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

Close to completion: BGE materials for adults

The work on BGE materials for self-study has required my full attention of the past weeks. It was a very tough task to find good “transcultural” or “culture-free” pictures and to create good intercultural dialogs. The book is practically finished; however, there are a few technical problems due to the size of the file.

Also completed are: the accompanying book for German autodidacts and the accompanying book for German adult learner groups. They will soon be available to the public.

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 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

Stumbling in my adults’ BGE Lesson #5

While Lessons #3 and #4 at the Akademie Schönbühl went well, the plan for #5 led to an unplanned and highly emotional evaluation-discussion. After I had the participants write a fax (like a written test, which most of them managed quite well), I had the usual preparatory section. Already during that phase, two groups complained that the topics were too demanding: the group that had to present “how to talk about things in the past” (i.e. simple past) and the group that had to present “how to contrast things” (i.e. comparative). Then there was first a revision and then a vocabulary group (I used the vocabulary exercise also to revise old vocabulary). Then, during the “past tense” group’s turn, people seemed so stressed that I broke up the lesson and started a discussion/evaluation.

It was strange that all of sudden people did not remember words that we have had in every single lesson. They claimed that there were so many unknown words and so few revision exercises (while I, in contrast, had noted that they didn’t even fully use the revision offers in class properly). Back home, I first had to correct the diagnosis. What I could draw from their impressions and feelings is, that it must indeed be stressful for the presenters to pay simultaneous attention to (1) the language, (2) the voice/presentation style, and (3) the contents, and that it must indeed be stressful for the listeners (1) to decode the words and (2) to process the contents. Therefore, I have decided to provide the worksheets for the experts with a German translation in small print and, for the rest of the learners, to intersperse complex contents with more explanations in the learners’ mother tongue. Also, most of the participants seem to have forgotten how to learn, so I will probably have to repeat my teaching advice more frequently.

Let’s see how it will work tonight.

Joachim Grzega

2nd BGE lesson in Lindau

There are now 17 learners in the group. In the 2nd lesson I inserted more partner work so that people practiced more, but it was also harder to give feedback on their utterances. On the other hand, if I have everybody read or say 1 or 2 sentences followed by a feedback on my part, then this takes a lot of time where the others are rather passive.

I think that I’ve managed to respect the heterogeneous skills of the learners in a better way. At the same time, it’s also demanding to see that the better ones don’t scare off the “true” beginners (who are actually the real target group of BGE).

I try to present grammar basically in two ways: the lexical approach and presentation in the form of tables and rules. And I give learners fixed dialog that they may want to memorize at first before replacing elements with elements that are more personalized.

Despite my improvements, I’ve sent out a feedback questionnaire to get an idea of the learners’ feelings.

Also of note, we have still another teacher now among us. She will observe and give me feedback, too. She suggests to work more with “learning streets”. This seems an idea worth reflecting on, but such a technique must, in my view, not lead to a smaller degree of dialog/interaction.

And I’m definitely going to include much more LdL. (e.g.: Grammar sections could be prepared and presented by better students).

Joachim Grzega

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

BGE – Additional Material

My BGE materials for primary schools now also include a German version of the respective hand-outs. A French, a Spanish and an Italian version are in the making, too.

Joachim Grzega