11 December 2015


Use this to find out more about new words and how they can be used in English.

On MOOCs 02

What is a MOOC? 
  • MOOC stands for a Massive Open Online Course
  • MOOCs are online courses aimed at large-scale participation using the internet
  • They are similar to university courses, but do not offer academic credit
Find out more:
Over to you
  • Explore this aggregator to explore past, current and forthcoming MOOCs.
  • Post a message to identify a MOOC that you think would be of particular interest for people who are studying management.

On BelfastiTours

Downloadable audio visual walking tours of the city, available FREE in a dozen short sections from http://www.gotobelfast.com/. Or search YouTube.

On the price of an airline ticket


Wednesday, 16 July 2014


Setting a price

Think for a few minutes about the ways in which low cost airlines seek to get money from their customers.
Then watch this video (5 minutes) in which a group of passengers report on their experiences when they flew to attend a cousin's wedding.

Over to you
Tell us about your experiences - good or bad - on a no frills airline.


Over to you 
Put the following items in the order in which they are mentioned in the video:
  • Airport taxes
  • Extra bags
  • Insurance 
  • Paying by credit card
  • Penalising passengers who do not check in online
  • Priority boarding
  • Taxi to the airport
  • The ticket
  • Using the jacks (slang, = toilet)
  • ... and one other ...
 (I apologise for the lack of political correctness and the language in this item.)

On START HERE - for Personal Lesson Planners

DRAFT TEXT to introduce the BELFAST blog to Learners, especially those using Personal Learning Plans:
This website provides some FREE resources to help you practise and improve your English. Everything here is in the public domain, from publishers, language schools and organisations such as the BBC and the British Council.
I have been gathering examples of useful resources from a wide range of sources. No one person will want or need to use everything; select the resources you personally find most interesting and useful.
This is work in progress to provide a compendium of free resources for the BELFAST Programme.
Please use the COMMENTS feature on each of the messages, to provide some comments; you are encouraged to use this to practise writing skills.
Explore other resources that are available on the various websites; these will help you to become aware aware of the range and variety of good quality resources available online to help practise and develop communication skills in English.
Over to you
Please comment on the options you can suggest to design, document and deliver such a resource.

On more grammar tests

Spend a few minutes on this site.

Over to you
Use COMMENT to write a few sentences about the value of this resource.

On the future of work

Explore this offering from the Royal Society of Arts.
It is an example of an animate, a popular technique for succinct presentations.


Over to you
What are the main points you take from this item?

On English vocabulary exercises

Spend a few minutes on this site.

Over to you
Use COMMENT to write a few sentences about the value of this resource.

On herding cats



Over to you
What are the main challenges facing the BELFAST Programme as we move into 2016?

On Belfast Telegraph postcards

Six thousand postcards featuring Belfast and beyond, available from the Belfast Telegraph and the Linen Hall Library, over the years are online here.
They are free to browse; images are also available for purchase.

Over to you

  • Post a short message to identify those of greatest interest to yourself.
  • Cooment also on the potential any may have for the BELFAST Programme.


6 December 2015

On blogging

 Sunday 6 December 2015
 Please scroll down to see the new content. 


I have had this blog since 2002 - a long time ...

In this area I contribute anything that seems likely to be of interest to those I meet, either in teaching or elsewhere.

NOVEMBER 2015: I am starting to mine archives of past postings, from Cavan and elsewhere, to identify some options for a simple but sufficient set of resources for the BELFAST Programme's various stakeholders:
  • Volunteer Teachers
  • Personal Learning Planners
  • Beginners
  • ... ? Absolute Beginners ?
(while familiarising myself with the latest interface).

PLEASE add comments, etc. as we seek to build the virtual community.

On Brassed Off

I mentioned this film at the meetup on Thursday evening.
It was characterised as a romantic comedy ('romcom'), based on events around the closure of many coal mines 30 years ago.
Find out about the film here.
The full film seems to be available on YouTube, in nine sections.
- BUT be careful if you have a limited data allowance.

On the Yes / No game

Michael Miles had success with this TV game more than half a century ago.
Contestants in a light-hearted quiz game could not use the words YES or NO; nor could they nod or shake their heads.


Michael Miles
host of Take Your Pick

Peter Viney used the idea in Unit 33 of Streamline Connections to provide opportunities for Learners of English to provide and practise more interesting alternatives to YES and NO.
For example:
  • That's right!
  • That's OK!
  • That's correct!
  • OK!
OR
  • That's wrong!
  • That's not correct!

On Down Memory Lane

I have just reactivated the link to Down Memory Lane, a site that contains a growing number of photographs from different towns in the north of Ireland.

Over to you
  • Are there any items here of particular interest to yourself?
  • In what ways might we be able to use such a resources with Learners on the BELFAST Programme?

On China - Kathy Flower

This book, written by Kathy Flower (formerly of International House London), in the worthwhile Culture Smart series provides a guide to the complexities of living in a rapidly changing world power.
Find out more about:
  • Customs, values and traditions
  • Historical, religious and political background
  • Life at home
  • Leisure, social and cultural life
  • Eating and drinking
  • Do's, don'ts and taboos
  • Business practices
  • Communication, both spoken and unspoken.

                
                                                     Kathy Flower

On meeting a new class for the first time

Please do not take this programme too seriously.
Consider any issues in classroom management.


Over to you
What are the main points you get, as teacher, from this programme?

On financial terminology

This is your opportunity to practise your financial decision making.
And it's fun! ... but addictive ...
Use this game ...

On MOOCs 01


Over to you
Spend a few minutes exploring www.mooc-list-com to find some current and forthcoming resources of interest to yourself.
Then post a message to tell others what you have found.

On SPQR - A History of the Roman World

I have been listening with considerable appreciation to the audio version of Mary Beard's latest publication:
M Beard, 2015 SPQR - A History of Ancient Rome, Profile Books, London
I have taken particular interest in the remarks she makes about attitudes to people of very diverse backgrounds in the Roman Empire. I reckon there are lessons that could be of benefit to politicians all over Europe at present.

On favourite films

What is your favourite film?
My favourite film is Chariots of Fire, 1981.
It is about Eric Liddell, who won an Olympic gold medal in Paris in 1924.
Eric Liddell is played Ian Charleson, who was the President of the Drama Society at the University of Edinburgh when I arrived there in 1969.

Over to you
What is your favourite film?
Write a sentence or two about why you like it.

On innovation in the Roads Service

Many of us will have seen roads in bad condition:

 ... or ...

Roads in this condition can result in traffic calming ...

I believe this was developed in Canada:

On punctuation

Consider the importance of the comma here:
  • It is time to eat, mother.
  • It is time to eat mother.

On starting the vacuum cleaner ...


After I left the University of Ulster I used to sit in the house all day.
My wife Elizabeth said: "Arthur, you could do something useful, like vacuum the house once a week."
I said, "OK. Show me the vacuum cleaner."
Half an hour later, I went into the kitchen to get some coffee.
Elizabeth said, "I didn't hear the vacuum work. I thought you were going to use it?"
I said: "The stupid thing is broken. It won't start. We’ve got to buy a new one."
"Really", she says, "Show me: it worked OK the last time."
So I did …
Click here.

On TED

What is it about TED talks that has made them so successful, and what can the business speaker learn from them? A new book marking their 30th year, Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds by Carmine Gallo, promises to tell us.

“We are all in sales now,” writes the author. This is especially true of Mr Gallo, a corporate communication coach who uses a number of classic rhetorical tricks to sell himself. Enumeration – ticking off numbered points – is a way of making something that may be complex seem clear-cut, or something that is open-ended seem complete. Hence his claim that there are nine – not eight, 12 or 42 – tricks to public speaking. He stakes a claim to authority (what Aristotle called an ethos appeal): “I am in a unique position to analyse TED presentations.” He asserts, somewhat absurdly: “If you’ve been invited to give a TED talk, this book is your Bible. If you haven’t . . . this book is still among the most valuable books you’ll ever read.”
Well, perhaps. The nine aspects of effective communication he picks out are (I paraphrase):
● Be passionate about your topic
● Engage the audience by telling stories
● Treat your speech like a conversation
● Tell the audience something it doesn’t know
● Include a few jaw-droppers
● Use humour
● Keep it brief
● Engage all the senses by painting word-pictures
● Be authentic.
You might notice that some of these overlap. No matter. All of them are sensible. And none are secrets, unless you stretch the definition of “secret” to mean principles independently discovered by all TED speakers and used by Mr Gallo “for years to coach CEOs, entrepreneurs and leaders”.
I am particularly interested in Mr Gallo’s remarks about delivery – last of the classical tradition’s “five canons of rhetoric”. What TED talks have in common is that they are 18 minutes long and generally stripped-down in format: one person, a stage, perhaps some slides. Delivery is therefore vital. The Greeks called it hypokrisis, which is the same as the word for acting.
Mr Gallo affirms that the most successful TED speakers use body language to frame their points, and by practising in front of a camera learn to strip out unintentional gestures (jiggling, fiddling with cuffs and so forth). They also emphasise key phrases with changes of volume or intensity, or bracket them with pauses. And they find a sweet spot of about 190 words per minute. Acting skills, in other words.
Why 18 minutes? In the words of TED’s chief Chris Anderson, it is “long enough to be serious and short enough to hold people’s attention”. Units of speech that much longer create a “cognitive backlog” that makes it harder and harder to digest new material. If you are presenting for longer, therefore, it is wise to break your speech down into 10-minute or quarter-hour units and build in what Mr Gallo calls “soft breaks”, such as stories, videos and demonstrations.
Brevity applies, too, to slides. One of Mr Gallo’s interesting findings is that where “the average PowerPoint slide has 40 words . . . It’s nearly impossible to find one slide in a TED presentation that contains anywhere near 40 words”. One TED speaker mentioned – whose talk has had 7m downloads – was 25 slides in before she hit 40 words in total.
In short, you should be thinking not about how much you can deliver, but about how little your audience can take in. That’s a secret you can have for free.
The writer is the author of ‘You Talkin’ to Me?’ Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama’

ON ESOL in the UK and Ireland

English as a Second or Foreign Language

The Wikipedia article has merit.

See also the Skills for Life programme.

Activity
Use your online searching skills to identify resources that can support the work you are doing with foreign nationals.
Post a message in which you pass on what you have been able to find to other people who use this site.



On the price of a turkey

As we move towards the holiday season a turkey may be on your shopping list.
Visit this site and be amazed at the price of the festive bird!