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?