A very interesting article on many levels but one of the most interesting for researchers into language is the point that what will be developed is an ethnography of speaking rather than a grammar or dictionary. Not knowing much about the project, it seems it would be useful to have both but I assume this is not practical. I certainly see the point of this ethnography of speaking.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/03/last-of-the-arctic-hunters
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.
Patricularly interesting part is
" It is worth mentioning that, of these examples, only the Luxembourg business was conducted mainly in English. I was dismayed to learn recently that neither the Middle East director in the Foreign Office nor two of our ambassadors in important Gulf countries can speak Arabic."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jul/22/ambassadors-relations-diplomacy-cameron
This does seem to show a lack of awareness of the importance of languages among the people in power.
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
A very interesting article about the diversity of the world's languages.
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
New course starts this week.
So far, there are a lot of enthusiastic responses on the tutor group forum.
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)
I am now about half way through the marking for E844 e-TMA 1. Having done it eight times before, it is interesting how similar the assignments are the first time and how much most (but not unfortunately all) students seem to develop over the year.
Problems with the first assignment tend to be that some students over emphasise experience and what they already know without fully engaging with the course material - they seem to be lead by experience rather than the course content.
Some students do not refer to the course content enough in the first assignment. I hope that feedback will encourage them to do so more.
This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.
