Lingua Franca English in Written Contexts?

I’ve always said that in written contexts people’s expectations of standard English are stronger than in spoken contexts. In Global English for Academics (GE-A) and Global English for Business (GE-B) includes that for important written contexts users should seek advice from native speakers. Here are a few links that may be helpful:

• Job Applications in Different Nations
• Library of Sample Business Letters
• More Sample Business Letters

Joachim Grzega

BGE for Self-Study

I’ve recently discussed the first draft of the BGE material for self-teaching (developed by Marion Schöner and myself). I’ve initiated a discussion thread on my discussion forum at the ELiX website.

It turns out that the toughest tasks is to find

• an effective way for acquiring pronunciation

• different material for the same speech acts

• materials for different types of learners

• good ways for self-testing

Joachim Grzega

Wikipedia Access in Classrooms

Jean-Pol Martin has all his lessons take place in his school’s computer lab in order to be able to constantly get access to resources (Wikipedia) to answer questions. See his blog entry here.

Felix Schaumburg has commented on this blog entry that it’s also possible to access Wikipedia in a normal classroom if students use all potentials of their mobiles; with a 2 GB memory card you can easily store Wikipedia on your mobile. Here is his blog entry.

Joachim Grzega

BGE for Mobile Phones

At present, we’re also cooperating with a company that produces language courses to be stored on mobile phones. You can read, you can listen to audio files, you can record yourself and compare your recording with the model audio file. I’ve developed four sample chapters, the company is now getting the demo version ready.

Joachim Grzega

Dealing with Heterogeneous Learner Groups

Jean-Pol Martin has recently told me that he is currently teaching a very heterogeneous group. In my view, one of the most central problems to solve in classes at German schools and universities is differentiation. How do you manage that everyone will leave a lesson saying “I’ve learned something new that will help me.” For my BGE primary school course I developed materials that will allow learners to decide themselves whether they want to learn by themselves or in pairs, whether they want to deal with the language actively or passively, whether they want to deal with simple or more sophisticated tasks. At university, I try to meet differentiation by having the students choose topics for their seminar papers themselves (according to their interests and needs). This can be a simple or a complex task (my task will be to find out together with the student if the task can be completed in a reasonable span of time). Nevertheless, when presenting the topic in class, everyone has to make this topic as interesting as possible for the others. LdL at its pure form. And this is also what JPM has experienced as effective.

Sometimes, though, the course contents are neatly defined by official regulations. Here, I have to find a way that everybody reaches the minimum level required in an effective and very efficient way, and I have to see that those who acquire the level earlier can advance even further. One of the things that I use is to present students two baskets of exercises—easier ones and more difficult ones. This way all everyone can decide for himself or herself from which level s/he wants to draw a slip of paper (with an exercise) be tested. Even the simple exercises, however, will seek that the learner (and everyone else in class) can check how well s/he has acquired the minimum level.

Joachim Grzega

Support by the Wirtschaftsjunioren Ingolstadt

Last week I met with Karl Ettinger from the Wirtschaftsjunioren Ingolstadt. He is going to support the BGE project for adult learner groups and for self-study. This will be a very good opportunity to get contact with different potential users and with people who deal with adult teaching.

Joachim Grzega

BGE at kindergarten?

Rosa Wagner has been organizing English for children at kindergarten for many years and written books for such groups. She has now contacted me and we’ll both check if there is any way of reasonable cooperation.

Joachim Grzega

Contributing to the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue

2008 has been the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue. This was the reason that we started an international project on European communicative strategies in April. Researchers (professors and students from a broad range of European countries) have participated in this project over the past months and contributed to a 202-page long special issue of my Journal for EuroLinguistiX, which is now available via the ELiX homepage or directly here. This volume also includes

• an empirical report on the recent developments of my BGE projects
• a basic European language guide (a synopsis of common European communicative strategies and equivalences of important sentences in different European languages)

Joachim Grzega

BGE in the regional press

In today’s edition of the regional newspaper “Nürnberger Nachrichten” was a report on BGE (see the online version). As an immediate positive reaction, I received e-mails from 15 readers asking for self-study material (among them: a mayor). I’m eagerly working on this, but creating material for self-teaching is highly complex–especially since we planned to create something that is immediately usable for learners of different mother tongues. Marion Schöner and I have created some pages already, but the discussion in my seminar today has shown that we need to reflect more particularly on the following questions:

• How can we teach pronunciation just from a book that works with pictures and English words? (Or is it impossible? This would mean, of course, that we cannot use an entirely monolingual approach (after all, this is something that the applied linguist Wolfgang Butzkamm has been promoting for many years: functional bilingualism–cf. the English Wikipedia entry on Butzkamm).
• How can people test themselves?
• How can we teach communicative competence when there is only one learner?

More about BGE for self-study in another post.

Joachim Grzega