Personal Blogs

I was reading the book Whoops by John Lanchester and he referred to economics having a case of physics envy, meaning that it often wants to use quantitative data in the way that the natural sciences do.  Later in the book, there are examples where this has proved to be very mistaken - some events that have happened were described as being extremely unlikely - one chance in a number bigger than all the atoms in the universe.   I suspect education does not envy physics so much but some educational research still seems to have too much faith in numbers.

We had an Elluminate meeting last night to debrief on the L185 course.  From a technical point of view, it was the first flawless Elluminate I have experienced.  I have further meetings today and on Sunday.

I thought the content of the meeting was useful.  As is often the case, there was quite a variety of views on the usefulness of metalanguage for language teaching.  I tend to be someone who feels that metalanguage should be very limited but some colleagues did not agree.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/aug/24/who-still-wants-learn-languages

Interesting if depressing.  I am surprised businesses do not make more of an issue of this.  It seems that even if a lot of business is done in English, British firms can only really find out about other countries (eg opportunities, problems etc) if they have the linguistic capacity to do so. 

I also wonder if more use should be made of capacity to teach languages spoken in this country rather than the traditional foreign languages.

 

 

Interesting issues are raised here.  To me, it seems that all languages are complex overall although they tend to be relatively simple or difficult in different aspects - eg Chinese is simple in terms of days of the week (day 1, day 2 etc) but very complex compared to English in terms of words for family relationships.

http://www.tnr.com/blog/john-mcwhorter/75710/english-special-because-its-globish

It seems to be working more smoothly as a way of teaching as I become more familiar with it and also (perhaps even more importantly) use a better quality computer.  It does seem to require a very good computer and some students do not have that.

Several interesting things in the Guardian on languages.

Phrase books - interesting that they think that these phrase books might be useful in learning a language rather than just being for tourists.  However, it is positive that they are focusing on mainly non- European languages.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/series/language-phrasebooks

The death of a language

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/05/bo-language-extinct-linguistics

A blog on language learning policy and attitudes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/07/anushka-asthana-french-language-education

 

 

I was asked about what reflections on practice might look like.  I remember reading Barrett who suggested that the following are questions that should be asked for reflective purposes.  

What? 

So what?  

Now what? 

Can this be applied to my reflections?

(eg What?  Elluminate.  So what?  It is something we are experimenting with and it seems like a useful tool but problematic.  Now what?  Worth trying again.  Encouragement of more speech rather than text seems useful.)  

Barrett, H.C. (2001) “Electronic Portfolios: a chapter to be published in Educational Technology: an Encyclopedia to be published by ABC-CLIO, 2001” [online] Available from http://electronicportfolios.org/portfolios/encycentry.pdf (Accessed 28 October 2007)