Learning or using English?

What English course settings might a student in Germany experience? Evan Frendo’s professional development session at ELTABB cleared the cobwebs on CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), a relatively new concept at the primary and secondary school level. I know it well from my own school days at The German School in Washington. Going through […]

Rhetorical styles

The PhD students looked at ways of incorporating rhetorical styles into their poster presentations. They were best at using the rule of three for repetition, but clearly need lots of practice in creating shorter, more powerful parallel phrases. I demonstratrated the power of cutting out needless repetition through this correction (which is still not ideal): […]

Stuart Brown explains play

I used the first 10 minutes of this video, with its wonderful photos of the male polar bear and the female husky at play, as an intro to my last/ 3rd day of teaching the PhD students, as they trailed in, to attune them to the idea that play allows us to do things we […]

An elevator speech format

Today the PhD students and I did this exercise, among others, to prepare elevator speeches that will work with a wider audience. Step 1: Watch the presentation by Steven Johnson on his book, Where Good Ideas Come From. Then answer: How long have I been exploring this? Why is it relevant? What’s my approach/ perspective? […]

Communicating science across fields

Today I gave a class to PhD candidates on the challenge of communicating science to a broader audience without dumbing down. First I did a mixer where each member chose a word from their research, something that was challenging them or very much on their mind. I told them that “intelligibility” was on mine, and […]

Lee Holtz communicates science

I’m delighted to be teaching a workshop geared to communicating science this week. Watch Lee Holtz and decide: What is his profession, and who exactly is his main audience: scientists? reviewers policy makers? the general public? What makes you think so? You’ll find the answer in this blog.

ELF in the news

I’ve been listening to Al Jazeera all day as the reports come in about the horrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan, 8.9 on the Richter scale, a 7 on the Japanese scale. The Japanese people are being so courageous. Thinking of them. Anyway, as I listen, it strikes me: There’s been a lot of talk […]