Thoughts on language and teaching

Oh what a long time since my last blog entry! Just been a bit too much going on. But I've been thinking about it the whole time, I promise...

So there's this thing that's been preying on my mind for some time. It has to do with language and education, and attitudes to both these things. A couple of years ago I ran a course at Masters level for the Swedish agricultural University, SLU, over a period of 10 weeks. From the students who participated in that course I learnt that all the Masters courses at SLU are run in English, they're open to international students so there's a reason for this. But here's the first problem, which someone actually brought to my attention much earlier. Not all of the university lecturers are proficient enough in English to allow the teaching to be at an appropriate level. The person who first mentioned this to me was very concerned about the standard.

Fast forward to my course and my discussions with the students. This course was also run in English, which wasn't much of a problem for me, it being my native tongue, but it certainly caused complications for the students. A couple of them in particular had quite a hard time because I ran the whole course based on participation and discussion and their lack of practice that English held them back. Now this course happened to be the last one of their entire university education. So they had been to at least two years of courses run in English and you have to wonder why they hadn't already become quite used to using the language. The simple answer, I learnt, was that no one had forced them to participate in discussions previously.

We talked about this at length and, after experiencing what the 10 weeks with me had given them in terms of knowledge as well as practice, they were themselves painfully aware of the shortcomings of having to sit and listen without active participation in all the previous courses (lectures).

So I have two points here: the first is that language is a fairly important part of the art and skill of teaching, how on earth do you get complex subjects across without control of language? My second point is, what on earth is going on when Masters level education does not include an absolute requirement for student participation?

And just as a final point, one might care to dwell on the fact that while Swedes are in general much better at English than other nationalities that don't speak it as their first language, that doesn't necessarily mean that people are really good at English. Better is a relative term. There are very few people that speak English well enough to be able to teach a university level course.

A statistics-on-social-media update

Are you really aware of how big this is? (watch directly on YouTube if the window doesn't size properly)

PowerPoint gone mad

Here's a wonderful example of the terror of PowerPoint. Of course it's not Ppt one should look to for the cause of this. We're hard on Ppt and it takes the brunt of the criticism because it's an easy target. But Ppt doesn't invent this type of content on its own, does it?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?emc=eta1

Ppt is used all too often as a  manuscript for the speaker so try to focus on not showing the audience your manuscript - build a content for the AUDIENCE instead.

Absorb those great words

The next time you hold a presentation try checking out this site first.

http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2010/04/50-incredible-historical-speeches/

It's a collection of some of the best-known and impressive speeches, in English and with a strong American bias! I have a theory that listening to the voices of his great speakers can have a positive effect on your own intonation and maybe even on your self-confidence. Just don't let yourself get phased out by the gap between us normal people and them.

Keep it simple s....d

Well I've been going on about this for some time now so I hope no one thinks this is news ;) but here's a link to a very interesting scientific article which demonstrates once again that you should keep it simple.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051031075447.htm

The title of the article is wonderful: “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.”

I guess you get the message.

A couple of quotes: "Anything that makes a text hard to read and understand, such as unnecessarily long words or complicated fonts, will lower readers' evaluations of the text and its author."

"One thing seems certain: write as simply and plainly as possible and it's more likely you'll be thought of as intelligent."

Did you know that Word has a built in readability check?

Amazing what you find out just by chance.

1. On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Spelling & Grammar tab.
2. Select the Check grammar with spelling check box.
3. Select the Show readability statistics check box, and then click OK.
4. On the Standard toolbar, click Spelling and Grammar .
   
   When Microsoft Word finishes checking spelling and grammar, it displays information about the reading level of the document.

Charisma Wordle

I tested a new idea last week. I was sitting eating lunch in the middle of a one-day course for a group of 78 students and it suddenly occurred to me that I finally had the opportunity to test something that will only work really well with a large group of people. The perfect opportunity! I divide the students up into 13 groups and gave each group the instructions to define a charismatic speaker using five keywords.I opened the website Wordle.net and (painfully) typed in all the words they gave me. That's quite a lot of words. Then I just clicked the button, chose a layout and colours and hey presto! He is the result. The size of the words reflects their frequency and the website algorithm automatically arranges them. Apart from the odd spelling mistake which messes up the frequency of course, you can see which words were the commonest and you get an instant impression of the results. Great fun, great site!

Link: http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1929130/100421_självständigt_arbete

More tools

Here's a bunch of computer-based tools that might be useful if you work with page mockups or graphic design or designing webpages.

http://www.badlanguage.net/seven-website-mockup-tools

Sorry about the missing side

My blog seems to consistently remove the right-hand side of any video window that I put up. In other words the column width in my  browser is narrower than the video window.   I might manage to fix it one day but in the meantime I suggest that you just go to YouTube or Ted and view the video in situ there. Sorry about this!

Pawan Sinha on how brains learn to see

This is a very interesting story, quite a long presentation but it holds a fascinating message about how our brains learn to see. As with many of the videos on TED.com a great learning experience.