Edited by author 22-11-2003 23:51
Dear Working Group,
Well, not much activity on our Bulletin Board! But friends into Newsgroups tell me it takes a year for a Newsgroup to get rolling since most people prefer one to one e-mail communication rather than Virtual Bulletin Boards. Anyway, here are a few notes I'd like to put up.
1. As you know, the next SIETAR-EU Conference will be in Berlin (Humboldt University) from 30 March to 4 April 2004. There will be a special track on Language: "The Role of Language and Linguistic Paradigms in Transition". Rethinking how we teach language obliges us to rethink language, so the presentations should be of interest.
2. I've been asked to chair the Language Track. Anette, for the Organizing Committee, has told me that they will soon be looking for people to be Commentators. A Commentator is the person who, after a talk, gives a comment on it, before opening up the discussion for questions from the general public. So even if there are no questions, the speaker will at least have had some feedback. You get to see the paper in advance, to prepare your remarks.
Any of you interested in being a commentator?
3. Two people sent me private emails with comments on the paper I was writing this autumn. I would like to thank them here. As you know, the paper was on how to get language learners to "rewrite themselves" as members of another culture (the target culture). It's done now. Three practical activities are described; they may be of interest to you if you want to give the paper a glance:
http://host.uniroma3.it/docenti/boylan/text/boylan21.htm(If clicking doesn't work, just copy the Internet address into your browser).
4. A question:
I do task-based teaching in my "English for Intercultural Communication" courses at the University: in fact, the "practical activities" in the paper just mentioned are three such tasks. My colleagues prefer giving their students language-based exercises (study of lexis and word formation, role plays to drill specific items of syntax or phraseology, etc.). These colleagues ask me: "But do your students really improve their hold on language, by doing your intercultural communication tasks?" My experience says Yes, but to test my conviction I am giving the students a computerized test in the lab at the beginning and at the end of the semester. So we shall see.
The problem is, the only computerized test I could get for free is "L-Test", an imitation of the TOEFL or TOEIC test: 50 listening comprehension questions with multiple choice answers (you hear a 4 line dialog, then choose a sentence that represents the most logical continuation) and 50 reading comprehension questions of the same kind (you read a short text and choose the sentence that most coherently continues it). Every time you take the test (up to 10 times) the questions change.
And that's it. No speaking. No interaction. Little pragmatic awareness required. No knowledge of register or varieties of English required, Emphasis on lexical items, in particular idiomatic expressions, in the listening part. Idioms, verb concordances and noun/verb agreement count for half the discriminating features in the written part.
Do you know of any better computerized test? One that sees language as more than just lexis and grammar and that evaluates a richer range of linguistic abilities? Not necessarily free, but computerized since I don't want to have correct 240 papers (three classes of about 80 students each).
That's it for now.
Patrick
