BGE in the regional press
Posted by asecoli on December 2, 2008
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
