Getting real in teaching listening

Book review: Richard Cauldwell: Phonology for Listening. Teaching the Stream of Speech. Speech in Action. Birmingham, UK 2013. ISBN 0954344723, ISBN-13: 978-0954344726. Printed on demand by Amazon. €25.68 http://www.speechinaction.com Richard Cauldwell makes a key point: Listening acquisition lags behind the acquisition of other skills, he says, because we treat listening skills as something learners will […]

Eric Berne: Games People Play

A seminal, very useful book is turning 50 this coming year. Published in 1964, and the best selling non-fiction book of the 1960s, Games People Play by Dr. Eric Berne introduced Transactional Analysis, which looked closely at human relationships. He opted to study interaction as transaction, since he said we communicate to get something out […]

EAP 2013

We had an EAP  conference here in Berlin yesterday organized by the Humboldt University Language Centre. ELTABB, the teachers association I coordinate events with, was involved as one of the sponsors. This was the second such annual conference here in Berlin. Time will tell whether there is a need for such a conference to grow […]

Ha-Joon Chang

Ha-Joon Chang, Professor of Political Economy of Development at the University of Cambridge, explains economics very clearly and simply. In his book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, he argues these 23 tenets: There is really no such thing as a free market. Companies should not be run in the interest of their […]

Presenting science to your peers

I gave a morning workshop yesterday on scientific presentations to students of Geoscience and updated my approach a little. It now includes the concept of creating storytelling cycles of tension and resolution (situation, complication, resolution, example), as explained by presentation guru Andrew Abela, whose book, Advanced Presentations by Design, I have just ordered. Also see […]

Ian Badger on Listening, and apps for teaching

I had the opportunity to hear Ian Badger speak at MELTA in the mid-2000s, and even back then he was saying we should be teaching the English people need at the workplace, not the standardized language codified and prescribed in Business English course books. Now he has an excellent book/audio CD, Collins English for Business: […]