Graham Davies

Derek writes: France's loos are a lot better than they used to be. I recall the dreaded "squatters" and the open-sided "pissoirs" in the in the 1950s. As I said, the "bog standard" yardstick is very reliable. It tells you all you need to know. As for the Central and Eastern European regimes of yesteryear, they all called themselves "Socialist". Has there ever been a true "Socialist" state anywhere? By the way, East Germany inherited much of its infrastructure from Hitler rather than Stalin. The Free German Youth and the Stasi of East Germany were direct descendents of the Hitler Youth and the Gestapo. To compare the oppressive machinery that operated in East Germany with the controls against terrorism that the UK is about to introduce is a mockery. I am sure Derek has never experienced how awful East Germany was as a regime. It wasn't just the censorship and the knowledge that one was constantly being watched. It was also the sheer drabness of everyday life and the constant shortages that made life miserable. The people that govern us are pussycats by comparison.

I like Goldwynisms. The following are attributed to Sam Goldwyn, founder of MGM: - “ I never prophesy – especially about the future." - "Give me a couple of years and I'll make that actress an overnight success." - "I don't care if it (his new picture) doesn't make a nickel. I just want every man woman and child in America to see it." - "I'm willing to admit that I may not always be right, but I am never wrong." - "Tell them (the actors) to stand closer apart." - "If I were in this business only for the business, I wouldn't be in this business." - "I read part of it all the way through." - “If I look confused it's because I'm thinking." - “When I want your opinion I will give it to you." - “I don't want yes men around me. I want everyone to tell the truth, even if it costs them their jobs." - “You are going to call him William? What kind of a name is that? Every Tom, Dick, Harry is called William." - “An oral contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." - “Go see that turkey for yourself, and see for yourself why you shouldn't see it." - “True, I've been a long time making up my mind, but now I'm giving you a definite answer. I won't say yes and I won't say no--but I'm giving you a definite maybe." - “It's more magnificent than mediocre." - “I had a great idea this morning, but I didn't like it." - "Gentlemen, include me out." - "A hospital is no place to be sick." - “If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive." - “That's the trouble with directors. Always biting the hand that lays the golden egg." - “Never make forecasts, especially about the future." - “Can she sing? She's practically a Florence Nightingale! - “Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined." - “You fail to overlook the crucial point." - “It's absolutely impossible, but it has possibilities." - “Put it out of your mind. In no time, it will be a forgotten memory." - “I never liked you and I always will." - “A bachelor's life is no life for a single man". - “In two words im-possible." - “We have all passed a lot of water since then." - “This makes me sore, it gets my dandruff up." - “My wife's hands are very beautiful. I'm going to have a bust made of them." - “If you can't give me your word of honour, will you give me your promise?" - When he first saw Ava Gardner's screen test she had a thick southern accent at the time. His response was,”She doesn't even speak English. Bring her back next year." - When Goldwyn's secretary asked him if she should destroy files that were more than ten years old, he answered,”Yes, but keep copies."

The old regimes in Central and Eastern Europe weren't a good advertisement for Socialism. I have travelled widely in the course of my life, lecturing and running training workshops in 21 different countries and visiting around a dozen more on holiday. The old regimes in Central and Eastern Europe all fall at the bottom of my list of countries regarding how comfortable I felt visiting them. Belarus, which I visited in 1995, comes at the bottom, and Canada, which I visit regularly, comes at the top. The most (politcally) right-wing country that I have visited is the USA, but on the whole one still feels comfortable travelling around, people are generally very polite ("I just lurve your British accent. Say it again..."), and in rural areas such as Vermont or New Hampshire one often feels that one has been taken back in time to 1950s' England: sparkling white weatherboarded houses, lace curtains, tea and cakes at 5 o'clock, houses clustered round a village green (as in Middlebury or Woodstock in Vermont), and a crime section in the local paper running to two paragraphs. We stayed in a motel in Woodstock, where the owner would often go off on a shopping trip leaving the office unlocked so that we could pop in and help ourselves to hot coffee. In the course of my travels I have discovered a yardstick that has proved to be completely reliable regarding the quality of the regime of a country, namely: the quality of toilets in buildings such as educational institutions and offices. If the loos are good then the regime is good. For eample, one immediately noticed the difference when travelling from West Germany to East Germany. In West Germany the toilets were clean, the plumbing worked, and there was a good supply of toilet paper. In East Germany the toilets did not smell very nice, the plumbing was iffy, and the toilet paper was like sandpaper (if it existed).

Toby makes a good point. We shouldn't target Asians in general, of course, but human beings are irrational and (as I have pointed out before regarding the way the Irish were treated at the height of the troubles) they will move quickly from the particular to the general, blaming the whole community rather than one extremist sector of it. I am a bit more optimistic now. The Indian family that runs our corner shop don't appear to be suffering abuse as a result of the present situation, nor does my Sikh friend with whom I enjoy a pint at our local pub. And the young Muslim woman in her headscarf at the check-out in Sainsburys where I buy my groceries still greets every customer with a big smile - which they always return. As a footnote, I witnessed an extraordinary conservation between the Bangladeshi owner of our local take-way and a British-born Afro-Caribbean woman while I was waiting for my order to be completed. A news item on the TV came up, focusing on the new EU member states. The Bangladeshi immediately began talking about the influx of Polish workers into our area and how immigration needed to be controlled. "Some of them can't even speak English", he said, "and they are taking jobs away from local people." The Afro-Caribbean woman agreed with him. I just kept quiet...

Just a reminder. The annual conference of EUROCALL, the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning, will take place at the University of Krakow, Poland, 24th to 27th August 2005. The theme of this year's conference is: CALL, WELL and TELL: Fostering autonomy See: http://www.eurocall-languages.org and http://www.eurocall-languages.org.pl Footnote: I am fascinated by the discussion going on regarding the School History Forum. I feel somewhat self-satisfied that teachers of foreign languages don’t appear to get embroiled in such bitter in-fighting over political issues. Not that there is a lack of political debate among teachers of foreign languages but we tend to focus more on issues that affect us directly as educators. The only in-fighting (if one can call it that) that I am aware of focuse on different approaches to language teaching: grammar-translation, the communicative approach, constructivism, etc. – and it’s all done is a very genteel way. Should this forum not concentrate more on EDUCATION and educational issues?

Censorship doesn't only operate against the left. I was in East Germany on three occasions in the 1960s-1980s, and I lived with a family in Leipzig for a whole month in 1976. Censorship was evident in almost all aspects of daily life. East Germans who did not have access to West German TV had a very strange image of life in the West. Newspapers and magazines from the West were banned and confiscated from Western visitors as they crossed the border. I recall talking to two East German farmers over a meal in the Auerbachs Keller. They were attending a trade fair and I was the first Englishman they had ever met. They were excited to meet me and told me all about their free state education system, national health service etc, which they thought was unique to Socialist countries. I don't think they believed me when I said that we also had free state education and a national health service - which wasn't at all bad at the time and even now is not as bad as many people make it out to be (I've had to attend hospital several times in the last two years for three totally unrelated problems, all of which were quickly and efficiently sorted out). After spending a month in Leipzig I spent a week catching up with all the news that I had missed. I think we may be wrong to talk of left or right, socialist or capitalist, etc when we discuss governments' policies regarding censorship or terrorism. Any government, left or right, can be oppressive, and one government's terrorist is another government's freedom fighter. I prefer to think in terms of "hard" or "soft" or "nasty" or "nice". Hitler's regime was hard and nasty, and so was the East German regime that followed it. In comparison, the UK's regime is quite soft and nice - but getting harder and nastier in response to current events.

Read what the public says at the Have Your Say section of the BBC site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/4711189.stm I haven't counted the "fors" and "againsts" re the shoot to kill policy, but it looks like it's around 50-50. You should hear some of the comments on this issue in my local pub - which is around halfway between a large council estate and several middle-class private estates. I dare not repeat them here. Suffice it to say that most of the views expressed appear to fall to the right of those of the average member of the BNP. I guess it will take some time for reason to prevail - if at all. The times in which we live make us all a bit edgy and unreasonable.

John writes: It’s a policy that I accept if I am likely to be the victim of a suicide bomber, especially as I travel regularly into London and use the Underground. And is the policy “new”? It's highly regrettable that people of Asian appearance are regarded as suspicious both by police and by public. It was also regrettable that when IRA bombers threatened London anyone with an Irish accent was regarded as suspicious. My wife (from Belfast) and my sister-in-law (from Cork) recall several occasions on which they were subjected to abuse for no reason other than having an Irish accent. John writes: Just as the people of Northern Ireland accepted that they might be blown up as they went about their business at the height of the troubles. They also accepted many counter-terrorism restrictions. At one time you could not enter Belfast City Centre without going through a steel gate and being submitted to a body search. Once you were inside the City Centre you might be subjected to further searches when you entered a shop. A shoot to kill policy was in operation – though perhaps not freely admitted. I recall stopping my car in front of the Crumlin Road jail in 1976 to ask a policeman for directions. He gave me directions once he had signalled to two soldiers to approach my car and point their rifles at my head. This was not very nice, but I accepted it was a matter of security.

Andy writes: I was merely pointing out that I agree with a shoot to kill policy if innocent people's lives are threatened. Presumably the police who shot the innocent Brazilan man thought that he was threatening people's lives and took a snap (now in retrospect wrong) decision to kill him. Similarly, in 1969 the police in the Shankhill road took the decision to use a powerful Browning machine gun to blast a block of flats - I saw it myself. This decision was also in retrospect wrong as the Browning is a pretty indiscrimate weapon whose shells can penetrate walls and kill innocent people as well as taking out snipers. Right now, we don't know all the facts about the incident at Stockwell Tube Station, and it will probably take some time for the facts to emerge. There has to be a thorough enquiry and if the police officers can be shown to have reacted in haste and incompetently they need to be disciplined. On the other hand, do we want to create a situation where the police hesitate too long to take action and allow suicide bombers to succeed?

I saw the programme too, and I have to say that I found it all a bit scary - if sensationalist in places. It confirmed my belief that the Web has a Dark Side and can be a dangerous tool for the spread of extremist views. On the whole I don't agree with censorship, but there is a limit to what is acceptable and I don't know where to draw the line. It is a well-known fact that websites that advocate extremist views of any sort are constantly monitored by the USA and the UK goverments - and by many others. A lot of money has been spent on the development of software tools to make this job easier. I have seen demonstrations of language tools that have been developed to transcribe TV broadcasts in Arabic automatically (and they work quite well) and tools that can translate the gist of Arabic texts into English and even identify their authorship. By publicising their views on the Web extremists are actually making monitoring of their activities easier. There is probably no need to close their sites down. Big Brother is watching all the time. See, for example: http://ai.bpa.arizona.edu/research/coplink/crimenet.htm

David writes: I've already written to the DfES to point out that ALL, CILT, Languages ICT, ICT4LT and EUROCALL should be included. All the above have been active in promoting ICT in MFL. CILT published its first guide to the use of computers in language learning and teaching in 1982. EUROCALL was initiated in 1986 at a meeting in Liege and put on an official footing in 1993, when it became a recognised professional association.

Writing as a regular traveller into London and on the London Underground – and indeed on the stretch of line from King’s Cross to Russell Square that I use to get to London University – I do not object to a “shoot to kill” policy if my life faces a potential untimely end due to the actions of suicide bombers. But, of course, I expect the police to have a very good reason for taking someone’s life. In August 1969 I was in the Shankill Road in Belfast (where I was visiting my parents-in law) dodging bullets being fired from the Divis Street flats. The police fired back, killed the snipers who were firing at us and, unfortunately, killed innocent people too, including a nine-year old child, if my memory serves me right. I am grateful that the police killed the snipers before they killed me, my wife and three-month old daughter, but I find it hard to justify the unnecessary death of a child.

This looks more like a major blunder in which the situation was incorrectly assessed by the police - and were they "police" or were they the SAS? If the man had been a suicide bomber, about to set off a bomb that would have killed and maimed dozens of people in his immediate vicinity, then shooting him in the head ("cold-blooded execution") would have been the correct action - but the armed men who killed the suspect obviously made a grave mistake. As I said before, the situation of heightened tension in which London finds itself right now makes the police and other armed forces nervous and/or trigger-happy. We've seen this situation before, at the height of IRA's terrorist campaign - Bloody Sunday being a prime example. The main victims of terrorism are always innocent people.

Andy writes: Fairly typical of the DfES. I've had a look at the links. You are lucky to be included. The list is remarkable for its omissions. I doubt if a "strategy" actually exists. I get the impression that the government just thinks e-learning is a "good idea" and is therefore throwing a lot of money in this direction.

Chris writes: You may have a point, Chris. On the other hand the police may just be getting nervous and/or trigger-happy in the current climate of heightened tension – which happened at the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland. Ruthless retaliation is not pleasant, and it can, as Chris points out, have the opposite of the desired effect, i.e. creating a scenario for more martyrs to join the cause. On the other hand – and drawing another parallel with Northern Ireland – it has been argued that the ruthless retaliation of the Protestant paramilitaries following the Shankill Road bomb in 1993 expedited the peace process. Pressure from the communities on both sides of the divide was very evident at the time. With one voice they were saying “Enough is enough”. The difference now, regarding the London bombs, is that there doesn’t appear to be an opening for any kind of peace process. I think we are in for a long struggle, which will inevitably lead to Asians in Britain being regarded with suspicion by police and public alike, just as anyone with an Irish accent was regarded with suspicion during the 1970s and 1980s. My wife, who has a marked Belfast accent, can relate a number of unpleasant experiences that she had at the time.

Just an aferthought to my last message. My wife comes from a working-class community in Belfast, a city which has been subjected to terrorist onslaughts ever since I met her in the mid-1960s - and which I have experienced at first-hand on several occasions while visiting the city. I can only recall being gripped by real fear on one occasion, namely in 1969 when we were (literally) dodging bullets in the lower Shankill Road that were being fired at us from the Divis Street flats. On several other occasions I heard bomb blasts and gun fire and saw the immediate after-effects. People's reactions to terrorism are initially fear, followed quickly by anger and a determination not to allow the terrorists to win. I think this spirit is very much in evidence in London right now. Belfast has survived, and when I visited the city a couple of weeks ago it was clean, bustling with life and boasts some of the best music pubs in the UK. Every night is Saturday night in Belfast. In one respect the terrorists did Belfast a favour, forcing the city planners to pedestrianise the city centre (cutting down the danger of car bombs) and limiting traffic to public transport and taxis. They also forced the city planners to think carefuly about city design in general, making it safer for everybody with regard to general crime as well as terrorist crime. I can think of few car parks in Belfast with stair wells in which muggers can easily hide and I cannot recall using a dangerous pedestrian underpass (which we have in my home town and where innocent people are constantly being attacked). I don't think the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan are the main cause of the rise of terrorism in the UK - they are merely an excuse for acts of violence against the UK and the USA. It goes deeper than that and goes back much further. The twin towers were hit before both of these wars started. And France, which is one of the most vocal opponents of the war in Iraq, has also been targeted by terrorists because of the ban on the wearing of religious symbols in schools - a policy which is clearly directed against Muslims even if this is officially denied. The state of Bavaria in Germany (in common with several other German states) implements a similar policy and makes it quite obvious that it is targeting Muslims as it doesn't ban the wearing of Jewish and Christian symbols: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4005931.stm

I was in London 12-14 July, attending a teachers' conference. I was most impressed by the way in which the 2-minute silence was conducted. Just before noon ve we all left the conference room in our hotel and stood outside with the other guests and staff. All the traffic stopped and the silence was observed by all for the full two minutes. It was a moving act of remembrance as well as an act of defiance showing that we all stand together and cannot be intimidated by bloody acts of terrorism. It is remarkable how quickly London returned to normality following 7/7. But then we've been through the Blitz and suffered the onslaughts of the IRA for nearly 30 years. It takes more than a handful of radical nutters to break London's spirit.

Andy writes: The ICT4LT site (ICT for Language Teachers) is aimed both at teachers undergoing initial teacher training and teachers already in service: http://www.ict4lt.org Many educational colleges and university education departments use ICT4LT- the site receives around 600-900 hits per day. It was created with the aid of EC funding (1999-2000) and the English language section has been continually updated by myself as editor. Originally we thought about creating the site as a sort of VLE, but the EC funding we received (greatly reduced from the amount we applied for) did not stretch to the labour-intensive process of wrapping up the materials in a VLE package (e.g. WebCT or Blackboard), and we certainly could not support the salaries of online tutors. So we opted for a set of downloadable resources that could be used in other ways, e.g. in face-to-face training or as reference material for training delivered online in a variety of ways. In retrospect, this was a good decision, and feedback indicates that we have taken the right route. I have gone off the idea of one-size-fits-all VLEs - they often don't offer what you really want - and my personal experience over the last 20 years as a teacher trainer indicates that blended learning works best. "Blended learning", by the way, is just a fashionable new term for what many of us have been doing for a very long time. The NOF programme was hammered by OFSTED for failing to take account of teachers' needs, in particular the online training facilities offered by some of the NOF agencies that left teachers feeling isolated. Online training doesn't work if you don't create a sense of community among your trainees. The Open University knows a good deal about this. They use a conferencing package called Lyceum (not available outside the OU) that addresses the need for human contact (teacher-learner and peer-peer) that people following a distance learning course have always experienced, regardless of the way it is delivered - by printed materials, TV, radio or the Internet.

John writes: Our local vicar (who conducted the wedding ceremony of my elder daughter and son-in-law) is a woman - but our local church is CoE. I'm not religious, but I enjoyed the ceremony.

I witnessed the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, arriving the day after the event was announced, and spending the remainder of the week in Berlin and Rostock (formerly East Germany). Here is the account of what I witnessed: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/berlin.htm I was in South Africa in 1985 when a state of emergency was declared. I was in the Shankill Road, Belfast, August 1969, visiting my parents-in-law, when Callaghan sent in the troops. Before the troops came in we were dodging bullets and putting up makeshift barricades in the streets in the area now occupied by the Peace Wall. It was scary! I just got back from a conference and a holiday in Northern Ireland. What amazing changes have taken place! Tourism is booming. Pub/club life in Belfast is just great, and the Bushmills Distillery was teeming with visitors from the USA, Japan and Germany. Don't let the miserable politicians kid you that it's all doom and gloom. I was just three when World War II ended in 1945. I can recall the barrage balloons, sirens and searchlights, sleeping in an air-raid shelter, dog-fights over Kent where we lived at the time, and the victory bonfire at the end of our street. I clearly remember an effigy of Hitler being burned on the bonfire and running screaming to my parents because I thought it was a real man. I think I've had enough excitement in my life, but I would have liked to have witnessed Goethe meeting Schiller.

I had just driven down from university in London with a friend to visit my parents in Maidstone. We decided to have a quick pint in "The London Tavern", Maidstone, on the way. The news spread like wildfire through the pub that evening.

Andrew raises the issue of accessibility. This is crucial for education websites. Education websites have to comply with SENDA 2002. Most of the rules are basically quite simple, e.g. - Use fonts of a readable size. Sans serif fonts are preferred. - Don't mix colours that colour-blind users cannot read - and which normally sighted people find uncomfortable to read. - Always provide alternative text for graphics and pictures. - Don't present key text in graphics as it renders it JAWS-incompatible. - etc. See: BECTA (2002) Paving the way to excellence in e-learning, a publication relating to e-learning materials commissioned for the National Learning Network (NLN), covering pedagogy, accessibility, technical standards and quality assurance: http://www.becta.org.uk/corporate/publications/ I am currently working on a DfES-funded e-learning project. Everything we produce has to comply with technical and accessibility standards. But it's not just a question of technical and accessibility standards, it's also a general question of good graphic design and commonsense. I have seen far too many websites that would make a graphic designer tear his/her hair out.

I tend to agree with Susan and with Mike. The conspiracy theories sections have dominated this forum to such an extent that teachers coming in from disciplines that have no interest whatsoever in conspiracy theories may well be put off joining and contributing to the forum. And the structure of the forum is a bit complex. It's not easy to locate individual sections or to browse the archives. I have tried to enliven the modern languages section, but discussions either fail to start or die within a few days - which is not very encouraging. It's not that teachers in my discipline have no interest in education issues in general and no interest in ICT in particular. I am a member of the Linguanet Forum and the Languages ICT forum, both of which are active throughout the year and both of which have archives which are easy to search: http://www.mailbase.org.uk/lists/linguanet-forum http://www.mailbase.org.uk/lists/languagesict-forum Teachers of foreign languages have a lot to discuss. Our subject is in real danger of dying out in secondary education in England, as a direct result of a goverment policy that no longer requires a foreign language to be studied by children over the age of 14. We are all very p*ssed off by the way the government treats our subject.

Andrew writes: I'll have a look at it. We use automatic exercise generators a lot in modern languages. Hot Potatoes is useful for creating Web-based materials, but there are also a number of exercise generators around that create offline exercises, e.g. my own Fun with Texts and GapKit packages, Wida Software's The Authoring Suite and TaskMagic by mdlsoft. They all enable text, images and audio to be incorporated into the exercises, and Fun with Texts and Wida's The Authoring Suite have the facility for incorporating video. Audio is absolutely essential for modern languages. See: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/fwt.htm http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/gapkit.htm http://www.mdlsoft.co.uk http://www.wida.co.uk Offline exercises continue to be popular among modern language teachers. While presenting audio is not a problem via the Web (streaming audio quality is now excellent), streaming video quality can be poor (even at the BBC Languages site - see the Spanish Steps clips), and so far I have not yet seen a Web-based facility that enables the teacher to set up listen/record/playback activities, e.g. along the lines of the EuroTalk and Auralog CD-ROM and DVD-ROM packages.

There are quite a few quiz generators around on the Web. Hot Potatoes is the one most favoured by teachers of modern languages, and Quia is quite popular too: Hot Potatoes: http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked Quia: http://www.quia.com There is also the Teacher's Pet site that provides macros for Word: http://www.teachers-pet.org