Graham Davies

1. The Olympic Games. Have a look at these sites a. Winged Sandals: A delightful multimedia website on Greek Mythology created by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in association with The University of Melbourne's Centre for Classics and Archaeology. The website is designed for children 6-12 but will certainly have a much wider appeal: http://www.wingedsandals.com b. Perseus Digital Library: A gem of a site for Classicists. Everything you need to know about Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Based at Tufts University, USA, this site contains masses of texts, pictures, tips for learning Greek and Latin, dictionaries, help with fonts and many other resources: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu There's a bit on the Olympic Games at both sites. 2. Copyright Andy asks: This is what Mailbase, managed by Newcastle University, says about the online lists that it maintains. The same principles apply to most online lists: NEVER, NEVER, NEVER upload other people's materials to your own site without seeking their permission. If you do so, you are asking for trouble. The general advice given by copyright experts is that you should link to other sites containing material that you wish to draw attention to, making sure that the URL of the linked site is clearly visible in the browser's address box. I have incorporated other people's materials (with their permission) at the ICT4LT site that I maintain. I have often found that they are flattered that I wish to do so. Apart from the copyright issue, it's only common courtesy to seek such permission.

That's sad news! I heard him speak a couple of times at conferences during the 1980s. The MEP was a good initiative in many respects. It developed out of the CET (Council for Educational Technology), didn't it? The CET was the forerunner of MESU (Microlectronics Education Support Unit), which then became NCET, which then became BECTA.

Have a look at Section 14.3 (A classroom illustration of email in action) and Section 14.8 (Working with partner schools) of Module 1.5 at the ICT4LT site: http://www.ict4lt.org You'll find some useful links and advice there.

I have been using MailWasher Pro for around two years. It filters most of the spam automatically - i.e. so that I don't even see it - mainly by referring to realtime blackhole lists, but I can also set up my own "friends" and "foes" filters and other specific filters in addition to these. MailWasher Pro filters incoming mail from my three ISPs simultaneously - two of which I access via Eudora and one via CompuServe Classic. The three different ISPs that I use have their own filtering systems that stop spam before it hits my mailboxes. CompuServe appears to be quite efficient: only half a dozen spams per day get through to my CompuServe mailbox. Force 9, my second ISP, seems to block all spam: since using Force9 I have had zero spam hit my Force9 mailbox over a period of two years. Netalia, my third ISP, lets around 30-50 spams through each day, but it blocks all known viruses. Netalia was, however, unable to stop the spam hijack that hit me in July this year, when my Netalia address was spoofed as the return address of several different spam companies. However, the storm of bounces arising from the hijack was shortlived, lasting only 3-4 months. I am back to my normal quota of 30-50 spams per day arriving via my Netalia mailbox, and MailWasher Pro zaps most of these automatically. Essentially, I don't regard spam as a problem anymore.

Another example of open source software is Moodle, a software package designed to help educators create online courses: http://moodle.org Why use WebCT or Blackboard? Moodle is free. I avoid Outlook (a.k.a Look Out!) - too prone to virus attacks. I use Eudora for email - the free, downloadable version. On the other hand, when one aims to reach a mass audience one has to take into consideration what the majority of people are using out there - for compatiblity reasons alone. As Arneil and Holmes (the "Hot Potatoes" boys) pointed out in their excellent paper at EUROCALL 2004, making Web pages compatible with a range of browsers is not an easy task, especially if (as we linguists do) one creates media-rich resources. I keep a careful watch on the hits at our business website to see which browsers and operating systems our visitors are using (our hit counter records this data). A massive 86% are still using IE5 or IE6.

David, you should give a presentation at next year's EUROCALL conference. See: http://www.eurocall-languages.org

David writes: I takes around three hours for me to travel by train to Paris or Brussels: one hour to London and then two hours from London to Paris or Brussels. Mike writes: An old schoolfriend of mine was based in the British Embassy in Saigon at the time of the Tet Offensive. He often talked about the different approaches adopted by the Brits and the Americans. The British Embassy bought most of its provisions from local suppliers, e.g. fruit and vegetables and other basic foodstuffs, and they employed Vietnamese staff as housekeepers in Embassy staff's homes. My friend had a Vietnamese cook. This gave the Brits useful contact with the local people and insights into their thinking. Before he was posted to Vietnam my friend took an intensive course in Vietnamese in the Foreign Office's language teaching unit. Virtually everything that the American Embassy in Saigon used was imported direct from the USA, and they employed few local people. Mike writes: Yes, we have experienced the same problem in Northern Ireland. I was staying with my in-laws in the Shankill Road when the first British troops came in (in August 1969). I remember them running around like headless chicken in the early days, grabbing a local and pointing to a group of people asking if they were Catholics or Protestants (in those days Protestant = friend, Catholic = foe). I was always puzzled by my wife’s ability to be able to identify almost immediately if someone was a Catholic or Protestant. They speak with the same accent, and I could never tell the difference simply by talking to someone. But, if one grows up in an environment such as Northern Ireland one seems to develop a sixth sense, which is characteristic of most people living in most divided communities. Names are an obvious clue: Billy = Protestant, Sean = Catholic, Robertson = Protestant, Kelly = Catholic (although this is not 100% reliable), but there are other little indications that I have never fathomed out. The British troops must have learned a lot from local intelligence. They got a lot better at identifying who was who, especially who was a terrorist (from either side). One of my Northern Irish friends says he can say immediately if someone is Catholic or Protestant, merely by asking them to recite the alphabet. He claims that the give-away is the pronunciation of the letter “H”: a Protestant says “aitch” and a Catholic says “haitch”, he claims. Don’t ask me why this is so! My sister-in-law (a Catholic from Cork) does, however, say “haitch”, and my wife (a Protestant from Belfast) says “aitch”. Yes, Mike is right: travel for Americans is expensive these days. We have the advantage of very cheap flights from the UK and a very strong pound - particularly if we visit the USA or Canada. I visited Canada and the USA in May this year, and I returned with a lot of spare cash as I had overestimated what things would cost. I should have known better, I guess, as I have visited the USA and/or Canada every year since 1993. We take three holidays abroad every year - and I now live mainly on my teacher's pension, supplemented by a small income from a business partnership.

Mike asks: At the risk of being accused of being flippant, we Brits take an avid interest in World Cup soccer and rugby, and many Brits can name the leading European soccer teams and players. But, yes, Mike is right. Local issues play the predominant role in politics. On the other hand, why do I always feel that I have lost touch with the rest of the world after 2-3 weeks in the USA (or Canada, where I have relatives)? I guess the point I am making is that travel broadens the mind: v. the case of G.W.B. before he became President. When I first visited Northern Ireland (where my wife was born) I was shocked by its religious fundamentalism and prejudices - it's still dreadfully racist. I recall being asked by someone on my first visit: "What do you think about Northern Ireland?" I replied "I think you need to travel a bit more." (I was just 23 years of age at the time.) In retrospect, I don't know how I avoided a dig on the jaw.

Just a couple of quick comments: 1. Yes, of course the news coverage in the UK focuses mainly on Britain, but if you read any "quality" newspaper or watch the TV news you'll find that international events are very well covered. How many Americans own a passport? I've heard various figures quoted, from 10% to 20%. Not that owning a passport necessarily makes you better informed about world affairs - v. the number of Brits who holiday each year in Spain but who have little exposure to Spanish culture in the purpose-built English-speaking holiday resorts. I have, however, been frequently surprised while travelling in the US to find that many people I have met have never travelled outside their own state, let alone travelling abroad. 2. I enjoy the religious diversity in the UK. Our neighbours (Hindus) have just celebrated Guy Fawkes night (5 Nov) with a firework display, and they will be celebrating Diwali (12 Nov) with another firework display. They also celebrate Christmas and New Year. We are usually invited to Diwali parties in the area where I live. It's great that we can all join in with one another's festivals. It makes life far less boring!

Picking up the thread of the isolation of the USA, I always find that when I go to the USA (and I visit the USA quite often) that I lose touch very quickly with what is going on in the rest of the world. I tune in to CNN’s “international” news, only to find that 11 out of 12 news items focus on the USA and one on Canada. Only major disasters in Europe or elsewhere in the world hit the headlines. Bill Bryson (who is an American) sums up the situation in an article entitled "Those boring foreigners" in his collection "Notes from a big country". Bill Bryson writes: "Julian Barnes, in a line I intend to make my own when the moment is right, once observed that any foreigner visiting the US can perform an easy magic trick: 'Buy a newspaper and see your own country disappear'. Actually, you don't need to read a newspaper. You can read a magazine or watch TV or just talk to people."

I was disappointed not to see a Democrat elected, but I was never all that impressed by Kerry as an alternative to Bush. The American people have made their choice, in the same way as the British people chose to be governed by Margaret Thatcher for 11 years. As Mike says, “American presidents reign for only four years - eight if they are re-elected - and then they go.” Isn’t there a tendency to support a fundamentalist right-winger when terrorism is perceived as a major issue – as it was in the UK during the Thatcher years? Like Mike, I married into a family of Northern Ireland protestants. They are tough cookies but pussy cats compared to the terrorists currently stalking the world. Northern Ireland is less of an issue now – we have other things to worry about. Two years ago, my wife celebrated an important birthday in Belfast. We had difficulties finding hotel rooms for the whole of our family over a long weekend – because Belfast is now one of the most popular destinations for weekend breaks. During the 1970s I feared going anywhere near the place. The US is not a homogenous society. Values very considerably from state to state. In Oxford, Ohio, I found that I was only able to drink sitting outside a bar if the outside area was encased in something resembling chicken wire, but in New Orleans I could have walked down Bourbon Street with a glass of beer in one hand and a Hurricane cocktail in the other, with a cigarette hanging from my lip, whilst watching the girls on the balconies exposing their breasts in exchange for a few Mardi Gras beads.

Warning re Bulletin Boards It has just come to my notice that a bulletin board at one of the websites that I maintain has been blasted with emails from sources that have been identified as emanating from credit card fraudsters and hackers. The fraudsters / hackers send a message to the bulletin board that contains a clickable link to a website where credit card details might be requested or where information on how to generate fake credit cards might be viewed, and this information is then picked up and disseminated further by search engines such as Google. I immediately zapped the bulletin board - which was actually a hangover from a facility that we had stopped using some time ago and were no longer watching closely. If you maintain a bulletin board it is essential to filter incoming emails regularly and rigorously. Members of this forum may recall my earlier warning about displaying your email address prominently at your website, especially in clickable "@" format. My old business email address was hijacked in July this year as a result of our address being prominently displayed at our website and was rendered useless within a matter of days. We no longer display our address at our website. It is munged into a contact form instead. I have received emails from many sources, business and education, indicating that such spam hijacks are on the increase, i.e. whereby the spammer spoofs your address as their return address so that you receive all the bounces and irate replies.

Andrew writes: Yes, I agree that the future lies in the international variety. Sometimes I get confused, however. As a regular visitor to Canada, where I have relations, I slip into North American English almost automatically, as it avoids raised eyebrows, especially when talking about cars, but when I come home I find I am still talking about “gas”, “hood, “trunk”, “fender”, “windshield”, etc. North American English is now making such an impact on the variety that we speak on this island that I am no longer 100% which variety is which. I recently wrote an encyclopaedia article for Elsevier, who insist on US spelling conventions. No problem – easy if you set your spell checker to US English – but now I find myself writing “traveled” instead of “travelled” and failing to distinguish between “practise” (verb) and “practice” (noun). Andrew writes: The Academie has tried to impose French ICT terms instead of the more common English-based international terms. On a couple of occasions when preparing to lecture (in French) in France I tried to familiarise myself by learning the French terms, only to find that all the computer technicians I met habitually used English-based terms in preference to the French terms. Andrew writes: Using the different interfaces is a great way of learning the terminology in different languages: i.e. learn by doing. One of the CALL programs that I have written allows the teacher to set the interface to match the target language of the learner, thus “File/Open” can be made to appear as “Fiche/Ouvrir” or “Datei/Öffnen”. My language centre at Thames Valley University used different versions of Word with interfaces in French, German and Spanish.

Caterina writes: You might take a look at the ICT4LT (ICT for Language Teachers) website, which was produced with the aid of EC funding in four languages, including Italian. The Italian version was produced by Prof Roberto Dolci, University of Venice, one of our partners in the project. The 15 original modules are available in English, Italian, Finnish and Swedish - and there is a Glossary of Terminology in three of the languages (Swedish is the odd one out): http://www.ict4lt.org Most "international" terms such as "input", "browser", etc are not translated in the Italian version of the Glossary. The ICT4LT site gets around 600 hits per day, mostly from the UK, with Italy a close second. Prof Roberto Dolci has run several courses in Italy centred on the ICT4LT website. I contributed to one of his seminars in Venice a few years ago. The University of Venice has a well-equipped multimedia centre: http://venus.unive.it/cli/ Prof Dolci use to manage the centre, but he's recently moved back into Dipartimento di Scienze del Linguaggio and continues to lecture on languages and technology.

One thing I have noticed about Wikipedia is that it is rife with self-promotion - often in a subtle way, e.g. dressed up as "background" or "history" of the subject area. Having looked at a few articles in my area of work, I could recognise the style of one or two people I know - and who had included links to their websites or businesses. And, if you ran some of the stuff through a plagiarism detector such as Cerberus or Eve2, it could be interesting... Cerberus can be downloaded from: http://www.didascalia.be/cerberus.htm Scroll down to the bottom of the page. EVE2: http://www.canexus.com/eve See also COPLINK, an authorship analysis tool: http://ai.bpa.arizona.edu/COPLINK/authorship.htm Yes, authorship analysis tools have proved quite effective in the past and now they are being used in the fight against terrorism. I recall such a tool being used in the 1980s to establish the authorship of an unsigned manuscript, which the experts thought had been written by a famous Russian writer. The authorship analysis programme confirmed the experts' opinion - looking at type and richness of vocab used, typical sentence beginnings and endings, length of sentences, length on paragraphs, and a variety of features that I don't even begin to understand.

Having worked as a consultant and an editor for many publishers over a period of more than 20 years, I put my trust in their editorial procedures rather than in a website to which just anyone can contribute. I currently work as a series editor for a series entitled Language Learning and Language Technology, which is published by a major international publisher. Every contribution is read by two evaluators and by the two series editors before it is given the OK. However, having read the rubbish article at Wikipedia I decided to edit it. I zapped most of it and entered my own contribution - which is now up at the site under Computer Assisted Language Learning. I should add that the original article that I found there was factually inaccurate and out of date - it was not just a question of one person's opinion differing from another's. But how long will my version remain there? It's already been added to since yesterday - but the additions are OK. I have recently written two encyclopaedia articles on the same subject for two leading international publishers, and both were scrutinised thoroughly by consultants and editors before they were accepted. I agree with Andy. Wikipedia illustrates the problem of reliability of sources - which has become more problematic with the advent of the Web.

John writes: But what about quality control? I've just checked an article on a subject in which I consider myself a specialist, and it's rubbish.

David writes: Indeed, yes!

David writes: Only with respect to language training for airline pilots. The materials we developed for cabin crew, check-in staff, information desk staff, et al. covered English, French, German and Spanish. Most British school-leavers applying for a job, for example as cabin crew, would probably find that they could not pass British airline companies' language assessment tests in French, German and Spanish - even with a higher GCSE behind them. The assessment tests only assess general language skills, not language skills specific to the airline industry. This probably explains why most BA and BMI cabin crew who display the "language" badge on their uniform are not British but recruited from abroad.

I had to ring my mobile telephone company last month because they had put a bar on my phone, on the grounds that I hadn't paid my bill. I had paid the bill in fact - it comes off my credit card automatically. The customer services person was very polite, apologised and said she would investigate the problem. After half an hour she phoned me back to tell me it was a computer error and could not explain why it had happened. "No," I said, "computers just do what they are told to do. It's a programming error, therefore a human error and will probably occur again if the programmers don't sort it out." She did not really understand what I meant. This month the same thing happened again - same routine as before, but I was offered 10 pounds compensation and assured that the problem had now been resolved. We'll see... I used to have a sign in my room which read: "Computers are less intelligent than human beings but more intelligent than programmers."

Andy asks: This question often comes up. It's not easy to give a simple answer. MFL is a skills-based subject as well as knowledge-based. The four discrete skills that are taught and tested are: Reading, Writing, Speaking, Listening. It is not too difficult to teach Reading and Writing to a mixed ability group, as it's possible to divide up the class into different groups working on different tasks. If you have access to a language lab, you can quite easily teach Speaking and Listening to a mixed ability group, again by setting different tasks. The problem with Speaking and Listening, however, is that they are performance skills that have to be exercised on the fly - and in this respect they have a lot in common with musical skills or athletic skills. You end up with enormous differences in performance that cannot easily be reconciled, and these differences manifest themselves very early on in the language learning process. Thus, in a whole-class teaching situation, the tongue-tied child becomes extremely embarrassed in expressing him/herself in front of his/her peers, and the poor listener just sits there with the language washing over his/her head and literally not understanding a word. Mixed ability teaching of MFL canbe done, but it requires the patience of Job and a teacher with skills way above the average. There is a stack of research on this subject, most of which comes down against mixed-ability teaching of MFL - but the research that comes down on the other side is worth having a look at. See: http://ioewebserver.ioe.ac.uk/ioe/cms/get....578&4578_0=3424 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/1528573.stm

David writes: I worked for five years on a project involving the development of language training skills for the airline industry. They set pretty tough assessment tests. The tests get tougher according to the level of importance of language knowledge in carrying out a particular job. There are documented cases of planes having had near misses or even having crashed due to a pilot not hearing correctly the commands from air traffic control. When they recovered the black box after an Air China plane crashed, the first officer could be heard saying "What does 'pull up' mean?" I would be comforted to know that pilots' listening skills in English were rigorously tested in environments with lots of radio crackle and drop-outs, and with speakers using a range of weird accents. I would also like cabin crew to learn how to be a bit more polite - actually we developed a whole series of lessons on this aspect of language in English, German and Spanish. OK, we're talking about vocational training, but this assumes that you already have the basics from school.

I think that one of the failings of the UK educational system as a whole is that it fails to "stretch" people, thus foreign languages are perceived as "difficult" in this country and therefore not essential, whereas in Finland and Holland, for example, they are perceived as essential and are studied by all pupils up to the age of 16. Once a subject is designated "essential", or a "core skill" in UK jargon, it is amazing how people can be stretched. However, we have also failed to appreciate that while a gifted high-flyer might achieve CEF B1 (Higher GCSE) in French in 200 hours it could take 1000 hours for a low-achiever to hit the same target. Teaching non-streamed sets foreign languages has always been difficult, because of the element of progression involved, i.e. if you don't understand A then you are not ready to progress to B and if this process continues you end up with half the class not understanding a word of what is being said. There are relatively few documented cases of real success in teaching unstreamed classes foreign languages.

Audrey writes: There was a lot of “lost knowledge” when grammar teaching went into decline. As a result, the first drafts of the National Literacy Strategy document listing grammatical terms and their definitions were full of mistakes. These have now been corrected, but there is still some disagreement between English language teachers and teachers of foreign languages about the grammatical terms that should be used and how to define them. Terms for describing tenses are still widely misunderstood. The National Literacy Strategy document stated initially , for example, that English verbs have only TWO tenses: present and past. Teachers of foreign languages took issue with this, with the result that the KS3 strategy document for modern foreign languages now states: “English verbs have TWO BASIC tenses, present and past, and each of these can be simple or continuous” (my capitals). I believe I am right in saying that the word “basic” was missing in the first drafts of the National Literacy Strategy document. You still won’t find terms such as “imperfect” and "compound tenses" relating to foreign languages in the KS3 document, so neither teachers nor children know what we should be talking about! Having said that, I don't believe in pure grammar teaching, especially to younger children. There comes a point, however, when you can't avoid using specialist terms when you are "talking about" language, and this is no different from "talking about" any other subject, from physics to football. I can remember being proud of the fact that at a relatively early age I could "talk about" French and German as well as being able to pronounce "Bonjour" and "Guten Tag" correctly. Grammar can be fun. Many years ago (1979) I picked up a little booklet produced by Newcastle Polytechnic: "Xenophobowski's Guide to Grammar" by D.M. Kaufman. Many of the examples are amusing (and therefore memorable), e.g. under "Participles", Kaufmann writes: "There are two sorts of participles: present and past, e.g. going - He is going. vomiting - They were vomiting. gone - They have gone. cooked - He has cooked the hippo. See: National Literacy Strategy, Glossary of Terms: http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/literacy/...ramework/63285/ KS3 Framework for Teaching MFL: http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/keystage3...b/mflframework/

Well said, Audrey!