Thanks Helmut.

There’s a personal story that goes with this, as you can well imagine. My first present from my husband was a…

Blog challenge! Please join in and add two similar but different pictures to your blog!
Brad Patterson had the nice idea after I’d posted this.
Looking forward to seeing your pictures.
The following people have taken the challenge so far.

• Brad Patterson
• Baiba Svenca
• Ceri Jones
• Chiew Pang
• Cecilia Lemos
• Chris Adams
• Janet Bianchini
• Jason Renshaw
• Karenne Silvester
• Michael Harrison
• Ian James posted this
• Tara Benwell in My English Club
• Paco Gascón
• Stew Tunnicliff
• Mieke Kenis
• Leslie
• Alice M on Mafalda

photo: S. Hofschlaeger / pixelio.de

This roundup of blog posts written by BE/ESP teachers, teacher trainers and materials writers includes personal professional blogs and regular or guest posts for a magazine or publisher. Written for two separate target groups, viz. learners vs. peers, their purpose varies widely:

1. to reflect on personal development
2. to share materials and start discussions
3. to market oneself, or a group of authors, to peers and clients
4. to organize communications with students and clients.

For a summary of all of the posts,  take a quiz to test yourself on whether you’d want to read that particular post more thoroughly. Each question contains the link you need, and background on the author.

Take the quiz here:

The BE/ESP Blog Carnival Quiz

(quiz made using http://www.proprofs.com software)

A very warm thank you to all of the bloggers or featured guest authors who contributed to this carnival (in the order they arrived):

• Ian McMaster / Business Spotlight: International English
• Deborah Capras / Business Spotlight / Wise Words: Sarah Palin’s Shakespearean Tweets
• Jason Renshaw / English Raven: The best approach to exam prep is an unplugged one
• Virginia Allum / EMP English for Nursing and Health: For ESP to work, keep it real
• Nick Robinson / English for Marketing: Is there such as a thing as “general principles for the teaching of ESP”?
• Karenne Sylvester / Business English ~5 mins: Common errors
• Karenne Sylvester / Kalinago English: Wiki that company!
• Aleksandra Luczak / 1. Business and Legal English Blog for N.E.Body (the quiz refers to this post). 2. English for Polish Students of Law
• OUP ELT Global / Sam McCarter: What was the question?
• OUP ELT Global / John Hughes: Take time to teach negotiating
• OUP ELT Global / Vicki Hollett:  Activities for techies
• Vicki Hollett / Learning to speak ‘merican: Got any time to spare?
• Candy van Olst / Candy’s Blog: Is THIS dogme, perhaps?
• Eric Roth / Compelling Conversations: Have You Added Informational Interviews to Your Advanced ESL Class Yet?
• Alex Case / TEFLtastic: Getting Away with Games in Business English Classes
• Stewart Tunnicliff / Goodopenenglish: Creative Writing for English learners
• Evan Frendo / English for the Workplace: On teaching the language of meetings
• Sue Lyon-Jones / The PLN Staff Lounge: When Good Workplaces Go Bad
• Jennifer Verschoor / My integrating technology journey: Best websites to teach writing
• Mike Harrison: Techno Tool Tames Transcription Trouble
• Betty Carlson / Forever Teaching : Oh, I just don’t know where to begin
• Shelly Terrell / Teacher Reboot Camp: Goal-Setting with English Language Learners
• OUP ELT Global / Shelly Terrell: Motivating Adult Learners
• Vicky Loras: Teaching Business English in Switzerland
• Pete Sharma / PSA: Business English materials in the digital age: what’s new?
• Delta Publishing / Nicky Hockly: Teaching Online 5: Five steps to becoming a (good) online tutor

BESIG Conference in Bielefeld, 19-21 November 2010

So Dogme means “emergent” and “co-constructed learning” on the one hand, and “essential bareness” on the other. It has little to do with whether there is in fact a book around. It seems like the most natural approach to take until you hit on some very specific snags that can’t just be solved then and there. You, the teacher, have the experience, authority and responsibility to point the way, even define the next steps once things stop “emerging”.  As Scott Thornbury’s approach is a philosophy, rather than a method, it’s more about your perspective than about what you actually do. Got that? Right. I think it’s only natural to be somewhat confused.

I started into EFL in small town Germany, with an academic background, and was, yes, a native speaker. It’s unfair, I know. I didn’t skill up beforehand because it was so easy to get a job. My very first gig was two weeks with a hospital professional on his way to Australia to manage a huge reorganization project. I knew nothing about hospitals, Australia, “TEFL”. We were given a gawdawful coursebook on the economy in general that contained a lot of utterly useless translation work from German to English. He was keen. We both did some thinking, adjourned for research, pooled our resources, made up tasks together as we went along. He was happy. I wish I could beam myself back and see whether I would be, now. Had I started out, inexperienced, wanting to apply “tried and tested” teaching tools without the option of “essential bareness”, eager to live up to a quality standard of some sort, things might have gotten pretty ugly.

My Director of Studies then promptly gave me my first company course: Deutsche Bank. Three tiers. Six learners each. Ten weeks. No guru, no method, no teacher. No CELTA. Yet an opportunity on a silver platter. On arrival, I found they had self-study materials that I wasn’t really supposed to know about, let alone use, but the participants eagerly handed them over for me to peruse. After they’d told me in detail what they actually did all day, what worried them and what they wanted to do in our course (in English naturally), we went about carefully setting up a great big simulation based on the skills featured in those books, with scenarios that all the participants were familiar with and needed to master in English. We didn’t do it all at once, I’d watch them and they’d watch each other and then we’d figure out what they needed. The atmosphere was very friendly. I was told by my advisor to “include some grammar”, and I brought along a horrid little book that thoroughly confused us all. What made most sense and came most naturally was teaching short phrases that came up in our simulations, and comparing sentences that used or varied them. Sometimes I’d show them phrases in their self-study book before we went into the simulations. Someone else would be responsible for notes each lesson. Chunks. Emergent. Co-constructed. Scaffolding.

I still like to work like that. No method, no guru, no teacher?

Actually, my initial do-it-yourself learning curve in TEFL included:

• how to assess what students need
• how to use visuals
• how to document what we are learning

It felt pretty good to figure these things out on my own, but I didn’t really get it right: An evening class student came back from an intensive course in Britain and had made incredible progress. That was very sobering. And then, one day, I met the first challenge I couldn’t handle: A woman with serious mental blockades connected to suddenly having to manage her company in English. She would shut down completely when she had to speak English. I was so sorry, and completely fascinated, and finally had the challenge I needed to make teaching my profession. So I earnestly started learning how promote language learning:

• how to prepare students to process new language
• how to review new input to really make it stick
• how to get learners to notice and accept their own progress

I began going to workshops, soaking up accepted TEFL methodology, taking every bit of training offered by the different schools I worked for, and learned

• how to facilitate groups
• how to teach people who think they can’t learn
• how to use media
• how to assess performance
• how to give feedback

I’d always used didactic approaches from museum work, e.g. responding to images and music, solving puzzles, creating and extending stories/ scenarios, acting things out, making posters etc. But there was an intensive phase where I overegged the pudding, using all sorts of therapeutic bells and whistles. I quickly realized it was just a way to keep people who like that sort of thing happy. Went mainstream again. Did the LCCI CertTEB with Mark Powell. Took the Cambridge TKT. I was always going to do CELTA, but there were always other extensive courses that seemed more applicable and interesting: intercultural competency; media in teaching; teaching ESP at college; setting up distance learning.

Today my classes are materials-light though I actually write self-study materials; I’m focussed on my learners and don’t make my students work online unless they want to, though my classes are permanently hooked up to the internet. I’d quite possibly fail CELTA, as my lesson plans hardly ever turn out the way I thought, and I hardly use my laminating machine anymore, though the guillotine does comes in handy for made-to-lesson cards. If a learner needs to be immersed in hands-on, friendly learning materials, I can still pull out the stops.

Looking back at my teaching life so far, I see I’ve missed the boat on CELTA. It should have come after about a year of teaching. I feel a bit naked around EFL movers and shakers who espouse CELTA, but that can’t be helped. It’s so easy to get too comfortable in teaching, so I’d still take a course, frankly, reviewing the whole of TEFL, with a trainer whose philosophical approach embraces dogme and who focusses on support and coaching, rather than on input and training.

I’m clearly not the nicest Anne Hodgson online.

One of my nephews thought I was another Facebook Anne Hodgson. She looks that much like me.

Now, being confused with namesakes or similarly named people doesn’t worry me in the least. On the contrary, there is safety in numbers. Here are my favorites:

• The similarly named Ann Hodgman has written children’s books with great titles like “The French Fry Aliens” and “My Babysitter Bites Again”. Please feel free to confuse me with her.
• Ann Hodgson is a professor of Education at the University of London, with a special focus on 14-19 education and training and life-long learning. I’ve found her in connection with IATEFL. I’m afraid she’s got qualifications I’ll never have.
• Anne Hodgson & Co, a group of lawyers headed by my namesake, lends a touch of class to our dogsbody name.

No, what really has me worried is what happens when I type my tag annehodg into the internet. I did so last night for a laugh,  and looking over all the links gave me a bit of a shock. I work hard to create a professional online presence, only, and to protect the privacy of people close to me, and I’ve been relatively successful. But using Twitter in particular means that the things I’ve written all over the place this past year do come together in a rather disconcerting way.

I’m turning over a new leaf for the sake of privacy. I’m off Twitter for anything but professional networking, for one, and it’s time to change my tag.

This particular blog carnival came into being when Carl Dowse was rounding up blogs dedicated to Business English in a links list for BESIG, the Business English Special Interest Group of IATEFL. The conversation brought to light that there are just a few blogs that focus completely on business, like Evan Frendo’s “English for the Workplace“, Jeremy Day’s “Specific English“, the Business Spotlight blogs by Deborah Capras, Helen Strong and Robert Gibson, or Jeffrey Hill’s “The English Blog: Business“. But even writers for and teachers of Business English will treat non-business topics in their blogs; just think of Vicki Hollett’s “Learning to speak ‘merican” or Karenne Sylvester’s “Kalinago English“. Then, teachers of general English are highly respected and much read in the BE/ ESP community, like Alex Case of “TEFLtastic“, Larry Ferlazzo of “Websites of the Day” or Jamie Keddie,  etc. etc. Plenty of teachers – including many readers of this blog! – cross over on a daily basis between teaching young learners, giving general English classes and handling business English groups, and they must have interesting lesson ideas to share to introduce themselves to a more specialized, business-focussed readership. The round-up of blogposts will also be published on the BESIG website – so new readers are guaranteed!

So I’d like to extend a very warm invitation to all of you, from the specialist to the generalist, to contribute to this upcoming event. Just make sure that your entry is indeed geared to Business English or ESP, that is: the English people need at work. Have a look at the form, please, and let me know whether you’ll be joining us.