Where was I...?

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

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

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 ...

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!

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 ...

 

Related posts:

• English for Nursing
• Why do we do it?
• Deadlines, deadlines

Free online teacher's notes

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:

• Wordlists in ESP
• BESIG 2009 (part 2)
• How did PPP become a dirty word?

ESP Consultancy, Cyprus

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!

Related posts:

• First steps in ESP course design
• Two approaches to course design
• A wish-list for ESP course design 

BESIG 2009 – part 1

[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.

IATET event for technical English trainers

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/

Conferences and Presentations - autumn 2009

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.