Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting a student who I have been working with since April on oral English by distance learning. These meetings from virtual to real are happening to me more and more often and even though yesterday's meeting was short, in the middle of a conference and on my way to another meeting, it was also sweet. We have of course built up a relationship of sorts and it was nice to be able to shake him by the hand.

Many people doubt that oral English can be taught effectively online but I must say that this time round I am quite satisfied with what we achieved.

We had two main tools we used to enable synchronous and asynchronous communication. So  I started by giving online audio sources, some didactic such as breaking news English and some authentic such as the BBC News for children which often has an audio version, as a prompt for further discussion. First reactions were posted and discussed on the asynchronous recording tool and we had a regular meeting time once a week when we would explore the topic further in a live discussion as well as going over any language points which had occurred in the original audio or the asynchronous discussion. The live discussion was archived and this meant my student could listen once more at his leisure to pick up any points glossed over in the session.

I insisted on the prompt material being in audio form since my students had written English exercises from an other teacher. (I alternate between the singular and the plural because we were a small group to start with which slowly dwindled to one - lots of reasons for this not necessarily allied to the teaching programme or method).

After a while as we got into the swing of the discussions I tried to focus a bit more on pronunciation, intonation, the common use of the schwa sound and so on. I guess I was lucky to have students who were willing to go into these topics and this gave rise to a few a-ha experiences about fluency in English speech.

I was hoping that my student might be able and willing to contribute to a podcast as a big finale but although he can speak quite well, this is obviously too great a step for him. So the final activity ended up being a joint evaluation of the Eyespeak software which I stumbled across by accident. We both agreed that it was in the interest of the demo software to give participants a low score so that they feel they need to buy the programme. It made me feel a little better about my low score anyway to look at things in this way. Evaluating the software should lead us on naturally to considering strategies for maintaining oral abilities once the course ends this week.

The Teaching Culture! project has come to an end with a final project meeting in Siegburg coupled with a workshop session open to all teachers in adult education where we shared some of the exercises which we had developed over the last three years. We also invited former participants along and presented this year's cohort with their certificates, a little ceremony which they seemed to appreciate.

For me, both the project itself and the group of partners I have been working with has been most rewarding so it is a little sad that we have come to the end but tinged with satisfaction at the successful completion of a set of wild promises we had made at the beginning. It would be nice if the course we developed could be taken up and used elsewhere perhaps in adapted format.

We partners stayed in the monastery which dominates the town of Siegburg and I am only now just beginning to recover from the hard bed which I had in my room.

We would like to continue working together as we believe we can be effective so the next question is, doing what? We also think that we have met a few interesting people in the course of the last three years who could be invited to join the partnership.

 

Today we had an open house to celebrate the merger of two course centres in the town of Grenaa which have become one. We naturally had to be re-branded and are now to be known as CV2 - something about being two and working on your CV but also that it takes at least two to make progress in learning. Our logo is a compass needle and we have been doling out pens with attached compasses as part of the marketing.

My hope is that the merger will bring in a period of financial stability so that project work can be viewed in a wider context as beneficial to the whole organisation rather than in pure profit and loss terms since under these circumstances, pilot projects almost never make a profit.

I have commented on Teacher's TV earlier as a missed opportunity but I am rather saddened to read here that nobody is watching it.. Unsurprisingly teachers are too busy to watch it. Though I am thinking on different lines, I think this issue of teacher time for professional development is a crucial nut to crack because one of the prime roles for me now is to develop professional development courses for teachers which they will want to sign up for.

I tried to use Teachers TV for a concrete problem recently as my daughter is having problems with long division. I found two programmes about division but these were about the stage before you get to long division. So no help there. We'll just have to work together slowly, patiently and with lots of examples and she will be stuck doing it my way as I haven't been able to find out anything about these mysterious other methods which are purportedly flying around her classroom.

When I interviewed some friends who had worked 3 years in Greenland for the latest edition of the Absolutely Intercultural podcast, I naturally asked them about learning Greenlandic. I had heard before how difficult it is as a language to learn but when people say that about, for example Danish or French, I often make some quick retort to the effect that babies in those countries seem to manage well enough. However I was surprised to learn that in Greenland this is not the case and that many Greenlanders cannot themselves speak Greenlandic or that they forget the language after having completed their education in Denmark. The language is certainly constructed differently to English and Danish for example with many nouns being replaced by a descriptive phrase. The example mentioned in the podcast is that of the ptarmigan bird which in Greenlandic translates as 'the one you throw stones at'. I am not sure how much of these problems are due to the inherent difficulties of the Greenlandic language and how much is due to the cultural background with Denmark as a former imperial ruler and Greenland retaining many cultural ties with Denmark.

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