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

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.

Linguistic Edutainment: Foreignish for Freshmen

Always in search for new ways of disseminating linguistic knowledge, I tried out a new one last Thursday: linguistic edutainment. I combined lecturing, audience participation (through quizzes) and music for a performance “Ausländisch für Anfänger” (“Foreignish for Freshmen”) at the Volkshochschule Weißenburg. It seemed to have worked as shown by the report in the local newspaper here.

Joachim Grzega

Upcoming events

My first events at the Akademie Schönbühl are set:

2 April:

introduction to Basic Global English for a general public

15 May:

1. introduction to Basic Global English for compulsory school teachers

2. introduction to Lernen durch Lehren (LdL) (for teachers)

3. how can we use Wikipedia and its sister projects) (for students, teachers, parents and everyone)

19 June:

1. what does user-friendly language look like? (for business people and administration people)

2. how do I learn effectively and efficiently? (for students, teachers, parents and everyone)

3. edutainment on communicative behaviour around the world (for everyone)

I’m also eagerly working on my edutainment lecture “Ausländisch für Anfänger” that I will give to a general audience next week.

Joachim Grzega

Guest lecture on eurolinguistics in Innsbruck

Last week I was at the University of Innsbruck (Austria). I had been invited by Professor Wolfgang Pöckl for a guest lecture. Originally, all students wanted to buy my “EuroLinguistischer Parcours”, but unfortunately the publishing house is sold, because the owner has fallen seriously sick, and there were not enough book copies left. I’m currently looking for another publisher for a second edition of the book and hopefully also for an English edition. The students had been given a copy of a few chapters of the book and my talk was now to supplement the reading.

I was glad to hear that Professor Pöckl wanted a rather programmatic lecture. So the title that we both decided on was: “Goals and Ways of Applied Eurolinguistics in a Globalized World”.

After summarizing the basic competences for knowledge societies that we could deduce from best-selling books on socioeconomic history and development, I presented my ideas of how we should/could teach eurolinguistics and what kind of research questions we should/could focus on. Of course, I also introduced LdL, BGE and two of my student projects (at the moment, the outline of my presentation together with the links I used is still available on my Wikiversity site). I also tried to activate the students using questionnaires and inserting brief discussions; their professor afterwards told me that he was surprised how much the (normally shy) students actually participated in the brief discussions. Another professor told me immediately after my talk that her students said that they were inspired by the ideas presented and that they would like to talk about them in the following seminar session. Both professors told me that their students—all future interpreters and translators—normally ask for practical exercises in interpreting and translating and dislike too much “academic research”; but due to my talk, they said, students could see that doing research, if in some way connected to practical problems, is something that students should try out in present-day society and that it is something that can be fun. As a matter of fact, when I came back to my office in Eichstätt, there was already a mail by a student who wanted to add me to her network on xing.de and to exchange ideas on a thesis she is working on.

Joachim Grzega

Lecture with David Crystal

Last Thursday I attended a lecture given by the renowned and respected linguist David Crystal. The audience was thrilled by his very entertaining, or rather: edutaining, speech. This gives me courage to continue developping ideas for “linguistic edutainment” — also for an expert audience.

Moreover, David Crystal also called for a new kind of Historical English Linguistics, namely Applied Historical English Linguistics. He talked about how he taught Shakespearean pronunciation to a theater group. This is something that I was already asked for a few years ago (however, not for the performance of an entire drama, but for the performance of 2 Shakespearean sonnets). Apart from that, there is more that can be understood under Applied Historical English Linguistics – e.g. teaching knowledge of historical linguistics that teachers need to answer frequent learner questions. This is something I’ve been teaching as a course for several years. The course is also on the English Wikiversity since 2007:
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Applied_historical_English_linguistics

Joachim Grzega

BGE and thereafter

After the press reports on BGE, many people have contacted us, especially asking for self-teaching material. We are eagerly working on that.

Also, companies want to cooperate with us and have asked us whether BGE can also be particularly designed for certain professional groups. There is no real need for special subconcepts. The idea of the “individual” vocabulary aside from the “common” vocabulary allows a lexical specialization from the very beginning. In addition, it is easily conceivable to create courses such as “GE-A” (Global English for Academia), “GE-B” (Global English for Business), “GE-C” (Global English for Casual Communication). SO we have also begun to work on GE-B.

Joachim Grzega

Academic Feedback on My Work

A Spanish journal wants to translate (or an adapted Spanish version) of my article on Wikipedia.

Jean-Pol Martin and I have been asked to write an article on LdL for a French journal.

JG