Hi there,

I am learning about new stuff. New, because I have never used it. Today it was second life. I am doing an online course and as part of it I have an assignment in Second life. I had tried second life before and I found it confusing.
Maybe it is because I am not a big on games myself. Correction: I am not big on “graphic adventures”. Anyway, I tried it again and found it less confusing. New questions came up. How can this be useful for learners and educators? This is a double question: first wondering about it’s actual usefulness and once decided that it is somehow useful, attempt to define the “somehow”.

I tried the website of UDIMA, the Online University of Madrid. Graphics were appealing and if you were comfortable with controls, you could move around easily. There was no interaction because it was a Sunday.

Now this last sentence brings me to the real purpose of this post: which tools and for which purpose. To put it in a different way. Tell me what your purpose is and I will tell you which tools you may need to use. In the same way as we do not address different audiences even if the topic of a conference is the same, so it happens with IT tools in education.

Obviously, using second life in College degrees populated by the “gamers generation” is the ideal environment. It allows you to create a customizable environment. This virtual reality could make up for the coldness of online courses. For the consequences of having your own avatar do your job in class or elsewhere, you may want to watch “The surrogates” starring Bruce Willis.

If you do not need the appeal of fancy environments or flashy things, a decent website will do the trick. Use moodle or any alterntive to it and within it you can use many different tools.

I also tried today the course’s Wiki. Someone was modifying it so I decided to write this post instead and when I finish, if it is open to modifications, insert this link.

I found it messy. I do not know anything about tags, which might be the reason. Otherwise, I am the one who tells their students: “when you write your exam, remember: margins, space between the lines and clear handwriting (yes, they are done on a piece of paper)”. I believe the same applies to websites and if people are going to share a document such as a wiki, formatting it should be “for dummies”.

I still believe that a wiki is a very good idea. If you are going to write an article or a book or publish anything done in a team, using a wiki would be a good place for brainstorming, for sharing the results of research and to critisize each other – in a positive, good mood…

There are miriads of possibilities out there, but the way to go is simply: whatever works. If it is flashy but it does not suit the purpose, out with it.And as I said, I am not very sure about Second life. Maybe that is why there were very few people… as they say: get a life!

And that’s all folks!

There are nightmares you wake up from, and there are nightmares you cannot wake up from, no matter how hard you pinch yourself. They are real. Mine is, my students are reluctant to digitalize themselves.

My big time argument is they can learn English even when they are on the toilet. It is a bit scatological, I know, but it was my very last chance after trying all possible perks.

Maybe thinking aloud about them will help clear some of this mess.

The most obvious that comes to mind is that we break all time and space boundaries. Anywhere you may have access to the internet, you can log on to your course and work on it. Drawbacks … there should not be… BUT there are.

The drawbacks do not come from the system itself but from the circumstances that surround the students. Circumstances are different in, let’s say, The USA, South Korea or Spain. The USA is just the all-time reference, South Koreans are nuts about technology and Spain… well, Spain is still different.

America is not yet fully digital – that is South Korea of all places. But America (I mean the U.S.) has fully embraced as a country the digital era. There might be some reluctant individuals who do not like the idea, but I guess most people who work with a computer are well updated in using the internet and know the basics about benefits, risks and what to do to avoid these. They all have their driver’s license, if you know what I mean.

South Korea is discarding a broadband technology in favour of the next one. Ironically, that discarded technology is being adopted – now – in the U.S. In south Korea a baby died of starvation and neglect because the parents were playing a video game about – raising a child:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8551122.stm

A disturbingly telling symptom.

As I said, Spain is still different. Here in Spain, the average internet user has either been fighting for years in order to get decent bandwitdh at an affordable price, let alone wireless connection on portable devices. Those who jumped late onto the bandwagon, are still dazzled and confused. There has been a lack of formal technological education integrated in the standard curriculum among those who are, let’s say, above 30 years old. Jobs that exist in countries like my two other examples – or for that matter in countries like Germany or France – are not so technologically integrated in Spain. Companies are still too analogical.

An example: an education consultancy belonging to a group where there is a web programming company and it took them five years to have an up-and-running online teaching website. Appalling.

So this applies to my students as well. They are between 18 and 55. They are all supposed to have access to their intranet and are automatically assigned an email account. Recently one of my students came back to the course after being abroad for some weeks. He is forty-something.

Me: Hi, what have you done with your English these weeks?
Student: Hardly anything, some exercises on a grammar book I have at home.
Me: (trying to sound cheerful) which book is it?
Student: I can’t remember, It is blue outside.
Me: (Repressed sigh/grunt) have you tried our website as I told you?
Student: Actually I forgot all about it.
Me: By the way I remind you it is vital for you to sign up, for administration purposes. You have done it, have you?
Student: I don’t have an e-mail account. So when I reached that… I tried before leaving and then…
Me: You all have a corporate e-mail address…
Student: Do we? We do have this X thing…
Me: That’s it.
Student: (Surprised) Is it?
Me: Yes…

The conversation went on for a long time. This is an analogic student. He has an email  account that he has been given for free at work. He has not even used it once. Luckily I do have a geek student whom I asked to help this other student. But this student should already know the basics. Right now it is like not knowing how to use the phone – or a mobile phone, of which he has two. Wait till he hears that he can use the course on his mobile’s screen!

Lesson learned: make sure your students have the basic digital skills before starting the first class.

So many years later… I am still linked to this book. I first came in contact with it on its first edition, when my evening class English teacher told my father to buy it for me, in addition to my school book. Back then, I had just started taking classes with her and I was a bit lost – actually completely lost – concerning English. Since my father regreted that my grandmother had not transmitted English to him, he wanted to restart the chain of English speakers in the family.

And indeed he did. I ended up with a degree in English and working both as a teacher and translating into English.

Part of the blame falls on this book. And on the teacher who made me do it, back to back. Twice. When I first finished it, I was given an eraser (a rubber it was called then) and I knew then why I had been suggested not to be to hard on my pencil.

At college I sometimes went back to it. For reference, when more technical books became too dense. By then I had bought a second edition and my first was getting yellow. After college, as the years went by and I started teaching more and more, I noticed that English grammar in use had reproduced. Eventually there were three levels, and then other “cousins” about vocabulary, phrasal verbs, idioms, and even pronunciation.

For a while I became Director of Studies in a couple of consultancies that offered courses at companies and public agencies, I included those books as part of the background material. More than once we received suggestions from students asking to have english grammar in use as class material and not only as support in their office libraries.

The salesman from CUP sometimes just asked me: how many are you going to order this time?

By now you may have concluded that I am a big fan of anything to do with English Grammar in Use. Goes without saying that I continue to recomend it. It is a great, easy to use book. It is wonderful for reference and to reinforce some grammar point that your students need to hammer down. Unless your students are really serious and can do without so much fun in class, they are not classroom material to be followed every day.

However, if you are preparing for any of the Cambridge exams, these books should be your gym, where you lift weights. I always tell my students that grammar and vocabulary have to be like the skeleton. Used all the time with precision, but seldom seen. You must reach a point where you do not think about grammar – or vocabulary – but they will come to you naturally. Instinctively.

And in order to achieve that, in order to be the Rafael Nadal or the Harry Potter of Grammar (or rather Hermione!), the best option is to drill yourself until you achieve mastery.

If you want to achieve that, English Grammar in Use and its offspring are for you!

Some things do not depend on technology, but just on common sense. And when people panic, common sense goes out of the window.

Phrasal Verbs are one of the most ingenious and technologically advanced building blocks ever invented by English speakers. They are an acquired taste for me, and unlike many non-native speakers, I have come past the hate stage to actually loving them.

To love something you have to understand it, be it consciously or unconsciously. In every language, there are those expressions that almost define a whole culture. Using them gives you an edge, it makes you cross an uncharted frontier.

When I explain my students stuff about phrasal verbs I tell them what they are first.

Phrasal verbs are useful, convenient and often colourful shortcuts. They the brush strokes of masters who have often concentrated paragraph long explanations into a verb and one or two prepositions or particles. Speak about genius. If you use them fluently you should put “advanced summarizing skills” in your CV and linkedin profile?

I have my favourites, which I repeatedly use as examples. Above all, “pig out” stands out as an instant reminder of its biggest fan, Homer Simpson. But the most important thing is to let learners know what the key is to understanding them:

“Go for the particle! Go for the preposition.” It is no use learning them by heart and worst of all, to learn them by base verb. It is the particle that changes the meaning of a boring verb into something exciting and complex. And often, the base is not even a verb. See pig out above. Do you “pig” me?

One of the problems is that most books and dictionaries that I have come across which deal with phrasal verbs do it by alphabetical order of the verbs and not by particle. The only one I have found which does not follow that system is the wonderful “Collins Cobuild Phrasal Verbs Workbook” which ironically is out of print since 2002! (Note: if anybody wants to give me a present, I would love a copy).

So to wrap it up, phrasal verbs should be taught using common sense and not stubborness. Rubbing the dictionary against our heads will not help them get through our skulls by osmosis. Understanding them and using a sensible approach is the key to learning any vocabulary. Phrasal verbs are no exception.

Besides the obvious reaction to losing the 2020 Olympics and not even making it to the “silver medal”, here in Spain and specially in Madrid, attention has been drawn to how far the choice was affected by the English proficiency of the city Mayor, Mrs Ana Botella.

I must admit I expected the president of the Autonomous community to have been equally embarrasing, but since nobody seemed to say anything bad about him, I doubled checked by looking at videos online showing the public television broadcast of the event and my impression is he spoke fluently and correctly.

Then there was the symptom of the voice-over. The video I found had a voice-over from the public television broadcast which made it very difficult to follow the “original soundtrack”. And this got me thinking about the overall attitude of Spain as a country towards foreign languages – even to more than one national language.

If Mrs Ana Botella is our Frankenstein monster, it is a Frankenstein we all created. And there are millions like her.

First, a little bit of historical perspective. People would go and put all the blame on Franco, but again Franco is a product of centuries of evolution – or lack thereof – in Spanish mentality. In a nutshell, given our historical links, allegiances and conflicts, spaniards had reasons (valid or not) to distrust anything coming from the British Isles. Besides, we had the experience of being invaded by Napoleon’s army and at that time the concept was fixed: don’t trust them if they speak the language of the enemy. They must be the enemy. And if you want to be trusted don’t learnt it.

This concept, which had been brewing for a long time, brought about the approach to foreign – and internal languages – other than Castilian Spanish, during Franco’s dictatorship. A smugness extended itself, and a phrase was coined “let them learn Spanish. Anything but French, because it was admitted that French had class. It was the language of diplomacy…

And although the country was internationally isolated, you had to speak something other than Spanish, right? And French was sort of easy…

So, a whole cohort of Spanish people learnt some French at school. Most never used it and let it get rusty. In the meantime, the world changed and the US was the dominant power (other than the USSR which Franco abhorred: learning Russian was the worst thing you could do). Eventually Spain had to open itself up to tourism and this meant funny people who spoke an assortment of foreign languages.

But still the “let them learn Spanish” was the general attitude. Those who learnt some English or other languages, were generally happy to “get by”, which is a very flexible concept. This concept has transformed nowadays in Spain into the equally elastic “intermediate English”.

Certainly there was an landslide of american and foreign material on television in Spain which had started in cinemas before Franco’s time. But there were tools to avoid that “contamination”. In the first place, censorship often altered or even denied access to some materials. Then there was dubbing films, which is the usual practice to this day. This was vital in the malnourishment of multilingual skills in Spain.

An aside: there are four possible approaches to foreign content: dubbing, which assimilates the content completely to the country’s culture and language; voice-over, which reduces the original soundtrack to background noise; subtitling, which is a somewhat cumbersome compromise between bilinguals who want to hear the original and those who can’t speak the language and finally just watching/listening in the original version.

(Also, you can watch things with subtitles in the original language and learn a lot!)

In Spain dubbing was promoted to the extent that it became an industry and its specialists made it into an art. There are many excellent dubbing jobs both in film and television in Spain, just to name one “The fresh prince of Bel Air”. The downside of this was that people continued to avoid what has become now an urgent need: becoming bilingual. Will Smith spoke such good Spanish!

As a language consultant I have to deal with the results of this wreckage every day. Not until the crisis struck did companies – and their employees at an individual level – realize how urgent their need was. The spanish market evaporated overnight, LatAm is limited. They look for other markets. Oh surprise, suddenly I need more than just the “get by” attitude. No English, no business.

And in this sort of “they don’t know what hit them” eerie state, we can include Ana Botella. With all this background she can’t be blamed completely for her non-existent English. However, it wouldn’t have hurt if she had gone to class hand in hand with her husband, once he became ex-Prime Minister.

He was the laughing stock when his efforts to learn English and put it to use were publicly known. As a professional in the field I must praise his guts. His starting point was the same as his wife’s but he decided to solve the problem. And that’s a decision that many people and many companies still have to take in Spain.

Back to the Ana Botella controversy, her advisor, Mr Terrence Burns, is an expert advisor and consultant and has succesfully helped several other cities in becoming Olympic. I don’t know much about what was going on in the background, but from the outside it seems that Mr Burns has never seen himself in such dire straits.

Let me explain. Mr Burns had to do many things, including coaching Ana Botella for the promotion of Madrid 2020. An obvious bonus would be, someone thought, if she defended it with a speech in English. What a great idea! As a marketing strategy it is a logical move.

Not really. Because it backfired.

People who learn things phonetically are typically people with a musical training which I expect Ana Botella does not have. A famous case in this sense was Pavarotti. He had that skills, to the point that he couldn’t read music scores but could sing incredibly well in languages he did not speak.

One thing which I do with my clients is explain them where the problems lay and how things work. Obviously in order to do that, you need an insight into the topic. That’s where, in my opinion, the training of Mrs Botella should have been handed to a language expert. I have no doubt about other skills that Mr. Burns may possess, but the language hurdle was one which he was not ready to address.

Yet another aside: my opinion is that Mrs. Botella’s english proficiency did not play a significant role in not getting the olympics for Madrid. It was just a very public and very notorious embarrasment.

Alternatives to what happened in Buenos Aires: she could have spoken in Spanish (after all it is not a tiny, irrelevant language that a bunch of people speak on a small island somewhere) or even better, she could have introduced briefly someone who could do it better, like some spanish athlete or maybe the councillor for sports (if there is one and if he can speak English).

It is a national sport to laugh at people in disgrace. Mrs Botella made it crystal clear that she completely lacked a skill that is vital if you are the mayor of a world-class capital that aspires to hosting the olympics. But she is the tip of the iceberg. The employees and executives of many companies in Spain are in similar situations and their business opportunities are seriously compromised by their deficiencies or their lack of english skills. Many unemployed people in this country would have a job abroad if only they spoke decently other languages besides Spanish.

Solutions to this? that is a topic for a different post. This is long enough!