Archive for the ‘English for Academic Purposes’ Category

Have done a bit more tedious reorganisation so that you don’t need to do so much tedious searching, and you can now find all the links to my stuff on said topics elsewhere on the internet as well as my exclusive TEFLtastic stuff here:

Teaching exam classes-articles and tips for teachers

and here:

EFL exam worksheets, lesson plans and tips for students

Comments or tips for other good sources welcome here:

It was a quiet month (if you don’t count the sound of the cicadas), but that will just give you the chance to read all of them for once, starting with a new series of “well balanced…” articles on Usingenglish.com:

A well balanced use of L1 in class

A well balanced use of error correction

And back here in TEFL.netland

15 ways to prepare for the CELTA etc

15 ways to do needs analysis

Academic Vocabulary in Use review

And not one of mine but edited by me

Imagine That (Mental Imagery in the EFL Classroom) review by Darren Elliot

If that isn’t enough for you (and how could it be?), you could have a look at the same post for July, my newly updated list of links to my stuff, or my newly updated worksheet pages with links to stuff by category.

Finally, if you like any of my stuff, you’ll love ELTgames.com, from the ever fab Jon Marks- it is a lesson to all the rest of us about what a truly professional TEFL internet could be.

ARELS- Association of Reasonably good English Language Schools
 
BAAL- The false god of Applied Linguistics
 
Direct method- A system of language learning aimed at making Japanese students say what they really mean

Ditransitive- verbs often used with the object “Lady Di”
 
EAP- English for Academic Purposes- learning English to seem intellectual
 
Facilitation- Rather than leading the language learning process, teachers aid the students by standing there doing nothing and spouting stuff like “Don’t ask me, you are empowered to control your own learning”.

Feedback- Based on the similarity with playing an electric guitar, in ELT this term is used to express the teacher’s ability to produce discord and put people on edge with the use of error correction

FFI- Form focused instruction- designing your lessons just to get good marks on the categories you know are on the student evaluation and lesson observation forms

Fillers- breakfast foods suitable for teachers who will be photocopying through their lunch break

FL- foreign language. Pronounced “fleur”, with as outrageous a French accent as you can manage
 
Focus on form- The problem of teachers writing down all the things students tell them during a level check interview and only remembering to notice the language they use during the last few seconds. Often contrasted with focus on forms*

Focus on forms- A teacher being distracted by the student’s figure during a level check interview and only remembering to notice the language they use in the last few seconds. Often contrasted with Focus on Form*

Fossilization- The immobile face and blank stare that teachers who have been in the business too long develop

Gap filling- The favourite physical threat of drunk TEFL teachers

Grammatical terminology- “all these like little name things” (definition by an English Language Teaching Assistant in Hong Kong, quoted in Teacher Language Awareness pg 157)

IH- International House, the chain of schools formerly known by the less successful name of “Nationalism House”

Immersion language learning- A way of increasing student motivation to speak. See also waterboarding*

Implicit knowledge of language- Students hiding the fact that they’ve known that grammar since primary school in order not to seem like a swot or to save the teacher embarrassment

Inductive approach (the) - Giving students who pause forever before speaking an epidural injection to force delivery

Inflections- Passed on in the spit of Spanish people trying to pronounce /h/

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.

Might just be the physics graduate in me coming out, but I seem to find myself teaching numbers in my classes all the time- be it shouting “seven Eight NIne TEEEEEEN!” at the top of my voice in my kindy classes or bringing my tape measure into my Technical English classes to liven things up by measuring the table and people’s noses.

Here’s a selection of games ideas and worksheets on teaching everything from “How old are you?” “I am three” to kids who are actually two but have been trained to say “I am three” by overambitious Thai parents to get them into class to “one billion seven hundred and two million point one” and the difference between “zero”, “nought”, “nil” and “oh” to Financial English students who need to learn something from you for once rather than teaching you about the weaknesses in your financial portfolio as usual.

So here they are, starting with a brand new article on the TEFL.net Idea Thinktank page:

The fifteen stages of teaching numbers with possible problems and game ideas for each stage

Business and ESP first lesson lesson plans with a number review including pairwork 

Fun for all the family 1- 22 games for teaching numbers

Numbers practice idioms and proverbs

Xmas trivia numbers pairwork

On the TEFLtastic worksheets page (easy to rip off, difficult to print out)

Technical English Japan by numbers pairwork game

Japan numbers trivia Elementary team game

And stuff you have to pay for on Onestopenglish.com:

Medical English numbers trivia

Business English numbers trivia

IELTS Writing- describing graphs

Having found out from the book “English for Specific Purposes” by Keith Harding that ESP has spawned a whole raft of lovely acronyms such as EAP, EBP, EMP, EOP, EPP, EST, EVP* and also the disparaging one for General English of ENOP (English for No Obvious Purpose), I thought it was time to brush the dust off the Alternative ELT Jargon Dictionary and set off in defence of General English.

Although I have a fair number of ENOP students in both my Business and General English classes, lots of my non-Business students have very specific purposes indeed. Here are a few acronyms to make those purposes look a bit more important and so get them the respect they deserve:

EKTRP- English for Killing Time after Retirement Purposes

EACRP- English for Avoiding Cultural Restrictions Purposes- like Japanese women who can only debate in English because the feminine forms of their own language are so weak it is impossible to compete with men

ESAP- English for Smart Arse Purposes- such as showing off the latest useless idiom they have learnt

EEP -English for Extramarital Purposes

EGSP- English for Gaijin Stalking Purposes/English for Giri Stalking Purposes- this one works for women whose list of needs in a relationship are topped by “blond hair” in both Spain and Japan

ENP- English for Nationalistic Purposes- such as explaining to foreigners why they should never criticise your country

EBP- English for Babysitting Purposes

ETP- English for Therapeutic Purposes- because your GABA teacher is the only person who will listen to your problems

ECP- English for Chaperone Purposes- for Turkish university students who are only allowed to stay out past the curfew of their halls and meet people of the other sex by signing on for English classes

And a couple which give a more realistic idea of what Business English and ESP classes turn out to be:

EAWP- English for Avoiding Work Purposes- coming to class might be the only chance they have for a one hour lunch break

EBP- English for Budgetary Purposes- for companies where the only way to give staff training on the cheap is to choose English lessons rather than the IT training they really need (more…)

“We didn’t have active discussion, active uses of English. … We inertly listened to her [the professor] during the class,”

 You’re thinking it’s from a 3rd world country, maybe one with a non-democratic regime, right?

Think again.

 ”Several students said they felt that the classes were poorly organized, and the wide range of student abilities made learning more difficult.”

Sounds like Japan, all shiny and Western looking on the outside but Confucian chaos on the inside. But no…

So, must be one of those European countries with teacher-led grammar-obsessed English classes like Spain we always forget when contrasting Asia with “the West”. Well, let’s have a look through the round window*…
(more…)

Sorry there hasn’t been a lot going on the blog page of my blog. It’s all going on elsewhere though: (more…)

Have put some new worksheets up for teaching ESP for artists and art students:

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheet-art-discussion-questions/

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheet-art-gallery-post-visit-discussion-adjectives/

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheet-artspeak-guessing-game/

Anyone got any other ideas or resources?