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.

The marvels of real writing.

I'd never done graduate research until last year.  I started at Trinity in Dublin last year this time and I'm back and happier this year.

One thing I had always wanted to learn was research.  It all seemed so ephemeral how this is good and valid and that is shoddy and not empirically grounded... We did a little bit this past year but choosing good writing was part of the process of it.  Doing the literature review is a major part of getting started in the research.

Access to all the world's research is amazing and throws up some nice stuff though there is a lot of "brilliantly and specifically useless."

While going through some papers for my dissertation project on technology and pronunciation, I found what should be a priority piece of reading for all of us.  This is from the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. Jennifer Jenkins is covering the pronunciation angle.  She does so expertly and I can't think of her as popular fluff after reading it.  Granted she blows her own horn but she deserves it.  Here's a massive quote that as teachers you must appreciate.

"Based on research into pronunciation attitudes, both that of other scholars (see below on sociopsychological issues) and her own EIL research, Jenkins (2000, pp. 209–210) proposes five stages of pronunciation learning:

1. •    Addition of core [i.e., Lingua Franca Core] items to the learner’s productive and receptive repertoire 
2. •    Addition of a range of L2 English accents to the learner’s receptive repertoire
3. •    Addition of accommodation skills
4. •    Addition of non-core items to the learner’s receptive repertoire 
5. •    Addition of a range of L1 English accents to the learner’s receptive repertoire

Learners who have elected to acquire an accent that enables them both to preserve their L1 identity in their L2 English and to be (pronunciation-wise) intelligible to other NNSs will probably aim for the first three stages. However, they may also wish to be able to understand the pronunciation of NSs, certain features of whose speech can, without prior familiarizing, present particular difficulties for NNS listeners (Bent & Bradlow, 2003). In this case, they will probably aim for all five stages. The critical point, though, is that there is no suggestion of losing their L1 repertoire and, by definition, their L1 identity. This change in emphasis has already filtered through to pronunciation materials, which are tending to incorporate a greater degree of learner choice of target than hitherto, and to move away from nativelike targets for learners whose goal is international intelligibility."

 It's like she's writing for us.  Good, isn't she?  Here she is again in case you missed the link above:


http://www.google.ie/search?q=trinity+college&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=yMG&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=wcNvTougO87n-gaat7mzCQ&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CBYQ_AUoAQ&biw=1228&bih=838