One of the journals they offer is System, an international journal devoted to the application of educational technology and applied linguistics to language teaching and learning. Type System into the journal search, and scroll down the list of journals until you find it. I signed up with ScienceDirect (www.sciencedirect.com) and have them send me an occasional email with the 25 Most Downloaded Articles from System.

I really need these connections to the professional side of our work—after one leaves college and starts teaching, one (read: me) gets very busy and loses track of what’s fresh, interesting and useful.  I’d be interested in your thoughts about this and any other sources to keep up-to-date professionally; attending conferences isn’t always possible.

FYI: here are the 25 titles they sent in the last email:

• A brief overview of individual differences in second language learning
• Language learning strategy use of ESL students in an intensive English learning context
• The relationship between EFL learners’beliefs and learning strategy use
• Learning outcomes and students’perceptions of online writing: Simultaneous implementation of a forum, blog, and wiki in an EFL blended learning setting
• Chinese students’perceptions of communicative and non-communicative activities in EFL classroom
• The impact of the interactive whiteboard on the teacher and children’s language use in an ESL immersion classroom
• Pre-service ESL teachers’beliefs about second language learning: a longitudinal study
• Non-native English-speaking teachers, context and English language teaching
• A cognitive perspective on language learners’listening comprehension problems
• Native and non-native teachers in the classroom
• Autonomous language learning against all odds
• The impact of general and specific vocabulary knowledge on reading and listening comprehension: A case of Iranian EFL learners
• An English teacher’s developing self-efficacy beliefs in using group work
• Teaching reading strategies and reading comprehension within a technology-enhanced learning environment
• Developing cultural awareness and intercultural communication through multimedia: A case study from medicine and the health sciences
• Individual differences in second language acquisition: attitudes, learner subjectivity, and L2 pragmatic norms
• Differences in the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies among native and non-native readers
• The impact of vocabulary preparation on L2 listening comprehension, confidence and strategy use
• Effects of perceptual learning style preferences on L2 lexical inferencing
• Assessing the use of language learning strategies worldwide with the ESL/EFL version of the strategy inventory for language learning (SILL)
• The relationship between vocabulary size and depth for ESP/EAP learners
• Listening comprehension: The learner’s perspective
• The L2 motivational self system, L2 anxiety, and motivated behavior: A structural equation modeling approach
• The effects of focused and unfocused written corrective feedback in an English as a foreign language context
• Anxiety and predictors of performance in the foreign language classroom

Title: Intonation in Text and Discourse: Beginnings, Middles, and Ends
Author: Dr Anne Wichmann
Publisher: Longman

Every time I think of writing something for publication, I discover that someone has already done it, or is in the process of doing it. It used to disappoint me, but now….now I’m just really happy someone else did it for me so I can use it. This is one of those books.

Dr. Wichmann has written a great study on the English intonation patterns we use to clarify the relationship between successive utterances, that is, what we do acoustically with our voice that, in writing, we convey by using semi-colons, transitional words, paragraph changes, etc.

In speaking, we have a set pattern of acoustical signals to convey the introduction of a topic, the continuation of the topic, an elaboration of a part of the topic, an aside or parenthetical statement, and a conclusion to a topic.

Dr. Wichmann also addresses turn-taking signals, both harmonious and combative, as well as intonation patterns used for phone-speak.

Because I work with advanced clients, these are some of the issues that they don’t understand—there’s a lot of published material on intonation patterns within a sentence, but very little easy-to-understand and easy-to-use materials for discourse intonation instruction.

This is one of those rare books that covers the research, yet still is accessible, interesting, useful, and best of all, right to the point! Hallelujah.

This 6-CD + study book set is designed to be used by students as a self-help tool, but it’s perfect for teachers as well.  Cook not only “covers all the bases” of American pronunciation, she also provides easy-to-understand nationality guides, in which she lists the major interference points for speakers of other languages.  The only thing lacking is a feedback loop for those studying on your own—you’ll need a way to know if you’re making the correct pronunciation adjustments or not.  You’ll have to provide that yourself, but that’s not difficult really.  If you have a native-speaker conversation partner, ask them for feedback.  Or download something free like Audacity from sourceforge.net and record yourself, listen, re-record, compare yourself to the audio models on the CDs, etc.

If you’re teaching pronunciation for the first time, or you’re frustrated because you are unable to help your students improve their pronunciation, invest in this set–you won’t regret it.  I’ve been teaching American pronunciation for years, and Ann Cook’s kit is still one of the first resources I grab when I want to refresh my memory about the problems Arabic speakers have, for example, or the problems I can expect with my Chinese clients.

Here’s a link to the set on Amazon, so you can check it out!
American Accent Training

I whole-heartedly support Kiva, and urge you to consider helping the working poor.  One small contribution will make a huge difference to another person in our global community.

This is such a brilliant idea!  I’ve been a member for years now, and have loaned $25 at a time to many, many “friends” out there in the world.  Never once has a person defaulted, even in countries where the odds are staggeringly against success.  The loan recipients, with business guidance from agencies in their area, have borrowed, created and expanded their businesses, and repaid the loans.

My first loan was combined with others to help a small cooperative of 5 women pool their resources and energy to start a chicken-raising business.  I admired them so much for their courage and commitment, and the fact that they guaranteed each other—they guaranteed that if one of them fell behind, the others would cover her portion of the debt.  They, like all the others, paid back every cent.

Kiva offers so much information–if I want to, I can follow their repayments, their progress, and I frequently get updates from their sponsoring “field fellow” about how things are going now for them.  I can choose to loan to a man or woman, or a group.  I can choose whether to loan to someone in the Americas or anywhere else around the world.  I’ve given $25 gift certificates to family and friends, so they can reach out and connect to the world also.

So…how often do you check something on Wikipedia? Can you even imagine your life without information sources such as this?  Wikipedia has been instrumental in changing the nature of the internet, from a home-shopping, blind-dating random network to a source of collective wisdom that we all can contribute to, edit, share, critique, and learn from.  If you “get” from Wikipedia, please “give” to Wikipedia; you’ll feel like one of Santa’s elves, all warm and fuzzy inside!

It’s “cloze” in American English, and “gap” in British English, but whatever you like to call it, here’s a free site you can use to quickly create a listening/reading activity requiring students to fill in the blanks.  The GapMaker is just one of the features this website offers.  It also provides extensive, leveled word lists of academic English vocabulary, concordance exercises, and some exercises and teaching support.

Of course, there are many other academic word lists on the internet (but perhaps not leveled as these are, by complexity), and there are other sources for concordance information and activities, I presume, but this is the only Cloze-maker that I have in my toolbox (naturally I stopped looking once I discovered this, so please advise us if you know of a better/different/more usable tool).

Just copy a text, paste it into the word box, and choose the level of difficulty (1 to 10) — 1 having very few blanks, and 10 having many blanks, and even multiple, consecutive blanks (two or three consecutive words missing).

Sometimes I create these purely as reading exercises, but more often than not, I add a listening component.  I find an article, interview, or speech that has both audio recording and text, change the transcript to text or doc format, drop it into the GapMaker, and create a cloze exercise for students to listen to and fill in the blanks.

This feature allows you to not only adjust the number of blanks by choosing the difficulty level, but also to either include the missing words in a chart at the end, or leave them off.  High level support vs. low level of support.

Strengths: fast and easy to use

Drawbacks: American teachers, note that this site is British, so expect differences in spellings of vocabulary words; kind of an ugly site, but then, looks aren’t everything!

author: DREW RODGERS, of the Norwegian School of Management; publisher — Cambridge University Press, 1998

If you teach advanced-intermediate, and advanced business ESL/EFL, and you long for some action in your class that let’s the teacher move away from center stage, I think you’ll like this book.  Rodgers has created a collection of case studies that address various business negotiations.  He provides case summaries, background information about the culture of the negotiators, and focuses on a particular element of business oral and written business language, and related vocabulary.  There’s also a negotiations worksheet and a position presentation worksheet to help student-negotiators organize their thoughts and language, and decide on their approach.

The 10 case studies:

• Sun and Fun Tours vs. Hotel de la Playa: Compensation for Breach of Agreement
• Sansung Sporting Goods Seeks a Scandinavian Distributor: An Agency Agreement
• Acme Water Pumps and the Nigerian Government: A Sales Contract
• American Auto Corporation vs. The Mexican Auto Works’ Union:Wage and Working Conditions Negotiations
• Hydra Tech and Bertoni Shipping: Product Presentation and a Sales Contract
• Tourism Comes to Zanir: Development of a Tourist Resort: Development of a Tourist Resort
• Smirnov Goes to Paris St. Germain: A Player’s Contract
• Chemi Suisse vs. The State of India: A Catastrophe and Claims for Compensation
• Kenji Motors and the American Auto Corporation: A Joint Venture
• Group Presentation:  An Open-Ended Case

If you can pair up your students, you can take on the role of negotiation coach as the students act out their roles and practice using the language and strategies.

Strengths:  students are completely involved and responsible for the outcome; each case study focuses on a different language skill; as close to authentic as one might be able to get

Drawback:  if you only have one student, you’ll have to take the part of one of the negotiators, which might make it harder to coach the student.

Why do I go back to this book over and over?  Ewing offers simple, clear advice on how to overcome one’s fear of public speaking.  He provides a self-reflection tool to think about what kind of speaker you are (friendly, intellectual, dominant or submissive), and whether you match your audience or not (and if it’s a mismatch, what to do about it).  He uses these four categories as his anchor points for each chapter, so you have to buy into the idea that we have different (and categorizable? categorical?) approaches to communicating.

Here’s a sample page from the chapter on your pitch and intonation:

Strengths of the book:  helpful information, and excellent guidance to develop your presentation skills

Drawback:  outdated in reference to technology, but nothing you can’t adapt to new options

While the book is definitely “old-timey”, it’s also easy to peruse, very useful, and fortunately, light-hearted.  It offers a variety of ways to speak in business settings, from presenting your argument or “taking the floor”, to how to pre-empt an interruption when you do have the floor.  These expressions are accompanied by annotations on how to adjust them for varying levels of formality and tentativeness. Here’s a glimpse of the material.

excerpt from the chapter on Clarifying

Some things to do with the materials:

1) Speaking Practice: orchestrate paired conversations, assigning roles or positions; ask one party to make an adamant statement, while the other party tries to convince them to change their stand. Put persuasive expressions at different formality levels on 3 x 5 cards so the “persuader” can lay out the cards and quickly find the best way to ask questions, express reservations, challenge opinions, and make reassurances, all the while staying within the level of formality or tentativeness you establish at the start.

2) Listening Practice: survey the internet, find a speech or conversation of import, and “capture” as many of the expressions as possible.  If you are working on statements and argumentation, speeches are a good source.  If you are working on expressing opinions, interviews provide a good source.

3) Business Collocations: each chapter asks students to match collocates, e.g.  find the match for “vested” (in this case, “interest”) ; or students may be asked to assemble problematic prepositional phrases, such as “___behalf___” (= on behalf of).  Ask students to register on a corpora site like http://www.americancorpus.org, and search for (in these examples) what nouns occur after the verb “vested”, and what prepositions occur before and after the word “behalf”.  Bring to class, discuss, predict, and analyze the phrase’s usage and the context in which we found them.

Strengths: 1) People not only have to use these expressions appropriately, as well as understand the implications of the speaker’s word choices in formal meetings (e.g. Has the speaker just switched from formal to friendly?) 2) My clients/students like learning this material in this ‘language-function’ way.

Handicaps: 1) written using British expressions.  If you are an American English teacher,be sure to read ahead so you know what’s there and what’s missing. 2) It’s so “old-timey” that you might not be able to find it.

Q. What constitutes good manners?    A. It varies from culture to culture.

Many of us interact without thinking much about how we learned to be polite, and how we know when someone is being impolite.  It just comes naturally; we have been learning these rules since we began to interact with others.  But if you’ve ever lived in another country or with another culture, you quickly realize that politeness rules are not the same.

Geoffrey Leech’s politeness principles help us realize how tact, generosity, approbation, modesty, agreement and sympathy are expressed in American culture.

If you’re working with advanced ESL or ELL students, you’ll find a discussion of these maxims, and how they sound in informal and formal settings, to be very informative and enlightening. This topic can generate great conversations in classes of mixed cultures and backgrounds.

Leech’s 6 politeness principles:

TACT:  ‘Minimize the expression of beliefs which imply cost to other; maximize the expression of beliefs which imply benefit to other.’

GENEROSITY: ‘Minimize the expression of benefit to self; maximize the expression of cost to self.’

APPROBATION: ‘Minimize the expression of beliefs which express dispraise of other; maximize the expression of beliefs which express approval of other.’

MODESTY: ‘Minimize the expression of praise of self; maximize the expression of dispraise of self.’

AGREEMENT: ‘Minimize the expression of disagreement between self and other; maximize the expression of agreement between self and other.’

SYMPATHY: ‘Minimize antipathy between self and other; maximize sympathy between self and other.’

READ MORE:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politeness_maxims