Wolfram Alpha Bravo

A new link provided by Russell Stannard in November's English Teaching Professional mag: The Wolfram alpha website (named after creator Stephen Wolfram).

It's kind of like a variation of Google - ie, a search engine - but through which it seems to come up with various computational statistics on your search entry. For example, enter your name, and you can find such stats as how many people are alive with your name, how many people were born with the same name across the years, and so on.

Stannard suggests that you can use this site to compile informational searches on eg, cities, birthdates, foods, weather. However, perhaps it would be preferable to determine what linguistic output you are looking for, as it will be easy for your students just to list a load of words and numbers ad verbatim without doing much with them. An obvious language lesson that springs to mind would be for comparatives/superlatives.

I will add the Wolfram widget temporarily for you to do a test search.

Scam spam

Bombarded with them each day, I wonder whether there is perhaps scope to make a reading/writing lesson out of them, as an alternative to other letter writing genres - typically the job application letter and letter of complaint. This is the spam mail which tries to scam you or someone somewhere/their of your millions. All for a good cause, of course...

You could first of all analyze through genre analysis techniques. Eg, a lot of the mails commence with a personal introduction. This is followed by some more personal information to create some feeling of common rapport. Then, some sort of tragedy or unexpected announcement is made involving financial assets which happen to be destined to the reader. Finally, a plea is made for the reader to contact the writer. Sign off.

Some real samples of such mail:

Hi my dear friend,


My name is Mr. Goodluck Adom...

Donald A Phillips ESQ
LONDON, ENGLAND


I am in receipt of your response to the notification.


Kindly note that the notice you received has been prompted by the information contained in the WILL of the deceased. I stand to gain nothing in this matter, other than fulfilling the bligations bestowed on me by the late Mr.Richard Moore to ensure that his wishes are carried out as contained in his WILL. The value of the estate queathed to you is about $6.750, 000.00. The copy of the Will shall be made available to you after an application of claims has been filed at the London probate registry for security reasons.


The Will has to be executed before you can claim the bequest made to you. In order to execute the WILL, I need you to reconfirm your full names, current address, and phone numbers, with which I would process and obtain a probate order from the Probate Registry division of Her Majesty's Courts Services that will enable you claim your money from the finance institution were it is
lodged.


Do get back to me with your details to enable me commence the processing.


Yours faithfully,
Donald A Phillips Esq.


Dear Sir/Madam,


My name is Sgt. White Connor, an American soldier serving in the Military of the 1st Armored Division in Iraq. As you know, we are being attacked by insurgents everyday and car bombings. We stumbled into Saddam Hussein's storage vault and discovered funds belonging to his family. The total amount is US$25 Million dollars in cash, mostly 100 dollar bills tightly tied in $1000.00 bundles. We want to move this money to a reputable/sincere person for investment purposes.


This is the reason for contacting you.We are ready to compensate you with good percentage of the funds. The only thing we require from you is just for you to help us move the funds out of Iraq because Iraq is a war zone. We plan on using diplomatic means to ship the money out as military cargo, using diplomatic immunity.


If you are interested I will send you the full details. My job is to find a good and respectable partner with great repute that we can trust to assist us. Can we trust you? When you receive this letter,kindly send me an e-mail signifying your interest including your most confidential telephone numbers and your full mailing address.


Regards,
Sgt. White Connor.


I am Mr.Mohamed Abdul Monem, National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD) married with two children. I am writing this letter to ask for your support and co-operation to carry out this business opportunity in my department. On June 6, 1999, an America Oil consultant/contractor with Petroleum
Corporation,Late Mr. Arthur Simermeyer, made a numbered time (fixed) deposit for twelve calendar months, in my branch upon maturity.


After a month, we sent a reminder and finally we discovered from his contract employers, the Petroleum Corporation that Mr. Arthur Simermeyer, died in the plane crash On October 31, 1999, (an Egyptian Boeing 767 Flight 990) with other passengers on board as you can confirm it yourself.


I shall furnish you with due process of concluding this transaction without any delay.


Hi dear,


My name is Smith Johnson of DHL UK; I work as the warehouse officer. There is a consignment in our office which has stayed here for almost 8 months; this consignment came from one Mr. Paul Acquah working Bank of Ghana in Africa to be delivered to one Mr. Steve Johnson in United States. I was instructed as the warehouse officer to find out the content of the fund, the scanning shows
it contains cash in United States dollar currency.


I have made several contacts through our office in USA to locate this Steve Johnson in Maryland in USA, it was shocking that the address given in the airway bill do not exist, I also found out that Paul Acquah is no more working with Bank of Ghana. He used his influence as a bank worker to ship
this fund through DHL office in Accra Ghana.


It's against the ethics of courier policy to transport cash; I have not declared to our office that the content is cash; you are the only one whom I am letting this information out. I have to write officially to my office that I have located the next of kin of Steve Johnson who the consignment should be forwarded to. I also took picture of the funds; approximately, it should be
about $5M. I will like to have your full names and address, phone and fax numbers so that I will get all necessary documentations in your favour, then but I will seek the help of a diplomat to deliver the consignment to you.


Reach for details.


Regards,
Smith John


- From the Desk Of MR. LORD ADAIR TURNER CHAIRMAN, FINANCIAL SERVICES AUTHORITY (FSA) It has come to our notice via our central monitoring computer that a huge fund has been credited in your name for transfer with a London Bank. Under the stipulated enabling Law of the Government of Great Britain and Wales and other Commonwealth States, any huge fund that has been found in our computer system waiting to be transferred without claims for a period of 6 months or less, shall be confiscated and forfeited to the Government of Great Britain and Wales.We do hereby ask you to contact this office immediately for ratification within the 3 days of this notice or consider your fund confiscated. We appreciate your urgent co-operation. Respond to my alternative Email.

Tidying up

I'm going to delete some script-heavy widgets from this blog, as it seems to be very slow in loading these days. I will gradually update the links, too...

What do you do?

I've now finished reading What Should I Do With My Life (See earlier post), and as the book progresses, it does broaden out into the realm of life choices generally rather than just job switches, as I criticized earlier.


Also, later in the book, there is an interesting mention of the significance of the question 'What do you do?' - ie, What's your job? It discussed a regional difference in the States, in that, for example, in New Orleans, this was considered an insignificant question, and was rarely asked in that part of the country. On the contrary, in New York, this would be one of the first questions asked, and it was an instant do or die marker of your credibility as a 'valued' human being/conglomerate drone.


I thought about how the question is used in the UK, and would propose that generally, it is used as a way of getting into a conversation through common ground, just as in way Brits often rely on comments about the weather to strike up conversation.


This goes on to remind me of a variation on ice-breaker lessons that I used to do, in that with more advanced classes, they can decide from a list of questions (which introduce more complex grammar/vocab formations) what they think would be 'good' questions to ask on a first meeting. You can set the contexts as a first date/job interview/parents etc, to extend the exercise. By the end, the students need to have practised asking/answering these questions to each other, and making sure that they have taken away a few new expressions to vary the 'What's your name?', 'Where do you live?', 'What do you do?' blandness.


Coincidentally, I've recently started taking a short evening class for accounting (despite loathing numbers and abhorring accounting!), and it was funny to see the teacher at the first class set what he seemed to think was a great activity and no doubt runs this activity at the start of every single course he does - talk to the person next to you and ask them these 2 questions (he then proceeded to right these questions out on a board, and explained in depth how to go about asking the questions...): 1) What is your name? (even though names had already been listed as an attendance check); 2) What are your hobbies? Imaginative? No.


Some possible questions for discussion - more 'exciting/adventurous' questions can be found according to class:

• I love your name; what's the origin?
• If you could have your time at college again, what would you study?
• What's the most spontaneous thing you've done in the last month?
• What trait do people find most annoying about you?
• Are you a fan of reality TV shows?
  
• What are you reading at the moment?
• What's your take on (current event)?
• Who in your family do you take after most?
• What's on your iPod these days?
• Are you a morning person or a night person?
• You've got only $50 to your name. How would you spend it?
• Tell me about a person who you admire.
• Can you recommend a restaurant to me?

Voices in the back of the head

An idea I have pinched from a recent in-house training session. Could be used for speech competition training, or just general concentration/confidence/voice projection building in English. Usable with all levels and ages except perhaps complete beginners.

In short - one student, A, makes a speech in English standing up in front of the class. Another 'yin/dark force/alter ego' student, B, stands behind student A, and starts to whisper insidious comments into their ear, such as 'you are terrible', 'poor pronunciation', 'everyone thinks what you're saying is boring', 'just forget about this and think about ... blah blah'. A has to remain focused and try to project their speech over the negative comments. The speech event could be as basic as just reading out the homework answers or answers to a grammar exercise, etc.

Thinking about spin-offs to this idea, you could perhaps also try distractors when doing listening exercises, to train your students to focus more - particularly important for listening exam skills. Perhaps get a sound track of daft sound effects/jingles which are played on a second tape player concurrent to the main listening exercise track. Certainly seems fun, and an exciting way to jazz up routine lessons. I could imagine that kids would love this in particular, although you'd have to make a clear goal to force the students to be motivated to concentrate on the main listening track rather than encouraging renegade students to break out into farting fanfares and convert the whole scene into anarchy. On the otherhand, perhaps you could allocate a group of 'farting' students in one sector of the class, while another has to gap fill from a playing cassette task.

In fact, these variations start to become infinite. For reticent teens, howabout playing a pop song on one cassette/CD player, while simultaneously playing another listening task on another machine...

Tracking Stats

Just occasionally, I look at the reader stats on Sitemeter in order to guage whether there is any purpose for me to continue spending time posting on this blog. It seems there is, although I would appreciate more feedback on those who are interested in TEFL resources available on the web. Anyway, I have never commented on these stats in a posting before, although I just had to smile when I found this search criteria entered into Google which led to my blog: celta pre interview task answers saxoncourt. Is the task that hard you need to try and cheat? From what I recall from the test back in 1999, this task required you to distinguish between past tenses, and for you to be able to say what sort of tasks you would give unmotivated teenagers. Are the questions still the same?

RIP Geocities

Before Blogger, Typepad, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook et al, there was Yahoo Geocities. Although you were aided by a Wizard to create your website, rather than needing to know HTML knowledge, there was at least a sense of you being able to craft your site into a unique layout that is definitely lost with the likes of one-face-fits-all Facebook, and to a large extent, Blogger. I spent ages setting up my first Geocities web pages (again the 'pages' element lamentably lacking with Blogger), and for the first time embarked on training myself in digital design. It was a nice transition after having abandoned pen and paper drawing altogether. I was always bothered by having spent hours on a drawing only to conclude that the result was crap because of my own lack of artistic realization skills. With digital design, the pixel never lied, and I could realize my visual intentions perfectly. I bought a copy of Photoshop Elements 2.0 in 2001, and tried out free downloads for Flash and Coreldraw (Does this program still even exist?. I read up on HTML coding, only to find that CSS was the new thing, and that it'd take years to get a full grip on programming. Photoshop and Geocities became a love affair.

Above are some screen shots from my Geocities website before it gets sent to the underworld.

Anyway, after some 10 years of its existence, Yahoo have announced that all free Geocities accounts will be closed by the end of October. I think this means that there will be no more option to edit and access accounts, and possibly even total deletion of the webpages. You are advised that there are some web archiving options available to salvage your pages in some type of static form, but essentially, free Geocities is no more. RIP.

I still find Blogger the best medium for putting what I need 'out there'; however I did cave in a couple of weeks ago, and set up a Facebook account for the first time. I say 'cave in', and that's because I had - and still had - strong reservations about the function of Facebook. It's one thing to expose yourself so publicly on the web, as that's your choice, but there is something I still don't find altogether agreeable about other people being able to view your friends' pictures/details so easily. Facebook is essentially promoting who is on your Hotmail address list.

'Look, I've got 10 more Friends than you!'

I'm instantly also concerned about how many sub-teens there are on Facebook, as I realized after I was Friend-ed by some former private students I used to teach when they were still in kindergarten. They are less than half my age. They post all sorts of photos that are just the sort of stuff that sad pervs prey on. I can also see how cyberbullying can manifest itself on Facebook with horrible consequences on an individual. When you put yourself on Facebook, you are really making a brave expose.

The main catalyst for joining Facebook was following bumping into a high school friend in a local supermarket. I hadn't seen her for over 15 years, but she instantly recognized me - Hey, if I haven't aged one bit, who's complaining?! Facebook became a way to re-connect with these people, and it has been a fascinating trawl through the past to see what former classmates appear to be up to now. However, again, it's a double edged sword, in that I am not particularly keen for some of the people from my past to catch up with me today. Some were people I didn't like; others were people who didn't like me.

Another feet-dragging moment for Facebook is the fact that I don't have time to manage blogs, email accounts, YouTube, and a Facebook account, as well as trying to have a life on a daily basis. It's too much hard work!

My employer is even pushing for us to use Twitter and Second Life, too. Can I just get paid for 'social networking' on the job, then, Mr Boss? Now, as for Twitter, it is the daftest internet craze to take hold in my opinion, and it is something I definitely won't join in with. Maybe I am anti-social, but for me it appears to be a horrible creation of the developed society, where truncated texting messages replace real conversation. Who on earth is really interested in my one line thoughts on Twitter? Is a one-liner really going to make the world a better place to live. Is Twitter really going to make your students speak better English. Me thinks not.

Ode to Geocities!

Charitable plea

I had typically used the idea of an advertising commercial in classes, literally thinking commercial. However, an interesting variation cropped up in the latest edition of English Teaching Professional magazine - producing a commercial to encourage donations for a charity. Stages of development for your lesson could therefore be as follows:
(Bring in some sample posters/ads) What charities do you know already?
What are their causes?
How do they make themselves known to the public?
Do they appeal to young/old/both?
How would you decide on the charity you want to promote/Can you invent your own charitable cause?
What does the charity do?
What angle would you emphasize in your commercial?
Expressions to help you 'beg' for money from the public at large?

Oxford Text Checker

For guaging the level of a piece of text to be given to your students:

Oxford 3000™ Text Checker (previously called Oxford 3000 Profiler - note, you will have to set country preference first before you are taken to the Text Checker page.)

To find out which words in a text are part of the Oxford 3000, type or paste it into the box, then click ‘submit’. The words which are not part of the Oxford 3000 will be highlighted in red. The Text Checker will also tell you what percentage of the words in your text are part of the Oxford 3000. You can use this information to judge the difficulty of a text. In general, the more words highlighted in red, the more difficult the text.

In a typical lower intermediate text close to 100% of the words will be Oxford 3000 keywords.
In a typical upper intermediate text 90-95% of the words will be Oxford 3000 keywords.
In a typical advanced text 75-90% of the words will be Oxford 3000 keywords.

The Text Checker will automatically ignore any numbers (in the form ‘25’ or ‘twenty-five’) or symbols. If there are any proper names in your text, such as Oxford or Smith, you can enter them in the ‘ignore’ box. This will make sure that the Text Checker does not mistake them for difficult words and highlight them in red.

The Text Checker will also check your text to see if there are any words from the specialist lists (Arts, Science and Business and finance). These words will be highlighted in blue.

Skribit

An alternative to comments posting, Skribit is yet another new web 2.0 application trying to be the next Twitter... (Try it out in the sidebar).

Swine Flu Latest

Not for your younger students...

What Should I Do With My Life

A possible for a higher level reading class. What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson, published by Vintage Books/Random House, is conveniently broken up into short chapters, each one based on events in a person's life when they found their 'calling'. The UK edition has a section at the end with a list of discussion questions that are ideally suited to classroom use.

The book has been on the New York Times bestseller list. I was therefore expecting something that would make me view life afresh and that would add psychoanalytical analysis to the process of making life-changing decisions. However, I was rather disappointed in that we only get very brief snapshots of events leading up to a change with very little added analysis layering at all. And, moreover, I don't think this is necessarily a book about life per se, but fundamentally about career change. As someone with a checkered history of being all over the place career wise, I can relate to the book's theme of not following a conventional linear progression from college up the corporate ladder. I am fundamentally conscious of putting interest of job over salary all the time, so don't need my own 'awakening' as a lot of the people in the book seem to encounter after a long inner struggle about who they are. I'm sure a lot of EFL teachers can also relate to this extremely well. However, it is a book with lots of topics relating to dilemmas that could stretch a long way in the classroom, so see it as a great book for that purpose.

Volcano in my flight path!

Another aviation English link - a simulation video of flying through/around a volcano.

Also Swiss/English radiotelephony convention notes.

International Dialects of English Archive

IDEA - International Dialects of English Archive contains a great compilation of audio samples of non-native English speakers by region. I would imagine that you need at least intermediate level students to use this in class activities. Perhaps they could try to diagnose the pronunciation idiosyncracies which might be characteristic of one nationality as a tool to better understanding how they could make their pronunciation more native speaker like, as well as improving listening skills generally. I will add the link to 'P' for pronunciation in sidebar.

It's also a useful tool for trainee TEFL teachers, who usually encounter some course component which involves identifying L2 traits by comparison to native English speakers.

As a side note, I recall that I was given a quick spelling test for my TEFL course interview, which included the word 'pronunciation'. It was one question I got wrong, as prior to the answers being revealed to me, I had always thought the articulation and thus spelling of the word was 'pronounciation'.

New set of books coming out - scream of excitement!!!

A bit of a self-publicity gag, but I am proud to see that a project I have been involved in for the past year is coming to the market. I have written and edited several titles of the new Grand Master project series, a commission from the South Korean government in collaboration with Dammora publishing to chronicle distinguished Korean taekwondo masters who emigrated from Korea across various corners of the globe to spread Korean culture. As the project and publications gain more momentum, I will hope to write a bit more about this, but suffice to say that I have been very lucky to have been able to take part in the project, and praise the team at Dammora for such incredible hard work to realize this project.

No recent posts 'cus I took a mini break to Venezia. I attended the Biennale, the bi-annual art exhibition. Discussing art in your EFL class is a possibility, but I've noticed it's hard if your class are not of the arty farty set. Instead, one art-related activity I found worked well, was to generate several line drawings with random bits of clip art (although I made a fancy worksheet using Photoshop). One image might have, say a picture of a house, a church, a crying girl, some fish bones on the floor. You need to pre-teach speculative phrases such as: 'It might be that...' or 'It could have been that...' or 'It looks as if...' and students discuss with each other/the teacher plausible explanations for what could have happened in the pictures.

Second Life - educator articles

As you will have noticed, my recent post about Second Life attracted a large number of comments. I've also found a collection of articles on education in Second Life on shambles.net HERE.

It's going to take time evaluating all the articles, so I'll try to come back with a summary soon...

Updating Job Links

I'm updating sidebar J - JOBS at the mo, and have realized a little known fact, in that it was not Diana Ross that Michael Jackson was trying to emulate, but a KOREAN...

The above Michael Jackson spitting image comes from Flying Cows (added to sidebar), a new website which allows teachers to list themselves as available on the site. It's a bit dodgy, as all your personal info can be publicly viewed, and furthermore, any of these people posting themselves available to work in Korea are falling prey to either getting caught working without a visa or being solicited by unworthy institutes who haven't been able to find teachers by other means - red flags. Personally, I'd advise not to post yourself up for public view on such a site - just apply for jobs directly. There still seem to be plenty of jobs on offer in Korea, although it's reported that some programs such as the government school EPIK, GEPIK etc have had a higher number of applicants than usual, perhaps owing to the current financial crisis. One incident that involved the higher number of applicants than usual saw Korean recruiter Footprints having to apologize after they had to make last minute job switches for a SMOE blunder:

In the last week Footprints was contacted by the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education (SMOE) to let us know that they had over accepted and that almost 100 teachers who HAD BEEN accepted for teaching jobs and who were in various states of departure readiness would not be required to teach with the SMOE. Our Footprints Placement Coodinator Dave Harvey first learned about this situation and he immediately passed the news on to our Korean General Manager Scott Kim who followed up with the Ministry of Education, the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education and with Ben Glickman, co-owner of Footprints Recruiting. Ultimately this was to dramatically affect 26 Footprints teachers.

Immediately Footprints went to work to see what we could do to salvage our teachers jobs. We were able to re-position several teachers with various other Ministries of Education around Korea, we were able to guarantee first placement status with some teachers for February placements with the SMOE, we were able to negotiate with the airlines to honour plane tickets for departures any time within a 365 day period so that teachers could use the airfare to travel to Korea for work as soon as their jobs were solidified and we communicated with each teacher affected personally. Ben Glickman, co-owner of Footprints personally called each teacher and spoke with them at length about the situation, Footprints' response to this situaton and the possible opportunities or alternatives each teacher had to explore.

"Ultimately this was a terrible situation", says Footprints co-owner Jeff Strachan. "Footprints is always trying to put forward the best impression for the industry as a whole and we undertake to represent only those opportunities that are genuine and professional. The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education offers this in all their jobs. This is an incredibly unfortunate mistake, one that the SMOE is extremely apologetic about and one that we are committed to resolving for our teachers in the best way possible for each and every one of them."

Ben Glickman, who has been placing teacher in Korea since 2001 says, "This is an unprecedented situation for us and for one of our clients. We have treated this is a priority one emergency to ensure our teachers are first up to bat when SMOE is considering teachers and we are effectively working with the SMOE administrators to help them come to terms with what has happened and to help them deal with this situation as effectively as possible."

When asked what happened Ben Glickman could only comment that "when time permits there will be an inquiry into the situation but at the moment we are working to find the best possible outcomes for our teachers."

While currently refreshing my J - JOBS listings, I have also noticed that ATC - Avail Teachers Consulting agency in Korea seems to have disappeared off the map. Did they go bust?

Another jobs avenue that I found was ToyTown for Germany (again, link added on sidebar). This includes a lot of teaching gigs and childcare work for expats in Germany. There are also a lot of one off jobs such as TV presenters, tour guides, costume designers and man-with-a-van jobs. Useful to cover yourself financially if go out on a spec job hunt in Germany.

Fashion Disasters (ie Warmers)

Following my first day observe-a-teacher training in a Japanese language school way back, I thought what a fantastic idea it was that the teacher started the lesson by asking 'What did you do at the weekend?' to her class. Of course, the idea was sooo good, I adopted it as an eternal warmer activity for just about every other class.

While the argument goes that practicing basic past tense phrases is a useful activity, it does go stale after a certain amount of time. Many students will also never reveal what they did, just replying with 'nothing'.

Using current news quirkies can provide unexpected topics, although of course you will need to tailor your questions to your students' levels. Using for example, Digg (a Digg widget is now added to my sidebar for quick reference), you can identify an interesting popular story, and it can take you to all sorts of unexpected leads. For example , the People of Walmart site reminds you that most people in the States are not replica Paris Hiltons. You could use this site to do a review of eg, 'He's wearing a ...', or 'What is the strangest sight you have seen in a supermarket?'

Incentive Plus

I was handed a copy of a mail order catalog from a company called Incentive Plus. It sells all sorts of educational resources related to something called 'Seal' which I believe is an acronym to do with social and behavioral skills teaching in UK schools. The UK is obsessed with trying to rehabilitate out of control youngsters who of course are off the rails more than any other nationality!

Although some of the products are quite highly priced, I could envisage some of the materials being used as theme units to use in overseas EFL classrooms when the mastery of the sentence textbooks have run out of steam. For example, there are DVDs about anti-social behavior, worksheets about anger management, board games about bullying, CD Roms on team work, and resource ideas on special educational needs.

All like regular EFL resources, but more content based, and suited to forward-thinking youngsters.

Second Life

Not that you can even have a first life if you are undertaking an MA in linguistics, my employer is trying to push us towards joining Second Life. This is a virtual reality 3-D social networking site, which appeals visually to those used to gaming world environments. However, the purpose of Second Life doesn't just end for the sake of pleasure; there are potentials for setting up learning experiences, including that of congregating in a classroom-like backdrop for learning English.

Now, on a Linpus Linux operating system (my case), you cannot download the required files needed to make Second Life run on your computer. Neither if you have a slow internet connection or a computer running out of memory is a platform like Second Life gonna give you much joy - it will just seize and crash all the time. Therefore, I have not been able to explore Second Life in much depth to be able to fully comment on whether it's something that could work or not as an English learning tool.

Getting on to Second Life as a 'character' is totally free. Basic navigation around all the islands and worlds is also without much limit. You do need to pay for developing your avatar, such as purchasing designer apparel or even buying your own skin - akin to getting virtual plastic surgery. In one source, it mentioned that Second Life generated over half a million dollars in one of its earlier years of existence. It is a very sophisticated system in terms of the detail, although reading about how to build and construct things in Second Life reminds me of my former AutoCAD training. In reading about the scope of the Second Life 'world', you can do things such as earn virtual money by washing peoples' windows, program explosions to set other peoples' property on fire, create your character to go into spasms. Weird stuff, but I can envisage people who would get addicted into this whole realm. I would also be wary about trolls and nutters who might approach my character in some sort of deception. For this final reason, Second Life is not yet really secure for young children to use without adult supervision, which is a shame, as I could imagine young kids taking to the Second Life learning concept stronger than other age groups.

It definitely does appeal to the younger Web 2.0 generation, used to interacting online; also for lovers of tailoring avatars - something was indeed very popular with online cults such as Cyworld in Korea. But for communication purposes, it initially seems to have similar limitations of other types of web based chat. The most obvious difference emerges from the audio captured by recording equipment which is totally different than the learning skills needed in face to face interaction where there are many visual cues, most critically body language, to aid comprehension. There is also an awkwardness in speech turn taking with computer mediated chat.

As a coincidence, as I was about to write about Second Life, I was cleaning up by 'B' for 'Blogs' shortly before, and noticed that Graham Stanley's blog has its latest postings also on Second Life. There are a few posts on there, including an audio discussion hosted by Nik Peachey on the advantages and disadvantages of using Second Life as an English language learning tool. Some of the more constructive learning activities for Second Life that were mentioned on the audio discussion were the potential for collaborative problem solving, although how quality 'problems' were to be set up needed to be explored more, since there are other types of platforms which already have rival capabilities such as Wii and even Nintendo. Also, easier to conceive of, would be an exploration type of task, whereby you send out groups of students to explore and research a particular region of Second Life with a set of objectives and 'come back' and report their findings.

If anyone else has any lists of tried and tested activities used to teach on Second Life, please contact me. There was actually an online conference on Second Life for teachers that was held in May. More details here.

Skybrary

Sorry for further absenteeism. I have been trying to catch up on the past 2 years since my Masters has finished. I will gradually be aiming to update my links. For starters, if you are involved in the growing field of aviation English, there is a great free reference wiki-type site here which will help not only students, but also teachers without an aviation background. It's called Skybrary. There are explanations for many technical terms in aviation speak. To date, a lot of schools have been ordering the likes of the Dictionary of Aviation, but in theory, Skybrary could replace the need for the book. Sorry Dictionary Publishers - although the book is definitely handy where you have a low/no IT capacity and cannot access Skybrary.

Criminal Typos

Not sure how I ended up on a local police mailing list, as it just instills lots of fear about setting out outdoors. However, today's mailout include some typos, which include:

The team is focused on tackling burglary and other priority crime and these
arrests are a warning to criminals that the police and the communities we serve
will tolerate criminality in any form.

I was going to point out another one which I thought was wrong, but when I double-checked it, turns out I was wrong. My spelling and comprehension is really falling by the wayside these days. I wonder how much of it owes to my wilderness years in non English speaking countries, or whether it owes to my getting old, or even whether it owes to having my confidence gradually chipped away by those around me...

Argument involving English

I was watching some fantastic videos on YouTube of Hong Kong IFC Building and Taipei 101 Building, as fireworks were launched from their exteriors. Not really related to English language learning...until I came across this one posted by lukwama. Although lukwama is from Taiwan, this video has to have been shot in Hong Kong, as the dialog/tantrum is in Cantonese. Apparently, this disgruntled couple are parents of a child who they gave some sort of software product to as a gift. Now, they want a refund because the product was in English, and their son can't read English. The shop assistants just ignore the couple completely, all the while being filmed by a seemingly casual onlooker. If this had been in England, the heated duo would have smashed the camera, knocked out the cameraman, knifed the sales assistants and assaulted the policemen who were very quick on the scene. The Cantonese police tactics here are generally to let the couple rant away to no result, occasionally chipping in with 'Dak-ka-la!' = 'Nevermind'. To that, I will respond, equally: 'Ng gan yiu la!!!'

Numion

Not a lot of use for teaching, but a curio for computer geeks - including those that have their own webpages. With Numion, you can measure for example, how fast a page loads, trace the network route from the Numion server to yours, or how much bandwidth you can access.

Online translators

Another blow to Babelfish.

My input:

en el campeonato de hace dos anos, habia un competidor coreano desconocido

Hit translate, and voila:

in the championships of two anuses ago, habia a unknown Korean competitor

Of course, it would be better if I learnt Spanish, wouldn't it?

The (Post) Graduate

I have to admit that I never quite fathomed the term 'post' graduate, but I've now (assuming that I'll pass in the official December release of gradings - is that a dangerous assumption?) joined the growing number of TEFL teachers who are getting the MA in TESOL. I've just completed my last dissertation, and I am really pleased it's all over!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As mentioned in previous posts, I've taken my MA with the UK's Open University. I've really enjoyed the reading, and the materials have been first class, but it's been much more full-on than I had initially imagined, and having to do a couple of hours reading every single evening after a long hard slog at work became more and more draining as the time went on, especially when combined with a commission to write a book half way through my second year of study.

Having never had to read a single book and barely write an essay on my undergraduate course in architecture ten years ago, it was difficult to judge in the absence of mingling with peers what constituted a 'good' essay. I would advocate where possible a full-time, on-campus course, as some employers do shun a so-called 'distance' courses. However, I was not prepared to give up a full year of employment for such study, as the cost of not working and the cost of covering living expenses in the UK for one year would have been a huge investment. As there is no pay-back for me for doing the MA in the short term at least, then it was not a financial sacrifice I was prepared to make. The total cost of the Open University MA has been GBP 3000, which while still a lot of money, is much cheaper than some of the overseas distance courses being offered to TEFL teachers in some Asian countries, for example.

Another observation I've made about doing a distance course is the fact that having the face-to-face interaction IS different - and I conclude in this case inferior to an online tutorial forum. This latter issue was also supported by the tutor in my first module, with which we did have several face-to-face group sesssions throughout the year. The tutor explained how they were not meant to give explicit guidance in the form of 'this is right or wrong', but very loose hints for direction, as it was recognized that meanings were more easily construed on an online forum, and the university tried to any risk for students taking on board 'concrete' advice and later coming back to them to complain that they were somehow 'mislead'.

Anyway, here is me in all my celebratory glory, celebrating the final moments of my dissertation with Kabaenes, a digestif I picked up on my January trip to Holland. The image comes from Mag My Pic, which could also be a fun teaching resource if your students happen to be writing for some kind of newsletter or magazine. There are lots of magazine covers for you to try with any photo upload you have.

So, how to take the Open University's MA in TESOL? You can take it from anywhere in the world, although technically, you are supposed to be a UK resident if you want to qualify for home fees, which are half of overseas rates. Even so, if you end up paying the overseas rate of GBP 6000 in total, this is still nearly half of what some other distance MAs are charging. You need to take 3 modules to make up the MA, and each module starts at the beginning of October. You study one module per year, although you can combine two modules within one year if you want to speed it up, which is what I did, but is not recommended. Once an Open University student, you have online access to a vast database of academic publications, and plenty of online support. There are no exams for the MA TESOL; you submit around 5 online assignments per module plus post a printed copy of a longer dissertation at the end of each module. Visit the Open University website for further information.

The marriage contract

Put your students in pairs and get them to draw up a fantasy marriage contract. Could be combined with modals.

Guess the toilet quiz

Just in case your students are into idio(t)syncratic British toilet humor, use this quiz as a discussion point as to whether sit or squat is best (note that this site is not for young children - lots of other quirkies links on it) :

Guess the Toilet Quiz

High speed car chase

One of my colleagues was talking about a fluency activity that sounded really fun for higher level speakers. Play a high speed car chase video with the commentary turned off - such videos can be found on internet or recorded from TV. Get the students to improvise the commentary. As a variation, one student can sit with their back to the screen while another one gives commentary. The 'blind' student should take notes and then re-narrate the commentary they have been given by their peer.

New look in progress

If you've visited this blog in the past 24 hours, you may have noticed that things look slightly different. No more metrosexual pink page!!!

I decided to risk pushing the nuclear button to convert my old template into a new one, and much to my relief, all the posts and sidebar links remained in tact.

I then explored the possibility of further converting my template, using a free template from either Btemplates or Pyzam, but before it was too late, discovered that if I converted to those by cutting and pasting all the html code, I would have lost my sidebar links. Instead, I just cut and paste several lines of Pyzam code to change my background from blank white into the notepaper style you see here.

I'm going to gradually change more and more, but I keep encountering a script error message which slows down any editing in Blogger to a painfully slow process, so am not sure how long it will take. Then, hopefully, I will also resume posting relevant EFL themed posts at some point soon.

I think I have finished my MA, but am not celebrating yet, as I need to check the assignments through one more time before I declare it's all over.

Quarter as busy...

I'm still remaining silent on this blog, but am nearing the end of my MA dissertations. I reckon I can have them all wrapped up by mid July.

Therefore, I hope to do more things with this blog (and my social life!) after then. I have plans to switch to the new(er) Blogger template - Can anyone advise me in advance if this means that it deletes all previous posts?

Half as busy

Yeehah! I have finished the first of my final MA projects! Just one more to go!

Busy, busy, busy (again)

I'm still too busy to add regular posts to this site. I'm in the dying phase of my MA in TESOL. It's been harder than I expected, and I'm struggling to find sufficient time to do it justice. I've spent as much time as I can on it, but now it's becoming a chore and I just want it to be over so that I have no more obligation to study every single day...

I've got 2 small-scale research projects to undertake with a 5000 word write up each. I've just about finished my first one, and although it's quite a solid piece of research, reckon it will only get an average grade because the moderators are very keen to see you making as much reference to the course material as possible, and I haven't done this as much as I suspect they would like. Instead, I've spent more time writing about how I conducted the research rather than the ideas that surround it.

12 weeks to go...

Busy, busy, busy

Sorry, no updates for ages, but I'm sooo busy, I have no time to post. By the end of this month, I have to submit one book, one script, 2 MA essays, and still work full-time...

Producing culturally appropriate narratives in EFL

One of my MA final projects (I am doing 2) will be about analysing Saudi EFL essay writing using systemic functional linguistics. As a consequence, I have been sourcing articles on similar topics, and have come across some interesting readings.

J.Y. Kang of Korea University, has an interesting article published in the Narrative Enquiry (Vol. 16, no. 2, 2006), which to some extent supports my own experience that Korean students were not necessarily poor at writing in English because of cultural differences of approaching writing, but were more likely hampered by language difficulties.

Interestingly, Kang deliberately selected personal narrative writing rather than academic writing. She says that narratives are common to every culture, whereas an expository genre is 'peculiar to western cultures'.

Kang selected a narrative topic that talks about a frightening incident. Contrary to stereotypical expectations, the Korean students didn't hold back on their emotions. Although, there was the observation that the Korean students tended to write about ghost stories, whereas the American students tended to write about accidents and catastrophes.