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

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