Task-based Language Teaching

News on Education

Experience: I can speak 50 languages

This piece of news was taken from The Guardian newspaper.

'I'm often asked what the secret is. The truth is it's mostly down to endless hours of reading, studying and practising grammar, "I've been obsessed with languages for as long as I can remember. My family travelled a lot when I was young and my dad, and self-taught polyglot, would talk to everyone we met with apparent ease, confidently switching between languages. His abilities made a big impression on me, but I was intimidated by him, and he didn't encourage me to follow his lead. I wasn't a natural language learner aged 11, I made slow progress with French at school and almost gave it up. But things felt different when I took on German at university – loving many German writers in translation, I wanted to read them in their native tongue, and that's been my main motivation for learning new ones since. It can be a real revelation when you start to get it. Once I got German, I was hooked; French, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit quickly followed. The idea of having an encyclopedic mind – comprehensive overview of the world – has always fascinated me, and acquiring languages seemed a good way of achieving that. By my 20s, I'd set my heart on devoting the rest of my life to learning as many as I could. “I'm often asked what the secret is, and whether some people have an aptitude for absorbing words and phrases. The truth is, predictably, it's down to endless hours of concentration – reading, studying and practising grammar, as well as my own technique called "shadowing", which involves walking briskly outdoors while listening to a recorded language and repeating it out loud. For five or six years, before I married and had children, I would study for 16 hours a day. I'd transcribe Irish, Persian, Hindi, Turkish, Swahili. Gradually, all these wonderful languages started to swim into focus, and ever increasing numbers of great works became accessible. “It's hard, but the rewards can be thrilling. When I started studying Spanish, for example, there was a moment when the living language – which I'd heard spoken around me when I was growing up – suddenly revealed itself to me, as if the wax was falling from my ears. That's the moment I crave – it comes to me quickly with European, Germanic or Romance languages – and it's very addictive. Something similar happened when I first went to Sweden – I'd never studied Swedish, but when I heard it spoken around me, it seemed to combine elements of languages I was familiar with. All it took was three weeks and I was able to hold my own in complex conversations. That's as much as most people would want, but as far as I'm concerned, at that stage I'm still in the foothills. Climbing the mountain – achieving native fluency – is always going to take years. "Now, I can read about three dozen languages and speak most of them fluently, and I've studied many more. The more of them you know, the more you see how inter-related they are. ”Exotic languages can be more of a challenge. I worked as a professor in Korea for eight years and it took almost a decade to get my Korean skills close to native level. We live in Singapore now, and at home I speak French with my sons, unless my Korean wife is there, in which case we'll use English. If we don't want the kids to understand everything we're saying, we use Korean. “I'm not a naturally forthcoming person and I used to be wary of talking to native speakers in their mother tongue. But to have the language come alive you have to speak it, to live it. Now, I find when I'm immersed in a language, I have another, more garrulous persona. “I think I'm much richer for that – it makes me more confident. If I were kidnapped tomorrow and dropped in an unknown region, I think there are only a few very remote areas I'd struggle to make myself understood. “I'm increasingly drawn to dead and endangered languages, and want to set up a polyglot academy where people with similar interests to mine can flourish. I've studied Esperanto, and although I can see the benefits of a world language, I do think the loss of so many quirks and colours would leave the world a less intriguing place. It would be like visiting a botanic garden where there was only one type of plant – that thought horrifies me. ”Do you have an experience to share?"

Below you can have a look at more polyglots and some bilingual speakers:




 What about you? Me, they're just making me green with envy. Lucky, you!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/mar/16/i-speak-50-languages-experience

The way you teach

 I've just found these two blogs by chance, surfing the net and I think they are completely worthwhile. If you are a teacher of English, you'll probably enjoy their reading. Here are the two links: http://cecilialcoelho.wordpress.com and http://www.yearinthelifeofanenglishteacher.com/

Below you can read some teaching reflections, which were taken from the first blog by Cecilia. Congratulations! "We have to use some critical thinking (which we talk so much about teaching to our students – it’s time we use it as well!) and be honest about it. And make any necessary changes, adapting and personalisation needed without being afraid. We are the experts in class. We should be allowed to teach and decide which technique or activity will be more effective with each learner / group of learners in different moments. Effective teaching, as far as I am concerned and have noticed over the many years I have been teaching, is not black and white. There is no absolute truth, or a right and a wrong way of doing it. There are uncountable shades of gray, because teachers are different, students are different, needs and learning styles are different… And the teacher should be allowed to decide what works best for his/her learners and groups without being judged by it”.

Beyond the school

Nowadays, every educational system is being reformed by governments all over the world and there's no reason why we still try to stick to old methods and approaches and syllabus. Society has changed to a greater extent and thus, students need new approaches. Are we going to keep on-line resources aside? Of course, not. Just because we create an enormous amount of education resources through new technologies and what's more: we've got a wonderful 24 hour educational environment for anyone to practise, edit, create and work on, trying to do one's best, or getting your best potential and for that you need to go beyond the rigid school timetable. Youtube is not only for fun as you can read through this The New York Times article, ICTs are now part of our lives (The New York Times article) They won't go away and , in fact, we need them to educate new innovative and creative students.

Being Creative

 After the recent Government change in Spain, I wonder if there’ll be another change in Education shortly. Changes are said to be changes for the better, nevertheless, do you think that it’s only a question of a new Education system? Well, at least some food for thought.  

Rather than Educational changes,  we need new ways of thinking and in terms of Creativity and innovation.  It’s like going to the doctor for some pain-killers or something like that. At hospitals, you’re very likely to wish your doctor to be up-dated, fit for purpose and practical too. On the contrary, teaching has reminded the same in the last 60 years, with some reforms, but quite the same thing. Therefore, we firstly need to take into account that “Creativity is  been maligned, neglected, and misunderstood” by Society over the last decades. However, according to Sir Ken Robinson, who led the British government's 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, “people see creativity and critical thinking as being opposed. It's partly because people associate creativity with being totally free and unstructured. But what we really have to get hold of is the idea that you can't be creative if you don't do something”. 

“You can be creative in math, science, music, dance, cuisine, teaching, running a family, or engineering. Because creativity is a process of having original ideas that have value. A big part of being creative is looking for new ways of doing things within whatever activity you're involved in. If you're a creative chef, for example, then your originality is going to be judged in terms of cuisine. There's no point applying the criteria of modern jazz to somebody who's trying to create a new soufflé.
A creative process may begin with a flash of a new idea or with a hunch. It may just start as noodling around with a problem, getting some fresh ideas along the way. It's a process, not a single event, and genuine creative processes involve critical thinking as well as imaginative insights and fresh ideas.
But creativity isn't just about coming up with new ideas; some ideas might be completely crazy and impractical. So an essential bit of every creative process is evaluation. If you're working on a mathematical problem, you're constantly evaluating it, thinking, "Does that feel right?" If you're composing a piece on the piano, part of you is listening to what you're doing and thinking, "Does that work? Is that going in a good direction?"
“What's the biggest misconception people have about creativity?
One is that it's about special people—that only a few people are really creative. Everybody has tremendous creative capacities. A policy for creativity in education needs to be about everybody, not just a few.
The second misconception is that creativity is about special activities. People associate creativity with the arts only. I'm a great advocate of the arts, but creativity is really a function of everything we do. So education for creativity is about the whole curriculum, not just part of it.
The third misconception is that creativity is just about letting yourself go, kind of running around the room and going a bit crazy. Really, creativity is a disciplined process that requires skill, knowledge, and control. Obviously, it also requires imagination and inspiration. But it's not simply a question of venting: It's a disciplined path of daily education. If you look at some of the people we most respect for their creative achievements, it's because of the extraordinary insights, breakthroughs, and discipline they have brought to their work.
Why do you think creativity is especially important right now?
The challenges we currently face are without precedent. More people live on this planet now than at any other time in history. The world's population has doubled in the past 30 years. We're facing an increasing strain on the world's natural resources. Technology is advancing at a headlong rate of speed. It's transforming how people work, think, and connect. It's transforming our cultural values.
If you look at the resulting strains on our political and financial institutions, on health care, on education, there really isn't a time in history where you could look back and say, "Well, of course, this is the same thing all over again." It isn't. This is really new, and we're going to need every ounce of ingenuity, imagination, and creativity to confront these problems.
Also, we're living in times of massive unpredictability. The kids who are starting school this September will be retiring—if they ever do—around 2070. Nobody has a clue what the world's going to look like in five years, or even next year actually, and yet it's the job of education to help kids make sense of the world they're going to live in.
You know, for my generation—I was born in 1950—we were told that if you worked hard, went to college, and got a regular academic degree, you'd be set for life. Well, nobody thinks that's true anymore, and yet we keep running our school systems as though it were. So many people have degrees now that an individual degree isn't worth a fraction of what it used to be worth. So being creative is essential to us; it's essential for our economy.
I work a lot with Fortune 500 companies, and they're always saying, "We need people who can be innovative, who can think differently." If you look at the mortality rate among companies, it's massive. America is now facing the biggest challenge it's ever faced—to maintain it's position in the world economies. All these things demand high levels of innovation, creativity, and ingenuity. At the moment, instead of promoting creativity, I think we're systematically educating it out of our kids.
Is creativity at odds with a culture of standardized testing?
We have a major problem with our education systems, not just in America, but in many of the old, industrialized countries. If you have a system as in the United States where there's a 30 percent high school dropout rate—in the African American/Latino communities it's over 50 percent, and in some of the Native American communities it's nearly 80 percent—you can't just blame the kids for it. With that amount of waste, there's something wrong with the system— with impersonal forms of education, with people sitting in rows and not discovering the things that impassion them or invigorate them or turn them on.
That's increasingly the case with this culture of standardized testing. It's totally counterproductive. Looking back at our own education, we came alive in certain sorts of lessons with certain teachers when we were given an opportunity to do things that invigorated us. And when you find things you're good at, you tend to get better at everything because your confidence is up and your attitude is different.
Too often now we are systematically alienating people from their own talents and, therefore, from the whole process of education. This isn't, to me, a whimsical argument, like, "Wouldn't it be nice if we all did something we liked." It's a fundamental human truth that people perform better when they're in touch with things that inspire them. For some people, it's gymnastics; for some people, it's playing the blues; and for some people, it's doing calculus.
We know this because human culture is so diverse and rich—and our education system is becoming increasingly dreary and monotonous. It's no surprise to me that so many kids are pulling out of it. Even the ones who stay are often detached. Only a few people benefit from this process. But it's far too few to justify the waste.
People often associate creativity with the individual. But is there a social dimension to creativity that's particularly relevant in the 21st century?
Absolutely. Most original thinking comes through collaboration and through the stimulation of other people's ideas. Nobody lives in a vacuum. Even people who live on their own—like the solitary poets or solo inventors in their garages—draw from the cultures they're a part of, from the influence of other people's minds and achievements.
In practical terms, most creative processes benefit enormously from collaboration. The great scientific breakthroughs have almost always come through some form of fierce collaboration among people with common interests but with very different ways of thinking.
This is one of the great skills we have to promote and teach—collaborating and benefiting from diversity rather than promoting homogeneity. We have a big problem at the moment—education is becoming so dominated by this culture of standardized testing, by a particular view of intelligence and a narrow curriculum and education system, that we're flattening and stifling some of the basic skills and processes that creative achievement depends on.
Look at Thomas Edison. He was one of the most prolific inventors in American history. He had over 1,100 patents in the U.S. Patent Office. But actually, Edison's great talent was mobilizing other people. He had teams of cross-disciplinary groups working with him. They gave themselves clear objectives and tight deadlines and pulled out every stop to work collaboratively.
So there's no doubt in my mind that collaboration, diversity, the exchange of ideas, and building on other people's achievements are at the heart of the creative process. An education that focuses only on the individual in isolation is bound to frustrate some of those possibilities.
Can you teach creativity?
Yes. But people think they can't teach it because they don't understand it themselves. They say, "Well, I'm not very creative, so I can't do it."
But there are actually two ways of thinking about teaching creativity. First of all, we can teach generic skills of creative thinking, just in the way we can teach people to read, write, and do math. Some basic skills can free up the way people approach problems—skills of divergent thinking, for example, which encourage creativity through the use of analogies, metaphors, and visual thinking.
I worked a while ago with an executive group of a Native American community. They wanted me to talk to them about how they could promote innovation across their tribe. We sat around a boardroom table for the first hour, and I guess they were expecting me to get some flip charts out and show them some techniques. We did a little of that, but what I actually got them to do was to get into groups and draw pictures of some of the challenges they're facing as a community.
Well, the minute you get people to think visually—to draw pictures or move rather than sit and write bullet points—something different happens in the room. Breaking them up so they aren't sitting at the same desk and getting them to work with people they wouldn't normally sit with creates a different type of dynamic. So you can teach people particular skills to free up their own thinking, of valuing diversity of opinion in a room.
But in addition to teaching those skills, there's also personal creativity. People often achieve their own best work at a personal level when they connect with a particular medium or set of materials or processes that excites them.
My new book, The Element, is about finding your passion. I talked to many people—gymnasts, musicians, scientists, an amazing woman who was a pool player. Whether it was music or jazz or the triple jump, each of them found something that they resonated with, that they had a personal aptitude for. If you combine a personal aptitude with a passion for that same thing, then you go into a different place creatively. You know, Eric Clapton was given his first guitar about the same time I was. Well, it worked out for Eric in a way it didn't quite work out for me. He got the hang of it, but also combined it with tremendous passion.
If creativity and innovation are so important, should we assess them?
You can't assess people—in general—for being creative because you have to be doing something to be creative. If you're working in math class and the teaching is encouraging you to look for new approaches, to try new ways of thinking, then of course you can begin to judge the level of creativity and imaginativeness within the framework of mathematics as you would within the framework of music or dance or literature.
I make a distinction between teaching creatively and teaching for creativity. Teaching creatively means that teachers use their own creative skills to make ideas and content more interesting. Some of the great teachers we know are the most creative teachers because they find a way of connecting what they're teaching to student interests.
But you can also talk about teaching for creativity, where the pedagogy is designed to encourage other people to think creatively. You encourage kids to experiment, to innovate, not giving them all the answers but giving them the tools they need to find out what the answers might be or to explore new avenues. Within particular domains, it's perfectly appropriate to say, "We're interested in new and original ways you can approach these issues."
Whether there would be an individual grade for creativity, that's a larger question. Certainly giving people credit for originality, encouraging it, and giving kids some way of reflecting on whether these new ideas are more effective than existing ideas is a powerful part of pedagogy. But you can't reduce everything to a number in the end, and I don't think we should. That's part of the problem.
The regime of standardized testing has led us all to believe that if you can't count it, it doesn't count. Actually, in every creative approach some of the things we're looking for are hard, if not impossible, to quantify. But that doesn't mean they don't matter. When I hear people say, "Well, of course, you can't assess creativity," I think, "You can—just stop and think about it a bit.”

Source:
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/sept09/vol67/num01/Why-Creativity-Now%C2%A2-A-Conversation-with-Sir-Ken-Robinson.aspx

Reggio Emilia approach

What's the Reggio Emilia approach?











For further information and videos, let's have a look at these teaching clips about the Reggio Emilia  Approach:

Quotations on Education

Every teacher should look for their own favourite quotations, those ones that can represent their particular methodology or teaching approach. Here's your section to add your meaningful sayings, refrains or quotations on education. Please, do not hesitate to add your comments to contribute with your special quotations.

"Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm", by Winston Churchill
(I've just found this quotation in the book: Creating Tomorrow's schools Today, by Richard Gerver. Very worth-while reading, by the way)

What's your best quotation on Education?

Richard Gerver and teaching passion

The traditional Education system doesn't cater for the rapid change of our students any more. They need a new Education, which at least can make them more autonomous and less careless students. According to Richard Gerver, the education changes must be thoroughly discussed among teachers and educators. However, this is not going to be easy at all, and it will take us a long time to come to some conclusions, but at least we've got to try it. Here's some teaching inspiration from Richard Gerver.




Teaching sucess is more than passion and dedication. Personally, I think that motivation is a hard task for all of us. How can we change this girl attitude at her school? She does want to demolish it!!!

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Celebreties speaking in English

This section is for famous people. We could add more speakers, please write your commentaries to include more video clips like this one.




For more videos like this click on the Post title or straight on here.