structure the lessons. In other words, to turn a string of lessons into a coherent course.

But where do you start?

Well, the first step is obviously some sort of needs analysis, but I don’t really want to get into that in this post. I mentioned it here, and I’ll certainly come back to it in future posts. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume we have a good idea of what our students need from their course.

Where I teach, at the British Council, we have semesters of 31 lessons of 90 minutes each, so I’ll use that as my model. It could be, of course, that you don’t have semesters at all in your teaching situation – lessons start when the client signs the contract, and finish when you’re undercut by a rival language school (or one with better marketing), or the next financial crisis causes your client to put those expensive English lessons on hold. If that’s the case, consider imposing your own pseudo-semesters. How many lessons are there between now and Christmas? 18? OK, that could be your semester.

Coming back to my 31-lesson semester, the first thing to do is to break the course down into units (or modules, if you prefer to call them that). So I’ll give myself 6 units of 5 lessons each (with an extra lesson at the end for something Christmassy, or a test, or whatever). So now instead of worrying about 31 ‘things’, now I only have 6 things to worry about – a big psychological improvement.

Those 6 things should be topics or broad scenarios. If our course is for factory managers, for example, we could have a unit about factories, one on production lines, one on staff management, one on health and safety, one on technical problems and one on machines. For example. These are just off the top of my head ideas, and of course I’d base a real course on needs analysis. But let’s go with these six units.

Now the next step is to sketch out a grid to help you plan your units. Let’s create a table with the unit titles down the first column, and along the top row we’ll have the following titles: Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking, Grammar, Vocab and Functions. (I could have added Pronunciation here, but that’s something I tend neglect, for reasons I’ll explain one day).

I can now start filling in the spaces in the grid with the info I picked up in the needs analysis. What are their priorities in terms of grammar? Perhaps I can get some reading texts from their company websites, or the website of the governmental body that regulates their part of industry, or the UK equivalent of that agency. What writing situations did they say they needed to work on? What functional language would support them in each of those situations? What about speaking – what role-plays can I set up which will practise those situations well? What functional language will support them in those role-plays? Can I find listening / video materials to serve as models? And so on.

Each of the boxes should generate approximately one lesson … well, actually, I only need five lessons per unit, so I’ll aim to get one out of the reading (with discussion and vocab), one out of the listening (again with discussion and vocab), a third out of a big role-play (with functional language input) and a fourth out of a writing task (with a model to read and some functional language input). That leaves the fifth lesson in each unit for odds and ends, like some grammar pulled out of the text and the listening, some vocab revision and recycling, perhaps some feedback on the writing, that sort of thing.

The table doesn’t actually need to be complete at this stage – a sketch is fine, because I’ll get many more ideas as I’m actually teaching the course. Course design is always something of a fiction – as soon as you get into the classroom you’ll see all sorts of holes in your current plan and all sorts of opportunities to fill those holes.

So I’d aim to get the first two units planned in great detail, and leave the others as sketches. I’ll then actually write the first unit – easier said than done, but I guess that’s something for a later post too. And we’re ready to go.

Well, almost.

I’m terrible at planning timing. An activity that I plan as a 10-minute warmer sometimes takes off and sees me through two whole lessons. Other times, a big showpiece 5-page extravaganza can be sailed through in a matter of minutes, if the students don’t share my own enthusiasm for it.

So … you’ve got to have a stash or warmers, fillers, uppers, downers and shame-faced time-wasters up you sleeve. Again, I’ll save my ideas on these for a later post, but you’ll find some of my favourites in my two teacher’s books (available from all good bookshops).

And that’s it. A homemade course with a beginning and an end. When you finish, your students will have a neat stack of six attractive and chunky handouts to remind them of what they’ve achieved, rather than the random pile of dog-eared one-pagers that they usually accumulate during lessons. And you can use that stack of handouts as the basis of your end-of-course test, to see if they've actually made any progress towards those meeting needs that you analysed so painstakingly at the beginning.

As always, feedback is very welcome. Do you use these or similar techniques? Is it as easy as I’ve made it out to be, or are there more traps we need to look out for? Looking forward to seeing your ideas.

Me and the blogosphere

2009-09-06T23:04:00.002+02:00

I spent most of the summer either working like mad on my writing and editing work or relaxing in the sunshine with my wife and kids. So I kind of neglected not just my own blog, but also everyone else's.

Now I'm back in control again, and I've at last had a chance to check what fellow bloggers have been writing during my absence. And I've found some great stuff.

First of all, remember this piece I wrote - my thoughts on blogging - as part of a blog carnival organised by Karenne Sylvester at Kalinago English? Well, the carnival happened during my absence (as carnivals always seem to), and it's really worth spending a couple of hours wading through it, following all the links, noting down the great advice. I've only skimmed the surface of the wealth of knowledge and expert support for new bloggers like me, but I'll go back to this resource again and again.

One thing I noticed on Karenne's site was that she'd reached the number one spot on OneStopBlogs. Congratulations Karenne! But when I followed the link, I was delighted to see my own humble blog in the top ten. (It was number 9 when I first checked, number 11 yesterday, and back to 10 today - not that I'm obsessed or anything). How did that happen?

(Well, now I know how it happened. My blog was mentioned twice in other blogs in the OneStopBlogs list ... both times, it turned out, on Kalinago English. Once in the carnival and once on Karenne's round-up of blogs for June.)

Anyway, I kind of liked the idea of being in the top 10, so I set off in search of more statistics. (You won't be surprised, by the way, to hear that I check the sales of the books in my series about once a week, or that when I used to sell newspapers in Berlin I kept a graph of daily sales on my wall). I found a function on Blogger that tells me which sites link to this blog, and I found well over 100! I calmed down a bit when I realised that over half of these were from Vicki Hollett's blog, which has a short cut to my own. I guess every time she updates her blog (which seems to be quite often), I get a new link.

What I like about Vicki's blog is that the entries are all nice and short, so you can go in, get your quick fix of ideas / inspiration / enlightenment and get on with the rest of your life. I'll try to follow her example ... one day. Anyway, Vicki's great story on "How it all started" (well worth a read, including the comments) led me to explore Ken Wilson's blog.

As well as his own "How it all started" story (which, like Vicki's reminded me of the horrors of my first lessons - something I'll have to write about one day), I also loved his piece on native and non-native-English-speaker teachers (NESTs and non-NESTs - great acronyms!). I've been muttering about discrimination against non-NESTs for quite a few years, including a very stressful conference panel debate where the other three panelists ganged up on me! So that's something else I plan to explore on my own blog.

Coming back to the list of sites that linked to my own, I did find one genuine article, which was inspired by my post on non-experts teaching ESP: this very interesting piece on Margaret Marks' Transblawg. (Again, I'll come back to the points she raises in a later post here.) It's well worth exploring Margaret's blog, especially if you teach legal English - scan through her posts on law here, for a taster.

Anyway, seeing Margaret's post reminded me about a message I'd posted on LinkedIn's BESIG group when I started this blog, asking for opinions on the non-expert issue. It turned out there were a couple of great responses, which I REALLY will write up on this blog very soon, so I'll resist the temptation to say more on that topic for now. (There's nothing like a wander round the blogosphere to give yourself inspiraration!)

But while I was at LinkedIn, my eye was caught by a link to Carl Dowse's blog, where he had posted a video interview of Matt Firth by Gavin Dudeney. Matt is a legal English expert, someone I've worked with directly and indirectly quite a lot over the last couple of years (e.g. Matt co-authored Introduction to International Legal English, to which I wrote the teacher's book). That interview is well worth watching, not least because he has some really good points to make about the expert / non-expert debate (which, as I've said, I'll come back to!)

While I was at Carl's blog, I noticed in his list of topics immediately beneath Matt Firth was Nik Peachey. Nik gave me an early break in my career back in 2003/4, when he gave me the chance to moderate the Language Development discussion group on SearchEnglish, one of the British Council websites that Nik used to run (and which is sadly defunct nowadays).

(It could well be, of course, that I was the only person to volunteer to moderate that group, so I suspect he didn't have to agonize for long over the decision to take me on. But that opportunity gave me the chance to discuss things with learners and teachers all over the world ... well, mostly the discussions were between the moderators themselves (who also included Gavin Dudeney, Nicky Hockley and Graham Stanley, if I remember correctly), because I guess the world wasn't ready for our version of Web2.0 back then ...)

Anyway, it occurred to me that Nik could help me with my search for statistics, and sure enough I found this great tutorial on using Google Analytics to monitor traffic on one of his sites. Excellent. And as a result, dear reader, I now know EVERYTHING about you, haha!

From there, I finally made it back to Kalinago English, where there's a fascinating guest piece by Gavin Dudeney on inspirational women in ELT. Now perhaps I'm imagining things, but it feels as if Gavin's been following me on my trip around the blogosphere! Paranoia aside, I decided to check out Gavin's own blog, where he's got some great ideas on the future of books, which I'll be sharing with my colleagues in the world of publishing. Interestingly, it was Gavin who gave me some excellent advice about becoming an author the first time I met him (for a few minutes). (The second time we met, again briefly, it was deep underground, and we were very hungry, but that's another story).

So what have I learnt on my first real wander round the blogosphere? Well, I've learnt why it's called the blogosphere for a start - everything's connected to something else, forming a huge web of connections. Also, it does feel like a community. The same names keep coming up, and discussions lead both to unexpected, intriguing new sites and to reassuringly familiar places like Kalingo English, which is good when all the wandering around gets too much.

So I've created my own blog roll (called "Blogs I like", in the side bar), to help me find those blogs again. Also, because I enjoyed seeing my own blog mentioned elsewhere, I thought it'd be nice to return the compliment (and perhaps help those sites stay high in the rankings). Finally, if there's anyone out there who's as lost in the blogosphere as I've been, I hope I've helped you find some great places to start exploring. Have fun!

Imagery in Financial English

2009-09-02T23:59:00.002+02:00

Have you ever noticed how rich Financial English is in terms of metaphors and imagery? I use metaphors and imagery all the time in my teaching to explain vocabulary, and I consider it to be an incredibly powerful memory tool. I'll tell my story first, and then come back to this important general point.

A few weeks ago, I did a reading text from the BBC on Over-the-Counter Derivatives with several groups of students. I'll admit now that I wasn't very creative with the text - most of the students had forgotten to bring their books (again) and I happened to have the text in my bag. I already knew it well after preparing this Jargonbuster exercise for Professional English Online (PEO). So we just did a predict-read-discuss-vocab lesson. (And you thought I always prepared immaculately polished lessons?)

I should also point out that my students weren't financial experts at all, but all seemed to appreciate this crash course in financial jargon. I also really enjoyed playing the expert: I'm actually pretty clueless about financial English, but I've had to do lots of research for my regular activities and jargonbusters on PEO, so I've started to get a general understanding of the murky world of finance.

It was as I was going through the vocab that I was struck by the beautiful imagery of financial English. Here are the key words from the text, in the order they appear (and I suggest you read the text quickly now before looking at this list). Notice all the pictures I ended up drawing - something I'll comment on at the end.

Curb: This word originally meant the piece of metal between a horse's teeth, which the rider pulls to slow the horse down. [I drew a picture]. Nowadays curbs refer to anything that slows something down.
Derivatives: Just as the word 'curb' derives from a piece of metal, derivatives derive from simple financial instruments like mortgages. [At this point I drew a diagram to explain how Collateralized Debt Obligations derive from mortgages - see this posting for the source of this diagram.].
Over-the-counter derivatives: I explained the difference bewteen over-the-counter pharmaceuticals and prescription drugs, and elicited the parallels in derivatives markets.
Convergence: I drew arrows to show converge and diverge, and gave examples from the history of languages (e.g. British and American English have been diverging for a long time, but in some ways they are now converging again).
Regulatory framework: My students know frame as in picture frame, so I first made them think of the framework beneath a skyscraper - all those metal girders beneath the flimsy-looking glass exterior. From there it was easy to get to framework = underlying structure.
Conduct (= behaviour): They knew conduct as a verb (with the accent on the second syllable), so I started with this. I elicited what you can conduct (e.g. a meeting, research, an orchestra). "What do you think it means if you conduct yourself in a particular way?", I asked. They worked out that it meant behave, so it was a short step from here to the noun (with the accent on the first syllable). For good measure, while we were on the noun, I also elicited professional misconduct and gross misconduct.
Core problems: I drew an apple core.
A build-up of sth: I used an exploding pressure cooker as an example.
Leverage: I drew a picture of a fridge and a stick person (me, of course) trying to lift it. Then I gave my stick-self a crow bar to act as a lever. Suddenly I can lift something very heavy without much effort (shown on the diagram with a big upward arrow and a small downward arrow). This led me to a simple financial example of leverage: using my savings of £10,000 to buy a house worth £1 million. (NB In my dreams!) I then went back to my fridge picture to elicit what might happen if you take leverage too far: your lever breaks and your fridge falls on top of you, just as happened with banks that used too much leverage.
Shock absorbers: I drew the suspension system in my car.
Margin: I showed the margin of the page. I then elicited other types of margin, such as a profit margin or a margin of error to show how these could act as shock absorbers.
Liquidity: I drew some bananas in a food blender (seriously). The bananas are fixed assets, but they can be liquidated (well, actually liquidised, but I figured the financial term took priority over the cooking term) i.e. turned into banana milkshake (= cash) quite easily. I then drew a coconut - another fixed asset, but one which can't be liquidated so easily. So liquidity is the extent to which our assets are like bananas rather than like coconuts - how easy is it to turn them into milkshake (cash). You face a liquidity squeeze if your assets are long-term things like a house with a mortgage (which you can't just sell tomorrow to pay your short-term debts). Liquidity is another type of shock absorber.
Cushions: I elicited a situation where a cushion could act as a shock absorber (e.g. if someone punches you, a cushion might make it hurt a bit less).
To withstand sth: I drew a stick man trying to stand despite strong wind - to withstand the force of the wind. Then I related this back to the punching-a-cushion image - it's easier to withstand being hit in the face if you have a cushion. (Sorry for the silly imagery - the important thing is that it should be powerful and memorable, not necessarily realistic or pleasant).
To contain a risk: I used the image of a hospital trying to contain an outbreak of a nasty stomach bug, by isolating the ward and imposing tight controls on people coming and going.

And that's it. You can imagine what my sheet of paper looked like by the end of the lesson, with a car, a blender, a horse, an apple ...

Anyway, the point of all this isn't just to teach you some financial jargon (for which I would refer you to a good dictionary rather than listening to me!) or even to show how to teach these particular words. Rather, I wanted to hammer home the importance of imagery as a teaching tool. All of those pictures I drew were quite time consuming, and in terms of getting the message across, probably unnecessary. But in terms of making them memorable, I think they're well worth it. An abstract concept like core or withstand is very difficult to learn unless you can attach it to a picture. And as I hinted above, the pictures may be silly, unpleasant, weird ... but as long as they're memorable, they're great. Ideally, they should be personalised too, so I used my car, my mortgage, someone punching you in the face, which is much more memorable than simply any old stick man.

The same goes for the words I explained without pictures. I think there's a fair chance my students will remember the chain from conDUCT a meeting through conDUCT yourself well to a code of CONduct and then gross misCONduct. Even if they don't remember it consciously, next time they see a word and momentarily wonder what it means, it may trigger a memory deep within their subconscious.

So today's tip is: make vocab memorable through imagery, metaphors and chains.

PS I promised a few months ago to tell you when my lesson on financial English videos was available. Well, it's here. If you try it with your class I'd love to hear how you get on.

PPS By coincidence, Karenne Sylvester has also been writing about images in financial English, and she seems to have spent a lot longer preparing her lesson than I ever do. [I thought she was supposed to be into dogme ...?] Anyway, you could use Karenne's techniques with my article, or the other way round, or both ...

Grammar syllabuses for ESP

2009-08-29T12:40:00.010+02:00

(Apologies to purists who'd say the plural of syllabus is syllabi. To my mind, the word syllabus looks silly enough already without a fancy plural ending.)

One of the biggest differences between general English (GE) course books and ESP course books is that GE books tend to be driven by what I'd call a traditional grammar syllabus: Unit 1: Present Simple and Continuous; Unit 2: Past Simple; Unit 3: Present Perfect; Unit 4: The Future ... The syllabus may be prominent or disguised to varying degrees, but it always seems to be there.

Not so with ESP course books. Take International Legal English, for example. Here, the syllabus is very much topic-driven. We have units on contract law, company law, intellectual property law, and so on. The aims of the units are to help lawyers and law students to communicate in real-life professional situations such as lawyer-client meetings, contract drafting and discussions with colleagues. There may be some grammar input and practice to support those aims, but it's never the other way round (with the grammar aims leading the course and dictating the topics). What's more, the grammar is often field-specific, i.e. covering grammar topics that are unique to that ESP field. For legal English, field-specific grammar includes things like said/such, wherein/herewith/thereupon, and techniques for switching between legalese and plain English.

Another example comes from Cambridge English for Jobhunting, which teaches students how to write CVs and cover letters and how to perform brilliantly in job interviews. Now, imagine when we were creating that book we had started with a traditional grammar syllabus, and we were planning practice activities for present perfect. Hmmm ... how about job interviews? "Have you ever worked with children? How long have you worked for XYZ?".

The problem is, if you look at strong examples of authentic job interviews (as we did when we were researching the book), you find that present perfect isn't actually used in this way in real life. If the interviewers want to ask you about your experience, they'll ask you to "tell us about a time when you demonstrated ...". In other words, you'll need past simple, and perhaps some narrative tenses, but not present perfect. (There's also the issue that they won't ask if you've ever worked with children - that should come out of your CV, not the interview).

So what grammar do you need for job interviews? Let's look at this question: "Tell us about your weaknesses". It turns out there are several great techniques for answering this question. One is to talk about a weakness that you've actually overcome ("Well, I used to be a bit disorganised, but now ..."). In other words, it's worth teaching/practising used to. Another technique is to play down your weaknesses using phrases like "a bit", "very slightly" and "occasionally" ("Well, I can occasionally be a little bossy, but ..."). The interesting thing for me here is the use of can to show that the weakness is an occasional bad habit rather than a permanent character flaw. I've never seen can explained in those terms in a traditional grammar course, presumably because it's not an especially useful or common use of can. But it is an extremely useful piece of grammar for this particular situation.

So where does that leave the tradional grammar syllabus that I mentioned at the top of this post? I'd say that in modern ESP course books, there's no room for it. There are so many other teaching materials that contain systematic grammar syllabuses that we don't need to include them yet again in ESP books. Another way of looking at it is that there's so much specific language work that does need to be taught in ESP books (because it isn't taught in any other published materials), that it would be a waste of space to include traditional grammar. (This relates to my wish-list for ESP course design - we want course books to cover the difficult things like authentic listening materials and original language work, rather than the easy things that we teachers can make for ourselves).

What's more, ESP course books are often aimed at students with a much wider range of grammar needs than other books. For example, International Legal English will work well with students from B2 to c1 level and above, precisely because it doesn't focus on traditional grammar: the situation-based course aims will be broadly the same for both levels, where grammar-based aims would be very different.

The same goes for books aimed at different nationalities. My students in Poland need a lot of work on articles and present perfect, while native speakers of Spanish at the same level of proficiency would find that grammar work embarrassingly easy. And so on ...

BUT ... the key word in the above paragraphs was course books. There may be no room for a traditional grammar syllabus in the ESP books we use, but I'd argue we still need such a syllabus (tailored to our own students' needs, of course) in the courses we teach. But where do you get a grammar syllabus if not from your course book? You've got two options:

Create your own worksheets to teach and practise all the target grammar structures. This is what I do, although I'll admit it's very tough to be systematic and to actually integrate a whole grammar syllabus into an ESP course.
Supplement your ESP book with another book that does have a strong, systematic grammar syllabus. I'm talking about buying the book, of course, not photocopying it. Aside from the moral/legal issues surrounding photocopying, you and your students are more likely to be systematic if you have an actual book to work through. A grammar classic like Murphy would be fine, as would a GE or business English course book with a strong grammar syllabus. [My favourite used to be Business Opportunities, which had the best grammar syllabus of any book I've used. But it looks a bit dated nowadays, unfortunately.] So you could use your ESP course book on Mondays and your grammar-based book on Thursdays, for example.

Of course the ideal situation would be if ELT publishers brought out grammar books for each of the ESP areas, but for the time being at least, it seems there's not enough demand to justify the investment.

Perhaps one day in the future when I've got too much time and money on my hands I'll write them myself ... (I'll also try to post some grammar activities on this blog as I write them - look out for the 'grammar' label in the list of postings.)

So, what about you? Do you agree with my views on topic-based and grammar-based course books? Where do you get your grammar syllabus from (if you use one)? Or should we ESP teachers forget about grammar and leave it to the general English teachers? Add your comments below.

PS I've just been having an idle look around the blogosphere (still a very new experience for me, being very slow on the uptake) and I came across Alex Case's bank of 500 worksheets. I haven't checked them all out, but it seems to me you could make a pretty good free grammar syllabus for your ESP course just by exploring all the great ideas here.

Deadlines, deadlines ...

2009-08-28T15:17:00.008+02:00

So much for my noble aims of writing a couple of times a week - it's now been more like five weeks that I've been neglecting this poor blog of mine. And all the time, I'm told, my interview with Lawrence Harris was badly formatted to make it unreadable. (Although on my computer it actually looked fine). Anyway, I hope that's fixed now - thanks to Karenne and Lawrence for helping me out!

The frustrating thing about being involved in publishing is that I can't tell you all the exciting things I've been busy with - it's all top secret until the new books are ready for publication. But I don't think I'll get into trouble for mentioning that my series, Cambridge English for ..., is growing. We launched the series last year with four titles, Jobhunting, Engineering, Nursing and the Media, but of course the plan is to keep adding to the series as long as there's demand for new titles. So I've been very busy working on the latest titles. Watch this space for news of the new additions, probably within a month or so.

The thing that's kept me busiest over the summer has been an online course in technical English for a university, to which I've been adding content. I'll write up a blog entry about that when I've finished my work on that course.

I also did some legal English teacher training over the summer, which I mentioned here. That was a great experience, and gave me lots of ideas for this blog ... if only I had time to write them up!

Anyway, enough complaining. Time to get on with some proper blogging!

Interview: Lawrence Harris

2009-07-20T20:51:00.008+02:00

For the second in my series of interviews with top ESP people, I've invited Lawrence Harris, a specialist in Technical English based in Germany. Lawrence came to my attention earlier this year when he posted the following message to the IATET group:

There are far too many cowboys - or far more likely - cowgirls, purporting
to be TE trainers who have not the slightest idea of what they are talking
about, and basically are just business English teachers with a smile on their
faces bluffing their way through industry. If you want to teach EFL legal
English, then you must have a background in Law and a legal qualification, most commonly a law degree; if you want to teach medical English...ditto. Technical English teaching is haunted by incompetent business English teachers. There are some people who imagine that if they can change an electric plug, they are capable of teaching electrical engineers. Etc. Etc. When these sort of people get into the classroom, they smartly switch to teaching basic English, or choose a daft course book.

As you can imagine, those comments sparked a bit of a storm on the group, which in turn inspired my post last month on non-experts in ESP. My first reaction to Lawrence's message was defensive - I teach legal English despite not having a law degree, and I've spent much of my recent career trying to support other non-experts in their chosen ESP fields. Does that make me a cowboy?!?!

But I figured one learns more by listening than shouting, so I decided to probe a bit deeper into Lawrence's arguments. And it turns out there's a lot to agree with ... including his very sensible ideas for a system of qualifications for ESP teachers. It turns out that Lawrence's system has plenty of room for 'cowboys' like me. Enjoy the interview and please add comments at the end.

Could you tell us something about the ESP teaching you're involved in?

Because my former career background was in engineering I enjoy getting technicians and engineers to use the appropriate language in order to carry out their job functions. I have special areas where I have a lot of professional knowledge, and others where I have wide experience.

I currently teach at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg where I give courses in technical English and business English. Another interesting job is teaching the Hamburg River Police (Wasserschutzpolizei) who need English to communicate with foreign vessels. Other clients are a Canadian company where I teach business English and TE at some Airbus related companies. My most enjoyable training sessions are my one-to-one meetings at my studio in Hamburg-Bergedorf with high level engineers, scientists and managers. It is with these people that my knowledge and skills can be fully utilised.

How did you get into ESP teaching?

Following a grammar school education, my working career began as a civil servant with the British Post Office Telephones where I learned all there was to know about the then humble telecommunications technology. I decided the organisation was not for me when I wanted to leave aged 22, and someone commented “But what about your pension?” After a year’s adventurous sabbatical as it is called these days, I joined GEC and worked my way up the career ladder for five years, installing and commissioning telephone exchanges in the UK.

The thought of going freelance with my own business appealed to me, and I soon discovered that being free enabled me to utilise my telecommunications talents to the full. I studied most evenings, and eventually moved on into the newly developing micro-electronics industry, first testing, then designing. I even received a commendation for one of my designs submitted to the Post Office Approval’s Board - “Far better than anything they had seen from any of the big companies,” ran the citation.

One mid-winter’s afternoon in 1987 I received a phone call asking if I’d like to do a year’s contract in Hamburg at a ludicrously high rate of pay. I was soon in my trusty MGB and heading for the Hamburg ferry at Harwich to join a 15-man British design team working on a weapons’ simulation project using low-power lasers. (less noise, no one gets killed).

After my contract finished, by which time I had met my German lady-friend, I continued doing some electronic design work making special amplifiers for telephones and hard-of-hearing people to watch TV. But I was getting restless. Then the defining moment of my new career occurred: Tante Friedel took my hand one day, put the telephone in it, pointed to an advert in the Hamburger Abendblatt, and said “dial” .... er ... what ... teach English .... at a language school!? (I had actually been doing teaching English odds & ends at home). It was September, and I think a teacher had failed to turn up.... and that was how it all began. And what a wonderful new career it has been.

What does ESP mean to you?

ESP is about the students’ work and their career. This means the teacher has a responsibility to possess a fair knowledge of the subject because that is the purpose of an ESP course. But how might students view such a specialist course? Some, if not many of the students will have joined the course simply to improve their general English, and the fact that they are receiving it in an ESP context is all the better. If the teacher dwells more on the grammar and fluency side of things, then I believe most students would not object too much if the teacher is somewhat inexperience in the actual ESP skills. In my experience this is fairly common. In the same context, one might argue that if the teacher dwells too much on the ESP subject, students might not get the grammar and fluency practice for which some thought the course was about. But this is highly unlikely as competent ESP teachers are able to mix the two aspects effectively in real job-related contexts. Equally so, discussions on real topics can be given and monitored for correct use of language. The actual trainers’ skills level is often declared by the language school when offering to do the ESP course. If the trainers are simply ordinary teachers with a bit of basic knowledge and an interesting course book, many companies accept this situation as their primary interest might only be in improving language fluency. It is usually highly skilled personnel whose English is already good who seek more advanced technical knowledge: “Horses for courses” is perhaps the view to be taken!

Do you think you need to be a subject specialist in order to teach ESP?

If the course is a true ESP course to develop students language skills in that area, then the comments below, I believe are appropriate, otherwise the answer to the previous question might have more bearing. That old adage: “A little knowledge is very dangerous” is very true! Most trainers know something about the common ESP subjects, and no doubt could run such a course. The reality will come when they are asked professional questions. Students need to know that they are using the correct language for their daily work or when speaking to another nationality to sort out an issue. The students’ least interest is talking about Robby the Robot on my technical English courses, for example. Naturally, one’s worth will be greatly enhanced if you know all the particular ESP terminology in L2. In fact, this is virtually a “must” to be an effective ESP teacher in Germany or any other non-UK country. If the trainer is unable to describe whatever it is they are trying to say in the appropriate technical language with the correct vocabulary, then they should not be in that field of ESP. Every teacher has a certain style, and in general they will manage to overcome a difficult situation. Perhaps the client might object if they are clearly inexperienced in the subject, but they might also be happy because of their other aspects. The annoying thing with inexperienced trainers is that they undercut the pay rate of those trainers who really have expert knowledge and have studied to get it. I believe that ESP trainers should have some form of categorisation to show clearly their skills and competency levels, which would avoid misunderstandings on engagement. If a trainer has an ESP qualification to hand, then it can be shown. On the other hand, ESP is so wide in its areas of subjects and sub-topics within the subject, that I think one has to be honest with oneself as well as the client as to whether you could teach a specialist area with confidence.

I mentioned in an earlier posting about stereotyping two different types of ESP teachers. Do you think there's any truth in the stereotypes? Or are the majority of teachers somewhere in the middle?

I think your description is fairly true but perhaps at the end of the day it will be a compromise situation. Experts will not always be available from an agency, and if they want the work they will put anyone into the job. I believe there is a need for far more specialist people from the ESP professions to be trained as specialist-area EFL teachers,* or improving the skills of the existing teachers interested in going further, with a commensurate rate of pay at the end of it. Anyone who is really interested will want to develop their skills, and they should show a modicum of self-help in the process, this is why I proposed my idea for a certificate of competency*.

Perhaps I am an unusual exception with my high level of skills, but I do know of similarly qualified people in the Hamburg area and I am sure there are many others around, especially in other ESP fields.

* I have developed a course curriculum for both situations and want to offer a certificate of competency for technical English through my own company and to get the course formally accredited.

You mentioned once the need for a three-tier system of ESP qualifications. Could you explain how this would work? Is there any chance of such a system becoming reality?

Below is the article on the subject which I wrote last year for our teaching magazine, the ETM and also posted it on the IATET forum. It only shows two grades. A third grade would be added for people with more than one ESP skill. Reality of introduction: Yes, I see no reason why it should not become available but as was pointed out by another IATET contributor, the cost of setting up and running such a qualification by a formal examination board could be the stumbling block.

Is there anything else we should know about you?

My personal interests maybe?: Walking in the refreshing quiet of the countryside and forests, sailing, astronomy, and a good pint of ale in congenial company are but a few of my interests.

Here's Lawrence's article on his proposed ESP qualifications:

Technical English teaching, certificate of Competency
Initial proposals

Introduction
An authority or company engaging a technical English teacher needs to be certain that the teacher can project essential technical language to students. The old adage of a little knowledge can be very dangerous may be over-extending the principle of understanding one’s subject for general English teaching, but technical English could deal with safety and reliability issues, so a technical English teacher should be able to offer genuine, reassuring skills to students. Half-cock comments such as ‘Well, we are only here to learn about language’ are not acceptable on a technical English course.

Objectives of the Certificate
The objective of this qualification is to provide reassurance to an engaging authority or company that a teacher has genuine technical skills to impart to their students as well as being in possession of a formal EFL teaching qualification.

Grading
There are to be two (three) grades of competence: general and advanced (Advanced+).
The general grade assures a broad range of general technical knowledge.
The advanced grade is for specific technical skills at a high level of competence, in addition to the general grade. Advanced+ could be for trainers with two or more ESP skills.

Principles of the Certificate
The teacher should:
Ideally have a work-related background in the subject(s) they are teaching.
Have a good general knowledge of two other technical subjects.
Be able to hold in-depth technical discussions in their subject(s).
Be able to write in a technical manner with a good range of formal vocabulary.
Have a general knowledge of engineering mathematics and technical principles.
Subscribe to at least one technical periodical.
Regularly read periodicals/articles of a technical nature.

Examination content
General technical English grade
Demonstrate understanding of a range of general technical vocabulary selected at random.
Be able to talk convincingly about a range of common technical and engineering topics.
Read a technical catalogue and extract specific information.
Read a general technical article and extract specific information.
Have a general understanding of metallic and non-metallic materials.
Demonstrate the usage of basic mathematics and technical principles.
Use appropriate technical language to write: a specification, a problem report, a technical
instruction, an experiment report and a progress report.
Demonstrate practical usage of common electrical and mechanical tools and test equipment.

Advanced technical English grade
Complete everything in the general grade.
Demonstrate understanding of a range of vocabulary selected at random in your specific subject(s).
Read a subject-specific document and extract specific information.
Be able to talk convincingly about your chosen subject(s) and generally about two other subjects.
Discuss the functions shown in a technical drawing in the chosen subject(s).

Examination grading
Pass: 75% correct answers
Excellent: 90% correct answers
Examination duration: three hours

Fun with contracts

2009-07-16T20:09:00.013+02:00

I've just finished a 3-day teacher training course - Teaching Legal English - which went very well, but which completely took over my week. (Apparently it's been hot and sunny ...)

One of the great things about teacher training is that it forces you to hunt back through your old materials from years ago, looking for inspiration. This week I stumbled across some work I did about 5 years ago, when I first got involved in legal English. Like most materials writers, I tend to dismiss my old work as hopelessly naive and embarrassing, but revisiting old stuff can remind you that it wasn't so bad after all.

Anyway, the materials I found related to extracts from contracts - how to understand them and how to write them.

The first exercise is about commas: students have to draw lines to show relations between different types of commas: list commas (e.g. A, B and C) and enclosing commas (e.g. ... including, but not limited to, the following ...).

Sorry if you can't read it clearly - I've copied the text below this paragraph just in case. Anyway, the point is, when you've done the intial matching, you find you're left with about 4 commas that don't match up with anything ... or rather they match up with each other over long distances. In the above extract, for example, the comma before "in each case" leads all the way back to the one after "expenses", 5 lines above. This sort of untangling exercise REALLY helps me to understand the complex relationships within monster sentences like the one above. So I guess they should help students too, not only when reading such sentences but also when drafting their own.

(a) The Partnership shall indemnify, to the fullest extent permitted by law, the General Partner and its officers, directors, employees, partners and agents ("Indemnified Parties") from and against all costs and expenses, including attorneys' fees, judgments, fines, settlements and/or liabilities incurred by or imposed upon any Indemnified Party in connection with, or resulting from, investigating, preparing or defending any action, suit or proceeding, whether civil, criminal, legislative or otherwise (or any appeal thereof), to which any Indemnified Party may be made a party or become otherwise involved or with which any Indemnified Party may be threatened, in each case by reason of, or in connection with, the Indemnified Party being or having been associated with or otherwise acting for the Partnership, or having acted as a director, officer, employee, partner or agent of any Entity in which the Partnership had invested, or by reason of any action or alleged action, omission or alleged omission by any Indemnified Party in any such capacity, provided that the Indemnified Party is not ultimately adjudged to have engaged in gross negligence or wilful misconduct, and provided further that the Indemnified Party acted in a manner that he reasonably believed to be in, or not opposed to, the best interests of the Partnership.

Before I move on, did you notice the mistake in the above clause? I'll tell you at the end. (It's very satisfying when a mere English teacher can find holes in an apparently beautifully-crafted legal text.)

OK, here's the next one:

Students have to complete the boxes, using this sentence from a contract:

During the course of your employment and following termination of your employment for any reason, you are required not to use, reproduce or disclose to any person, firm or company any information coming into your knowledge or possession which relates to the affairs or the business of Shark or any client or to the work performed by you, …

Again, this is really useful for understanding complex relationships within long sentences. (Speaking of which, can you spot the mistake when I made this 5 years ago?) Once the diagram's complete, of course, you can also get students to cover the text and recreate it orally or in writing using only the diagram. As a follow-up, get students to create their own diagram of a different sentence. And then get them to draw a diagram using their imaginations (based on, say, a role play) and then use the diagram to write a perfect sentence/clause. Fantastic!

The third example is very similar to the last one, but the answers are already filled in.

Again, here's the sentence it was based on:

C. The Company possesses, and will continue to possess, information that has been created, discovered or developed by, or otherwise become known to, the Company (including, without limitation, information created, discovered, developed or made known by me during the period of or arising out of my employment by the Company, whether before or after the date hereof) or in which property rights have been or may be assigned or otherwise conveyed to the Company, which information has commercial value in the business in which the Company is engaged and is treated by the Company as confidential.

How about cutting it up (each box on a separate slip of paper) and giving students some string and glue, as well as the original paragraph, so they have to physically move the pieces of paper around and show the relationships with string ...

A bit too TEFLy, perhaps ... but let me know if you try it (or any of the other activities)!

OK, I promised to tell you about the mistake in the first contract clause. It's here:

... any action, suit or proceeding, ... to which any Indemnified Party may be made a party or become otherwise involved or with which any Indemnified Party may be threatened ...

There's a mix-up with prepositions: party to, OK, threatened with, OK, but involved to?

As for the second exercise, my mistake was to have the 'why' arrow pointing from the wrong box. For whatever reason relates to termination of your employment, and not, as I've shown it, required not to. Oh well, you live and learn ...

One last thing: the contracts all come from http://www.onecle.com/, a fantastic free source of thousands of authentic contracts and legal documents.

Needs, lacks and wants

2009-07-11T10:35:00.009+02:00

I've been thinking a lot this week and last about student needs. You see I've just taken over a couple of groups of lawyers for a month, while their regular teacher is doing the dreaded CELT-YL qualification. And the book we're using ... English File Upper Intermediate.

Don't get me wrong, it's a fine book. I like the grammar presentations, and the topics are interesting. But last week, after a quick get-to-know-you, I found myself asking the lawyers "What do you know about chimpanzees? Have you ever seen one in a zoo? Can they think?"

Hmmm ...

The weird thing was, though, that I was the only one who seemed distressed by the silliness of asking lawyers to talk about chimps. They were quite happy, and answered all the questions fully and intelligently. It turns out that these students, as well as their bosses (who had arranged the contract with my employer, the British Council), had specifically requested a general English course. I was actually not allowed to touch on legal English. Fair enough ...

And this reminded me of the famous trio of things to consider during a needs analysis: not just NEEDS (what they have to do in their jobs in English) but also their LACKS (what they're currently unable to do) and their WANTS (what will motivate them to study during and between classes). I'd become too focused on NEEDS, and overlooked their WANTS. I also discovered an important LACK during my second lesson with them: serious holes in their understanding of Present Perfect Simple and Continuous (hardly surprisingly, I suppose, given that they're Upper Ints). And that was something they WANTed to overcome.

So I decided to swallow my ESP pride and give them what they lack and what they want.

I've got another group of lawyers who are slightly more complicated. At the start of the course, they and their bosses agreed that they needed to learn about legal English, so we got them copies of International Legal English, and I started working my way through unit 1. But it turns out that what they need and what they want are actually very different. They spend all day dealing with legal problems in English and Polish, and by 5.30pm they're sick of legal English. When I take the book out of my bag they roll their eyes and beg for interesting articles from the internet. Hmmm ...

Here I have a delicate balancing act, because ultimately it's their boss who is the customer, and my brief is to teach them legal English. But I also need to motivate and engage them. So I try to hide little nuggets of legal English in 'internet articles' (such as the one I talked about the other week here). Very tricky.

And what of LACKS? The best example of this was a few years ago when I was working on a course called 'English for European Patent Attorneys' (you see - my imaginative course-naming system doesn't get any better over the years), which I wrote for the British Council in partnership with the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich. The aim was to have a course for patent attorneys in countries such as Spain, Poland and Italy, which had large populations but whose languages are not official EPO languages.

I was flown to Munich for a couple of days' intense training, including sitting in on some amazing hearings about disputed patents. I learnt about the language needed to apply for a patent, to challenge someone else's patent, to take part in face-to-face hearings, and all the rest of it. Needs, needs, needs. I was even given a big pile of excellent materials developed by the EPO's in-house English teacher.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I came back to Warsaw and started writing and then teaching my wonderful course. It went pretty well, and the patent attorneys were very happy (not least to have a teacher who had more than a very basic idea of what they did). But it was pretty obvious that they knew all the stuff in the course already. This was their job, what they did every day. It was all new to me, and of course they were interested in the materials, but I was focused too much on their NEEDS and not enough on their LACKS.

So what did they lack? What they were desperate for was the language to write to an important client who hadn't paid for work done several months earlier. It turns out that this is extremely common in the world of patents - it's really quite shocking how often this happens. So that was one of the things I added to the course: some model letters with focus on the ability to be firm but polite.

That's of course only one example, but it taught me an important lesson: focus on what they can't do, not on what they do every day.

By the way, last year I wrote up my lesson on delicate-but-firm emails and put it on Professional English Online. You can download it here. I've used patent attorneys as the context, but of course the language is suitable for all sorts of professionals. I've used that lesson with most of my students, no matter what their background is.

Over to you: how do you determine your students' needs, lacks and wants? Are they all equally important? Do students really know what they want? (Or what they need or lack, for that matter.)

Factory tour

2009-07-03T13:50:00.006+02:00

I spent most of the first half of my teaching career in factories, including half a year in a paper factory (where they turned trees into boxes) and three and a half years in a cigarette factory.

That was where I first got into ESP, although at the time I didn't know there was a name for what I was doing.

In the very early days, I had one-to-one lessons with the Health and Safety Manager, so every lesson we used to go through her huge H&S Manual (which was in English) and see where it would take us. I called that course English for Health and Safety. I did something similar with a group of accountants preparing for their ACCA exams (English for Finance) and the team of junior managers who were being trained in their new SAP computer system in English (English for SAP Coordinators).

A bit more sophisticated was my first course on sales, English for Regional Sales Managers, where I actually wrote some of my own materials, and English for Company Chauffeurs (for the A1-level drivers who ferried VIPs around and needed to say "Let me help you with your bag" instead of "Give me bag!"). My final course in the cigarette factory, English for Production Trainers, was my most ambitious. The students were the factory's top engineers who had become trainers within the factory and were being groomed to train in other factories around the world. In English, of course.

So at the end of my stint in the factory, I had a pretty impressive ESP CV (although the names for my courses didn't show much imagination - a tradition I'm pleased to say has continued with the series I edit for Cambridge University Press). But in fact the courses in those days were based on the simplest of teaching techniques. One of my favourite such techniques was the fabulous Factory Tour.

Basically, this involved the student(s) showing me round their part of the factory and explaining everything in English. ... er ... and that's it. Of course I did error correction and noted useful new vocab, but otherwise there was no input from me. What I loved about the tours (apart from the fact that I could get away with a whole lesson with no preparation) was that I got to know the factory really well - better in fact than most of the employees. When you've been shown the same machine by a production manager, an accountant, the H&S manager, an engineer and the factory boss, you get a really deep understanding of how everything works.

But there was always the nagging feeling that I should be providing more input, rather than just correcting the output. At the end of last year, I stumbled across a video of an authentic factory tour on the BBC news website - well, actually it was a tour of a TV recycling plant, but the language of the tour is what I was interested in. So I set about analysing the language of describing processes as part of a factory tour. Here's what I came up with:

a. What you can see here is the conveyor belt which takes the circuit board away.
b. Over here is where the glass is cut and dropped down a chute.
c. What we do here is we use a rotary diamond blade to separate the back glass, containing lead, from the front glass, which has some hazardous coatings.
d. What happens next is the TV yokes are sent to another specialist recycling plant.
e. What we have to do next is separate the glass section from all the other components.
f. This is where the old televisions are brought in to the plant.
g. What’s going on here is the televisions are taken apart.

So lots of great what-clefting, as well as a few more such introductory phrases - phrases which focus the listener's attention, and allow the main content of the utterance to come at the end, where it'll be more prominent. What-clefting is one of my favourite grammar structures: once you start noticing it, it's everywhere.

Anyway, you can find my activity on Recycling Televisions here, and the BBC clips here and here. You don't actually need internet access in the classroom to try the activity - and you don't need to be in a factory. If you do use this lesson, I'd love to hear how you get on with it.

Thoughts on blogging

2009-06-28T23:36:00.015+02:00

This post is in reponse to a "Blogging Carnival" organised by my friend Karenne Sylvester, on the theme of "What advice would you give to a new blogger blogging in ELT". Find out more about Blogging Carnivals on Karenne's aard-winning blog, Kalinago English. You can see Karenne's eye in the 'followers' section of this blog - like the eye of Sauron in the high tower of Mordor, making sure I fulfil the mission I've been set and join in the carnival.

Today marks two whole weeks since I took the plunge, registered with Blogger and started this blog. It seems like a lot has happened since I hesitantly typed in the name of the blog, chose a design and a colour scheme, inserted pictures of my books down the side and posted my rather apologetic introduction. So what have I learnt in those two weeks?

First of all, I really enjoy blogging. As a writer, I’m much more comfortable expressing myself in writing than orally, and the idea that I can write whatever I like and some people care enough to want to read it is hugely flattering. (I also realise that many will take one look and never come back – fair enough). But that also creates a pressure I wasn’t expecting: to keep producing postings at a quality and quantity to satisfy the demands of eager readers. Very scary.

Secondly, time is a real issue. I could easily spend the whole day blogging, and still I wouldn’t get everything out of my system that I want to say. But, to borrow a phrase from Paul East when I asked for the interview, I have mountains of ‘deadline stuff’, big writing and editing jobs to do by the middle of next week (or last week, or last month). To make matters worse, some of the people who are waiting for ‘deadline stuff’ from me have started reading this blog, so I can’t use the old excuse ‘I literally didn’t get 5 minutes near the computer all weekend’.

Thirdly, it’s amazing how quickly word spreads. I thought I’d have a couple of weeks at least to build up some content and play with the blog before anyone really became aware of it. But this experience has really brought home to me the phenomenal power of social networking. On the first Tuesday, I mentioned the blog casually on Facebook. My friend Nick then gave me a tweet on Twitter, and suddenly I had followers and comments. Unbelievable. I then updated my LinkedIn page last week, and sent a simple message to the BESIG group on LinkedIn. The next day I found two messages from Yahoo! groups I belong to:

First message, 22nd June, from IATET (International Association of Technical English Trainers):

I've just just come across a new blog that I thought fellow list members might enjoy. It's by Jeremy Day, who some of you might know from CUP's ESP series. See:http://specific-english.blogspot.com/ Cheers,Vicki Hollett

Wow! Vicki has been an absolute here of mine since I started teaching in 1996, when Business Opportunities and Business Objectives formed the core of my teaching (as they would for many years to come). Vicki must have seen the message about my blog on LinkedIn.

Second message, 22nd June, from EULETA (European Legal English Teachers’ Association):

Hi. Jeremy Day has a new blog that looks to be of great interest for teachers of English for Specific Purposes: http://specific-english.blogspot.com/.

That one was from Matt Firth, another of my heroes. Matt has been involved in so many important legal English projects over the last few years that I think I’ll have to interview him very soon on this site. Matt must have seen my message on Facebook – we’ve been friends since we worked together on Introduction to International Legal English (see the image down the side of this blog).

Anyway, the point I’m making here is: don’t expect to retain any control over how word of your blog spreads, how fast and in which directions. There are probably all sorts of word-of-mouth chains going on that I’m completely unaware of. As a result of Vicki’s and Matt’s postings to IATET and EULETA, many hundreds of people have seen messages about my blog, if not the blog itself. All completely unprompted by me. Very cool but again very scary.

A fourth thing I’ve learnt – very practical for new bloggers – is to write postings in MS Word first. One reason is that it’s much easier to catch typos that way. (I keep finding typos in my earlier postings, and will probably spot some in this too as soon as it goes up, and again in four years, after the rest of the world has had a chance to laugh at my spelling mistakes!) There is a spellchecker in Blogger, but I keep forgetting to use it. But Word doesn’t even ask me – it checks automatically. (And I'll forgive my version of Word for not recognizing the words ‘blog’ and ‘blogger’ – it just shows (a) how fast things have developed and (b) how old my computer is.

A more important reason to write in word is that posts are added in the order you create them, not the order you post them. Last week I posted a long message about ‘Google News for ESP Grammar’, which I’d been working on for over a week, off and on. Unfortunately, when it appeared, it was buried down among many older postings. So after all that work, probably no-one ever saw it! So if ever I half-finish a posting again, I’ll copy it to MS Word to finish it, delete the original draft message and create a new posting with the complete article. (In fact, I’ve just realised I could still do that with my grammar story, but now I’ve posted the link, I feel less bad about it wallowing in the ‘dead old stories’ section at the bottom of the page, also known as the archive.

The fifth lesson is simply that there’s loads more I can do with this blog (like learn how to embed videos), and gradually I’ll work through Karenne’s advice on Alex Case’s blog, as well as the amazing tips on Nik Peachey’s blogs. But in fact you don’t really have to do lots of research and use all the cool techniques right at the beginning. It’s actually really easy to get started, surprisingly easy to get noticed, and amazingly easy to get hooked on blogging.

Jeremy

PS To see what I mean about being “much more comfortable expressing myself in writing than orally”, I present two links connected with this story. The first is my 10-second interview by Karenne at last year’s BESIG conference, which is where I first met Karenne and was persuaded to join Facebook and the blogosphere. Karenne has been a huge inspiration and helping hand in my first weeks as a blogger.

The second link is to the videos at the Virtual Round Table website, which is where I first met Vicki Hollett a few weeks ago, and spluttered out a rather gushing question (and still managed to dig myself into a hole by criticizing one of the teacher’s book). I recommend that you watch all the clips from the Vicki Hollett interview, not just my questions. I’ll talk more about the Virtual Round Table soon.

Interview: Paul East

2009-06-24T21:31:00.005+02:00

One thing I'd like to do with this blog is pick the brains of some ESP experts around the world. This is mainly for selfish reasons - I think I can learn a lot from asking other people about their experiences and advice. But I think it can also be interesting for readers of this blog. So every couple of weeks I'll try to interview an ESP celebrity/guru/expert/unsung hero.

For the first interview, I've invited Paul East. I chose Paul because he is one of the organisers of the ESP conference in Ulm, which I'd like to know more about. Paul is also very good at networking, so I wanted to ask him for some tips. Anyway, here's the interview. It's quite long, but I think there's some really useful information in there. (I'm going to use colours for the interview, green for me and blue for Paul. When I turn black again at the end, it means I'm talking to you again, not Paul!)

How did you get into ESP? Do you still teach?
A few years ago, I decided to diversify somewhat - offering not just in-company Business English training. I thought that English training would eventually start becoming more specialised so I began to search for trainers who are not only qualified teaching professionals but who also have expertise in specialist areas. Our main focus is on legal, finance, technical, HR, construction and insurance. I still teach myself but only Business English.

Could you tell us something about the Ulm conference? Why should I attend?
The ESP Conference is a bi-annual event held at the Hochschule Ulm - this year´s conference is on 26 September. My fellow organisers are Cornelia Kreis-Meyer and Karen Richardson. The all-day conference is aimed at teachers and trainers who already teach ESP or are thinking of expanding their knowledge and moving into specific areas of teaching.This year we are offering a choice of 30 different professional workshops, presentations and company talks on topics such as law, medicine, the automotive industry, technical English, aviation, finance, law enforcement, telecommunication, and human resources as well as workshops addressing the skills and techniques required to teach ESP. The speakers are all experts in their fields and are coming from countries as far flung as France, Switzerland, Romania, England and the USA, as well as Germany. There will also be presentations and exhibition stands from the key providers of English language teaching publications enabling participants to get personal advice about the best course and examination materials for lessons and training sessions.
Website: www.esp-conference.de

I read recently in one of your postings that you belong to dozens of discussion groups, quite a few of which you moderate yourself. What do you get out of membership of these groups? Which of these groups would you recommend for ESP teachers?
Probably too many groups! The main reason is that it´s one way of keeping up-to-date of what´s going on in the teaching profession. Many of the discussions are very interesting and it´s also a good way of networking. Yahoo has thousands of groups and we are spoilt for choice. Recommendations (all Yahoo except where stated):

Business: BESIG (IATEFL's Business English Special Interest Group)
Legal: EULETA (European Legal English Teachers' Association
Technical: IATET (International Association of Technical English Trainers)
Technical writing: ATTW (Association of Teachers of Technical Writing)
Online Communities - Webheads

What exactly is the Pyramid Group? What can you offer to teachers like me?
As mentioned, Pyramid offers a range of specialist English training (ESP) focusing on legal, finance, technical, HR, construction and insurance. Pyramid Legal, for example, now has partners in 14 European countries, North Africa, Gulf region and Hong Kong. We are also heavily involved in in-company Business English training and being a partner in Pete Sharma Associates (PSA), we provide a comprehensive range of blended learning training. In addition, we offer translations and interpreting in 58 languages.

I´m always interested to hear from teachers who would like to work together with Pyramid and our teacher training programme will be continually expanded in the future.

I know about IATET (the International Association of Teachers of Technical English Trainers) through the Yahoo discussion group, but there's much more to IATET than that. Can you tell me more about it?
IATET is an international organization whose main aim is to raise the quality of technical communication in English. As an organization of independent teachers, trainers and coaches in association with schools (secondary and post-secondary education), companies, and commercial training organisations, IATET plans to develop and promote principles, methods, and practices for training of technical communication in English.

We see an opportunity here to raise the standards in the field of teaching English for technical purposes, and will be focusing on such things as development of internationally-recognized examinations for students as well as teacher training. The emphasis is very much on an international-oriented association and not just with a European-only focus. IATET has been in existence for almost two years as a Yahoo group and is now an officially registered non-profit organisation. Membership is open to anyone involved in Technical English and, like all Yahoo groups, is free to join.

The following have been elected to the IATET board: Paul East (Chair), Cornelia Kreis-Meyer (Vice-Chair), Andreas Büsing (Treasurer) and Matthias Meier (Secretary). We are also very pleased to announce the first IATET Regional Coordinators: Albert P’Rayan (India), David Magee (Gulf States/Saudi Arabia), Vicki Hollett (USA) and Duncan Baker (United Kingdom). With members from around 25 countries in the meantime, we hope to have other regional coordinators in place soon.

Work has started on a website - www.iatet.com - which will eventually feature news and updates from all IATET activities. There will, of course, be a members-only section. At the founding meeting, there was a lot of discussion about membership fees and it was decided to charge 30 euros for individuals and 100 euros for institutions (which includes three named representatives).

An annual conference is planned but the emphasis will be on regional activities. For those based in Europe, for example, the first workshop day is planned for 28 November in Stuttgart.

One of the biggest issues within ESP teaching is the question of whether teachers should be subject experts. For example, only teachers who have studied and/or practised law should teach legal English. Do you think non-experts can/should teach ESP?
Good question! Certainly for very specialist subjects such as legal English, I think it is essential - not so much perhaps for such things as ILEC exam preparation but definitely when dealing with practising lawyers. There are a number of important points which apply regardless of the subject and even if the trainer has not studied or practised it.

The trainer should:

have a real interest in the student´s line of business
be able to do professional research on the subject matter
have knowledge of the learner’s L1
be a good listener
be an experienced language teacher
have extensive work experience in a non-teaching related profession e.g. translating

Thanks very much, Paul. You've given me plenty to think about.

Over to you. If you have any comments or questions for Paul, please leave a comment below. You can also contact Paul directly (paul.east@t-online.de). Also, which online communities do you recommend?

Paul East Biodata
Paul East is the founder and managing director of The Pyramid Group which offers a range of specialist English training (ESP) in the area of legal, technical, HR and insurance, as well as providing translations and interpreting in 58 languages.

He is the President of the International Association of Technical English Trainers (IATET) as well as being a founding member and on the board of EULETA (European Legal English Teachers´ Association). Paul is also the ELTAU president (English Language Teachers Association of Ulm / Neu-Ulm) and President of the Ulm Toastmasters.

Memberships include Arbeitskreises für Technikgeschichte, Ulm, Ulm / Neu-Ulm Marketing Club and BVMW (Bundesverband mittelständische Wirtschaft Unternehmerverband Deutschland e.V.).

The Pyramid Group is headquartered in Ulm, Germany and has offices in London, Frankfurt and Munich.

A wish-list for ESP course design

2009-06-23T20:11:00.006+02:00

Over the last 6 months I've done lots of presentations to promote the books in the ESP series I edit, Cambridge English for ..., which were launched at the BESIG conference last November. (In case you haven't noticed them yet, they're on proud display down the side of this blog).

Mostly these presentations have been on the topic of finding out and providing exactly what ESP students need. I built the presentations around the idea that there are some quick and easy (Q&E) techniques for ESP course design (e.g. creating a lesson out of a text from the internet), and there are other techniques for designing more useful and authentic materials (e.g. creating a credible dialogue to introduce and teach essential functional language for a given area of ESP). Unfortunately, these are much more difficult and time-consuming to produce, which is why I call them wish-list techniques, i.e. things we as teachers would love to do for our students if we had all the time and energy in the world.

So it may come as a surprise to anyone who saw my presentations that, so far, the lesson ideas in this blog have been from the Q&E side.

The reason is simple: most of the lessons that I write for my own teaching are actually very quick and easy to produce. I seem to be permanently rushing around, juggling with scary deadlines and trying to squeeze in a bit of quality time with my children, so I don't often have the luxury of spending four hours to create a one-hour lesson.

That's where the books come in - the ideal ESP book should, in my opinion, provide all those wish-list things like authentic and useful dialogues, leaving me as a teacher to supplement it with Q&E topical and personalised materials for my students. That at least has been one of the guiding principle behind the Cambridge English for ... series.

I'll try to work my way through some of the techniques from both sides over the coming months in this blog. There are quite a lot of them - my BESIG presentation had over 100 slides, which I tried to squeeze into a 45-minute presentation. (Yes, I know that was a silly thing to do).

But expect to see quite a few Q&E lesson ideas too - every time I create something for my students I'll blog about it.

In the meantime, I'll hand over to you. What's on your wish-list? What would you love to do with your ESP students, if only you had the time?