Graham Davies

Yes, I think Cormack is right in making a distinction here. But men don't tell many jokes either these days - at least my male friends don't. Jokes are for stand-up comedians, a growing number of whom are female. I get very bored with people (male and female) who insist on hogging the conversation in our pub by telling a string of jokes. The odd one is OK - if it's new and delivered well.

Sorry, quote wrongly attributed in last message! I meant: "Audrey writes" regarding the comment on Solnok. I'm not sure that there is a difference between "truck" and "lorry". One of my relations in Canada drives what he calls a "truck". He's always amused when my wife and I call it a "lorry". He also drives a pick-up, which he hooks up to his fifth wheel (a monster of an RV). Again, he is amused when my wife and I refer to his RV as a "caravan".

Rowena writes: Even shorter is Jak!

I agree with David. I think the document got it wrong regarding 4b. We have videoconferencing and we have Wimba, both of which can facilitate communicating with native speakers in different countries. We also have the telephone!

David writes: I like it!

I'm starting this topic because, as a former teacher of Modern Foreign Languages (German and French) I am puzzled by the addition of yet another new acronym, which appears to have arisen from the DfES in the UK: EAL (English as an Additional Language). This issue is also under discussion in another Forum to which I subscribe. It aapears that the DfES is the UK associates ESOL, ESL and EFL with adult learners and/on learners enrolled on a course for non-native speakers of English. What's it all about? This is my own view: EFL is often more closely associated with learners aged 16+ in some people's minds, but I have heard it applied to primary and secondary school children learning English as a Foreign Language - and you'll find plenty of such references on the Web. ESL in my experience was certainly used in a secondary education context throughout my career from the 1970s to 1990s. In fact, my centre at Ealing College commissioned a guide (published in 1987) on "Teaching ESL to bilingual students" - yes, that is the exact phrase used in the foreword by the ESL teacher who wrote it. He was writing mainly about children living in Southall, growing up speaking Gujurati, Hindi or Punjabi (or a mixture of these languages) at home and English at school. We had a lot of students at Ealing College from this background. Many of them were good linguists, picking up French or German as a third language at school and continuing to study it with us at degree level. ESOL used to be more common in North America than in the UK, but it's now caught on over here too. On a visit to Miami in 1987 (where I attended the TESOL 1987 conference) I recall ESOL being used in the context of teaching English in primary and secondary schools in Miami where the predominant language of the children was Spanish. One explanation of EAL that was offered is that it is a more accurate description of English as taught to children already speaking two languages other than English. In many countries in Europe this is quite a common situation - only the additional language offered would not be English, of course. I'm thinking of situtations in border areas, where for example, Catalan, Spanish and French are all spoken, each of which could be taught as the additional "foreign" language, depending on the country/region in which one lives. It can be a political thing. Bilingualism is the norm in many parts of Europe - as common as monolingualism in the UK: v. Dieter Wolff's publications: Aufsätze und Schriften zum bilingualen Unterricht http://www2.uni-wuppertal.de/FB4/bilingu/a...d_schriften.htm Is EAL just another example of the DfES "doing it's own thing"? The DfES seems to be using a different language from the rest of the world.

Rowena writes: In Hungarian the words for elder brother/sister and younger brother/sister are different. Isn't language fascinating? In another part of this Forum I once wrote about the "Windtalkers", the native Navajo speakers who were employed as radio operators in WWII. I don't think there were any written Navajo dictionaries or grammars around at the time, and the language in it spoken form is quite impenetrable. When the idea of using Navajo operators was proposed, the US military sent sample recordings to their own code-breakers, without telling them what it was. The code-breakers failed even to transcribe the language, let alone understand what was being said. It fooled the Japanese. A film called "Windtalkers" was made a few years ago, starring Nicolas Cage. I have heard two of the indigenous languages of the West Coast of Canada (Squamish/Salish) and Alaska (Athabaskan) being spoken. Some of the sounds are incredible - lots of glottal stops and unusual consonant combinations.

WebWhacker IS good. Now I promised not to do this - but it's only a quick one. If you download someone else's site to an intranet, check on the terms first. I manage the ICT4LT website and we only allow downloads of the site to a local intranet on payment of an annual franchise fee of 250 pounds. Alternatively, you can buy a CD-ROM containing the complete English language version of the site for 100 pounds for an unlimited site licence. This, by the way, is the only income that the site derives. CD-ROMs are by far the most popular choice. See: http://www.ict4lt.org The BECTA site contains several documents dealing with this issue.

Learning Hungarian was the most traumatic language learning experience in my life (I managed a project in Hungary from 1991 to 1996). Several problems hit me from day one: 1. The lexis has virtually no connections with other European languages, e.g. "bor" = "wine" and "sör" = "beer". 2. Hungarian is an agglutinative language, which means that words change their form substantially as a result of different prefixes, infixes and suffixes being added to them, e.g. "a felségemmel" means "with my wife", where "a" means "the", "feleség" means "wife", "-em-" means "my" and "-mel" means "with". There are no prepositions and possessive adjectives in Hungarian - it's all done by suffixes and infixes. 3. Word order can be very strange, with the verb normally falling at the end of the sentence, as in Latin, but not always... ...and I never really worked out why. 4. Hungarian has seven ways of expressing "you", depending on the relationship with the person you are talking to. 5. A man greets a woman with "Kezet csokolom" ("I kiss your hand"), but a woman greets a man with an expression corresponding to "Good morning" or something similar. "Hello!" is used for "Hello!" and "Goodbye!" 6. Questions are marked in speech only by intonation, but don't expect the intonation to correspond to question intonation in other European languages! I could go on...

It's often a question of personal taste, but there are obvious things that graphic designers know all about, e.g. which colours go well together and which ones to avoid in combination (red/green, blue/orange, magenta/yellow - common forms of colour blindness), font combinations, etc and, of course, how to make the site SENDA-compliant (essential in the UK): http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/directions/issue4/senda.html Lesley Shield (The Open University) gave a paper at this year's EUROCALL conference, entitled "Designing language learning Websites: are they special? Recommendations for good practice" http://www.e-lisa.at/eurocall/abstracts.htm#Shield The paper presented the initial results of a research project. Web guru Jakob Nielsen's site has sound advice on Web design: http://www.useit.com Did you know that the average person reads 25% more slowly from the computer screen than from the printed page? Nielsen's site is full of facts like this.

BECTA have produced a report entitled "ICT, amenability and the BBC digital curriculum service". I found a downloadable version in PDF format on this page: http://www.becta.org.uk/corporate/corporat...tion=12&id=3363 What do colleagues think of the MFL section on p. 17? How "amenable" are Modern Foreign Languages to being taught with the help of ICT? Has the report got it right?

Audrey writes: Aaargh! Don't tell me about it! Large organisations in their efforts to save money are locating their call centres overseas, but they have totally failed to realise how important it is for their staff to speak good, unaccented (or slightly accented) English. I was relayed to a call centre in Jamaica recently - at least I think it was Jamaica. I love the West Indian variety of English, but in this case I simply could not understand the guy at the other end of the phone. Several hardware and software companies have call centres in Ireland, but no problem here; Irish English has a pleasant ring, and the staff are usually courteous and often display a sense of humour too.

I rate pronunication and listening skills highly. Our local Chinese take-away is great. The people who run it are charming, and I have no problem communicating with them face-to-face. But when we phone through an order, they often fail to understand us, and we can't make sense of their replies. This has resulted in us getting some interesting combinations of dishes - but I'm all in favour of being adventurous! Teaching pronunciation and listening skills is quite labour-intensive, isn't it? I think ICT can help here - but in the end pronunciation is best judged by a human being. We have quite a high degree of tolerance, e.g. most English MT speakers are not put off by foreigners getting the "th" sound wrong, pronouncing it as "z". It's not really a crucial sound, I guess: Cockneys say "Forty fousand feavers on a frush's froat", and many Irish pronounce "th" as "t" or "d". But the "l" sound is often crucial. A Japanese colleague used to talk about a "General Erection", which is not what he meant - or maybe he did!

I used to get neurotic about losing data, but I'm calmer now. Like John, I have a large collection of data that I wouldn't want to lose. I back up onto CD-ROM once a week, but I also back up daily onto each of the three computers on my home LAN, so that every computer has a copy of everything new that has been added to each of the individual computers. I do this manually, using Windows Find, entering the date parameters and type of file. I am only seriously interested in doc, xls, pdf and other kinds of files that I have created. Really useful stuff is immediately stored offsite - unless it is confidential. I use two hosting services, one of which contains a mirror of my business and personal websites - just in case, as I had a scare about three years ago when the hosting service I was using suddenly went bust while I was at a conference in the USA. The complete website and non-confidential stuff is stored with both hosting services. Finally, I often send friends copies of useful documents. I haven't had a serious loss since the 1980s, when I was writing a book on my old Commodore PET during a thunderstorm. There was a power surge which zapped most of one chapter, but that's all!

David writes: I'm inclined to agree. There are a few instances in German where a difference in gender changes the meaning, e.g. "die See" ("sea"), "der See" ("lake"), but the context usually makes clear what is meant. Most Germans wouldn't bat an eyelid if you were in a restaurant and ordered "ein Kaffee" (which could be a gender mistake or a case mistake) instead of "einen Kaffee" (masculine gender, accusative case). You would still get a cup of coffee. I've always argued that knowing vocab and pronouncing it correctly is more important for the purposes of communication. Without vocab you are lost, and even then there is a wide degree of tolerance. If you are in Africa and someone suddenly shouts "Big cat, him come!" I think you would get the message that a lion is on the loose.

I realise that David and I may be taking this thread a little bit off track, reminiscing in this way, but our experiences show that bridging disciplines is a very fruitful experience. I used to teach German in the context of ICT at Ealing College. It was one of the special options that students could begin in their second year. They were taught about ICT in German and in English, read texts about ICT in both languages, and had to produce: a project dealing with an aspect of ICT in a German speaking country - which they researched during their year abroad - and a translation into English of a demanding German technical text of around 1500 words. It was a popular option and was highly relevant to the careers that some of the students eventually took up. In order to revive languages at KS4 maybe we have to think of ways in making languages appear more relevant or interesting, especially to boys, who often regard languages as "cissy" (which is well-documented in numerous articles). French is often considered a "girls' subject" by boys. There's a debate going on right now in the Linguanet Forum on teaching languages in the context of sport - which makes pretty good sense these days when you consider the international dimension of sports such as football. I've cited the case of a school in the North of England inviting French footballers from Bolton Wanderers to the school to talk to the children in French. How about French for football fans?

David writes: What a coincidence! I spent a month at Karl-Marx University in Leipzig in 1976, attending a refresher course for teachers of German. I lodged (unusually for that time) with a family. It was an unusual destination for Brits in those days - I've written a little bit about it in another section of this Forum. David writes: I bought a 32K BBC micro in 1983 and installed a WORDWISE chip too! The BBC micro still works and is packed away in my attic. I bought a Commodore PET around two years earlier, and managed to pick up a good word-processing package from a computer fair. I wrote the first CILT guide on computers in language learning with the Commodore package in 1982. The computer studies dept at Ealing College introduced me to word-processing in 1977, which is when I began to use the college computer to organise my research thesis. And we met at the University of Victoria, Canada, at the FLEAT III conference 1997, didn't we? We get over to Victoria regularly (home of the Hot Potatoes team, Stewart Arneil and Martin Holmes). We have relations on one of the nearby Gulf Islands. Small world!

Anders, don't even THINK about giving up! It's not as hard as you expect. I maintain a very large website, as well as my business website. You'll find that people are more cooperative than you think. It does take a bit of time, but I sleep well at night.

Interesting story about obscene website names, David! PowerGen Italy blundered with this name: http://www.powergenitalia.com It appears to be dead, as you'll only find an "under construction" message here now. Other obscene names that were spotted in time include: The South Hampshire Institute of Technology The City University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (This was at a time of mergers and status changes several years ago.) On a more serious note, David is right about the problems of enforcing copyright internationally. The two main messages that I would convey are: 1. Be courteous and ask people nicely for permission to make public their materials, explaining clearly how you intend them to be used. 2. Check out your national legislation carefully. Most of what I have posted is only relevant to the UK, which accepts only those bits of EU law that it happens to like!

"Boys' Own Club" This implies an understanding of the cultural background of my childhood years of the 1940s and 1950s. Boys and girls all read comic books in those days, one of which was called "Boys' Own Paper". There was also "The Eagle" and "The Rover". There were also comic books for girls such as "Girls' Crystal" and "Bunty". The sexual divide in those days was very marked. Boys were offered adventure stories, war stories and sports stories in their comics. As for the girls' comics, typically I never read them so I don't know what they contained! See: http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/British-comics A "Boys' Own Club" is a club that is exclusively for boys - part of the same culture as the comics to which I refer. I don't think such clubs are so popular now as they were in my youth, and the term now has a strong element of irony, e.g. one might refer to an exclusively male preserve of any sort as a "Boys' Own Club". Christine Sweeney appears to be saying that this section of the Forum is like a "Boys' Own Club" and she's offering to become a member. No further comment! This article is a good illustration of the use of the term: http://www.defenestrationmag.net/prose/amcvety.htm Anders, don't get too anxious about the work involved in seeking permissions. You will probably find that many people are willing to give you permission to make their materials public, providing it is in a non-commercial context. Leaving copyright aside, it is only courteous to ask someone if you can make their materials public.

I agree with David! Interestingly, we have a very similar background. I went to a highly selective boys' grammar school (1953-1961), passed O-levels in English, French, German, Latin, Maths, History and General Studies (1958) and A-levels in French, German and Latin (1960). I studied German (major) with French (minor) at Queen Mary College, London (1961-64), did a PGCE course at Goldsmiths' College (1964-65), read for a PhD at Queen Mary College, London (1965-68), while doing a bit of part-time teaching in secondary schools in London. I taught full-time in secondary education from 1968 to 1971 - and this is when I realised how narrow my educational background was. I moved into higher education in 1971, where I taught German at degree level. My interest in ICT dates from 1976. Who could believe that I would have switched from my PhD research topic (A Lexicon of Terms used in Medieval German Heraldry and the Tournament) to ICT?! There is a link, however. Once I had gathered all the data for my PhD I needed to organise it. I approached the computer services department to see if they could help - and they did.

"Tonio Kröger" - Yes, read it at university enjoyed it thoroughly, also "Der Tod in Venedig". I enjoyed German Novellen in general - short, readable and great stories. Storm's "Der Schimmelreiter" left a lasting impression - haunting story! I enjoyed the Middle High German epics at university: "Parzival", "Tristan und Isold", "Nibelungenlied" - great yarns!

No!

Teacher, telling his elderly mother that he has a new job: "Mum, I've got a new job." "Well done! Where is it?" "At the DFES." "That's nice. They make lovely sofas!" Coming back to "Bullxxxx Bingo", I remembered that I had already done some work on a set of education terms. I found the following list in a file on my hard disk. new strategy entitlement empowerment action research reflective practice pupil-centered SMT facilitation pilot CPD creativity gifted and talented SEN needs analysis cross-curricular learning environment value-added league table LEA knowledge, skills and understanding aims and objectives threshold assessment lifelong learning differentiation OFSTED SATs attainment targets inclusion

Nice one, Derek! And the rest are good too!