David Richardson

If a perspective from abroad is of any use to you, I'd be happy to help, either as mentor or as deliverer of an on-line seminar (I seem to have done quite a few of these this term about all sorts of things …). My main field of activity at the moment is English as a Modern Language … which is perhaps not so relevant for Kent-based teacher trainees. I can reminisce about the iniquities of KCC, though!

Wow! They're really trying to win friends and influence people, aren't they!

For PCs, there's an add-on to Acrobat reader which allows you to 'print' documents as .pdfs. For Macs, this comes as standard. There's an extra drop-down menu when you hit Apple-P, which lets you do all sorts of things, like creating a .pdf document and e-mailing it to someone as an attachment, and encrypting a .pdf document. The beauty of each of these systems is that you can turn anything you can print into a .pdf … This is really helpful if you're exporting documents into a programme which allows you to input .pdf (like the Mac version of Marratech). More or less anything you can see on the screen can then be turned into a .pdf document.

Marratech does a free, limited-feature version (http://www.marratech.com) which does what Breeze does … but a bit better, in my opinion.

I'm a Mac user, so this isn't a problem - you get the iLife suite of programmes free with a new Intel-based Mac and it's got everything you need in it. Admittedly they're slimmed-down versions of the 'real' programmes (a bit like the relationship between Photoshop Elements and Photoshop), but that's probably all that most teachers can cope with at the moment. I'm finding the impact of these new Macs (that run Windows and MacOS at the same time) fascinating. Our head of IT (a PC fanatic if ever there was one) has just bought himself one of the new laptops, and our department are also getting one for general use. Our reasons are firstly to be able to check the useability of web pages, Marratech, etc straightaway on the same machine, and secondly for visiting speakers, academics, etc. My turn comes in January (new financial year), and I'll use mine for similar reasons. Programmes like Marratech, which have different features in different operating systems, will be very much enhanced. Right now, we exploit these features by having two teachers on two machines work together, but we'll be able to do the same thing on one machine in the future. So, in this, as in many other computer questions, my advice is: get a Mac!

I've just started using SurveyMonkey (http://www.surveymonkey.com) for course evaluations, and I often use e-mail lists to do evaluations of particular practices (I got some really useful information about what students think about podcasting from the survey I carried out last autumn). SurveyMonkey is free, provided that you don't mind a slightly more limited service.

I was talking about this with a bloke called Johnny Widen, who's one of the 'grand old men' of ICT in Sweden. In the early 1980s at what is now Luleå Technical University, Johnny was behind the drive to use computers in education. He's a technician himself, and his natural starting point was with technicians, engineers and scientists. He acknowledges now that that was a mistake … because many of those people are extremely conservative (as they need to be - you don't want 'suck it and see' civil engineers). I mentioned to him how quickly humanities teachers got up and running, and how generally creative they are when they finally 'get' what ICT is. My explanation for this covers a few areas, such as the way we constantly have to make a distinction between outward form and inner substance, and the role we humanities people can play at a time of paradigm shift. We aren't expecting verities or absolute principles, so it's much easier for us to adapt and adopt in a situation where the parameters within which we're working are still very fluid. It's certainly been borne out in my current department (Humanities and Social Sciences). We're absolutely the cutting edge department at our university when it comes to the use of ICT in education.

There are still plenty of Scandinavian academics who think that RP exists. A colleague of mine, who's from Orkney, was once refused entry to an English course at university level by a Swedish academic because he said she'd never pass the pronunciation test with an accent like hers! Just goes to show the absurdites 'tänka rätt' can lead you into. The Queen doesn't speak RP any more: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/queen2.htm 'Glass' is the Swedified version of the French word 'glace' (ice-cream). It's pronounced just like the French. 'Glas' is the Swedish word for the English 'glass' and is pronounced the way Southerners speak: glarse. Norwegian doesn't follow quite the same conventions.

No, I think you're right. The problem is that the question of which 'English' is acceptable is completely mixed up with social class in the UK, which is why we don't code-switch, in my opinion. We use the code we use in order to place ourselves in a particular social class, which makes many people inherently insecure about whether they really belong there or not. At the same time, the development of language progresses and, as we know, there's quite a difference between the way people think they speak and the way they actually do speak. The result of all this is that there's total confusion about what the main focus of both language use and language teaching should be. The attitude of Swedes towards their own native language is equally fraught with contradiction. Dialects are specifically taught in schools in the subject of Swedish (together with basic Danish and Norwegian, interestingly enough), but the net effect of all the parsing pupils have to do is to give a mixed message: we say that dialects are important, but the model of language you're going to get marks for is this old-fashioned one, which people are increasingly moving away from. When I trained as an English teacher in London, we spent a lot of our time thinking about codes and sociolects, and I get the impression that this is now taboo in the new model England. The problem is that as soon as you start investigating how the ruling classes impose their rule, you threaten that rule … However, if you don't examine the social basis of the way we communicate with each other in our native language, it's very difficult to take change in language use into account (like the phenomenon of 18-34 year olds in the South East pronouncing the word 'laugh' as if it were 'laff'). One of the problems with teaching native language in schools is that it's often the one subject that the pupils at least think that they already master. If you've got an authoritarian turn of mind as a teacher, the temptation then is to 'set them straight' - you might think that you know how to speak English, but you're wrong.

There's a quotation from the Swedish philosopher, Thomas Thorilds, inscribed on one of the buildings at Uppsala University, which, in my opinion, gets to the root of this problem: Att tänka fritt är stor, men att tänka rätt är större It is a great thing to think freely, but an even greater thing to think correctly. If I were Chancellor of Uppsala University, I'd put a disclaimer under the inscription, so that people didn't think that that was an acceptable prescription for an educational establishment. I think that the problem is that the people who've shaped the British education system over the last 20 years have been obsessed with the idea of right answers, and haven't grasped that education is about getting the processes right - the answers then generally look after themselves. Right answers are the province of training, which isn't a useless activity in itself, but when it supplants education for young people, then we're all in trouble … OK, I'll get off this diversion from the original post now!

I think that this is probably more a US than a European phenomenon, at least at the moment (I don't really know much about how blogs are used in Asia). I often wonder where my US friends get the time, energy and interest to get so involved in their blogs - Swedish blogs tend to be fairly factual (aimed at specific special interest groups, like bird-watchers!). I discern a much greater obsession both with detail and with making sure that the voice which is heard is identified as yours amongst the US contributors to this forum, compared with their non-US counterparts … but perhaps that's just me.

Why on earth are children being told this in the first place? No wonder they're getting confused about foreign languages. When it comes to your native language, it's impossible to make a mistake in grammar. There might be more or less clear, aesthetically pleasing, socially acceptable, or contextually appropriate usages, but these are not mistakes. Swedish pupils have to do a lot of parsing in Swedish … and the results are generally disastrous, both for their own language and for their deep understanding of foreign languages. I often start my session on this point with a statement from my first Swedish textbook (when I threw myself in at the deep end and joined a class in Swedish for Swedes, despite not really being able to understand the language): "you have to learn the grammar of Swedish so that you can learn the grammar of foreign languages". I then ask them what the 'imperfekt' of the Swedish verb 'se' is in English in the first person. What I get is both "I saw" and "I was seeing". EFL teachers tend to use the 'duck' test when looking at the difference between tenses and aspects: it looks like a tense, it acts like a tense - it's a tense! So we look at the Past Simple and the Past Continuous as being two separate tenses. In the interests of grammar-translation, Swedish language teachers push the same line as the National Literary Strategy: English has a Present Tense just like Swedish, except that the English tense has two forms, whilst the Swedish tense only has one (which is a bit of philosophical hair-splitting which no-one - not even the teacher - can get his or her head around). Back to the presentation. I then point out that it's this distinction which causes all the problems for Swedes. However, let's stick with the original idea, that calling "I saw" and "I was seeing" 'imperfekt' helps you to learn foreign languages. I then take them to French and point out that "j'ai vu" is what the French call either 'parfait' or 'passé composé' (which is the terminology I used to use in England when I was teaching French). The French 'parfait' has a similar form to the English Present Perfect, but the meaning of the English Past Simple, which is why you have to be careful teaching the Past Simple to French people, but Swedes have no problem with it at all. On the other hand, the French 'imparfait' is the exact equivalent in meaning of the English Past Continuous. To sum up: the Swedish 'jag såg' is called by them 'imperfekt', but is a nice, clear equivalent of the English 'I saw'. Mix French in and the picture becomes totally confused, since the same grammatical metalanguage takes you to the exact opposite meaning. Collapse of argument (at least if you're a fan of logic). In my year doing 'O-level' Swedish, it was fascinating for me (who trained as an English teacher for British people before the National Curriculum) to see what the effect of spending all those hours on parsing was on my Swedish classmates. I never got less than 100% on all our 'grammar' tests, since 'underline the subordinate clause' didn't require me to actually understand the language, whilst they typically got about 25%. "You know it's a subordinate clause because if you make it negative, the word for 'not' goes in front of the verb" was a great explanation for me, who didn't understand the language (it explained why the word 'inte' kept hopping around), but a total waste of time for them, who never made the 'mistake' in the first place. The main two effects were to destroy their confidence in using their own language, and to crowd out any chance of learning much about Swedish culture and literature - in other words, much the same effects as the National Literary Strategy has had in England. One major problem we university teachers of literature have is that our students are unused to reading whole books in Swedish (they've had to spend the little time they have on anthologies), and they are culturally illiterate (you have to explain any references to Greek mythology and the Bible from scratch). They've read very little poetry, and have very rarely analysed things like metre and literary forms (alliteration and assonance are a surprise to them). So … I'm not surprised that the philistine attitude that's been shown to the subject of English in schools in Britain for the last 20 years has been having these effects. Until you ditch the National Curriculum and go back to real teaching, I'm afraid you're stuck with it. 'should of' has probably already found its way into the corpus, and it'll probably be the standard form in 50 years or so (unless the educational policies in England change).

Much the same goes for team blogs. I have been wondering for some time why it is that the posts my students make on team blogs seem to be longer and deeper than posts they make on discussion fora. One explanation I heard was that they perhaps see the team blog as more 'their space' than the university's discussion forum. It'll be interesting to see what happens. It may be that people cut their teeth on these public repositories of digital video films and then go on to develop their skills in the medium in other ways. I've heard an argument about why there are so many British computer game designers which says that it was the difficulty of programming the ZX Spectrum (to do computer games, anyway), which propelled British programmers into being especially creative in their solutions to programming problems. The results of sites like the one John mentions might be best judged by looking at their successors.

Another way to do it is to use the forum as a place where students have to post something which becomes the basis of other students' assessments. That way they get to both post and reply to posts. I'm using the English for Industrial Engineers blog to get the students to post instructions and then comment on the instructions other students have posted, using criteria garnered from a long extract from a book on the correct writing of instructions and descriptions: http://eiekalmar.blogspot.com/

Glad you like it, David. I remember doing a course years ago where we used First Class (which had a 'History' function, so that you could see who accessed whose posts and when). Most of the participants were in their mid-30s, but there were two younger ones, a man and a woman. I happened to notice one day that whenever the young man posted, the young woman was the first one to read the post, often within an hour of the posting. Unfortunately, though, it wasn't mutual - he probably finished the course blissfully unaware of his secret admirer. I'm doing a seminar in Stockholm on May 4th about team blogging and team podcasting, by the way. There's a blog relating to it, which can be found at: http://stockholm-seminar.blogspot.com/ Feel free to join us via Marratech, if you have the time and interest. You can read more about it at: http://www.upc.su.se/kalendarium/anmalan.asp?id=316

On the other hand, Audrey, linking language courses to a subject like Business Studies could be the first step away from the abyss for modern languages. Specialist language courses (we talk about ESP in English as a Foreign Language, which stands for English for Special Purposes) *can* be studied successfully by people with a low level of language skills, even by zero beginners. I've taught the Cashiers' course in Saudi Arabia, for example, where we had to teach Saudis who couldn't even recognise the Latin alphabet (let alone the intricacies of 'one, two, three') to take customers through the process of buying travellers' cheques and charging them to their bank account. I once also constructed an ESP course on the hoof for zero beginner marine biologists in Angola, where we had six weeks to get them up to a sufficient standard in English to be able to participate in a scientific conference on marine biology. The key factor, of course, is motivation (and I *know* they don't have any! I used to teach French in England once). So the trick is to get the pupils motivated to learn things about Business Studies in French, rather than hoping that French alone will motivate them. You probably know about instrumental and integrative motives for learning a language, so I'll just say that the pupils clearly don't have integrative motives, and the only instrumental motives they've been offered are ones like 'in some unspecified future time, MFL will help you get a job or get into university, but we can't quite say how'. The trick, now, is to set up some instrumental motives which are much closer to home. EFL teachers often have to get involved with ESP, and I'm sure we'd be happy to share our experiences.

Marratech is a desktop video conference system which we use quite a lot here. You need the Client software which you can download free from http://www.marratech.com, an ordinary webcam (if you want to be seen), and a headset - mike and earphones - if you want to be able to talk to the other participants without everyone else getting feedback from your computer. After that you need to know which virtual room we'll be using … and I can let you know that when it's been decided. If you want to try out the connection, open the Marratech software, and look up at the text box up towards the top of the screen. You'll see something like http://sessiondirectory/, which you replace with: http://artemis.hik.se:8080 Click return and this takes you to Kalmar's portal page. When you get there, click on Groucho's Café, and you'll enter a virtual room which is free for use by anyone at any time. If you look down in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, you'll see the icon for the Whiteboard. Click on that, and you can use all the drawing tools, etc which are along the top of the screen. We've discovered that some UK schools have ferociously-protected IT systems, by the way. There is a way round this, but you usually need the cooperation of your IT department. If you have problems with this, I can put you in touch with one of our technicians who knows a lot about firewalls. As you might expect, it all works better if you're on a broadband connection.

I don't think you should. My reading of this is that you both faced the problem of supping with the devil, but not having a long enough spoon! However, what's the alternative? To withdraw and do nothing? I think that the guilt should be put where it belongs - on the politicians and civil servants who screwed up what could have been a good educational system for political ends. The specific sin, in my book, has always been to demand specific outcomes from a process (i.e. the education of children) which can only provide certainty and specificity by subverting its own aims.

I'm doing a seminar about blogging and podcasting at Stockholm University on May 4th (you ought to be able to participate via Marratech, if you're interested). I've created a blog for that seminar, where I've already posted one or two descriptions of on-going blogs (including the TEYC blog in much more detail). You'll find it at: http://stockholm-seminar.blogspot.com/

I'm not sure how useful an international dimension might be to someone working within the UK education system, but here goes. I sometimes have to be a mentor for trainees who want to become language teachers. I use a modification of the Cambridge Diploma in TEFL observation form (which I don't happen to have on this computer, but which I'll try to attach next time I'm at work). One key element is a form I use during the lesson observation which is basically a series of columns with these headings: Time/Activity/Interaction In the first column I write the exact time things happen (including the time I think of things to write down) + spontaneous thoughts and observations I might have. The Activity column is for what the 'official' lesson is about, including the exact words the teacher uses in giving instructions, wherever possible. The Interaction column is filled with abbreviations like T -> SS (Teacher talking to the entire class at once) and S <-> S (pair work). In an average 45 minute lesson, I'll fill about about 5 of these, and afterwards I lay them out on a table, so that both the trainee and myself have a physical record of what went on, which forms the basis of a discussion of the trainee's performance (which often takes about an hour). We don't make such formal demands on trainees (or serving teachers) as you seem to do in the UK, so we rarely start with a formalised, written lesson plan. If we did, I'd include the other two Dip TEFL columns: Aims and Aids. Then, at each point in the lesson, I'd be recording which of the lesson aims was being handled, and what teaching aids were being used. Nowadays Sweden has a system called 'school-based training', where about one quarter of the assessment of each teacher trainee is formally entrusted to the mentor in school, with the collaboration of the teacher training college, of course. Here in Kalmar, we have a network of mentors in the county schools which meets a couple of times each term to discuss exactly how this assessment takes place. This has resulted in quite and elaborate checklist for English teacher trainees, to give them some guidelines about what to think about as they go into and through their teaching practice. Practising teachers are not subject to an inspection programme, but working in teams is standard, and peer 'inspection' (otherwise call teamwork!) happens all the time. OK, that's the formal system. When it comes to specific advice to give both teachers and trainees, my principle message is one which has already been mentioned: I don't want you to teach like me, but rather to teach like you. I always try to include sessions where we go out to a school and I teach a regular class with my trainees (or sometimes INSETT participants) observing me, and later commenting on my performance. My standard way of working is to demonstrate activities in the classroom for about 15 minutes, followed by buzz groups so that participants can begin to form their own impressions about what has been going on. For my distance INSETT groups team blogging has been an extremely useful tool. I have an active group at the moment on a course called Teaching English to Younger Children, where the serving teachers work in study groups and observe each other's lessons (the members usually work in different schools, so this is also a way of spreading best practice throughout a local authority area). They post their observations on the blog, and also report back at regular video conferences. Unfortunately for most of the readers of this forum, many of the contributions are in Swedish, but you'll find one or two entries in English: http://teyc06.blogspot.com/ (You'll find some English in the March postings). There seems to be something about the form of a blog which invites longer and deeper reflection than on a standard discussion forum. One explanation I heard for this last week was that blog participants feel a greater sense of ownership of the discussion space on their own blog than they do on the university's discussion forum. The main point, though, is that 'reality is something which emerges from discussion' (a very useful quote from the Swedish Armed Forces!). An informed, continuing dialogue between people who feel free to express themselves and share their experiences is probably the most important thing teachers and trainees need. The difficulty is in creating a 'safe environment' for this dialogue, so that participants don't feel that they'll be judged or penalised for taking part in it.

Perhaps the proliferation of 'home movies' on blogs, podcasts, etc is a phase we just have to go through at this stage of the development of the technology. One of the observations I keep making is the way that young teachers generally know which buttons to press, but they don't know why they should press this one rather than that one. Older teachers, once they get over the technological threshold, have far more to bring to the new technology, since they have far more experience of life in general. You probably won't be able to understand much on the TEYC blog: http://teyc06.blogspot.com/ but the average age of the contributors must be around 45 … and they took to blogging like ducks to water. The problem is that we're moving into uncharted waters, where the old social relationships and ways of being no longer apply. I'm 51 now and I interact on line with lots of people who don't realise I'm that 'old'. My age and general experience of life, however, makes interaction strangers easier for me than it is for many younger people. Perhaps I've got less to prove … so I don't need to hide behind an artificial persona - I can just be me. It makes it so much easier to function in an artificial 'microworld' (such as Second Life: http://secondlife.com/, see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life) because you don't have to invent so much. I've noticed lots of signs of insecurity in younger people (who were born during the neo-liberal revolution of the early 1980s) from HRT (high-rise terminals in their speech - generally a sign of lack of certainty) to an obsession with recreating rather than creating (how many music and fashion trends do we 'oldies' recognise from the 1960s and 1970s?). Perhaps we have to surfeit first on banality in order for creativity to break through. Are the early 2000s the new 1950s? If so, we've got the 1960s to come … and I experienced those as quite a cool decade!

Let me just add a bit about Galtieri and the Falklands War. If the Argentinian military dictatorship had waited 6 months, Mrs Thatcher would have given them the Falklands Islands, and most of the ships the British sent to take them back would already have been sold off to other countries. My understanding of that conflict was that the Falkland Islanders had the same legal status as the Hong Kong Chinese, and it was the future of Hong Kong which was being actively debated within the Conservative Party in the early 1980s. If the Falklanders had been permitted to enter and reside in Britain without a visa, then the same would have had to apply to the HK Chinese, and the UK government weren't going to allow that. The Falkland Islands were seen as an economic basket case (this was before they 'discovered' fishing rights), and Mrs Thatcher's government was giving the Argentinians clear signals that the UK didn't want the islands (such as selling off the remaining British ship that ever called there, and encouraging the Falkland Islanders to turn to Argentina for such things as advanced medical care). However, Mrs Thatcher also had serious political problems at home - Thatcherism was never very popular in Britain, and it was especially unpopular in 1982. The chance to divert attention from the economy by going to war on the other side of the world was too juicy to be missed. So … whilst it would be tempting to accept the kudos as a Brit for a war 'against dictatorship' and 'for freedom', I'm afraid that the facts just don't bear that interpretation out. Remember that it was the UK that was selling instruments of torture to both the Argentinian regime and the Chilean dictatorship, and that we did everything we could to avoid charging Captain Astiz (captured in South Georgia by the British) with crimes against humanity (such as the murder of a Swede in Argentina). Can you imagine a similar campaign to allow one of Saddam Hussein's torturers to get off the hook?

Do people still read 'How Children Fail' by John Holt? What's really frightening about the book is that it was written about experiences in the late 1950s. I reckon that Holt has the answer to this particular question too - pupils who're at the bottom of any heap will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid any more blows to their self-esteem … and to win any temporary advantages over people they can put lower down in the pecking order than they are themselves.

This is already a very hot topic in the Swedish general election campaign (they go to the polls in September). The bourgeois parties (as the parties on the Right are called) have claimed that the 'welfare state is safe with them' … but at the same time, they state that they want to bring Swedish taxes down to the average either of EU countries or of OECD countries (there are different bourgeois parties and they haven't quite coordinated their stories yet). This sounds fairly unobjectionable, but it means cutting about 20 billion euros from the state budget … which can only be done by crippling the Swedish welfare state. The bourgeois parties also want to 'stimulate employment' by drastically reducing benefits for people who're unemployed and on the long-term sicklist. One of the parties wants to introduce the same system of firing young working people which the French government is trying to introduce at the moment (hence all the demonstrations in Paris). This would have far-reaching consequences in Sweden, since, as in France, it's very difficult to rent a flat, take out a loan, etc, etc if you don't have a fairly secure contract of employment. Swedish election campaigns don't usually get going until August, and many voters make their minds up only at the last minute, so it's early days yet. However, on the few occasions that the opposition has won in Sweden (whether Social Democrats or bourgeois coalitions), at this time of year they've usually had a clear lead in the opinion polls. At the moment, though, the blocs are more or less neck and neck. It looks, therefore, as if Swedish voters aren't buying the usual right-wing argument that you can only get rich people to work by showering them with money, but you can only get poor people to work by pushing them below the poverty line. The fact that Carl Bildt's government in the early 1990s tried a carbon copy of Thatcher- and Reaganomics … and drove the country to the brink of bankruptcy in a few short months … is still in people's memories. We went through a very painful period of adjustment in the late-1990s, and the damage the bourgeois parties did last time is still in people's minds. The Social Democrats have been in power for 12 solid years now, though, so they're vulnerable to a feeling that it's time for a change. If Sweden does go bourgeois in September, it'll be a sign that the Swedish love of the welfare state has been somewhat diminished. However, even if that does happen, it's far from certain that what people vote for is what they end up getting. (BTW, the largest welfare recipients in Sweden are probably the Swedish private banks. When the economy went pear-shaped in 1992 - after only about a year of bourgeois 'government' - most of them nearly went bankrupt. These bold free-marketeers promptly turned to their 'get the state off our backs' friends in the government to demand subsidies. These got them out of difficulties and the banks are now extremely profitable … but somehow, they still haven't found time to reimburse the state for all the taxpayers' money they received. Still, that's how the free market works, isn't it.)

I'm doing a seminar on the subject of using blogs and podcasting in teaching on the afternoon of May 4th at Stockholm University. We'll almost certainly have a Marratech connection the whole afternoon, which would make it possible for forum members to take part. I've started a blog about the seminar, which can be read at: http://stockholm-seminar.blogspot.com If you're interested in joining us via Marratech, just mail me and I'll send you the practical details.