Winter break

'O the weather outside is frightful....'

Or so said lyricist Sammy Cahn, but I'm inclined not to agree.

Here, you only need four sets of thermals, a couple of hats, some gloves, a padded coat, and some thick felt boots, and the winter weather suddenly seems perfect.

With that in mind I think I am due once again to spend some time in the fresh air.

As a result, this blog will take a short break and head for the slopes, returning in the middle of February.

I look forward to seeing you all then, and wish you and yours a very happy festive season.

Cheers,
Tony

(Image: Ronald_H)

Crystal

Stephen Fry once outlined one of the golden rules of newspaper column writing.

He averred that you are allowed to write about writing your column, but only once.

More than once was tantamount to self-indulgence.

I'm sure this is good advice for columnists, and it may even be so for bloggers too.

This, then, is my 'once' - at least for this year.

iPower

What is today's BE lesson must-have?

The sine qua non of the pedagogic encounter?

It certainly isn't the course book.

Often enough, it's not even a room - at least a physical one.

No, the  indispensable piece of kit for every BE encounter seems to be the iPad.

Specifically, it is the learner's iPad.

But why?

The Top 5!

I have a secret.

One about which I feel quite guilty.

It is the online love that dare not speak its name.

Actually, I'm not even sure it has a name - catalogophilia, perhaps?

I speak, of course, of the love of lists.

The lexical load: 5 forms of repetition

Here in the heart of the oil industry, no-one says anything about oil.

No-one stumbles for a word, no-one mixes up a moon pool with a mousehole, and no-one asks me any questions like, 'How do you say нефть in English?'.

There is a good reason for this: the highly technical and complex vocabulary associated with the oil industry is well known to my learners already.

All of them come equipped with spreadsheets full of hundreds of specialist terms, most of which I have only a passing acquaintance with.

This is a shame in some ways as the nouns which fill these lists are eminently teachable and learnable.

Be that as it may, what my learners want is generally a mixture of GE and BE vocabulary, rather than ESP.

And I specify vocabulary here because it figures much more prominently on learners' wish lists than grammar (in an almost inverse proportion to its prominence on GE learners' wish lists).

So what is the best way to deal with this higher-than-usual demand for lexis?

O, and improving fluency

Needs analyses often seem to end with an addendum: O, and I want to improve my fluency.

Whatever the main objectives might be - report writing, doing negotiations, meetings - there always seems to be a demand for speaking better generally.

It's not so much the icing on the cake as the wish for a completely different dessert in the first place.

As the client is always right, how is it possible to satisfy their desires in this area?

If the accident will (ii)

What follows is a small example of what happened when 'the accident' did.

It began with two Tweets.

The first was by Carl Dowse recommending The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.

As so often with my PLN, the second Tweet had actually come first.

It was by Maria Popova and led me to her marvellous site describing books on the future of the internet.

This is typical of the recursive trajectory described by manoeuvring around a PLN.

It takes one Tweet to make an itch, but a second to make me want to scratch it.

If the accident will

'If the accident will'.

It sounds like a sentence designed to break CELTA trainees, but it is actually a stand-out line from a stand-out book, Slaughterhouse-5.

It's a line which, in the novel, captures the aleatory character of existence but which, for our purposes, also describes the happy juxtaposition of two or more sources from your PLN.

You happen to be reading, for example, about the experimental use of whale-song in meeting role-plays when you chance upon a blog post about white noise in learning environments.

The connection may only be tangential, but it is possible to sense a cognitive chime when this happens, a palpable re-adjusting of mental cogs.

It is a mini-Eureka!

But is it Eureka-lite?

Presentation Zen and the art of being two people

When is it right to tell a client he is wrong?

Is it:

a) when you know you are right?

b) when you think you are right and you have so little time that you can't afford to debate the niceties?

                                                        c) simply, never?

This is a relatively easy question if you are only teaching English, but if you are also training them to do something in English it becomes more complicated.

Networked intelligence

One of my favourite definitions of a service is that it is networked intelligence.

From my own experience, I know how valuable the network of blogs and Twitter feeds are that I regularly connect with.

They furnish me with ideas I wouldn't have thought of, promote a self-reflexivity that would otherwise exist only as a weak, stunted wretch, and inspire me to improve my practice in ways I had never imagined.

It is the very definition of a networked intelligence in action.

It is exciting, liberating, and stimulating, so why don't more people use it?

Appearance

If Business English is a service, what kind of service is it?

One of the more ubiquitous introductions to Service Design suggests that 'in Educational Services, [service] has the form of a promise to produce a new capacity for the customer to make new promises.'

When we sign a contract with someone, then, we are promising that we will enable them to make promises to others.

It almost sounds like a pyramid scheme.

And precisely because it does, it highlights the importance of something that receives commendably little attention: appearance.

Participle clauses: little objects of desire

Is there a connection between what a learner pays and what a learner does?

A group of learners pays considerably less than someone receiving individual tuition, but is the concomitant to that a lower level of effort and, consequently, achievement?

I was set wondering about this after reading Seth Godin's post 'Do it tomorrow'.

In it, he argues that people often confuse the value of advice with what they pay for it, even though there is often little correlation.

More intriguingly for BE, he proposes that, 'One of the most effective ways to get your ideas implemented is to charge a lot for them.'

This certainly sounds appealing on several different levels.

BESIG World Blog

This week's blog post has gone to a better place.

I speak, of course, of the mighty BESIG World Blog.

The post is on the new BESIG website which has been given a fabulous purple makeover by the BOT.

Congratulations to them and the BESIG committee for doing a great job.

Functional obsolescence

One of the great advantages of selling food is that it has built-in functional obsolescence.

Once the customer has bought their Extra-Large Tesco-Value Eight-Pack of Meringue Nests, they eat them, and then they need to buy some more.

It's a quite brilliant ruse.

Most technology companies do something similar, compelling tardy users to substitute their old kit for the next model.

This upgrade treadmill is a quite wonderful idea for businesses, but I wonder if the business of English language teaching doesn't operate in the reverse direction.

Is it possible, in other words, that BE has built-in functional permanence?

Summer break

'Summer afternoon - Summer afternoon... the two most beautiful words in the English language.'

At least according to Henry James.

And I am inclined to agree.

The sun is most definitely out here, and it's time to spend some time in the fresh air.

As a result, this blog will take a short summer break, returning at the beginning of September.

I look forward to seeing you all then, and wish you many happy summer afternoons in the mean time.

Cheers,
Tony

Feature deletion (ii)

In February I suggested that BE trainers court obsolescence.

Our functions as trainers will gradually be replaced by computer programmes, by internet modules, and by online meeting points for  professionals to practise their business English with each other.

What we do will still be there, but we won't be needed to do it, like an automated factory.

However, I think I may have been short-sighted, behind-the-times, and a little bit optimistic in my assessment.

This is because not only will we disappear, but what we do too.

Anchoring (ii): time management tools

Last week I suggested we need to anchor our learners' expectations with appropriate numbers.

One of those numbers is 80%.

That's not the number of students who fail to use the present perfect correctly, but a reference to Woody Allen's oft-quoted suggestion that 80% of success is showing up.

This number applies to language learning too.

It takes discipline and effort, showing up day in and day out.

But how do we help our learners meet that  requirement?

Anchoring

We may teach language, but numbers play an important role in our profession.

'How long will it take to learn this skill/lexical set/language?' is a key question, but the figures used to answer this will vary enormously.

And they will vary not just because of objective reasons, but because of subjective ones too.

Such subjectivity arises due to a concept which in behavioural economics is called anchoring.

Anchoring refers to the cognitive bias which underpins our decision-making.

For example, when people buy computers, they often compare them in terms of memory capacity because it is a figure with which they are familiar - 250GB is better than 200GB.

However, this may skew our understanding of computers and lead us to ignore more pertinent factors, such as RAM size and processing power, when making our purchasing choice.

Such skewing is also at work in the classroom.

Augmenting online proprioception

Back in April, I wrote about how we need to develop a substitute for the paralinguistic cues we get face-to-face for when we are teaching online.

I referred to this as a kind of online proprioception.

Bob Dignen, who has been leading the way in this area for some time, outlined a handy list of skills required for teleconferencing last week, mentioning the difficulties of speaking as a group without seeing each other.

He notes that in teleconferences 'silence is not an option' as participants have to show that they are engaged, assenting or otherwise, and wanting to take some kind of action, such as speak themselves.

In the traditional teleconferencing scenario, those cues which are usually intuitive, both in their display and interpretation, have to become explicit.

The rules have to be clear to everyone and everyone has to show overtly that they are following them, much as some autists have to negotiate interaction with others explicitly.

But what of online conferencing?

Code red

Do your learners take tests?

If so, what colour will they see in the room where they take the tests?

And how high will the ceiling be?

Perhaps, like me, you've never thought about it.

However, it turns out these apparently incidental details can have an effect.

Proprioception: I see learning people

What makes online teaching different from classroom teaching?

The ever-astute Maxim Achkasov suggested that the difference lies in the way we communicate in the classroom, in  a manner which exceeds the grasp of our five senses.

'There must be one more,' he avers, 'which makes it really different and probably "genuine" from any other way of communication.'

In trying to put my finger on what that sixth sense might be, I found an analogy in Oliver Sacks' excellent book of case studies, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.

In it he relates the story of a patient of his who suffered from a viral infection in her spinal cord, and, as a result, lost the ability to move properly or control the tone of her voice.

The cause of this alarming impediment was the loss of proprioception.

Choice architecture

There is no such thing as a "neutral" design.

So say Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their now-classic book, Nudge.

Every design you can think of, from canteen displays to school layouts, nudges people to make one decision rather than another.

They call the people who craft these designs 'choice architects'.

According to Sunstein and Thaler, 'a choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions.'

Educators, for them,  are choice architects par excellence, organising the context for their learners' education in a 1000 different ways.

Seating is one of the more obvious types of context in a classroom.

Comfort

From Cleopatra's burnished throne to the leather and wood electric variety, the chair has many guises.

My favourite is the armchair, simply because it is the most comfortable.

I have long dreamt of an armchair I could take with me into the mountains or to the beach.

This is simply so that I may enjoy nature's bounty in comfort, rather than perched on a wet rock, or wedged in between a million pebbles.

This small wish was finally granted  this week when I chanced upon the elegant Flux chair.

Finally, a lightweight foldable armchair enabling me to sit down wherever I want.

My dream has come true.

The mediaeval octopus

Listening to colleagues, it seems that, in our less sanguine moments at least, we imagine the mind of the language learner as something we lay siege to.

It is a recalcitrant mediaeval town, refusing to pay homage to the sovereignty of Application and Diligence.

We must bring it to heel with all the shock and awe at our disposal, engaging the enervated cradle of idleness in every way possible - with the classroom equivalent of cannons and tunnels and plague-ridden corpses lobbed over the battlements.

The mightiest siege engine of them all, however, the trebuchet in the classroom cupboard, is the computer.

IATEFL Online

It's that time of year again.

The clocks go forward, the price of petrol goes up, and your daffodils are destroyed by a late frost.

But amidst this doom and gloom, there is a ray of sunshine so strong your very soul will be charged with light.

Your mind will revel in the glories of a thousand ideas.

And your heart will sing with the companionship of your fellow-travellers.

And all that's just what's happening in the pub.

I speak, of course, about the IATEFL conference, this year in Brighton.

The re-distracted goldfish

I have been experimenting on my students.

I haven't gone the whole Frankenstein, although some of my more languid learners might perhaps benefit from neck-bolts and lightning.

Rather, I have attempted to see whether there is any validity in my proposition from a previous post, that 'in order to engage the new learning mind a lesson now needs multiple points of abbreviated contact'.

Not wanting to overdo it, I decided to double the points of contact in one lesson to see how effective it might be.

Class routes

If you use Gmail, you probably prefer salty to sweet snacks.

Should you be a Yahoo mailer, you probably lounge around your home in pyjamas.

And if you use AOL, there's a good chance that you're overweight, at least according to a fascinating report on Hunch blog.

Your email address apparently says a lot more about you than where you can be contacted.

The design guru, Swiss Miss, for example, admitted that she refused to consider employing a  lawyer because he had an AOL address and therefore lived in 'a different solar system' to her.

All of which led me to wonder what other things influence learners' opinions of us before we've even met, or, as is the case with that lawyer, not met.

Before a learner gets to me, and I get the chance to deter them personally, they have to go through a number of other potentially alienating hoops.

The distracted goldfish

'We are not only what we read,' says Maryanne Wolf in Proust and the Squid.

  'We are how we read.'

The internet has changed both.

We read 140-character Tweets, Facebook updates, news tickers, digests, digests of digests.

And we don't actually read either; we flit and we float - our attention permanently diffuse.

We skim sideways across the net, like a long-legged fly, touching only faintly any text.

How can anyone learn a language in such conditions?

More pointedly, how can anyone be taught a language in such conditions?

Feature deletion

The MP Norman Baker became briefly famous a few years back for inciting us all to stop using the standby buttons on our electronics.

The energy wasted on standby was equivalent to three million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year in the UK alone.

Everyone agreed that this was a terrible problem, but what could be done?

Surely, we were all just too fat and lazy to stand up and turn the TV off properly.

Cultura Franca

There is a bogeyman that lives under the beds of all BE students.

It comes out when all the lexis has been mastered, and all the skills honed.

It is a 50-metre wall.

It is a lake of fire.

It is quicksand.

It, of course, is culture.

BELF-U-Like

Rory Sutherland, one of the UK's leading ad-men, tells a great story about how Frederick the Great of Prussia re-branded the potato.

Frederick was very keen for his subjects to adopt the potato in order to stave off famine and stabilise the price of bread, so he made them a compulsory crop.

Frederick's subjects, however, were less keen, claiming they were not even fit for dogs to eat.

They hated the potato.

Despite meting out some severe punishments, the potato, like the 3rd person 's', simply did not take.

So Frederick resorted to Plan 'B'.

The waiting game

Learning a language takes a lot longer than ordering a McDonald's, but the two do share a common problem.

This problem is not McNuggets, or even 'Employee of the Month' posters; rather, it's the problem of managing expectations.

As a fast-food restaurant, what irks customers of McDonald's is waiting.

Generally speaking, you don't wait long at McDonald's to be served, but as you don't expect to wait long, any wait at all is a long one.

As the always-interesting David Maister points out, customer satisfaction bears little relation to reality and is, in fact, the perception of a service minus the expectation of one.

8 out of 10 BE students prefer it

The other day, a student of mine was discussing a few idioms with me.

He's an upper intermediate student, and I was advising him that he didn't need to master idioms just yet.

I suggested that native speakers tended to use idioms a fair bit, but the majority of English speakers, non-natives speakers, did not use them very frequently at all.

My student digested this information for a few seconds.

Business English: Working in the Lemon Market

Sam Levenson once remarked that we must learn from the mistakes of others because we  can't possibly live long enough to make them all ourselves.

Nowhere is this advice more pertinent than in the case of second-hand, or as Americans more tellingly describe them, used cars.

Most buyers of used cars are beset by the problem of asymmetrical information.

Unlike the seller, they don't know if the car is in good condition or not.

In all likelihood, they don't even know what 'good condition' is either.

Affordance

I was recently given an e-reader.

It was a great gift and instantly became my favourite gadget.

Suddenly, I had a portable library of 100s of books to take with me wherever I went.

I was smitten.

And because I have taken it everywhere with me, lots of other people have handled my e-reader too, mostly out of mild curiosity.

What has struck me about this is that everyone has tried to use the e-reader in the same way.

Simplicity is the Last Refuge of the Complex

NOT SO long ago, I set up a social network for my school.

I had run a single class trial the previous semester and it had been a great success.

Back then, I'd used a simple blog.

It had done the job, but it didn't really allow me to offer a full-on Web 2.0 experience.

If I wanted that, I needed to organise a proper social network with all the bells and whistles only it could provide.