Portrait of Jean-Pol Martin

The latest issue of the German journal GEO Wissen includes a portrait of Jean-Pol Martin and LdL – plus a photo with some of his Eichstätt disciples (Bea Klüsener, Laura Cau, Michael Kratky and me).

 

Joachim Grzega

BGE material for kids in Portuguese

The BGE handouts for kids are now also available in a (Brazilian) Portuguese version.

 

Joachim Grzega

BGE for self-teaching and for adult learner groups

The next milestone of the BGE project is reached: Both the German accompanying material for the self-teaching book Welcome to the World! and the German adult-group handbook Welcome, Global Players! are now among ASEcoLi’s products. Further language versions are planned.

An extract of Welcome to the World! – Deutsche Begleitmaterialien is available here. The book costs 8 EUR.

An extract of Welcome, Global Players! – Deutsche Version is available here. The book costs 9.50 EUR.

Joachim Grzega

BGE for Self-Teaching

I would like to quote three passages that have helped in furthering the Basic Global English projects during the past months:

• UN Millennium Declaration (“to promote greater harmony and tolerance in all societies”, “allowing genuine participation by all citizens in all our countries”)
• UN Declaration of Human Rights Art. 26 (“Education … shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations”)
• UN Declaration of Human Rights Art. 27 (“the right freely … to share in scientific advancement and its benefits”)

We have now mastered the next stage of our vision “global competences globally”: in order to enable everybody a fair chance in getting access to international information and communication the self-teaching basic material Welcome to the World is now available via the BGE website and the ASEcoLi website. As was announced, the basic book is for free. The “luxury equipment” will be available for a fair price.

Joachim Grzega

LdL in a teacher journal article

On p. 48/49 of its October 2009 edition the German teacher journal Praxis Geographie refers to an LdL article that was written by Marion Schöner and me and published in the Journal of Education for Teaching. It is an empirical study on the effectivity and efficiency of LdL from university students’ perspectives: “The Didactic Model LdL (Lernen durch Lehren) as a Way of Preparing Students for Communication in a Knowledge Society.“

Joachim Grzega

BGE and the European Day of Languages

Today is the European Day of Languages. Therefore, I would already like to give the link to the self-teaching material for Basic Global English here, on an inofficial basis. When the accompanying material is ready in 2-3 weeks, there will also be an official publication on the BGE website and the ASEcoLi website. As a social-enterpreneurial contribution the central materials will be accessible for free.

The European Day of Languages has been celebrated since the European Year of Languages in 2001. It commemorates the promotion of multilingualism. I regard BGE as one way to multilingualism. Many people are afraid that a promotion of English as a thread to other languages. But I see it as a component of global trilingualism, or “global triglossia” as I have called it (and as it can be read in my publications, e.g. in an article in the Journal for EuroLinguistiX). This means that I see BGE as door-opener to other cultures. Once English has allowed to communicate with people from another culture, I can decide to delve into this culture in a more thorough way and start to learn the language(s) of that culture. When I am talking to people about this, I always use the same example, which happened when we taught BGE to children in a EU project. The German kids were not only able to communicative with their EU partner-schools via letters, but when they were in Italy they could already talk to their Italian partner-kids on a basic level. They found it so interesting that they asked their principal also for a course in “Italian”. Basic Global English as a door-opener to Italian; and it can be a door-opener to other languages, too.

Joachim Grzega

LdL recently

LdL has recently attracted attention again. Yesterday, Christian Spannagel gave an internet-mediated talk on wikis, weblogs and Twitter at the GAL conference (German association of applied linguists). LdL was a central element in his talk. Here is the recording: http://tinyurl.com/gal09recording

Already some weeks ago, Jean-Pol Martin was visited by a journalist from the renowned magazine GEO Wissen. (Two weeks ago, a few of us LdLians were photographed for this article which is to come out in the November issue).

Joachim Grzega

Close to completion: BGE materials for adults

The work on BGE materials for self-study has required my full attention of the past weeks. It was a very tough task to find good “transcultural” or “culture-free” pictures and to create good intercultural dialogs. The book is practically finished; however, there are a few technical problems due to the size of the file.

Also completed are: the accompanying book for German autodidacts and the accompanying book for German adult learner groups. They will soon be available to the public.

Joachim Grzega

New material for sale!

ASEcoLi offers a new book: How to Become the Perfect Intercultural Professor – Tricks and Bricks for Intercultural Academic Teaching in English (and Other Languages).

In this book I bring my experience with, and ideas of, English as a global means of communication in an atmosphere of empathy and tolerance to the advanced level of “Global English for Academic Contexts”.

This book predominantly wants to take away fears from instructors who have to give courses in their discipline in English as non-natives and to provide them with “bricks and tricks” that enable a more comfortable atmosphere for both sides of the intercultural group, the instructor and the students.

Large parts of the book—the communication tricks, the instruction tricks (including LdL), the critical incidents and cultural information bricks—are also useful for intercultural academic teaching settings if the language of instruction is not English, but another language.

The book is available via ASEcoLi as an e-book with a simple cover page for 5 EUR.

At Lulu (accessible also via the ASEcoLi website) the book can be purchased in print form with a high-quality cover for 12 EUR.

LdL workshop in Jena (Thuringia, Germany)

On Tuesday I gave a workshop on LdL for college teachers. It turned out that, understandably, teachers are primarily interested in concepts that enable an improvement of teaching without having to invest too much time. Well, LdL potentially—at least in the beginning—requires more preparatory effort. However, after a while automatisms will evolve. Moreover, apart from objectively measurable time-effort there is also something like a subjectively felt time-effort. And the latter diminishes with LdL, since you can observe bigger effects in the learners and therefore teachers see their activity as more effective.

The feedback that I have now gotten was positive.

Joachim Grzega