Since I am a member of the English for Specific Purposes course as part of the annual free EVONLINE courses, I thought I would make a post about my own technical English courses. I have a feeling that most technical English is taught at a high scientific level but this does not reflect the needs of my current students at all. My current students all work for the SCA company in Denmark and they need English for very concrete work tasks. Their computers have recently gone over to English. They have to deal with suppliers and customers in English on the phone and in short emails. They need to be able to use technical manuals on a practical basis, which means a couple of pages at a time according to need.

I started technical English teaching a couple of years ago and did not really know where to start. I felt that the cloze exercises about mending cars were not really appropriate for an aeronautical parts company or packaging company. One item which I inherited from a previous teacher (who was giving up because she was at the end of her tether) was an English-Danish glossary compiled for the company and when I started with SCA I asked for a tailormade SCA glossary as I found this was the key to many things. First I asked students to choose those words which they felt they needed to work on. Then I gave them old-fashioned index cards on which to write the English word on one side and the Danish on the other. These could be collated in small groups and used for simple memory games. Every week I would ask them to choose 5 more words to add to cards and as time went on they started setting the words into sentences. A real hit was to ask small groups to invent new word games using the cards. This lead to a great deal of discussion, the need to write down the rules of the game and great fun as they tried each others games out following the rules as written down. The company glossaries are usually far from perfect and instead of getting frustrated with this I use it as an opportunity to make my students think carefully about each translation and suggest improvements where necessary. They also divided the words into categories according to whether they related to graphic design, marketing, production, administration and so on.

All this is very low tech; so low tech in fact that I am beginning to have problems in obtaining the index cards which are a mainstay of my courses now. However with SCA, the participants come together from all different areas of Denmark in a hired venue. None of us is really at home. In one of the venues we are even allocated a different room every week, therefore I think it is important to have a web presence for each course so that there is at least one constant in the students' course. The Moodle is also a place to which they can return after the end of the course to re-do the exercises, see the videos again, listen to the recordings we made of role play phone calls and see the taped meetings we held. I am experimenting with You Tube and Springdoo as means of recording role plays from which course participants can then compile their own comprehension questions or use as a dictation or transcripts can be used to make cloze or c-tests. However I have yet to solve the public/private problem on sites such as YouTube. I don't want to insist that students join You Tube for a short course, yet I would like to be able to embed the videos on the password protected Moodle which I cannot do if the video is private (only I can see it).

Now that I have run over half a dozen of these courses I can see that the participants themselves recognise the value of learning words in sentences rather than as individual entities and most of the games they devise themselves involve some sort of story telling element or putting the chosen word into a sentence.

The long and the short of it is that participants in my courses do not need to write or read long reports and technical articles. What they need is an emphasis on spoken interactions related to their everyday activities at work.

The main problem is that their need for English is very sporadic (apart from the computer interface being in English) and so reinforcement after the course needs to be worked at as they can't rely on their regular work tasks to give them enough practice.

When I contacted Vance Stevens to take part in the latest Absolutely Intercultural podcast I had in mind that we would explore the issues brought up in his publication Institutionalising Web 2.0 for learners in the Arab region but in the end rather than talking about different parts of the world we ended up spending most time on the importance of learning through being connected by your virtual network.

By sheer coincidence Elaine Hoter from Israel contacted me to tell me about a free online conference about technology and multiculturalism next Wednesday February 13 and we discovered that Vance Stevens is among their world class panel of speakers. The conference is in Arabic, Hebrew and English and among the other speakers in the English part of the conference there will also be Dr Sheila Geresh, Dr Janet Salmons and Dr Michelle Selinger.

We also had two winners of our CD competition which was lucky as I happened to have two copies of the CD to give away. I spoke to both winners. With Susanne Nyrop I explored the idea of anniversaries a little as this show represents our Golden anniversary! It turns out that Susanne had been to the first birthday celebrations of Denmark's first ever self-service supermarket. Our second winner, based in the Netherlands had a Danish name and turned out to be Danish. However her background was much more complicated than that and in talking about it I found out that it is possible to have triple nationality which was a great surprise to me.

I have just returned from an extraordinary trip to Ireland. The Achill experience is always special but the reasons it is special are different each time and this was my third time. To be in Ireland for over a week, especially on the West coast of Irleand and not experience one drop of rain, that is quite special. Neither a drop of alcohol! That's quite ...odd. Without much connectivity but yet being in charge of a workshop producing the project website is quite frustrating. Having taken my daughters because my husband is away in China at the same time, was a bit nerve-wracking until I saw how welcoming everyone was and that they were really integrated into their allocated work group.

I don't know how they do it but the students are usually really nice and this year was no exception, ranging from the young 18/19 year old Lithuanians to the rather older Germans.

The Achill experience is an Intensive Programme project and brings together university students from 4 different countries, UK; Germany, Hungary and Lithuania, though in actual fact the origins of the participants is even wider than that. The students start interacting together online in the run up to the trip as they apply for and appoint various managers jobs such as travel manager, catering manager and accommodation manager. These are real jobs carrying real responsibilities which can earn the students concerned real money if they do it right. If the managers have done their jobs correctly then the students and their teachers all meet together on Achill Island on the west coast where the students live and work in mixed culture groups in different workshops which all aim to find out about some aspect of the intercultural reality of the island or the student group or both. The week also includes a bus trip around the island while the rest of the time the students work intensively together talking to islanders and each other about different topics such as emigration, cultural artefacts, becoming an intercultural expert and so on.

This was my first time as a workshop moderator and to me fell the task of ensuring that the travelogue group worked effectively together to produce a web document of the event. I find it quite easy to be offline when I am on holiday but rather frustrating when I am still supposed to be at work. Working offline meant that only one person could see the latest version at a time and server problems at the destination end meant that we could not upload finished pages anyway but instead had to mail them to a third party and wait for him to get them up as and when it was possible instead.

I also noticed that we were producing blocks of text with no links as no-one had access to relevant URLs. For example we mentioned the Achill Cliff House Hotel where we had dinner every evening, we talked about SMART goals and we talked about the Kinlay House Hostel where we stayed overnight in Dublin. But none got a link even though they deserved it.

As part of the media workshop my group were invited to examine Kieran Sweeney's website selling premium Irish knitwear. Since the expertise in the group was very diverse we decided to give him 3 perspectives starting with the non-techie customer perspective, following by the technical web site builder perspective and ending with the view from an experienced Internet consumer.

As to the URL for the travelogue itself, that will have to wait until I am certain that it is in a fit state to be consulted!

It was not all plain sailing. I witnessed people getting upset with each other based on language misunderstandings for example while some of my colleagues experienced what could later be diagnosed as mid-week blues in their group dynamics. Huge numbers of us, including me and both girls, fell ill in spite of the good weather. It is traditional for the students to present their findings at the end of the week to the Achill community and I must say that the standard of the presentations was much better than I remembered and that was probably because groups tried out different delivery modes apart from just Powerpoint. So there were role plays and movies as well as a couple of powerpoints.

As well as the main business of the Achill experience, last week was also an opportunity to make some progress on the VITAE project in which we will develop teacher training for integration of ICT in everyday practice.

The first development is that instead of developing a standard course and tweaking it to meet each different partner context, we will try out different approaches first and then identify the common aspects which work. Therefore I have been busy developing ideas for the Danish version of our course and Achill was an opportunity to work on details. One aspect which has been worrying me from the start is that we said that we would also train our participants to become mentors to their colleagues. This had me imagining complicated two tier training with the ICT first and the mentoring later. But I have now found a way of integrating the mentor training as part of the ICT training which is a much more elegant solution. It will basically involve the trainers acting as mentors and making this part of the course visible and explicit to the participants so that they can easily copy the way in which we do it.

Since some of the VITAE partners were also on Achill we were also able to discuss some new ideas such as how to incorporate mobile learning into the training in order to give us an opportunity to find out what potential this form of learning may have more generally. By the end of our discussions I could see opportunities to include some sort of surprise mobile event during the face to face element of the Danish training as well as an element of mentor/coaching once the participants have returned to their home institutions to put into practice what they have learned.

We realise that there is nothing so inspiring as a good example so therefore I recorded interviews with two of the teachers on Achill who had not tried this intensive, experiential way of learning before. These may well find their way into the Absolutely Intercultural podcast but they were primarily recorded to contribute to a library of examples of different ways of learning.

I am therefore satisfied with the progress made while on Achill and now preparing for our first online meeting in which we will try to agree on which sets of standards we need to follow for the duration of the project. There will be three sets of standards.

1. Standards for ensuring quality of professional development - these would be standards which we project partners should follow ouselves.

2. Standards for teacher competences in ICT integration. These need to include pedagogic as well as technological competences. The NETS standards are a step in the right direction though still very focused on technological competence.  Just emerging are a new set of standards from UNESCO which look very promising.

3. National curricula These will be different in each partner country and we will of course have to be aware of what teachers are expected to teach in the different partner countries. In practice these requirements tend to be vague and not formulated in any detail.

Once we have decided on the various standards which will apply to the VITAE products then we can go ahead with our aims and objectives of the training.

In the latest Absolutely Intercultural show Laurence is still in New Braunfels Texas and talks to two couples who have left Germany for the USA and appear to have no regrets. One couple is doing really well with their German restaurant while the second couple is retired after a lifetime in the army. The show also features an interview with a British woman, Jean Lennox,  who moved to Germany which shows the traffic is two-way though the attraction was not that strong as Jean had originally wanted to go to France. Some German stereotypes about the need for order for example get an airing.

The sole purpose of this post is to be recognised by technorati. I have been trying to get linked in to Technorati for over a year here without success. Now there is a new way of doing it which involves inserting some html in this post. Let's hope it works. But maybe I will have to go through this all again once the address of this blog changes under TIG.

 

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