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 in the press

Nice report on BGE in the April/May edition of The Linguist.

Joachim Grzega

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

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

BGE in the regional press

In today’s edition of the regional newspaper “Nürnberger Nachrichten” was a report on BGE (see the online version). As an immediate positive reaction, I received e-mails from 15 readers asking for self-study material (among them: a mayor). I’m eagerly working on this, but creating material for self-teaching is highly complex–especially since we planned to create something that is immediately usable for learners of different mother tongues. Marion Schöner and I have created some pages already, but the discussion in my seminar today has shown that we need to reflect more particularly on the following questions:

• How can we teach pronunciation just from a book that works with pictures and English words? (Or is it impossible? This would mean, of course, that we cannot use an entirely monolingual approach (after all, this is something that the applied linguist Wolfgang Butzkamm has been promoting for many years: functional bilingualism–cf. the English Wikipedia entry on Butzkamm).
• How can people test themselves?
• How can we teach communicative competence when there is only one learner?

More about BGE for self-study in another post.

Joachim Grzega

LdL article on Goethe-Institut’s website

A few weeks ago, Jean-Pol Martin and I were interviewed by a journalist working for the Goethe Institute. His article has now appeared in English on the Goethe Institute website here.

Joachim Grzega

LdL in the press

Here is a newsreport (in German) on my presentation of LdL in Heilbronn from the Hohenloher Zeitung.

Joachim Grzega

Interview: LdL and Other Interactive Methods

Yesterday Jean-Pol Martin and I were interviewed on LdL by someone from the Goethe-Institut in Frankfurt. He wants to write an article on LdL for the Goethe-Institut’s website.

One of the questions was whether LdL wouldn’t only help the student-experts (or “mini-teacher”, as I call them in elementary school), but not the rest of the class, who would more profit from an interactive model with the teacher in the center. Actually, I did a little experiment on exactly this question in my 2 International Business English classes last year. The results haven’t been published yet, but the essence is that the performances of “LdL classes” in spontaneous, unannounced written tests is not lower than those of other “interactive classes”. (And we always have to keep in mind that many of the target competences of LdL lessons cannot be checked with written tests).

Joachim Grzega

LdL in DIE ZEIT

An article on LdL was published in the German quality weekly DIE ZEIT:
here

The first commentator even suggests to award Jean-Pol Martin and his “disciples” with the Nobel Peace Prize…

Joachim Grzega

European Day of Languages

September 26 is the European Day of Languages.

This was a motivation for me to up-date the list of web links and printed publications on EuroLinguistiX.

Yesterday I was interviewed on Basic Global English by a journalist from the regional newspaper “Nürnberger Nachrichten”. While listening to me, he put it correctly into a nutshell: the idea of BGE is practically “Intercultural Competence” taught in English. Yes—and that’s what makes it so different from traditional concepts of Teaching English as a Foreign Language. That’s why BGE can also open portals to other languages. Example: after their trip to Italy, many of our BGE kids in Goldkronach actually decided to participate in an optional course in Italian as well.

On Tuesday, we visited our former BGE class again and did an oral and written test with them. I’m currently evaluating the material. The first impression looks promising.

Joachim Grzega