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Graham Davies

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Everything posted by Graham Davies

  1. I think Derek is absolutely right when he says: My impression - from browsing the language teaching section is that this is indeed what many teachers are doing. There's an excellent tutorial too on creating audio materials using the Audacity software. See my previous posting: Moodle can be used for both open and closed systems. The above forum is accessible to the public (guest login) and many of the materials and links contained within it are also accessible to the public. However, you don't necessarily need a VLE to achieve all this. It can be achieved with a well-managed website - but then you probably need a higher level of expertise or a very amenable webmaster to set it up. The thing about Moodle is that it's open source. Bits and pieces are constantly being added on to develop it further and make it far less restrictive than VLEs such as WebCT and Blackboard: v. the COVCELL project that is being discussed in the above Moodle forum. COVCELL = Cohort Oriented Virtual Campus for Effective Language Learning (COVCELL) an EU funded initiative to develop new Moodle modules for collaborative language learning.
  2. David writes: "I'm delighted to say that Graham Davies' excellent ICT4LT website has finally got a mention on the BECTa site! It's listed among the resources and in one of the answers to questions." At last! The project was funded by the EC from 1999 to 2000. BECTA was actually designated as one of the original partners, but they backed out at the last minute just before the final bid went to the EC, although they did promise to promote it in the secondary education sector. For some reason or other they never did, however. I think it may have been because NOF got under way at the same time and everybody was after NOF money and possibly saw the ICT4LT training materials as competition - so best not to mention them, eh? I am delighted to say that the ICT4LT site gets quite a few referrals via the clickable link at the top of the page of this forum. Thanks! Here's the link again: http://www.ict4lt.org I notice that the mention of ICT4LT in one of the answers to the questions relates to Module 4.1 on Computer Aided Assessment. I updated this module recently, adding in a link to Linguanet Europa, which has focused in its second phase on adult and independent learners. It offers important advice on assessing one's own ability, with links to various self-assessment sites and lots of useful resources: http://www.linguanet-europa.org
  3. The idea of the whole word communicating and collaborating via the Web is a great idea. It was part of the vision of the creator of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, who wrote: "The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information." Unfortunately, this is a dream. Although the world is populated mainly by nice people, there are enough nutters out there who can create havoc. We used to have what we called a Bulletin Board at the ICT4LT site at http://www.ict4lt.org. However, we had to shut it down as it was abused by time-wasters, nutcases, spammers and - worst of all - credit card fraudsters. This was because we allowed absolutely anyone to contribute and didn't have any kind of automatic or manual filtering system in place. At the same time our email addresses were attacked by spammers, resulting in hundreds of spam emails per day hitting our mailbox for a period of around three months. Now we bounce all mail addressed directly to the ICT4LT mailbox. We have a feedback form at the ICT4LT site instead that uses the generic (free) FormMail CGI script. I filter incoming emails sent to me via the feedback form. The form is very effective at keeping out spam, but I still get emails from nutcases and people who can't be bothered to read what the ICT4LT site is all about. I guess you shouldn't have such problems if you only allow your own students access. But once you open up blogs or fora to the public at large you are asking for trouble. This is where a blog site is useful - i.e. you get someone else to do the filtering for you, as at the TES ICT Blog site: http://www.tes.co.uk/blogs/ I have noticed, however, that the TES ICT Blog site now requires contributors to register first. I guess that they must have had problems operating a completely open system. Andy is well aware of the problems that one particular individual, hiding under various pseudonyms, created in this forum for a while. This is why passwords and closed systems are essential under some circumstances. It's not a case of "hiding" behind a passowrd. It's to avoid the kind of chaos that can arise from operating a completely open system. BTW, using a pseudonym does not protect you if you make libellous remarks in a blog or forum. The courts can force the administrator of the blog or forum to reveal the identify of the originator of a libellous remark. See the story of the lecturer who sent a message to a blog calling a politician a "lard brain" and a "Nazi". The poltician successfully sued her, winning damages of over £10,000 plus costs of £7200: http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/story/0,,1737445,00.html Other cases (in the USA) are documented on the Web.
  4. Moodle is very popular among language teachers, not least because of the availability of its interface in a large number of different languages. EUROCALL conferences have featured presentations and workshops on Moodle: http://www.eurocall-languages.org The Moodle for Language Teaching forum is accessible at http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=31 I am not a Moodle user myself, but I often browse the forum and make contributions. The Moodle forum includes hints and tips on incorporating audio files into Moodle, special scripts, etc. Andy is, of course, right. You can achieve all of what Derek describes without using a Virtual Learning Environment (or whatever the fashionable term is for it) such as Moodle.
  5. WorldCALL conference on Computer Assisted Language Learning The WorldCALL 2008 Conference Planning Committee has reached a decision on the venue of WorldCALL 2008. WorldCALL 2008, the third in the series of WorldCALL conferences, will take place in Japan in the month of August, 2008. Further details will be announced later. Keep an eye on the WorldCALL website: http://www.upv.es/worldcall/
  6. Long-term remembering is a good thing as far as foreign languages are concerned. It's useful to carry 3000 words around in one's head, combined with the knowledge of how to put them together and the skills of understanding them when they are spoken and pronouncing them correctly. I did short courses in Russian and Chinese back in the 1960s while I was in the sixth form and at university. I didn't get round to using my Russian until 1995 when I went to Minsk. A colleague and I were left waiting at Minsk ariport. The chauffeur of a car arrived to pick us up, said something in Russian, which I didn't catch. I remembered (from around 35 years previously) how to say "Sorry, I don't understand. Can you speak slowly, please?" The driver then spoke slowly, and I understood that he wanted us to put our luggage in the boot of his car and to wait while he sorted something out with the immigration officials who had held up another member of our group. I didn't get round to using my Chinese until 1998. I followed a BBC radio course in Mandarin Chinese in the mid-1960s. The Mandarin that I practised pronouncing in the 1960s on my old reel-to reel tape recorder was still firmly embedded in my memory over 30 years later when I was travelling with my wife Sally on the monorail in Sydney in 1998. A Chinese family of four entered our carriage and began conversing quite loudly. I picked up enough to understand that they were talking about me when I heard the words for the "old ("lai") American" and something about my "grey hair". They weren't being insulting as referring to someone as old and grey is a compliment in Chinese (as I had understood from my three postgraduate Chinese students at the time). Imagine the family's surprise when I turned to them and said in Chinese "Bu shi mei-guo ren, shi ying-guo ren" ("I'm not an American, I'm English".
  7. Richard Hamilton has posted this message to the Linguanet Forum at http://www.mailbase.org.uk/lists/linguanet...06-04/0125.html Headed: "Doing it the right way" My wife and I have belatedly realised that the DfES / Ofsted view of human interaction is correct and we have therefore decided to make certain changes to our love life to harmonise our activities with this grand scheme. The following procedure will now apply, effective immediate : 1. All "activity" will be planned well in advance and mapped against our SOM ( = Scheme Of Marriage ). The SOM will be available in electronic form only. 2. A laptop will be positioned either side of the bed for the ICT element. 3. Observation by a third person will occur regularly. (!) 4. There will be a starter, main bit and plenary ( cigarette ? ) 5. A variety of styles will be expected, none lasting more than 10 minutes. 6. Opportunities for self and peer assessment throughout the activity should be, er, embedded. 7. There must be clear outcomes ( sorry...) showing how we have moved on or, indeed, whether the earth moved. 8. An evaluation sheet ( "How was it for me?" ) will be completed afterwards. 9. Performance will be graded using the 4 point Ofsted scale. 10. Any more than 2 "Unsatisfactories" per year will initiate competence proceedings ; blaming fatigue or last thing Friday will not be acceptable. I know we will be more fulfilled with this regime. Just off to send her an e mail...
  8. A cable-less device, known as CM2, by ONfinity, which turns any projector/screen combination into an interactive whiteboard. It has been developed for on-the-road presentations and for multi-room presentations and is used in combination with a standard projector and projection screen - or blank wall. All that you need to do to set up the system is plug in the CM2 device via a USB connection to a PC. There is no cable between the PC and the whiteboard or projection screen. The actual CM2 device is palm-size and you use an extendable electronic pen to click on and draw on the projection screen. It can also be used in conjunction with a large plasma screen, which has to be connected by cable to the PC. There is a video showing the set-up procedure and the CM2 device in operation at: http://www.onfinity.info/. CM2 is available from http://www.compubits.com Cost: Around 450 pounds. Cheaper than an interactive whiteboard!
  9. BECTA's ICT Advice site at http://www.ictadvice.org.uk/ has been decommissioned. It's gone the same way as the National Grid for Learning and Virtual Teacher Centre sites, i.e. it has been integrated into BECTA's main site. ICT Advice is incorporated into the subsection http://schools.becta.org.uk/ I find it difficult to navigate the BECTA site. It's just too big and labyrinthine. There is some useful stuff there if you are prepared to look for it. It appears, however, that the first port of CALL for most MFL teachers is a website that focuses on their own subject area, e.g. ICT4LT, Languages ICT (a subset of the CILT site) or one of the fora that focuses on MFL, e.g. the Linguanet Forum. MFL is not a strong area at the BECTA site, and several of the useful documents that I had at one time located at the BECTA site have moved or disappeared. SEN seems to be better organised. Interestingly, if you search the BECTA site for "Fun with Texts", a program that I wrote for teaching Modern Foreign Languages, it comes up in the SEN section rather than MFL. It can, of course, be used effectively with SEN children, but it seems strange that BECTA have missed its main focus. Search for ICT4LT at the BECTA site and you will get a zero return - in spite of the fact that the site gets over 1000 visits per day, mainly from UK-based MFL teachers or teacher trainees.
  10. I recall giving a lecture in Finland in 1985 - my first visit to that country. A couple of Finns told me over coffee that they found my pronunciation "unusual", referring to the way in which I pronounced the "-ing" ending of participles, etc. I come from mid-Kent and speak a variety of Estuary English, in which "going" and "coming" are pronounced as "goin" and "comin". I was a bit annoyed to be picked up on my pronunciation, which is completely normal where I come from, but then I realised that the Finns (both middle-aged females) had probably been exposed mainly to Received Pronunciation (RP) in their English classes and did not know any better. Who uses RP these days anyway? The Queen, maybe? I do code-switch a bit. I sound slightly "posher" when I give a lecture, and when I visit my relations in Canada I automatically refer to "drapes" instead of "curtains" and a "faucet" instead of a "tap". It causes less confusion. When I visit Northern Ireland I know that if I order "a half" in a bar I am likely to get a "half 'un", namely a single (35ml) measure of whiskey rather than half a pint of beer or stout, which is referred to as "a glass" of beer or stout. This reminds me of a Swedish friend who accompanied me on a trip to Norway and tried to order an ice cream in a cafe but got a small beer instead. Am I right in thinking that "et glas" is an ice cream in Sweden and a small beer in Norway?
  11. David writes: When my wife says "He got a quare gunk", she is speaking correctly in the context of her dialect of English (Belfast). When my bricklayer friend, with whom I enjoy a drink in our local pub, says "He ain't got no...", he is speaking correctly in the context of the working class variety of English that he uses. Where I think we go wrong in the UK is that we have an obsession with "correctness" rather than "appropriateness". I would not want to see "He ain't got no..." in a business letter, for example, and "I should of..." is quite inappropriate in a letter from the customer services department of a large organisation -it just makes them look uneducated. In other countries, for example Switzerland and Austria, a clear distinction is made between the local appropriate spoken form of German - which is incomprehensible to native speakers of German from North Germany - and standard German, referred to as Hochdeutsch (High German) or Schriftdeutsch (written German). It is not unusual to hear educated Swiss and Austrians conversing among themselves in dialect and then switching to accented High German when talking to people from outside the region. But they rarely write in dialect - maybe only in personal letters to friends and family. I recall listening to a lecture at a university in Switzerland, which was given in Hochdeutsch (with a regional accent) by a prominent Swiss professor of linguistics. In the ensuing discussion with the audience (mainly Swiss) he switched to Schwyzerdeutsch. I am not aware of dialect speakers in the UK code-switching with the same sort of ease - but maybe I'm wrong.
  12. David writes: When my wife says "He got a quare gunk", she is speaking correctly in the context of her dialect of English (Belfast). When my bricklayer friend, with whom I enjoy a drink in our local pub, says "He ain't got no...", he is speaking correctly in the context of the working class variety of English that he uses. Where I think we go wrong in the UK is that we have an obsession with "correctness" rather than "appropriateness". I would not want to see "He ain't got no..." in a business letter, for example, and "I should of..." is quite inappropriate in a letter from the customer services department of a large organisation -it just makes them look uneducated. In other countries, for example Switzerland and Austria, a clear distinction is made between the local appropriate spoken form of German - which is incomprehensible to native speakers of German from North Germany - and standard German, referred to as Hochdeutsch (High German) or Schriftdeutsch (written German). It is not unusual to hear educated Swiss and Austrians conversing among themselves in dialect and then switching to accented High German when talking to people from outside the region. But they rarely write in dialect - maybe only in personal letters to friends and family. I recall listening to a lecture at a university in Switzerland, which was given in Hochdeutsch (with a regional accent) by a prominent Swiss professor of linguistics. In the ensuing discussion with the audience (mainly Swiss) he switched to Schwyzerdeutsch. I am not aware of dialect speakers in the UK code-switching with the same sort of ease - but maybe I'm wrong.
  13. Read this article in The Times Online: It’s no longer enough just to say it louder English firms need to get up to speed on the languages and mores of their trading partners, writes Mike Nicks http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2095-2135663.html
  14. Read this article in The Times Online: It’s no longer enough just to say it louder English firms need to get up to speed on the languages and mores of their trading partners, writes Mike Nicks http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2095-2135663.html
  15. The early drafts of the National Literacy Strategy documents were riddled with errors - presumably they had been drawn up by teachers of English. For example, adjectives were described as having three forms: nominative, comparative and superlative. "Nominative"? Hey, that refers to a noun case. "Nominal" was what was intended. Whether it is important to teach these terms anyway to young children is questionable. The early drafts of the documents just stated that English had two tenses: present and past (the word "basic" was inserted later). Teachers of modern foreign languages in the UK got very uptight about the way in which our language was described in the National Literacy Strategy documents as it didn't appear to help the learning of French, German, Spanish, etc. I learned most of my English grammar at secondary school - from my first teacher of German.
  16. Heard recently on the BBC (reporters, not members of the public): "There is several examples..." "Less people are..." Misplaced stress also annoys me. I believe misplaced stress is known as "plonking", e.g. as in "There WILL be scattered showers in the South East". Why stress the verb? I've also noticed an increasing tendency for the modern Australian rising intonation to creep into sentences, making statements sound like questions. If children are told (in one of our National Literacy Strategy documents) under the heading "tense" that "English verbs have two basic tenses, present and past, and each of these can be simple or continuous", they might get the wrong end of the stick and be completely confused when confronted with the perfect and pluperfect tenses in French and German - which are constructed in much the same way as their English equivalents, i.e. using an auxiliary verb and the past participle. In fairness, however, I did find these examples in a National Literacy Strategy document: "You should have asked me" and "They must have been working" under the heading "modal verb", with the warning: "In this context 'have' is unstressed and therefore identical in speech to unstressed 'of'; this is why the misspelling 'of' for standard 'have' or 've' is not uncommon."
  17. Dear All I just received a letter from BT's Customer Service Director, beginning: "In your recent BT Bill you should of received your regular issue of Update..." I sent the letter back, underlining the error and indicating that they should swot up on their knowledge of English modal verbs and formation of tenses. Pompous old git, am I not? P.S. I am a retired teacher of German. No wonder modern kids can't understand how to form the tenses of German verbs when they can't get them right in their mother tongue.
  18. I don’t think teaching business languages at school is the solution. One needs to get the students’ general level of language skills up to a respectable level first. What constitutes a “respectable level” is a matter for debate, however. A few years ago I helped develop language courses for airline staff: check-in staff, information desk staff, cabin crew – not pilots, however, as they all have to follow a special course in Aviation English. One of the airlines we worked with used to recruit school-leavers in the UK, but they were finding it increasingly difficult to find school-leavers with a decent knowledge of the basics of any foreign language. They therefore began to hire French, German, Italian and Spanish native speakers, all of whom had a good knowledge of English from school and who just needed to top up their knowledge with a short course in airline language. One of the airline language instructors told me that she had noticed a steady decline in UK students’ language skills over the years. At one time, she said, an O-level was a good starting point for additional training in airline language, but the new GCSE appeared to be less rigorous and therefore an A-level became the starting point. Then the supply of students with A-levels dried up, and the airline began looking across the Channel. In another part of this forum I have mentioned Amazon’s exit from Slough, Berkshire, to Cork, Ireland, because of the difficulty Amazon have found recruiting students with a good knowledge of foreign languages to staff their European customer services department in Slough. The 2005 Eurobarometer survey shows that the Irish are around 10 percentage points ahead of the British in terms of their ability to hold a conversation in a foreign language. Partly, this is my fault. Back in the early 1990s I acted as a consultant to the University of Limerick, helping them set up a new language centre. This was at the time when Thames Valley University (TVU) still had well-equipped language centres on its Slough and Ealing campuses. I retired as Director of the Ealing Language Centre at TVU in 1993, and not long after that TVU’s language departments and both language centres closed. Students in UK schools (and teachers too!) need to be made aware of these problems rather than attempting to learn languages for business at school. Language skills for business are mostly industry-specific and need to be taught by specialists. British Airways used to run "taster days" for school kids, introducing them to airline language. I think these days took place at their training centre in West Drayton. The kids were rewarded with the BA cabin crew language badge at the end of the day. I still have one of the taster days booklets for German here on my bookshelf. I dont't think this scheme is still in operation, however, and I have no names that I can contact now. Languages ceased to be a training priority for airlines after 9/11. All their training efforts went into security.
  19. Audrey, how about this reference at the BBC site? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4765774.stm "Irish language skills lure Amazon" The 2005 Eurobarometer survey, which is mentioned in the BBC article, can be found at: http://www.eu.int/comm/public_opinion/arch.../ebs_237.en.pdf This states that 41% of Irish people surveyed said they could speak a second language at conversational level, compared to 31% in the UK. There are other interesting statistics in the 2005 Eurobarometer survey regarding the expanded EU. English is the dominant foreign language spoken in the EU (34%) followed by German (12%) and then French in third place (11%). Russian and Spanish come in jointly at 5%. I am not surprised that German comes in higher than French. My first foreign language is German, and I have always tended to travel mainly in central and central/eastern Europe, where knowledge of French is not a great help. I always found German more useful. German is the dominant mother tongue in the EU, being spoken not only by Germans but also by Austrians and a substantial chunk of the populations of Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Italy (South Tyrol) and the Czech Republic. English mother tongue speakers are outnumbered by German mother tongue speakers.
  20. David W., David R, John - all good postings. We seem to be on a similar wavelength! John writes: How true! I use a modern mobile phone that can capture and transmit still images and video. Mostly, however, I use it to TALK to people. I also use text messaging but only to convey and receive information that is important - and it's cheaper for transmissions across international boundaries. I sometimes send pictures of places I am visiting to family and friends. But most young people seem to indulge in pretty meaningless and unimportant chat on their mobile phones, purely for chat's sake, and they run up horrendous bills. Text messaging is creating bad spelling habits too. I see the shorthand of text messaging creeping into emails and written letters now - which is OK for communication between friends but not between schools and businesses. My business recently received an email from a teacher which read: "maybe u can txt me or me u". I was tempted to write back and ask him to communicate in English! Back in the early 1980s I recall my daughter coming home from school at around 3.30pm, having walked home with a friend living around 400 yards away. They then used to phone one another and talk for another hour, going over the same ground that they had covered on the way home. Our phone bill soared - it was still peak time - so I had to put a block on the phone.
  21. The impression I get from reading personal blogs and accessing sites where people upload their holiday photos and home videos is that I am looking into a very boring family album or listening to the pub bore who drones on endlessly about his rose garden. Similarly, I am bored with reality TV: Big Brother, home and garden improvement, buying a wreck of a chateau in France, making a mess of setting up a restaurant, swapping wives, etc. This stuff is cheap to produce: no actors, no scriptwriter, just a film tean and then lots of editing in the studio. As I have indicated elsewhere in this forum, TV broadcasts (documentaries and films on BBC, ITV, Sky) and the quality press were my lifeline during my stay in hospital - as well as a private telephone for contacting family and friends. I was able to keep myself interested for hours each day, watching TV programmes, reading the quality press and a selection of good books. Most of the younger patients complained perpetually of boredom. I felt sorry for them. They needed to be entertained, while I was able to entertain myself. Sunrise Adams didn't feature in any of the programmes I watched - could have bust my stiches!
  22. I wouldn't advocate streaming at primary school level either. When I began teaching full-time at secondary school level in 1968 I was thrown in at the deep end. The first and second year French classes (in a 4-class intake at a mixed gender grammar school) were unstreamed. Mixed ability teaching for the first two years was departmental policy. I found it extremely difficult, as the chosen method at that time was audio-lingual, with a major emphasis on listening and speaking and with no reading and writing in French at all until the first five lessons of the 20-lesson course (covering one academic year) had been completed. Use of English in the classroom was discouraged. Meaning was to be derived from context and from role-plays - and mostly the kids got the wrong end of the stick. The clever kids (mostly girls) progressed very quickly, leaving the slowest learners (mostly boys) miles behind after the first term's teaching. After one term's teaching we had kids at one end of the class who could pronounce and understand every single word and phrase correctly, and who scored 90% in oral vocab tests. At the other end of the class we had kids who were completely tongue-tied and could not understand the simplest of French phrases, and who scored zero in oral vocab tests. Banning the writing of French for the first five lessons was an added complication. I played the game according to the rules (as laid out in the teacher's handbook for the course) and watched out for kids taking notes, but the clever ones made notes under the desk to help them remember vocab, devising their own French spelling system: thus "Ça ne fait rien" ended up as "sanfairyann" or something similar. This made it more difficult to introduce the correct French spelling system. The exam results were a disaster at the end of both year 1 and year 2 of teaching French. Nevertheless, the audio-lingual method was hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread at the time, and many teachers claimed great results. It held sway during the 1950s and 1960s was finally discredited as a method by the early 1970s and replaced by a method based on the Functional-Notional Model (Communicative Competence) as recommended by the Council of Europe. This is our problem in teaching foreign languages: continually changing fashions in methodology and changing emphases on the four skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing. Reading and writing are probably the only two skills that can be taught successfully in mixed ability classes. See: Decoo W. (2001) On the mortality of language learning methods. Paper given as the James L. Barker lecture on 8 November 2001 at Brigham Young University [Online]. Available at: http://www.didascalia.be/mortality.htm
  23. Many of you will by now have read the story that Amazon is moving its European customer services centre from Slough to Cork, Ireland, one of the reasons being that they cannot recruit enough employees from the Slough area with appropriate skills to handle enquiries in European languages. Ireland is unquestionably ahead of England in terms of its population's language skills (v. the 2005 Eurobarometer survey), but I suspect another (main?) reason for the move is that Ireland offers great business incentives. Why choose expensive Slough when cheaper Cork is available with better educated local people? Both Slough's and Cork's industrial estates are close to international airports. Bear in mind that Slough's local Thames Valley University (TVU), which has main campuses in Slough and in Ealing, used to have well-equipped language centres on both campuses. I was Director of TVU's Ealing Campus Language Centre. TVU's language departments closed down in the 1990s - along with the two language centres - due to lack of recruitment of suitably qualified students. Fortunately, I retired (in 1993) before the crunch came. Ironically, at around this time I was employed as a consultant to the University of Limerick, helping them set up a new language centre - which is still going strong. There's a message here, I think... This doesn’t help Slough’s tarnished image, of course. Slough took a battering as the location for “The Office” comedy sitcom series on TV. And then there’s John Betjeman’s famous poem on Slough, beginning: "Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough It isn't fit for humans now, There isn't grass to graze a cow. Swarm over, Death!" In fairness both to Slough and to TVU, I was impressed by TVU’s student nurses during my recent stay in Wexham Park Hospital , Slough. Angels, all of them…
  24. So, the National Grid for Learning (NGfL) is about to close down (13 April 2006). The site was set up as the result of a government consultation process that took place in 1997. However, the NGfL turned out to be rather different from what people imagined it would be, and it was not really a "grid" – more a collection of resources and links and very difficult to navigate The NGfL resources – currently at http://www.ngfl.gov.uk – are being incorporated into the BECTA website. Another government website bites the dust. The Virtual Teacher Centre (VTC) went the same way in December 2005. The BECTA site is now becoming vast and increasingly difficult to navigate. It is not at all easy to locate information. BECTA has changed a lot since the old days when I first became aware of its existence and when it was known as the Council for Educational Technology (CET). In those days there was a strong emphasis on pedagogy. I was on the planning committee of a conference on Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) organised jointly by the CET and the Centre for Information on Language Teaching (CILT) that took place in 1981. Nowadays, BECTA seems to be mainly technology-driven and appears to have lost sight of the pedagogy. It has turned into a blinkered organisation, often failing (choosing?) to ignore the existence of other important sources of information, e.g. the ICT for Language Teachers website (ICT4LT), which receives over 1000 visits per day and is not mentioned anywhere at the BECTA website Does anyone actually use these huge, labyrinthine government-financed sites? I suspect most of us find subject area sites much more useful
  25. I don't see streaming as a left-wing or right-wing issue - although it appears that most educationists do. I regard myself as left of centre, but to me streaming is a matter of commonsense rather than political ideology. Some subjects lend themselves well to mixed-ability teaching, e.g. those subjects where projects can be set at different levels for different sub-groups. Mixed-ability teaching falls down, however, when a skills element as opposed to a knowledge element of the subject comes to the fore. I would hate to have learned how to ski in a mixed ability group. I got in a terrible tangle with my skis in the early stages of learning, while younger and fitter members in my group had few problems and were executing their parallels with ease after a couple of days and making me feel a right wally. I was glad to see the back of them when they were moved up to a higher group, allowing the instructor to give people like myself, i.e. slow learners, more attention. As a language teacher, I don't have much faith in 100% mixed ability teaching. OK, I could handle project work, e.g. getting the kids to work in pairs searching for vocab, cultural background info on the Web or doing different types of listening exercises in a computer lab, but live role-plays can be a nightmare. In a single group of 30 kids you have some kids at one end of the scale who understand one word in ten and cannot make an accurate utterance of more than two consecutive words, and the the other end of the scale you have the bright sparks who understand everything and can whack out accurate sentences with fluency. In my experience this leads to chaos. Judging to what extent mixed ability teaching works in modern languages is difficult in the UK. So few people reach a respectable level in modern languages (CEF B1) that it is difficult to come to conclusions. A quick search on the Web seems to indicate that mixed ability and streamed classes in modern languages are roughly equally divided in schools in the UK. The result: Most Brits end up tongue-tied when they go abroad and are incapable of putting their knowledge of modern languages to practical use. It's getting worse rather than better these days. See the Institute of Education article: "Success of mixed ability classes depends on what you teach" http://ioewebserver.ioe.ac.uk/ioe/cms/get....578&4578_0=3424
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