Graham Davies

Sorry wrong URL! My paper is at: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/worldgd1.htm not http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/wordlgd1.htm

Did Thatcher's lot invent anything new? They even borrowed the idea of the poll tax, even though a little bit of research could have told them it didn't work! And why "fortunately" regarding parsing? As I indicated in my earlier email, parsing was an easy way of gaining marks. Sentence analysis was a lot easier that having to dream up an imaginative essay - which was never my forte. I have never been a creative person. See my WorldCALL 98 keynote entitled "True creativity often starts where language ends": www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/wordlgd1.htm As I said before, it was a waste of my time as a German teacher having to explain what a noun is so that I could give my students a general rule about German nouns beginning with a capital letter. Similarly, the verb second rule in a main clause is easy to grasp if you know what a verb is. If you know the difference between a subject and an object the concept of the accusative case is easier to understand. I could go one... What drives MFL teachers like myself mad is how much time we waste teaching basic stuff like this. We are all pretty well agreed that this is not right. On a lighter note, concerning the modal verbs "must" in English and "må" in Swedish, a Swedish friend of mine told me the following joke: A Swede was visiting London and decided to use the Underground to get around to see the sights. He was spotted by an attendant at Piccadilly Circus station, standing at the top of an escalator and hesitating to step on. The attendant thought the Swede might have been nervous about using the escalator and asked if he needed help. The Swede pointed to a sign at the top of the escalator which read: "Dogs must be carried". "So, " said the attendant, "what's the problem?" "I don't have a dog." replied the Swede. German speakers often get confused by "must" too, because "I must not" is similar to "ich muss nicht", which means "I don't have to" and not "I must not". My dentist used to have a sign in Swedish in his surgery (he had a Swedish girlfriend). I can't remember all of it, but it was a list of sentences beginning with "Gör det". The last two were something like: "The Dane said: Gör det stor!" (Make it big!) "The Swede said: Gör det ont?" ("Will it hurt?") Does this make sense? It could almost work in German too, the expression for "Will it hurt?" very similar.

Designing good tests for learners of foreign languages is not easy, and a vocab test on its own is not a clear indicator of your ability to handle a foreign language. Four discrete skills are usually tested: Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing. The four skills are, of course, interrelated in real life. Unfortunately, there are a lot of amateurs in the business of producing tests for learners of foreign languages. The professionals have, however, been working on a reliable assessment system for over 20 years. The result is the six-point scale of the Council of Europe's Common European Framework (CEF) for Languages, which is being adopted by member states of the Council of Europe, including (belatedly) the UK: http://www.coe.int/T/E/Cultural_Co-operati...Language_Policy The CEF is the yardstick used by the Dialang project, which maintains a free website where you can test yourself in three of the discrete language skills. Speaking is not included because this is the skill where human intervention is crucial - and also in the other skills in order to achieve an accurate assessment of a learner's language competence. The lowest CEF level (A1 or Breakthrough) corresponds to what a reasonable adult learner could achieve after 90 learning hours. See: http://www.dialang.org See also the ICT Module No. 4.1 on Computer Aided Assessment and Language Learning: http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod4-1.htm School leavers in the UK do not perform well in relation to the CEF scale. A typical German school leaver would probably end up (at 18+) with a level corresponding to CEF B1 (Threshhold) or higher. We turn out a handful of students who reach this level. Most of our children do not progress beyond GCSE, where a lower/middle grade would probably correspond only to A2 (Waystage), a level which is not of much practical use in the real world. It means what it says: Waystage. Threshold is the level at which one begins to communicate with a reasonable degree of competence and confidence. Things will get worse as languages beyond Keystage 3 (age 14) in England become optional. So much for our future generations becoming members of a multilingual Europe!

Parsing was certainly not a new subject matter during the Thatcher era; it was a revival. I took the Oxford Board's GCE O-Level exam in English in 1958. Parsing featured in one of the papers. We practised parsing thoughout secondary school in the 1950s and I recall doing a bit of parsing in preparation for the 11-plus. I found it boring, but it was an easy way of picking up marks for people like myself who had an analytical mind, and it helped me in coming to terms with German, the second modern foreign language that I studied at school, e.g. being aware of the fundamental difference between a subject and an object meant that I could easily cope with the concept of accusative case. Parsing has made a comeback in the cross-disciplinary area of computational linguistics. I found the knowledge that I had gained at school useful when I developed an interest in machine translation (MT) in the 1970s. Parsing is a prerequisite of parser-based MT, although the current trend is towards more efficient translation memory or example-based machine translation (EBMT) systems. Translation memory systems (e.g. Translator's Workbench) are used extensively by the European Commission. Yes, and they do work! They are designed to be used as an aid for professional translators, not as fully automatic systems. They are particularly useful for translating texts that use a lot of standard formulations, e.g. EC jargon-ridden texts and technical manuals. See: http://europa.eu.int/comm/translation I used to teach parsing on my introductory course in computational linguistics at Ealing College in the 1980s. Researchers involved in ICALL (Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning) have written some clever automatic parsers and taggers. Geoffrey Leech developed the CLAWS parser/tagger at the University of Lancaster years ago - I recall it being demonstrated by him in at a course I attended there in the early 1980s. We cover the topic of parsing and tagging in Module 3.5 at the ICT4LT website: http://www.ict4lt.org This module is an introduction to Human Language Technologies (formerly known as Language Engineering). Section 5 and Section 7 of Module 3.5 cover parsing and tagging. Section 8 covers parser-based CALL. There is a link from Module 3.5 to an automatic Web parser at the University of South Denmark. It's surprisingly efficient, but by no means perfect. See: http://visl.hum.sdu.dk/visl/en/parsing/automatic/ Try it with your students! Module 3.4 on Corpus Linguistics also mentions the applications of parsing.

I trained at Goldsmiths’ in 1964-65 and did my teaching practice at Forest Hill School, a good comprehensive, but with some very tough kids from the Catford area. It was a baptism of fire in some respects. My first full-time teaching post in a grammar school in rural Devon was a complete contrast – a very easy ride! Yes, it’s true to say that English teachers were hammered during the Thatcher era – mostly unjustly – but there were severe shortages in the 1980s and schools were forced to employ under-qualified teachers in several subject areas. The problem is still with us. I recently visited a London school that had to shut down its French department for two years as they could not attract a single recruit and no one on the existing staff had enough French to keep it going. They are now up and running once more. Now the government’s policy for schools in England is to make foreign languages optional beyond Keystage 3 (age 14). This means that the shortage of staff will be alleviated but that our children will have even less of a chance of becoming members of a multilingual Europe.

Yes, true. The main disadvantages that I have noticed are: 1. The teacher may have to face the light source (depending on the location of the projector, of course) and this does not do one's eyes a lot of good. I feel blinded after a long sesson. 2. The user's height can be a problem. I have noticed some teachers (mainly female) struggling to tap icons on a menu bar at the top of the board. 3. Trailing cables - but this can be overcome if the board is fixed permanently and the cables are hidden. 4. The text on a whiteboard screen, which is currently limitied in size, is difficult to read from the back of a long room.

Yes, indeed! My daughter's teacher of English was the least qualified, and least capable of maintaining discipline in her department. Hence anyone who ended up in that lower-level group was destined to fail. On the whole I tend to favour streaming, especially in modern foreign languages, but a high degree of skill is required to get the best out of children who have been labelled as failures. Unfortunately, however, the more experienced teachers grab the most academic groups in order to give themselves an easy time. But I know a few experienced teachers who have worked wonders with special needs children.

Streaming, however, can also be damaging. Both my daughters went to a comprehensive school (1970s to 1980s) which streamed most subject groups. My elder daughter ended up in the top stream for French and in one of the lower streams for English. My daughter's knowledge of French grammar was (and still is) OK, but I was appalled when I looked at corrected work in her English exercise books. It was clear to me that my daughter's ability to write (and even speak) English was taking a nosedive. Many fundamental spelling and grammatical mistakes in her exercise books were left uncorrected, some of the "corrections" were actually wrong, and I was aware that her teacher had major problems enforcing discipline in her classes. When I took issue with the headteacher about this - as a parent and as a school governor - he dismissed my complaint. I won't go into the details, but the results of a subsequent inspection revealed that at least two of the English language teaching staff did not know their subject. They weren't subject specialists - there was a shortage of suitably qualified staff at the the time. They were subsequently dismissed, but a lot of damage had already been done. In the end, however, both daughters came through the system unscathed and went on to study at university, where they did very well. I agree that this did a lot of damage.

Yes, David, all very valid points but... Just to nit-pick: The “have” in “might ‘ve” sounds different from the “have” in “I’ve read that book”, so it’s not a fair comparison. You hear a schwa before the “v” in “might ‘ve” but only a “v” in “I’ve”. A better example for comparison is “would ‘ve”, where you also hear a schwa before the “v” – and, yes, I’ve seen “would of” written down too. You don’t have to resort to phonetic transcription either. All you have to do is point out that writing “of” is wrong because it should be the verb “have”, which sounds a bit like “of” in spoken English when it is shortened to "'ve". You don’t have to go into a lengthy explanation about tenses and the differences between verbs and prepositions at this point – but it depends on how much your learners are capable of assimilating or want to know. The National Literacy Strategy came about because of the appalling lack of knowledge about grammar among English children. I take your point about the metalanguage of grammar. I would not automatically expect an 11-year-old to understand terms such "subordinate clause" and "unattached participle", but the situation with which I was confronted as a secondary teacher in the 1960s and 1970s was that most children entering the school did not know basic grammar, such as the difference between a noun and a verb. I therefore had to explain what a noun was before I could give them a general rule about nouns in German beginning with a capital letter. I found this irritating as it was a waste of time and, in common with many teachers of Modern Foreign Languages, I felt that English language teachers in primary schools should have done a better job. The situation got worse in the wave of the trend not to mention grammar when teaching modern foreign languages. As a teacher of German in higher education in the 1980s I was then confronted with 18-year-olds who did not know the difference between a noun and a verb! Somehow or other they had muddled through secondary school without having a clear idea of the very basics of grammar. We therefore had to take remedial action. My approach was to use a range of computer programs rather than waste classroom time. I recall one 18-year-girl coming up to me after using a set of programs concerning word order in German, notably the "main verb second rule". "It's brilliant!" she said, "I didn't realise it was that easy." None of her secondary school teachers had ever explained to her that there is a basic rule - and it is a fairly rigid rule - concerning the position of the main verb in a sentence.

I like Kindersite! Have a look at the NACELL (National Centre for Early Language Learning): http://www.nacell.org.uk The Language Ivestigator site is useful for primary school children: http://www.language-investigator.co.uk/index.htm See also Winged Sandals: http://www.wingedsandals.org Greek Myths for young children Here's a nice primary school website in Wales: http://www.conwy11.u-net.com

As a teacher in a rural Devon secondary school I often heard kids saying, for example, “Where ‘re uz to?” (“Where are we?”), “Oi be” (“I am”), “Oi’ll see ‘ee somewhen” (“I’ll see you sometime”), which a teacher from our exchange school in Germany dismissed as “incorrect”. I pointed out that such expressions were not incorrect in the context of the rural Devon dialect, as everyone who spoke the dialect used them. There were some unusual formations of tenses too, but I can’t remember the system – and it was a system. And, of course, the German children on an exchange visit that I organised picked up all the non-standard local variations from the families that they stayed with. My wife Sally is from Belfast. Although well-educated, she habitually conjugates verbs in way that sounds incorrect to speakers of standard English, but it appears to be common throughout the dialect area, e.g. “He got threw out” and “Did you went…?” She often rearranges sentences too, e.g. “It’s cold getting” instead of “It’s getting cold”. In Irish English you often hear the “after” construction in verbal phrases – more common in the South than in the North, e.g. “I'm after going down there” (past tense). Regarding the social status of dialects, we have more hang-ups about this than German speakers, for example. In Switzerland it would be normal for a university professor to give his lectures in accented High German and then to chat to his students in Swiss German in the coffee bar afterwards. The situation is similar in Austria. I regularly visit St Johann in Tirol. People of all social classes speak Tyrolean German to other Tyroleans. But Tyrolean is more or less unintelligible to North Germans, so they tend to speak accented High German to them (and to me). But when they speak to Bavarians, who come from a closely-related dialect area, they seem to find a halfway mark. In other words they are virtually tri-lingual and particularly good at code-switching. The problem in England (less so in Scotland, Wales and Ireland) is that we have traditionally associated an accent or dialect with “incorrectness”. Things are changing now: v. the number of BBC news presenters that have a regional accent.

David Writes: Thanks - very useful! I met John Wells at a gathering of Esperantists some years ago. No, I'm not an Esperantist; I was just interested to find out what it was all about. Regarding the above website, I've noticed numerous shifts in pronunication and usage in my lifetime. My grandfather, a Man of Kent, pronounced a post-vocalic "r" but my generation had already lost it. I see more and more North American forms of pronunciation, as well as individual words and phrases, creeping into British English, but there is also a slight shift the other way too, which I've noticed when visiting our Canadian cousins: for example, "fridge" has replaced "ice-box" and "lift" co-exists with "elevator". My British English has sometimes confused our cousins, e.g. when I said "I'll knock you up early tomorrow morning" and "That's a load of b*ll*cks!", but I automatically slip into North American usage when talking about cars in Canada and habitually say "gas", "trunk", "hood", "fender" in order to be better understood. What about the rising intonation that characterises young (especially female) speakers of Australian English? That's creeping in over here too - attributed by some people to the popularity of Australian soap operas such as "Neighbours". An Australian colleague of my generation claims that the rising intonation is relatively new in Australia too. Rising intonation is well established in some regional accents of the British Isles, however, e.g. Bristol and East Anglian - and, of course, Welsh and Irish English.

And how about Jimmy Hendrix's rendering of "The Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock? I went to New Orleans a couple of years ago and heard a Hendrix tribute band playing a pretty passable imitation - awesome!

David writes: I don't agree. You can often resolve a spelling problem if you have adequate knowledge of the grammar. When I was at school in the 1950s the dictation exercise was still very much in vogue, especially in French classes. French words contain a large number of letters that are not pronounced, e.g. the "-ent" present tense ending of the third person plural of certain classes of verbs, but you could work out that it should be there if you heard a plural subject preceding it. As a kid, I used to find the weekly dictation class tedious, but in retrospect I can see that it had a point. It sharpened my ability to spell and my knowledge of grammar, as well as teaching me to listen accurately - lessons that have served me well in my professional life. It worked for me! When I entered the teaching profession in the 1960s the audio-lingual approach was in vogue. In my first school the French team adopted a new Holt-Rinehart-Winston coursebook, "Ecouter et parler", that favoured this approach. The teacher's handbook stated categorically that we should just get the kids to listen and speak for the first five lessons, so that their pronunciation would not be influenced by the vagaries of the French spelling system. All the French teaching team followed the handbook's advice. It was an unmitigated disaster. Most of the kids could pronounce French quite well but - because they had been told to write nothing down - they had problems remembering the words and phrases. The clever ones had devised their own spelling system, however, and had been writing down the words and phrases in notebooks under their desks, e.g. "byendayshozeshaytwuh" for "Bien des choses chez toi". It took ages to get them to write French correctly after that! David writes: Again, I don't agree. It works for some people. When I taught German I always tried to relate the grammar of German to the grammar of English, pointing out similarities whenever possible, e.g. showing that separable verbs in German had a lot in common with phrasal verbs in English. I avoided using technical terms as far as I could, simply pointing out that "ich stehe auf" is pretty close to "I get up", the difference being that "auf" can end up a long way from "ich stehe". This is similar to the approach used by Michel Thomas. My wife Sally tried to learn German many times but failed - until she bought a set of Michel Thomas CDs. His approach worked for her. Within three weeks she was constructing sentences such as "Das kann ich nicht tun, weil ich zu beschäftigt bin." I had to learn Hungarian some years ago while I was managing a project in Hungary. I decided I would just pick it up in a casual way. I have worked in Denmark, Norway and Sweden on several occasions and I never bothered to learn any of these languages systematically because I could make a good deal of sense of them - at least of the written forms - by applying my knowledge of English and German and of Germanic diachronic linguistics that I had learned at university. I got hopelessly confused with Hungarian, however. This is because I was being confronted with concepts that did not exist in any of the other languages (all Indo-European) that I had learned before. It was like trying to learn the rules of Bridge by peering over a player's shoulder. I therefore bought a dictionary and coursebook and took private lessons with a tutor. Hungarian, for example, has no prepositions and possessive adjectives - it's all done with sets of endings, infixes and postpositions. The verb normally ends up at the end of a clause. The modal verb "can" is often conveyed via an infix, and there is a verb ending "-lek/-lak" that conveys first person singular subject and second person singular informal object in one go: thus "szeretlek" = "I love you". Once I could analyse what was going on in a Hungarian sentence I made rapid progress and could quickly understand and produce sentences such as: "Bécsbe a feleségemmel mentem" = "I went to Vienna with my wife" which parses as: Bécs - Vienna -be - suffix = to a - the feleség - wife -em - infix = my -mel - suffix = with men - root of verb menni (to go) -tem - suffix = first person singular past tense It's easy to be dogmatic about methodology, but some approaches simply don't work for some people. People like myself have to analyse what is going on - and it's not just an adult thing: I have come across many youngsters whose minds work the same way as mine. When I learned to ski I could not master the parallel turn until I had been told that the secret lies in weighting/unweighting each ski alternately. The instructor had demonstrated the turn several times but could not explain adequately in English what she was doing. So I asked her to explain it in German - which then made it perfectly clear to me. But, having said this, I realise that this approach would put many people off, and I therefore always adapted my approach to my audience. You could probably say therefore that I belong to the school of bumbling eclecticism. Anyway, language teachers in the UK are stuck with the National Literacy Strategy. It is firmly embedded in the recently published Keystage 3 document relating to the teaching of Modern Foreign Languages: Department for Education and Skills (2003) Keystage 3 Framework for Teaching MFL: Years 7, 8 and 9: http://www.standards.dfee.gov.uk/keystage3/publications On the whole, reactions to this document from language teachers have been very positive. I find it too prescriptive, however, but I belong to a teaching generation that thought for itself.

Re the Speech Accent Archive at: http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/ A great site, David! I have spent at least an hour today, browsing the archive and listening in particular to the regional varieties of English. I am not a linguistics specialist - I began my career as a teacher of German -but I have always been fascinated by accents and dialects and can mimic a few. I have put in a link (and mentioned David as the source) on my "Favourite Websites" page (language-related sites) at: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/websites.htm Just a couple of comments about the text that the speakers are asked to read: “Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.” The term "snow peas" is unknown in British English. We call them "mange-tout peas", don't we? I was intrigued by our Canadian cousins ordering "snow peas" in a restaurant in British Columbia one evening - so I joined them. The penny dropped when the meal arrived. Most British English speakers would expand "go meet her Wednesday" to "go and meet her on Wednesday". I noticed that a couple of the British speakers at the site inserted an "on" before "Wednesday". But I realise that a standard text is useful in order to make comparisons, even though it is unnatural. The word "store" is North American, but it is creeping in over here and probably would not be regarded as unnatural. Our local supermarket is called "Country Store". My personal choice of interesting and distinct British and Irish accents would be:  London (Cockney). The London accent is spreading into the surrounding Home Counties, giving rise to a variety known as "Estuary English": http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/  Bristol  Birmingham - usually instantly recognisable. The sample speakers from Birmingham at the above site have a fairly soft Black Country accent .  Liverpool - very distinct and completely different from the surrounding rural areas.  Glasgow - can be completely unintelligible!  Yorkshire & Lancashire  West Country (Somerset / Devon / Cornwall)  Geordie (Northumbrian) with the distinct Danish "r".  Cumbrian  Welsh - the accent, not the language. My father was Welsh (lovely lilting accent).  Scottish Highlands  Ulster - Belfast being a particularly harsh form of the accent/dialect: See the BBC website, which has samples from the BBC Ulster TV series, "Give My Head Peace": http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/gmhp/. My wife Sally is from Belfast.  Dublin - very distinct from other varieties of Irish English and close to Liverpool English  County Cork, Ireland - a lovely sing-song lilt. My sister-in-law Helen is from Cork.  West Coast of Ireland (County Limerick, County Clare)  Donegal I hail from Maidstone in Kent, which falls within the area of Estuary English, and I only have a slight regional accent. I live in Maidenhead, Berkshire, where there used to be a fairly distinct accent with a post-vocalic "r", which you can still hear amongst the older generation, but Berkshire is now mainly Estuary (which lacks the post-vocalic "r"). The post-vocalic "r" begins to creep in towards West Berkshire and can be heard clearly when you reach Wiltshire.

Regarding the National Literacy Strategy see: Heather Rendall TES Online, 12 October 2003 "We need to talk: Is everyone using the same grammar terms with pupils at KS2 and 3? Heather Rendall sounds an alert for MFL and English departments" http://www.tes.co.uk/online/ (A search of the archives under "Rendall" will locate the article for you.) This was also the subject of a lively debate in the Linguanet Forum some time ago: http://www.mailbase.org.uk/lists/linguanet-forum One debate centred on the way tenses in English were described in the National Literacy documents. It was felt by MFL teachers that whoever drew up the National Literacy documents did not have a clear understanding of the grammar of their mother tongue. We found many blunders, most of which have now been corrected. To cite a couple of examples from Heather's article: 1. The following appeared in one of the NL documents: "Adjectives have different degrees of intensity: nominative names the quality (tall)." WRONG! The term "nominative" applies to the case of a noun not an adjective. The term "nominal" is usual in this context - contrasted with "comparative" and "superlative". 2. It was stated in one of the NL documents that the apostrophe plus "s" derives from "his", e.g. "the man's dog" was originally "the man his dog". WRONG! Every teacher of German knows that the apostophe plus "s" in English derives from the Saxon genitive. When British kids write "I might of known" and "Your the one", it's obvious that they don't understand the grammar of their own language. Is the National Literacy Strategy doing anything to improve things? TV and radio presenters don't help. They are always making mistakes. I must admit that I learned more about English grammar from my German teacher at school than from my English teacher. My German teacher was the local Delphic Oracle concerning all aspects of grammar in German and in English.

Exactly my sentiments! When I started out as a teacher in the 1960s I felt that I was trusted to use my intelligence and initiative. From the Thatcher era onwards that trust was systematically broken down and the National Curriculum - a disaster area for my subject area (Modern Foreign Languages) - was introduced, not to improve standards but to satisfy a disgruntled electorate and to pander to the mission-statement-new-management-control-freak mentality of those in charge of educational institutions, as well as keeping an army of civil servants busy producing a deluge of unintelligible, jargon-ridden b*llsh*t.

Now that's more like it! I am not a historian but I do enjoy history broadcasts on TV, e.g. the History Channel, which I access via my TV digital box. I watched the Ireland/Wales rugby match on digital TV last weekend, and I can see quite future in this medium. I used the digital facility several times: recapping the highlights of the game (I missed the first 20 minutes), reading viewer's comments about the game, checking the stats, etc. It's primitive interaction at the moment, but I guess it will develop further. And, of course, the technical quality of digital TV is far superior to the video clips you currently find on most websites - even BBCi News on the Web, which I have stopped watching now that I have three 24-hour news channels on digital TV. The term "blended learning" is being used a lot these days, and the topic has been discussed in another part of this Forum. I don't like the term - I find it pretentious - but I do subscribe to the basic idea. I can think of nothing worse than being restricted to the Internet as the only form of ICT-based learning - and I love to sit down and read a good book too.

Juan Carlos asks: This should be possible. In 1993 a group of European educational institutions applied for funding under the EC's Lingua programme (which is now part of Socrates) to establish a Pan-European Association for Language Teachers interested in Computer Assisted Language Learning and Technology Enhanced Language Learning. The application succeeded and within one year EUROCALL was founded: http://www.eurocall-languages.org You can read the background story at: http://www.eurocall-languages.org/about/history.htm Since 1993 EUROCALL has maintained a membership of around 350-400 people (mainly teachers) in over 30 different countries. It is financed by membership fees and profits from its annual conferences. We are currently working towards setting up WorldCALL on the EUROCALL model. There have been two WorldCALL conferences, the first in Australia (1998) and the second in Canada (2003): http://www.worldcall.org I currently head a team that is drafting the WorldCALL constitution. An important piece of advice: Don't limit yourself to the Internet. Although the focus in EUROCALL and WorldCALL conferences and publications has moved strongly towards language teaching via the Web in recent years, we don't limit ourselves to this single area of ICT-based technologies - and there is even evidence of a bit of a backlash in some quarters against the dominance of the Web. The Web is not the panacea, e.g. it's far too restrictive for certain types of interaction that require greater spontaneity, e.g. listen / respond / playback activities that language teachers like to use - which works much better in a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM environment. Bear in mind the UK government's broad definition of e-learning as it appears at the website of the e-Learning Strategy Unit: "If someone is learning in a way that uses information and communication technologies (ICTs), they are doing e-learning." In other words, e-learning is a catch-all term, embracing a wide range of ICT-based technologies: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/elearningstrategy/ I have sent John Simkin a bit of general advice about submitting project proposals to the EC - I have worked on three occasions for the Lingua Bureau (now defunct) and the Socrates Technical Assistance Office (TAO) in Brussels as a project proposal/renewal evaluator. I also have sent John a copy of the successful final proposal for the ICT4LT project, which was set up with the aid of EC funding under Socrates/Lingua: http://www.ict4lt.org The ICT4LT project was completed in 2000 and continues to flourish. It's a good example of a successfully completed and thriving project.

Having been reminded of the much-quoted definition about a language being a dialect with an army and a navy, I decided to check it's origin. Most authorities seem to agree that it emanates from Max Weinreich: "A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot " (Yiddish original) This is found in Weinreich's "Yivo and the problems of our time", Yivo Bleter, 1945, Vol. 25, No. 1, p. 13. Adding a humorous note to the discussion concerning dialect, here are some fun websites: Dialectizer: http://www.rinkworks.com/dialect/ Some years ago I recall being given a copy of a DOS program that converted any text into Jive. This a website that converts other websites into Cockney, Jive, Redneck, Elmer Fudd, etc. Alternatively, just feed in a text of your choice. Here's my original text, followed by the translation into Cockney: 1. "I was walking down the road the other day when I felt thirsty, so I went into a pub and ordered a pint of beer." 2. "I were walkin' dahn the road the bloody uvver day wen I felt firsty, so I went into a rub-a-dub and ordered a pint of beer." Hmm, a couple of rhyming slang opportunities missed, I think: (i) "road" = "frog" ("frog and toad"), (ii) "beer" = "pig's" ("pig's ear"). The Jive version is better: "Ah wuz walkin' waaay down d' road t'oda' day when ah felt dusty, so's ah went into some pub an' o'dered some pint uh beer. Ah be baaad..." The BBC TV series and book The Story of English featured Jive - as did the comedy film Airplane (the scene in which an old lady converses with two big guys fluently in Jive). Melvyn Bragg's series The Adventure of English featured Gullah, another Afro-American variety of English. For the Ali G translator see See http://mackers.com/alig The opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice reads: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." which translates into Ali G slang as: "It is a truf universally acknowledged, dat a single geeza in possession of a wicked fortune must be in dig of a bitch." For an academic b*llsh*t generator see: BULL at http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/nnh/critic.htm BULL stands for Basic Unitary Literary Language. It’s a computer program by John Holland that generates impressive-sounding sentences such as: "In a situated discourse, the metonymy of inclusion devolves into the hegemony of pre-existing structure." I love this kind of stuff . I wrote a poetry generator along these lines (in collaboration with my old friend David Steel) back in the 1970s, but it’s a long time since I saw anything as good as this. If you think the above sample is BULL then the real thing is even better: "If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the ‘now-all-but-unreadable DNA’ of a fast deindustrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of the inner city." The above text is authentic and written by one of the winners of the Annual Bad Writing Contest: see Volume 11, 82 of the Humanist Discussion Group at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/ I also like the Postmodernism Generator: I am grateful to Tim Johns for drawing my attention to this clever CGI program at http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern Written by Andrew C. Bulhak, it generates completely meaningless but impressive-sounding essays, e.g. Baudrillardist hyperreality and subpatriarchialist theory, by V. Andreas Buxton, Department of Gender Politics, University of California, which begins as follows: "Sexual identity is part of the paradigm of narrativity," says Foucault; however, according to Finnis [1] , it is not so much sexual identity that is part of the paradigm of narrativity, but rather the fatal flaw, and subsequent futility, of sexual identity. It could be said that Sartre suggests the use of presemiotic textual theory to attack sexism. Foucault uses the term 'Baudrillardist hyperreality' to denote the difference between art and class." Great stuff!

Further to the what I have already posted concerning English dialects, I found Melvyn Bragg's TV series "The Adventure of English" particularly useful - and the book is pretty good too.

There's section on the Olympic Games at the Winged Sandals website - which is mainly a multimedia introduction to Greek Myths and Ancient Greek History for young people: http://www.wingedsandals.com

Yes, that's my view too. This is largely due to the Internet as a means of communication and as a public resource bank. I never wrote a successful textbook. My printed publications have largely been more theoretical - and they don't sell in huge numbers and certainly don't generate much income. But I can see from access records to the websites which I maintain that hundreds of teachers at least have a look at what I have written there (I can't tell how carefully they read it, of course). Most of my income now derives from running ICT training workshops and from software publications. I started out as a secondary education teacher in the 1960s, when we were trusted to use our initiative and imagination. I moved into higher education in the 1970s, but I kept a foot in the secondary education camp by getting involved in in-service training, in the course of which I have visited many secondary schools all over the UK. From the Thatcher era onwards teachers have ceased to be trusted by central government to do a proper job, hence the introduction of the National Curriculum which, frankly, I think has been a disaster in my subject area (Modern Foreign Languages). The sooner we fall in line with the Common European Framework for Languages the better, but may be too late for schools in England, more and more of which are abandoning the teaching of languages beyond KS3 - and that does not even take them as far as the lowest level of the Common European Framework. Let's see what happens in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland...

The deal that I got under the teachers' pension scheme in 1993 (at the age of 51) was not that bad. I had 25 years of service under my belt, which was enhanced to 31.5 years under the then early retirement scheme. The aim of the enhancement was to encourage the dead wood to drop off and make room for new blood (if you will excuse the mixed metaphor). But the dead wood hung on, and people like myself, who were generating additional private income from writing and consultancy work, took the money and ran, as they saw an opportunity for expansion of their free-lance activities, cushioned by the early retirement lump sum (which enabled me to pay off my mortgage) and the regular income from the pension. New blood was injected into the system, but it soon became obvious to the management that a teacher of 25-30 cannot do the same job as a teacher of 45-50. I was therefore called back to my institution as a part-time consultant to assist with the management of a number of externally funded projects that I had set up. So I ended up with a higher net income and far fewer days work! When you retire you have to calculate in lots of different factors. There is a noticeable decrease in stress and you have extra free time to walk the dog, take longer holidays, etc, but you also spend less money. I spend most of my time at home in jeans and a tee-shirt. I rarely buy new smart clothes – they wear out more slowly – and I spend less money on cups of coffee and lunches. Above all, I don’t do a lot of travelling by car. I used to travel 25 miles each way to and from work – a journey that used to take 40-45 minutes when I started my last job in the early 1970s, but this time had increased to around 60-75 minutes by the time that I retired in 1993. So I gained at least two free hours each day, and my expenditure on petrol and maintenance took a nosedive. And now that my annual mileage is low I pay less for car insurance. Finally, I don’t have to fight for salary increases. I just wait for the annual inflation-indexed rise to come through. Having reached 60 last year, I now get the 200 pounds winter fuel allowance. I also get cheap transport on local buses and trains, a discount on my green fees at the golf club and 10% off purchases at the local garden centre – I have more time for gardening too!

I thoroughly recommend it!