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 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

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

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

German college teacher association (bpv) interested in BGE

Two days ago the chairman of the bpv, the Bayerischer Philologenverband (Association of College Teachers in Bavaria) and two of his colleagues came to see me in my office to discuss Basic Global English. We had a very fruitful debate and the bpv was highly interested in reflecting on BGE for an improved transitory period from elementary school to secondary schools. One of the plusses of BGE the bpv was the high communicative competence of the learners and that the BGE material respected the heterogeneity of learner groups. The next meeting will be in October/November.

Joachim Grzega

BGE lesson #7 in Lindau

I received good feedback for the latest lesson at the Akademie Schönbühl. Participants are happy that they not get the expert-group materials one week in advance (together with a German translation). Also the introduction of the new vocabulary in a suggestopedic way (which was done by one of the future BGE instructors) was welcomed as a nice change. Tomorrow we will have our final lesson and a form of test to see how well I have done as a teacher.

BGE lesson #6 in Lindau

“It must have gone well today, judging from your smile,” the director of the Akademie Schönbühl said when he entered the room after the lesson. Indeed, last session in Lindau was very good again. The learners’ performance during the pronunciation section was good as never before. One of the members said that this may have been, because I acted as such a great motivator today (and before the lesson people weren’t sure what they had to expect after last session’s discussion).

It is surprising, though, that it is still extremely hard for people to understand the sandwich technique, that it is also hard for them that they simply have to stick to what is written on their expert worksheets in order to present their material, and that it is also quite hard to speak slowly, clearly and loudly. But this is part of training intercultural competence. Also of note, the vocabulary section dealt with emotions this time and in order to memorize the words more easily learners were asked to also play the words (sad, angry etc.); not everyone felt at ease with that.

All in all, however, there was a very relaxed atmosphere in class. And learners also said that they feel they keep improving.

Joachim Grzega