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 and the European Day of Languages

Today is the European Day of Languages. Therefore, I would already like to give the link to the self-teaching material for Basic Global English here, on an inofficial basis. When the accompanying material is ready in 2-3 weeks, there will also be an official publication on the BGE website and the ASEcoLi website. As a social-enterpreneurial contribution the central materials will be accessible for free.

The European Day of Languages has been celebrated since the European Year of Languages in 2001. It commemorates the promotion of multilingualism. I regard BGE as one way to multilingualism. Many people are afraid that a promotion of English as a thread to other languages. But I see it as a component of global trilingualism, or “global triglossia” as I have called it (and as it can be read in my publications, e.g. in an article in the Journal for EuroLinguistiX). This means that I see BGE as door-opener to other cultures. Once English has allowed to communicate with people from another culture, I can decide to delve into this culture in a more thorough way and start to learn the language(s) of that culture. When I am talking to people about this, I always use the same example, which happened when we taught BGE to children in a EU project. The German kids were not only able to communicative with their EU partner-schools via letters, but when they were in Italy they could already talk to their Italian partner-kids on a basic level. They found it so interesting that they asked their principal also for a course in “Italian”. Basic Global English as a door-opener to Italian; and it can be a door-opener to other languages, too.

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.

BGE material for sale!

We are happy to announce that ASEcoLi now offers teaching and learning materials, in part in cooperation with Lulu.com,

• for primary schools (Hello World!)
• for self-educated German-speaking learners (Tickets to Basic Global English – Englisch in 111 Tagen)

See the following list or the ASEcoLi Website (Section “Publications/Material”).

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Print 15.00 EUR – eBook 4.50 EUR (Preview at Lulu.com; hand-outs in other languages for free at http://www.basicglobalenglish.com)

Joachim Grzega (with the assistance of Marion Schöner and Katja Weber) Hello World! Teacher Handbook Basic Global English (BGE)for First-Year Learners of Age Group 7-10 ASEcoLi Publications by the Academy for SocioEconomic Linguistics 1.1

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Print 15.99 – eBook 5.50 EUR (Preview at Lulu.com)

Joachim Grzega (with the assistance of Marion Schöner and Katja Weber) Hello World! Learner Materials Basic Global English (BGE) for First-Year Learners of Age Group 7-10 ASEcoLi Publications by the Academy for SocioEconomic Linguistics 1.2

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* download all files  (783 MB!) (7.50 EUR) > Contact ASEcoLi * download textbooks + flashcards (84MB!) (5 EUR) > Contact ASEcoLi * all files on DVD (10 EUR) > Contact ASEcoLi * textbook + flashcards on CD (5 EUR) > Contact ASEcoLi * WAV-files part 1 as audio-CD (4.50 EUR) > Contact ASEcoLi * WAV-files part 2 as audio-CD(4.50 EUR) > Contact ASEcoLi

Joachim Grzega Tickets to Basic Global English – Englisch in 111 Tagen ASEcoLi Publications by the Academy for SocioEconomic Linguistics 3 Consists of: 1. Textbook, 2. computerized German-English flashcards for Phase-6, 3. audio files (WAV-format + MP3-format) Here is a look into the preface and the instructions (in German)

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Trying out my skills in Romanian

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.

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

Test Lessons BGE for Self-Study

Today I completed two test versions “BGE for self-study”!!! Version 1 consists of an international main book in English + audio files and an accompanying book in German. Version 2 consists of a book especially for German learners.

These materials are now sent to various test persons, who should work with them and give me feedback by March 31.

Joachim Grzega

BGE on YouTube

On YouTube you have access to two video files in which I present BGE and react to some common points of criticism against BGE:

Part 1:

Part 2:

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