Tag Archive: EFL


A poor man’s David Foster Wallace

Filed under: Italy — 2 Comments
December 1, 2015
In 2005, the late lamented David Foster Wallace made a memorable speech to graduating students of Kenyon College which was posthumously published under the title This Is Water.
A few years back, inspired by this, I decided to make my own humble address at the end of an advanced English language course in Italy which I called my ‘Where do we go from here?’ lesson.
Today, I found my notes and decided to post it here (complete with DFW style asides in italics).
It comes over as much more pretentious and self-conscious I think but I delivered it with the best of intentions, hoping  to end the course on a thoughtful note rather than a lame ‘goodbye and good luck’ message.
Anyway, here it is warts and all (comments welcome):

Nowadays, it’s common to hear people talking about life-long learning.

[I ask who has heard of the phrase ‘lifelong learning’ – nobody has!]

One time, there was the mistaken idea that when you finished school or university, your official period of learning was finished – your next goal was to find work and earn a good salary. But learning is not a finite thing.  In a very real sense it never ends. Continue reading →

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LEARNING ENGLISH WHEN THE COURSE IS OVER

Filed under: Music — 2 Comments
July 3, 2013

With some relief, I have finally come to end of another term of teaching English as a foreign language at Bologna University.

How to end courses on a positive note is always an issue for me. I dislike scheduling an end of course test for the final lesson, preferring to get this out of the way beforehand.

In this way, I can set aside the last class to include a kind of ‘where can you go from here’ pep talk.

My model for this kind of address is David Foster Wallace’s amazing ‘this is water’ talk at South Kenyon college. Brilliant as this speech was, there’s also something reassuring about the fact that the students who heard his talk were not immediately in awe of Wallace’s brilliance.

I am happy if my more humble speech avoids sounding too pompous or obvious.

On the whole, I probably need to include more humour. For better or worse, here’s what I said [my bracketed comments were added afterwards]:

“Nowadays, it’s common to hear people talking about life-long learning.

[I ask who has heard of lifelong learning – nobody has!]

One time, there was the mistaken idea that when you finished school or university, your official period of learning was finished – your next goal was directed solely to working and earning a living.

Learning is not a finite thing.   In one sense it never ends.

[The students look as though they are thinking: ‘Where is all this leading? / Does he think we’re dumb?]

People who remain curious about the world are, in my view, those who are most alive.

Learning a language is a very particular case.

[The students look as though they are thinking: ‘He DOES think we’re dumb’]

Continue reading →

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LEARNING OBJECTS – HUMAN SUBJECTS

Filed under: Music — 2 Comments
March 22, 2013

Robots are not teachers and teachers are not robots

Week 2 – H817, ‘Openness and innovation in e-learning’ – Some brief reflections on learning objects.

We have the tools to make learning objects but we should not objectify the teaching process. We are, after all, dealing with human subjects i.e. students, pupils, learners, and therefore need to get personal too.

In the planning of my two current advanced level English as a foreign language courses I have been influenced by my recent experience with MOOCs. This has convinced me that technology only works in the classroom when it consolidates what I actually teach. In other words the machines serve the humans rather than vice versa.

My groups are not large and these are not officially blended courses. Initially, I’m experimenting with basics by sending a weekly e-mail to all participants as a follow up to each lesson. This forces me to look critically at the objects for each lesson but, perhaps more importantly, it means I have to outline my own objectives. If these are not clear to me, how can I hope them to be clear to the learners. Continue reading →

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TRANSLATING BUCKET LISTS

Filed under: Blogging, Health and fitness, Italy, Movies — 1 Comment
November 1, 2012

Jack Nicholson ticks off one of his ‘bucket list’ items .

As a teacher of English as a foreign language, I have more than a passing interest in linguistic conundrums.

Idiomatic and general slang expressions are notoriously hard to translate particularly when there is no direct equivalent in the target language, in my case Italian.

‘To kick the bucket’ is one example which, if translated simply as ‘to die’,  would lose the casual, even jokey register. You wouldn’t make a formal announcement that someone has passed on by saying that they had kicked the bucket.

In the last five years the term ‘bucket list’ has gone viral on the blogosphere and it’s a term that , until recently, left me mystified mainly because I missed the movie from which it originated.

The Bucket List (the film) is a kind of buddy movie  directed by Rob Reiner. It stars Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson as two terminally ill cancer patients who make a list of things they want to do before they ‘kick the bucket’. One critic described it as a feel good movie about death. Reviews are mixed and suggest that , while  it has its moments, it is no masterpiece. Continue reading →

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George Bernard Shaw surely knew the score

Filed under: Music — Leave a comment
October 29, 2012

Teaching English pronunciation and spelling is often a thankless task.

All of those soul destroying exceptions tend to make the rules less than golden.

Over the years, I’ve learnt never to say never; as in you should never split infinitives, never use double negatives or never talk about emotions using the ‘-ing’ form of the verb.

TV shows, pop songs or adverts will quickly make a mockery of such statements whether it’s Captain Kirk explaining the Starship Enterprise’s mission “to boldly go”, Mick Jagger bemoaning he “can’t get no satisfaction” or Ronald MacDonald enthusing “I’m loving it”.

The ground is just as slippery when it comes to pronunciation. My dad was fond of quoting George Bernard Shaw’s retort when a woman informed him that ‘sugar’ was the only word in the English language where ‘s’ is pronounced ‘sh’. “Are you sure?” he asked her.

Yet still there’s that fatal temptation to pretend that some rules work so when, in an advanced class today, a student asked me to spell ‘foreigner’ I was glad to oblige and smugly add a mnemonic I learned in primary school which was ‘I before E except after C’. After writing this below the word ‘foreigner’ I immediately realised I’d made an embarrassing gaffe.

Just consider for a moment some of the other exceptions to this spelling rule and tell me if it really serves any educational purpose whatsoever.

You can only grieve for foreign scientists who have to write their theses in English and seize upon weird rules believing they are receiving sound advice only to find them insufficient‘.

And, while we’re about it  just remember that the M in ‘mnemonic’ is silent – like the D in Django.

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