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

BGE, LdL and socioeconomic linguistics in dissertations

A German student contacted me because she wants to write her Master of Education thesis on BGE and LdL. A student from Singapore is writing his Ph.D. thesis on the use of English in China and aims at integrating BGE and my ideas on socioeconomic linguistics. That is a fantastic development.

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

BGE for Entertainment

I used BGE in a new experiment: I tried to speak and sing just in BGE manner at a performance I gave to a “normal/average” audience–and it seemed to work well; the audience liked it. Here’s the report in the local newspaper, Eichstätter Kurier.

Joachim Grzega

Akademie Schönbühl, BGE and LdL in the Press

Since this week I am the partner of a private limited company: the Akademie Schönbühl, an enterprise for advanced training and further education. I’m working together with Alfred Weinberger, who has already established an interesting program of courses and who has a high reputation reaching institutions not only in southern Germany, but also in Austria and Switzerland. At the Akademie Schönbühl, I will try to establish a new competence center for languages and communication.

Due to this new cooperation, I was interviewed by Michael Lehner, journalist working for the Schwäbische Zeitung. He understood the idea of BGE and LdL very fast and made suggestions for the further development and spread of BGE and LdL. He has tried to condense all the information he collected during the 90-min interview in this article, which appeared today.

Joachim Grzega

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

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

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

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

Peer group learning: LdL, BGE and IPK at a conference in Berlin

Last Friday I was in Berlin at the Didaktik Dialog (organized by Institut für prospektive Analysen (IPA), Team Global and the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung) to present LdL in connection with BGE (2^nd-graders) and my course Internet and Project Competence/Internet- und Projektkompetenz (IPK) that I’m currently offering for teenagers at the college next to our university. At present, the outline of my presentation, including some internet links, is still available on my Wikiversity page.

1. As to IPK, I illustrated the targets and showed some examples of websites by my students at university as “best practice” (see the example 1 and example 2). Then I tried to show what the difficulties are when (a) you do such a course almost exclusively non-face-to-face, via internet, (b) not everyone who first said they supported the idea (in this case the teachers of the different subjects) do not any longer support this, (c) students are not permanently compelled to complete certain tasks, (d) when such a project takes too much time. In the end, though I was able to make it clear—thanks to the student projects—that such the basic concept can lead to impressive results.

2. As regards BGE, I showed a video from Lesson 5 when the kids have to act as “mini-teachers” for an entire section of the lesson for the first time. The reactions from the audience were positive and supportive and showed curiosity to learn more about LdL and BGE. I could distribute several business cards

The entire conference was quite interesting. There was a teacher with two girls from a compulsory school who organize activities (“Fit for Life”) with teenagers from a town in Brazil and one in South Africa. They either do these projects (e.g. writing and presenting a theater play) via internet or together in one of the “network towns”. Throughout their presentation they showed how all of this is done during leisure time and their averseness to school (except for their teacher) became clear. Someone from the audience asked why they felt such averseness to school, and one girl replied that they have already organized many events and they always invite their friends, family, teachers and principal. As of yet, not a single one of their teachers has ever come to one of their events.

Another guy was the coordinator of the “Buddy Projekt”. Buddies are kids that are charged with finding a solution for a problem or being responsible for certain tasks, including the tutoring of other kids in class. So this comes close to what LdL is about—actually, the guy knew LdL and Jean-Pol Martin.

The audience consisted of all kinds of people active in education business: teachers, professors, private tutors, journalists, members of education institutes. Three utterances that set me thinking are the following:

1. Teachers are still very resistant when someone comes from outside to offer help—one, because they feel their work and their competences are ignored, and two because they fear they have to investigate still more time and effort. To me, this means that what we can bring to school are just offers and ways to find out how teachers with their individual personalities can integrate our suggestions to facilitate their life, to experience more fun in their profession. When we develop teaching concepts we have to keep both sides in mind: the children and the teachers.

2. You won’t convince teachers to try out concepts when you don’t convince their principals.

3. There are still areas of the German school system that are rather neglected: the Hauptschule and the Berufsschule. I’ve decided to spend on networking in this area.

Joachim Grzega