On Wednesday I was invited to a primary school to present on BGE. After I showed my videos and the results from the written tests, the audience showed a mixture of surprise and skepticism: “It can’t be true that the kids are able to speak like that only after a few lessons.” Yes, it is possible, if you have faith in them and if you give them the time to produce utterances and if you see that they listen to each other. I’m confident that many of the teachers, who have ordered my materials, will see that BGE is a realistic way to allow kids the acquisition of basic communicative competence.
Therefore, it is really a pity that university colleagues here in my region are not interested in BGE and that some prominent ones of them have reversed the formula “message before accuracy” into “accuracy before message” as their policy.
There are now 17 learners in the group. In the 2nd lesson I inserted more partner work so that people practiced more, but it was also harder to give feedback on their utterances. On the other hand, if I have everybody read or say 1 or 2 sentences followed by a feedback on my part, then this takes a lot of time where the others are rather passive.
I think that I’ve managed to respect the heterogeneous skills of the learners in a better way. At the same time, it’s also demanding to see that the better ones don’t scare off the “true” beginners (who are actually the real target group of BGE).
I try to present grammar basically in two ways: the lexical approach and presentation in the form of tables and rules. And I give learners fixed dialog that they may want to memorize at first before replacing elements with elements that are more personalized.
Despite my improvements, I’ve sent out a feedback questionnaire to get an idea of the learners’ feelings.
Also of note, we have still another teacher now among us. She will observe and give me feedback, too. She suggests to work more with “learning streets”. This seems an idea worth reflecting on, but such a technique must, in my view, not lead to a smaller degree of dialog/interaction.
And I’m definitely going to include much more LdL. (e.g.: Grammar sections could be prepared and presented by better students).
Last week I was invited to a conference in Romania. Beside some valuable intercultural experience that I could make, the 2-hours trip back to the airport which I spent in a cab was very interesting, because it showed me that there is still a lot to do in the development of self-teaching material. I had bought myself a language guide “Last-Minute Romanian”. I had practically no knowledge of Romanian (and it is a Romanic language very different from the other Romanic languages I know). I had manage to do 12 of the 20 lessons, but they did not allow me to talk with the driver in an efficient (and sometimes not even in an effective) way.
The situations that had been covered by the lessons did not help me here.
The lessons presented only people who already know Romanian so that I had not learned sentences that mean “Slowlier, please” or “I don’t understand”.
I had not learned to produce an internationalism in Romanian.
The book included only a Romanian-German, but not a German-Romanian glossary. It was also interesting how the driver started to speak not proper Romanian, but “foreigner Romanian” or “telegramm Romanian”.
If we hadn’t been forced to be together for two hours (in his cab), then the conversation would soon have been over.
Last Tuesday I had my first BGE lesson at the Akademie Schönbühl: 16 adult learners + 1 future BGE teacher. The group is very heterogeneous: some already have basic knowledge in English (“false beginners”), some are true beginners and represent the actual addressees of the course. Due to this heterogeneity I have to pay attention that the beginners are not scared off and I have to be ready to offer special services to these participants. On the whole, though, the atmosphere was very good and not even the video-camera was bothering. The principle of rapid “teacher-role rotation” worked well and it seems that LdL will be well suitable for the group. I’m also glad to see that I can use some of my self-teaching material and that I don’t have to revise and supplement my adult group material from scratch.
17 people have signed up for my first complete BGE course for adults. This response was unexpected. And I’m glad that many people seem interested in BGE in the Lake of Constance region. The course will start at the Akademie Schönbühl next Tuesday. There will also be one guy that wants to become a BGE teacher. Let’s keep fingers crossed for the first meeting.
A new LdL book has come out this week: LdL – Lernen durch Lehren goes global. It was edited by Guido Oebel, who started to make LdL known in Japan. The book unites contributors from Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Austria and Germany–including articles by Jean-Pol Martin and myself. Here is a brief summary of the contents (in German).
Last Saturday, Jean-Pol Martin and I were invited to give the two keynote speeches on LdL at a conference that Christian Spannagel and his team had organized. Materials, reports and videos (including my own speech) are available on Christian Spannagel’s LdL site.
In addition, Lutz Berger has published a teaser for my speech on YouTube:
I was invited to present BGE to teachers at primary and compulsory schools. The workshop was attended by about 20 teachers from different small-town schools. Most of them were convinced of the concept after I showed them the video files from my project classes and said that they would try out BGE. They were especially impressed of the mini-teachers in Lesson 5 and that the class could use so many phrases alredy at that stage.
