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.