Archive for the ‘ELT publishing’ Category

I’ve been reading through the new Cambridge Grammar of English. Not something I usually do for pleasure (honestly!), but got a free copy for TEFL.net reviews and so felt like I ought to examine at least some parts in detail- and now I am reading it for pleasure!

Maybe the most interesting thing is that the use of corpora rather than just common sense (otherwise known as native speaker intuition) means there are bits on almost every page where you go “Really?” Below is a list of the “Oh yes, I suppose so.” and “No, I really don’t think so” moments so far based on British and American English. Most good science throws out counterintuitive things like this. Unfortunately, so does most bad science, so I’d appreciate it if you would comment on how the things below match with your own experience and instinct- there are a few I have doubts on myself.

- In AmE, the score in “The Seattle Sea Hawks beat the Cincinnati Reds 7-O is pronounced” “seven nothing” or “seven to nothing” or “seven zip”
 
- “Four from nine is/leaves five” is okay in BrE
 
- The form in “Eleven hundred pounds” (rather than “one hundred one hundred”) is more popular in AmE than BrE

- “isn’t” (rather than ’s not) is many times more frequent in BrE than AmE

- Interrogative tags are about four times more frequent in BrE than in AmE
 
- The “do” in reduced clauses with modal verbs
“Are you going?”
“I might do”
is only used in British English
 
- She lives on/ in Leonora Street is a Br/ Am thing

- “Must” is much more frequent in BrE than AmE
 
- “Had better” is six times more frequent in BrE
 
- “Going to” often used for direction giving (finding your way) in AmE: “You’re gonna go two blocks…”
 
- “I suppose” is much more frequent in BrE

If you ended up here wanting to find more more traditional stuff about British and American English, try:

Wikipedia (of course) American and British English differences

The American’s Guide to Speaking British English

BBC America British American Dictionary

If you are interested in worksheets for classroom use on British and American English, look here:

How British is your Financial English?

ESL Printable British and American English page

British and American English elesson from the (recommended) textbook Inside Out

British and American: The main differences from the (equally recommended) vocab book Word for Word

And if you’d like your own shiny new TEFL book hot off the press for free, see here.

If the amount of new stuff I learnt from the new book “Academic Vocabulary in Use” by Michael McCarthy and Felicity O’Dell is anything to go by (a book for students from “good Intermediate level”, not for teachers!), the answer about whether I should be teaching English for Academic Purposes is a resounding “No!”, although several things make me feel better about that:

- I detest universities as institutions and don’t want to work in one anyway
- I studied Physics, so the longest thing I ever had to write was 1500 words and no one expected me to have basic human communication skills, yet alone a grasp of academic prose
- With authors like those, I was hardly going to know everything they know
- Ditto with the Cambridge International Corpus, and anyway the whole idea of a corpus is that it is supposed to give counter-intuitive results

With those provisos to make you feel better about your results, without any further ado here is the “Should you be teaching EAP?” quiz.

Answer the questions below to see whether you should be getting into or out of the world of EAP. My own score was very nearly zero (which is why I picked them, but the first question is an easy one to get you started), so good luck. Answers in the comments section. Only the answers from the book are acceptable, so if there are several possible answers you will need to think of all of them before turning to the answer key. One point per answer, total possible score is 38.
The “Should you be teaching EAP?” quiz

Collocations

1. Pick out the two collocations that are not given in the book “Academic Vocabulary in Use” and so are presumably not common in academic English

“gently fondle”,  “intermittent contact”, “animated debate”, “excess energy”, “recent phenomenon”, “conflicting role”, “efficient way”, “conflicting role”, “break off contact”, “with the fashion sense of a physics grad”, “differentiate the elements”, “emerging phenomena”, “strengthened roles”, “important difference”, “major point”, “enormous amount” and “widespread assumption” are common collocations in academic English

British and American Academic English

2. List 20 verbs that always take -ise (and therefore never –ize) in both British and American English.
 
3. Give four words that are spelt with ae in British English but e in Am Eng
 
4. And two with oe/e

5. How many words can you think of with a -our spelling in British English but a -or spelling in American English? (you only get points if your answer includes the one word that from the book that I didn’t know)
 
6. How many words can you think of with an -re spelling in British English but a –er spelling in American English? (you only get points if your answer includes the one word that from the book that I didn’t know)

7. Can you explain when we use the spellings “humor”, “honor” and “glamor” in British English?

8. Can you explain when we use the spelling “meter” in British English?
 
9. What’s the difference between the British and American meanings of (exam) rubric?
 
The original meanings of words

10. Sophomore comes from the Greek for…
 
11. What did the “hyper” in hyperrealism originally mean?

12. What did the “quasi-” in quasigovernmental originally mean?

13. What did the “-ant” in “coolant” and “accelerant” originally mean?

14. What did the “-cy” in “accuracy” and “literacy” originally mean?

15. What two meanings does “-ism” have?

16. What did the “-ics” in “genetics” and “electronics” originally mean?

Abbreviations

17. What does e.g. stand for?

18. What does “i.e.” stand for?

19. What does “et al” stand for?

20. What does “ibid.” stand for?

21. What does “cf.” stand for?

22. What does “q.v.” stand for?

23. What does “LLB” stand for?

24. What does “FRS” stand for?

25. What does “CUNY” stand for?

26. What does “FAAFP” stand for?

27. What does “MRCS” stand for?

28. What does “AMA” stand for?

29. What does “ACA” stand for?

30. What does “FASB” stand for?

31. What does “AICPA” stand for?

Formal and informal English

32. What are more formal versions of recap, be based on, deal with, promise, write about, almost

33. What’s a formal way of saying ‘although’?

34. What’s a more informal way of saying ‘nevertheless’?

Misc

35. Why do the words “discipline”, “underline”, “solid”, “generate”, “turn”, “confirm”, “identify”, “character”, “pose”, “nature” and “focus” all appear in the same section of a book on academic English?

36. Rewrite the sentence ‘Radiation was accidentally released over a 24-hour period, damaging a wide area for a long time’ in a more academic manner and identify the general feature of academic grammar that it illustrates.

37. Rewrite the sentence “Marx’s contribution is very significant” in a more academic manner and identify the general aspect of academic English grammar that this illustrates.

38. What other expression does the book give instead of “mind map”?

Jonnyboy is the cartoonist behind the often amusing Langwich Scool (if you think that is faint praise take a look at how much I’ve struggled and repeated the same jokes in my own attempts at TEFL humour) and the author of the life saving books At Last, Photocopies You Can Give Your Kids’ Classes Without Them Groaning. And now he’s released a book that makes IELTS fun. No, that is not another failed attempt at TEFLtastic humour- it really is so. Check out the book IELTS Resource Pack with free samples hereon the Delta Publishing website. I’ve only tried out a few pages, but as a certified photocopiable materials sommelier I can guarantee it is going to be full of all kinds of fun stuff. Quite a lot looks useful for EAP and Technical English classes too.

What is perhaps even more surprising about Jon Marks is that he has become a Delta Publishing regular author without being, to my knowledge, a member of the Pilgrimsmafia. Or at least if he is, he seems to have a bs detector that stops any of his games getting self indulgent and silly.

…a dash of realism, a big dollop of the painfully obvious and a side serving of hedging their bets:

“…for teachers, the distilled research finding that positive attitudes and motivation contribute to successful learning yields little useful insight into their day-to-day problems of how to motivate little Samantha in Class 2B and keep her motivated.

Fundamentally, two key principles seem crucial to the maintenance of motivation: first, motivation must emanate from the learner, rather than be externally regulated by the teacher;second, learners must see themselves as agents of the processes that shape their motivation.” 

The first sentence is a breath of the fresh air of realism in the usually bs smelling world of applied linguistics. Not sure what to do with the information in the second sentence, in fact I’m half tempted to say it “yields little useful insight into…”. 

And so the book goes on, telling us that (in my own simplistic words, based on my limited understanding):

-When they move to a foreign country kids are more likely to get a native or near native level than adults (but we don’t know if that tells us anything relevant about students studying a few hours a week in their own country) (Chapter 2- Age and Good Language Learners- Carol Griffiths)

- The students who are more likely to progress quickly, especially at lower levels, tend to be extrovert but the ones in the top classes tend to be people who are introverted but can look at the big picture and take guesses in an intuitive (i.e. not anally retentive) way. But again, we don’t know what that means for classroom practice,e.g. whether we should just use and try to reinforce students’ strengths or whether we should concentrate on developing their weaknesses (Chapter 4- Personality and Good Language Learners- Madeline Ehrman)

-Despite not being able to come up with any statistical evidence, the writer and we all know that the fact that fitting in for boys means not being seen to be studying too hard can be a problem for teachers. Boys also have different motivations and preferred ways of learning to girls (Chapter 5- Gender and Good Language Learners- Martha Nyikos)

- Students who are in higher level classes tend to use more strategies for language learning such as reading newspapers. It can be difficult to determine if they actually do some of these things because they have a high level rather than reach the level because they do these things, and even more difficult to determine if those study skills can and should be forced on students who don’t use them (Chapter 6-Strategies and Good Language Learners- Carol Griffiths again. Is she sleeping with the editor? Oh, she is the editor…)

- Etc

Etc. being a very useful word to hide the fact that I’m making comments about the book when I’ve only read a quarter of it. Oh well, surely that’s what blogs are for- half formed judgements and thinking aloud. The real review will be along in a month or so on TEFL.net reviews. Books I’ve been flicking through that I would highly recommend are:

A History of ELT

The Experience of Language Teaching

And it is quite possible I will end up recommending Lessons from Language Learners in the end as well, now I’ve got that little rant off my chest…

“Our profession is notorious for exploiting its most valuable asset – language teachers – for financial gain. I remember a teacher recalling taking a summer job where he and his fellow teachers struggled to teach competently in a school with sub-standard facilities and scant resources. He had a vivid memory of the owner arriving in a Rolls Royce and announcing that further cost-cutting measures were necessary. I think that says it all.”

Sounds like TEFLtrade is back on the case… (more…)

“In order to teach English in a private language school you need to be able to speak English fluently and have a certificate from either Trinity or RSA CELTA. These courses are around 4 weeks long and can even be completed online.”

(more…)

The case for the prosecution starts with exhibit A, Intelligent Business, the newish series of textbooks from Longman.

First, a mea culpa. At first glance Intelligent Business seemed like such a good concept that I recommended it to my school-a business series where the bits about marketing that are useless for accountants are left to another book where the teaching of business concepts are implicit for once,leaving the separate series of skills books to deal with the nitty gritty of telephoning etc.

Good concepts don’t cost publishers money, however, and the rest of the process was obviously done on the cheap- cheap production values, obvious skimping on proof reading and classroom testing, filling of page space with waffle and instructions etc etc.

And cost (and corner) cutting is not the only example of economics at play here- we also have The Economist magazine tie in, The Economist magazine being owned by Pearson, who also own the ELT publisher…(I’m sure you can guess). And then there is the classic having it both ways of designing it clearly for a market niche and then hiding that fact in the hope that people it is less suitable for will buy it and so make it a bestseller.Either I’m turning into the grumpy old man of TEFL well before my time or there really was a halcyon time when the evil magic of the ELT publishers’ marketing departments was not so strong.

I’m not suggesting that the advent of real market forces in ELT publishing in the UK has entirely been a bad thing. The publishers have at least started producing materials suitable for the budgets and abilities of real schools, teachers and students. One good example of this is the Oxford Basics series, where we can perhaps forgive the proofreading and other basic errors pointed out in a recent MET review because the budgetary restraints that probably caused those problems seem to have resulted in a book that is much more accessible for the real world than the stuff the big boys produced until a few years ago.

So, no real answer to my question so far I’m afraid, but at least that proves that the post title was a real question and not a lead in to a slagging off I guess… We can all see if things get a bit clearer in Part Two, in which I will list things that have got better and worse over the last few years.

“What do you know about the Silent Way?”

“Not much,…

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Getting published in TEFL- Choosing a route

There are 7 main routes to getting yourself published in the world of EFL. Although they are not mutually exclusive and a successful effort in one sphere can often lead to opportunities in another, I think it is worth examining the advantages and disadvantages of each one as people with limited time and energy might want to put most of their efforts into to one or another of the options and/ or people who were thinking of one of the options might think it is actually better to at least start themselves off in one of the others once they have seen all different approaches that are available. (more…)

Although many people find the fact that how to break into the ELT publishing world is rather opaque and difficult frustrating, the fact that it can rely on personal contacts and being in the right place at the right time as much as they standard of things you have written can also work to your advantage. In fact, you might even be able to break into the business without ever presenting your ideas on paper. A comment by someone in my recent workshop at the Tokyo Expo/ ELT Bookfair reminded me that the way I first got the idea of writing my ideas down and getting them published was by putting my ideas into a workshop plan and then having people who attended say I should get them published. By giving your workshops on a wider stage than I did, you might even find that the person giving you that feedback works for a publisher…

Example Career Path Two- The Workshops Man

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