ELSTA as a start to a PLN

If you teach a language in Dublin and work with a school you should know about these guys or should I say girls.

They are the English Language Support Teachers Association here in Ireland.  Their membership appears to include teachers of Spanish and German here in Ireland as well as English Language Support and the occasional EFL teacher (me) and UCC's Séamas Kirkpatrick.  There seem to be a lot of links to TCD amongst the Exec group.  

I suppose the main reasons to join groups like this are to find out where you live and to find good resources.  But the best resources are always going to be people.  Despite my love for multimedia, hanging out with sharp people is one of life's great pleasures. 

They'll be having another conference in Dublin on the 15th of October.  If you come along and read their site first you'll be finding a whole lot of other people who are into what you do. And iron sharpens iron.  This is what my grandmother said years ago.  Personal Learning Networks is the more recent buzz word for it.  

These don't just have to be physical.  Twitter really can work for a for you in finding resources and materials and advice from working teachers like ourselves and the people who write our materials.  Loads of authors use it to stay in contact and keep sharp.  If you aren't using it try it for a month following the people on the list in this site on PLNs.    

I think you'll be glad you did.

FluenCi and why it will succeed abroad... and maybe here.

If you are worth your salt as an English teacher you know that our alphabet is a minefield of confusion for learners who are trying to use it to speak the language.  Many, who have roughly phonetic alphabets (1 symbol=1 sound), are disappointed to find that our alphabet is crammed with the wonders of English history and this crowds out their current study of pronunciation.

As teachers recognize that opportunity and do our creative best to make some space for them to work.

We separate the written from the spoken as quickly as possible.  We show that the letters very often act as a guide to probabilities, not absolutes.  We teach them new sounds and concepts showing them techniques and frameworks that are helpful in analyzing any spoken language.  That's what FluenCi will help us and them do as well.  I hope for it's success. I'm a fan. Check it out and get in touch with Digital Media Centre at DIT to use FluenCi.  I'll be doing it for my school.

FluenCi involves putting lots of cool technology and a seven step process which may well be the first step towards teaching the kind of fluency you hear between native speakers in conversation, dialogic fluency.  It's only been in research books and reality but never in the course books or digital sources.

I can't wait to try it out.

Now...

Everything that FluenCi can do can be done by a teacher.   Though, the teacher would have to have a fanatical interest in speech science and huge faith in their learners potential to believe that their work alone could fight the current of current practice of sidelining students pronunciation needs.  And a whole lot of time.  It could happen if schools had everything Gavin Dudeney prioritizes for schools: wifi, data projectors, training and support (see the last two minutes).

To be as good as FluenCi might become, a teacher might also have to be a native speaker of the learners' language ...and that's why I think this product will do best abroad with a strengthening group of teachers, who are connected via technology and the language, accessing research and sharing advances in technologies and media.  Where is this place?  It will be in Dublin if we can stop being embarrassed by optimism.  Let's connect here.  This is an amazing time to be a teacher.

-the end

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The conference was hosted by the Ireland's English Language Support teachers' organisation called ELSTA.

PDFs of the presentation should be ready in a couple of weeks and I will post a link here when they are available on the ELSTA website.

Dermot Campbell presented at Drumcondra Education Centre on behalf of the DMC with Yi Wang and Marty Meinardi. 

Paul Robinson's Pronunciation in Practice

This is just for Dublin EFL teachers.

This is a recording of Paul Robinson (DELTA) giving a workshop on integrating pronunciation work throughout your English lessons.

It was recorded impromptu at CES 2 February 2011 as a part of regular in-house CES teacher development.

Forgive the recording quality but the content is good.

Click here to download.

A big thanks to Paul for giving me permission to post this here.