Jean-Paul Nerrier’s Globish
This is a comment on a great post by The Tesla Coil on the Graddolization of EFL. David Graddol honored MELTA with a visit last summer. Thanks, Tony Watt for the Globish link: Only 4% of the people communicating with each other today in English are both/ all native speakers. Jean-Paul Nerrier wants to “make it […]
Agile one to one. Progress, step by step
This is how I teach. Aiming too high can cause negative stress. I’ve learned to break learning down into small, productive, rewarding steps. I was thrilled and very priviledged to be sponsored by Cornelsen to present this at BESIG, the Business English Special Interest Group, in Poznan last weekend. It was a great event. This […]
Question: Do you believe in learning styles?
http://annehodgson.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/learning.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadIn my profession there’s a hot debate going on about “learning styles”. You know, finding out whether you are a visual learner and need to see things to understand them, or an auditory learner who prefers to hear things, or whether you are a kinethetic learner and have to […]
Losing face in English
I woke up this morning thinking about the debate on this blog on Westerwelle. It seems to me that this is an interesting case of a person losing face in public because he is being forced to speak English. BTW, I think the discussion has showed that both sides lost face: Westerwelle was most obviously […]
Asimov deconstructed
What Is Intelligence, Anyway? by Isaac Asimov What is intelligence, anyway? When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a […]
How I learned Latin… and French
Since I grew up bilingual in German and English, Latin was the first foreign language I learned. My dad taught me Latin when I was 5, using the Nature Method, a book of texts featuring a family with kids my age on up, talking about everyday life, with a brother beating up on his little […]
For teachers only: Vocabulary
Yesterday I ran a workshop for English teachers at VW in Wolfsburg who are having trouble adapting the coursebook they are using for their mixed level courses. Before they get started on the given tasks, they have to pre-teach the more challenging vocabulary. The coursebook comes with great texts that can be exploited, along with […]
