Monday 26 March 2012

IATEFL Glasgow Online

I am devoting this week's post to the excellent IATEFL Glasgow Online site.

As well as keeping us all up to date on everything happening at the conference, it has special forums devoted to the SIGs where the debates can rumble on long after the face-to-face conference has finished.

This year Merecedes Viola and Claire Hart are doing an excellent job co-moderating the BESIG forum.

I had the honour of doing this myself last year with the inestimable Candy van Olst and it proved to be most inspiring.

If you missed the conference, or if you missed the forum because you were at the conference, it's well worth a look.

Monday 19 March 2012

All presentation and incorrect


Presentations - have they ever been more popular?

There are more and more online tools for making and delivering presentations, adding to the arsenal of offline standards.

And I notice that teachers and trainers seem to use them in ever greater numbers for reasons as varied as the introduction of grammar points and professional development.

The presentation, it seems, is here to stay, and its role in the Big Six is seemingly assured.

But why?

What function does it fulfil?

Monday 12 March 2012

Enclothed cognition

The effects of the environment on test-takers appear to be manifold.

I have written before about the difference the colour red can make to a learner's levels of accuracy.

It now appears that not only is colour important to levels of success, along with room size, but also the type of clothing a test-taker wears.

Welcome to the world of  'enclothed cognition' as described by Hajo Adam and Adam D Galinsky in a recent paper of the same name.

Monday 5 March 2012

Automatic i+1


Wait until you see the whites of their eyes.

Good advice for snipers and now teachers too, apparently.

Daniel Kahneman recalls in Thinking, Fast and Slow how he began his career in the fledgling discipline of cognitive pupillometry.

He and his colleague discovered that the pupil expands and contracts in response to mental cognition.

The harder the task, the more the pupil expands, at least up to a point.

That point is reached when the average person is asked to add 3 to every digit in a four-digit number.

If people are asked to do anything more complex than that, it is deemed too hard and the pupils contract back to normal.

Equally, tasks which require little mental effort, such as small talk, reveal only tiny enlargements of the pupil.