Time counting

One of the things I have learned from teaching so many business people is the importance of prioritising.

A dispersed focus is no focus at all.

With that in mind, I have recently embarked upon a training course that I intend to devote my free time to, and, as such, I think it is unwise to continue writing this blog at the same time.

However, I will hopefully return to it in the autumn.

In the mean time, thank you for reading, and writing comments and emails, and I hope you have a good summer.

Tony

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.

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?

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.

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.

Lethe and lesson management

You are what you remember, not what you experience.

At least according to Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Laureate and author of last year's outstanding book - Thinking, Fast and Slow.

This partly came to light when he conducted a study on people undergoing colonoscopies.

The first group underwent shorter procedures, and the second group longer ones.

When asked to rate the total amount of pain they had experienced (this was before colonoscopies were routinely accompanied by anaesthetics), surprisingly the first group recorded a worse experience.

How could this be if they experienced significantly less time under procedural duress?

Desire paths

"All buildings are predictions.  All predictions are wrong."

So says Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn.

I feel the same about metaphors - they are all wrong.

They change how we think about the things they describe, and thus the things themselves.

I understand, however, that not only do we need them, but that we cannot function without them.

 Therefore we need to question the assumptions upon which they are based, the connotations they foster, and they effects they produce.

In that spirit, and the one described by Brand, I wonder if we in ELT might get rid of fossilization.

The past perfect

Which of the verb forms is the least useful?

This may sound like a strange question, but there is a sense with ESP generally, and BE specifically, that language must submit to calculations of utility and expediency.

If you teach IELTS, for example, reported speech is a luxury item but the passive is essential.

Thought of in these terms, the past perfect seems a candidate ripe for omission in a crowded, time-conscious schedule.

 In his seminal book The English Verb, Michael Lewis restricts his discussion of it to little more than a sentence.

It is less useful, it seems, even than the future perfect, and that's pretty low down the useful list already.

In the context of the grammar-lite BELF discourse we are moving towards, the past perfect is a clumsy, wind-up gramophone  in a world of sleek iPods.

Partly, this could be because we generally use it to avoid ambiguity, but that ambiguity only arises if we are sloppy to begin with.

Instead of stating they had eaten when I arrived, it can be simply said that they ate before I arrived.

The correct adverbial cuts out the confusion and dispenses with any need for the past perfect at all.

So, it's a sentence-bloating, learner-messing waste of time.

Or is it?

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.