Next week is the start of a new semester at my university. I am excited to teach a new class on academic vocabulary and meet new students. But I am also a little worried because I need to write a syllabus and that can be an unpleasant experience! A syllabus is an outline of the course. It gives students an understanding of the teacher’s expectations and of the course’s schedule. It shows how you plan to build the course.

I don’t like writing syllabi because it seems like too much planning. I am always a little hesitant to schedule out ten weeks of class before I meet the students. I would like my class to be dynamic and student-centered, but how do you write that into a syllabus. My question to you is: How do you manage to keep class time flexible AND give students a firm plan for the course in a syllabus?

I think, I have developed one strategy. I am going to supply an outline for the course as if it were a one-hour course. (The course is actually two hours long.) That way every class time, I have an hour to deal with student generated topics and problems. This will require work throughout the term to develop more materials and assignments, but I think it makes for a better class.

Maybe some teacher have a better way of outlining a course. To me though, it seems impossible to outline the entire course before the course begins. Still, I remember being a student and I had some great teachers who did just that. So if you plan your entire course before you start class, can you give me some tips?

I read an interesting article in today’s Taipei Times that addresses the value of the current trend of teaching English to children at an earlier age. It seems as though many people believe that if they can just start studying earlier, students will have more time to learn and end up better speakers. The author of the article describes this trend in Taiwan, but questions its validity and concludes with this point:

“Perhaps the issue of how early EFL students start to learn English is not that pivotal. The crux of the matter is whether or not the students will continue to acquire English after school. I’ve interviewed numerous adult learners who began to learn English after 13 and now have a native-like proficiency. The one thing they have in common is that they use English every day, whether it be watching TV programs or movies, reading English newspapers or popular novels, or other methods.

Therefore, English teachers need to ponder a more crucial issue: how to make their students still willing to involve English in their lives after leaving school.”

We believe that a classroom education is a crucial component of learning English. But turning that foundation into natural language use requires another step, which is lots of practice in context-rich environments such as having conversations with native speakers, listening to native speakers having conversations with each other, and being exposed to native English speaking culture.

The easiest way to get this experience is by living in an English speaking country where access to speakers and culture isn’t a problem. The challenge is that cultural immersion is only available to a small percentage of people.

English learners who can’t make that move must find a way to make English part of their daily lifestyle. They might be harder to find, but there are plenty of ways to simulate immersion such as reading English news, finding a language exchange partner, or spending time in environments where native English speakers hang out.

We urge all of our members at Ebaby! to actively participate in school, but to help them reach the next level and truly grasp the English language, we do everything we can to make practicing English fun and engaging in an effort to make using it part of their lifestyle.

Since Ebaby! TV was officially launched today, I figured it was time to share the story of the genesis of the Ebaby! soap opera.

First of all, in case you didn’t know, all the dialogues in the Ebaby! lessons are improvised since the whole point of them is to teach people real, conversational English. We just start with a topic and see where it goes, and then I take the recordings back to the office and make lessons out of them.

While most of us are pretty straight forward in the scenes, Amanda is the only member of the Ebaby! cast who is an actress by trade, and she likes to throw us curve balls for fun. Most of them don’t make it in the lessons because they tend to be a little risque. Her goal is to make the other person in the scene laugh.

Amanda’s main target for these shenanigans has always been Mason. She would just throw in some comment that would imply they have a child or are married or are dating or were dating but now she’s mad at him. Marni started trying to keep track of it, as though it were a plot line, “But, wait, last month you were just dating and now you have a child? What’s going on?” Which gave me an idea.

I had also noticed that the cast, particularly Mason, had some fans among the members. There are occasional broken English comments of the oh-you’re-so-cute nature. So I figured, what better way to tantalize these members who had developed a crush on Mason from watching him talk about movies and music than to actually depict him in a relationship?

All I needed was a plot. Luckily, around this time I went on a couple of dates with a girl I really liked. I met her through a friend and asked him if he thought it would be a good idea to try to date her. He said go for it; he’d date her himself if they weren’t so close. Then one day, whoops, they started dating. Sound familiar?

The cast didn’t know that I was basing the soap opera off my life until a couple of months ago when we filmed this scene in which Mason apologizes to me for giving me the go ahead to date Amanda and then making a move on her himself.

Now, even the soap opera episodes are improvised, so no one really knows what’s going to happen exactly until the scene is over. The direction for this scene was just, “OK, Mason, you sit down with me and apologize for pulling a 180 and I forgive you. Ready? Action.”

So when the scene was over, Amanda asked if I would really be that forgiving if I were in that situation. So I told her that I actually had in been in that situation and I was.

I mean, if there’s anything I’ve learned in this life, it’s that there’s no point in wishing for things that are impossible or trying to get people to do something they don’t want to do. What, was I going to steal my Amanda back from my Mason? Forget it. Couldn’t be done. So my options were, be angry at a friend who meant me no harm, or not be angry with him. Life’s too short to waste it being angry at your friends, so the choice was obvious.

The 19th episode of the soap goes on the site today, and it’s actually the first one that isn’t loosely based on my life. My Mason and Amanda actually aren’t seeing each other anymore, and if I wanted to keep basing the soap on their lives, I’d need another male cast member. But that’s another story.

It’s no big secret that rhymes help people remember things. Kids can learn using nursery rhymes, so why not ESL students too? Perhaps that’s what EnglishToday had in mind when they set out to produce a series of video limericks to help you learn English.

It’s a valiant attempt, but rhyming is harder than you think. Sure you’ve got “right, tight; lefty loosie” useful mnemonic devises, but rhymes aren’t usually that convenient. You commonly have to compromise meaning or word choice pretty heavily in order to get the job done.

This limerick about Maggie the Millipede is one of the best ones. I had to double check if it was already an existing limerick, but I think it’s original.

Some of the limerick videos are just this very, very British man talking into the camera in funny hats, which is pretty endearing. They did a good job of structuring these for YouTube. The meat of the video (the limerick), is at the beginning and there’s a bunch of silly stuff afterward in case you want to keep watching.

The only problem here is that the limerick is almost a tongue twister and is actually pretty tough to follow (Is “nobbled” a common word in the UK? I had to look it up. Spell check doesn’t even recognize it as a word.). This one about a three legged cat is pretty tough as far as English vocab goes as well. But the extras after the limerick are hilarious. I burst out laughing when clip art started landing on the cat’s back near the end.

How do you measure a students’ learning? and is that the same measure of their success? At the community college where I teach, the students are given three exams to determine their language ability. A reading test, a writing test, and a grammar test. My students have improved immensely over the last three months, in all four facets of the language: reading, writing, listening and speaking. But my boss told me that the students were not going to pass. It happens quite frequently that half the class fails; it simply isn’t always possible to improve that much in one term. I wonder how that affects students in our program. How does that make them feel? I think, It leaves them feeling unsuccessful. When we know they have not only worked hard, but have been very successful. It feels wrong to fail them because of the test scores. So I am left asking myself, why do we test them on so much material? Why do we test them on more than they can learn in a term?

The answer might just be: Because its easy. Because the tests are already made. Because tests don’t really matter. I find myself leaning towards the third answer. I hope that our program is not changing the tests because they feel the tests don’t matter. Personally, I think that the test scores aren’t very meaningful because they do not look at all aspects of language growth. They do not evaluate listing and speaking skills. At the same time, the people that my students interact with (there bosses, for example) are most likely judging their language ability on their speaking and listening skills.

So I wonder, what makes a good test? Is it an easy to grade multiple choice test? Or is it something more rooted in the students’ whole language ability?

I feel very strongly that learning should be much more bottom-up than top-down. Now that information is so widely available and easily shared, students should be empowered to make more choices about what they want to learn and how they want to learn it, including from each other.

Steve Hargadon had an interesting blog post earlier this month about Web 2.0 and how it’s the future of education. He makes some great points and here are clips from some of my favorite:

“Trend #4: The New Pro-sumers. The word “pro-sumer” is a combination of the words “producer” and “consumer.” More and more companies are engaging their customers in the creation of the product they sell them. The nature not just of how knowledge is acquired, but how it is produced, is changing”

Absolutely agree here. Who is better at describing what they need from a product than the consumer? What we’re seeing now with technology is one step further. The consumers are not only providing input, but they’re often creating the product. Check out this vocabulary game our members started on their own. It’s such a simple concept but it works so well and is one of the most popular threads on our site.

“Trend #7: The World Gets Even Flatter and Faster. Yes, and even if that “flat” world is “spiky” or “wrinkled,” it’s still getting pretty darn flat. That anyone, anywhere in the world, can study using over the material from over 1800 open courses at MIT is astounding, and it’s only the start.”

Right on. That someone in Zimbabwe can easily ask for English advice and become friends with someone in China is absolutely amazing.

“Trend #8: Social Learning Moves Toward Center Stage. …JSB discusses a study that showed that one of the strongest determinants of success in higher education is the ability to form or participate in study groups. In the video of his lecture he makes the point that study groups using electronic methods have almost the exact same results as physical study groups. The conclusion is somewhat stunning–electronic collaborative study technologies = success?”

The best teachers I had in school were the ones who naturally led us to learn from and share information with each other. The teachers I learned the least from were those who pushed information down to us and asked for regurgitation at test time. Students want to actively learn. Just take a look at one of our recent lessons where we brought up the topic of taking time off before college. We produced one page on the subject, then our members created 9 more.

Technology has been influencing education for years. But now it’s doing so at a faster pace than ever seen before, mostly because students are finally getting a voice.

So last week on the soap opera, Mason and Amanda finally got together. We spent three months dragging out the idea that she liked him and he wouldn’t notice her. But apparently that just wasn’t long enough for one incredibly patient Chinese member.

Of course there were many comments saying “Oh! How romantic!” and stuff like that. But you know what? I have to agree with this wise opinion instead.

May I only pray that all the real life Amanda’s of my life and men like me find this blog. But if they don’t, a couple of comments on a lesson about spooning reminds us that we always have one special lady in our lives…

Well, I’m not quite there yet. Apparently I have a couple of other options from fans I won with the wedding video.

That last one is particularly encouraging since I just found out that I am, in fact, going to China. More details about that later. But I’m already planning how I’ll impress the ladies there. I’ll amaze them with my powers to make the mundane interesting. A couple of minds seem completely blown by my lesson on losing your phone.

Well, that about wraps it up for this edition of best comments, so I leave you with the will-you-be-my-friend comment of the week. This one is sort of an Ebaby! inside joke which will be especially funny to regular users.

If you don’t fill out your profile, your name is a black non-link on the site. A lot of these non-links don’t realize they are non-links who can’t be messaged and go around asking for people add them. This one apparently missed an opportunity by just a few minutes…

Like two trains passing in the night…

Now, I have seen some funny translations in my travels. “Homos” for “hummus” and the like, but this takes the cake. This is just one of many groups of incredibly bizarre “vocabulary” words from a set of Chinese English learning blocks featured in this hilarious blog post.

It’s worth checking out just for the laughs, but it also raises a good point. As English becomes the global language, how will it change? The author of the post cleverly notes that as China’s 1.3 billion people learn English, it may become the case at some point that what they say goes since they’re the majority of the speakers. Chainsaw? Sorry, Yank, that’s a reactance.

According to this recent story from Indian news outlet NDTV, there are already more English speakers in India than in the US. Soon the tables will be turned and English slang will come from Asia instead of the US and I’ll be the one trying to keep up by reading ESL websites!

Writing can be hard, even for me a native English speaker and ESL teacher. But once ESL students become comfortable with writing in English, it is important to introduce some common structures in English writing.

Traditionally in English, an essay states the main idea in the first paragraph and each paragraph that follows supports the main idea. While this rigid structure is not always followed, students should understand that normally they should structure their writing in that manner.

ESL teachers, especially native English speakers, may not consider teaching essay organization, but some cultures value other essay structures. There is a great video clip about a nonnative English speaker, Pablo Zapata, and his problems with the very direct manner of English essay writing.

Some students may have a hard time transitioning to this style of writing, but once their language is intelligible, it is a necessity. English readers have certain expectations about how writing should be organized, especially in academics. As teacher, we should give our students the skills to meet readers’ expectations.

There is no shortage of stories out there about “the dangers” of social networks and how they’re banned in various workplaces and countries. So it’s really nice to see a story in the mighty New York Times about one worthwhile use for social networks that we here at English, baby! know a lot about: language education.  

The story focuses on a couple of sites that specialize in bringing foreign languages to Americans who want to learn them. It also focuses on the innovative technologies these sites have developed. 

But to me, what’s most exciting about the combination of language education and social networking is the fostering of a global community. Even though with 650,000 members, Ebaby! is huge, it feels like a group of friends. I’ve gotten to know a lot of the most active users through seeing them commenting on the lessons every day. The light-hearted and current topics make for fun dialog that’s hard to get on a hardcore language-learning site.

I mean, I don’t think any other social network or language eduction site would attend the wedding of two of its members or host a game show for a half dozen others.

But the best part of Ebaby!’s community is the massive cultural exchange that’s enabled by people from all over the world learning a language together. Since Americans are lucky enough to have our native tongue as the global language, it’s great that there are opportunities online to learn a foreign language and become a better ambassador. But for a lot of people, English is what enables them to make friends outside of their home country and social networks are where they come to do so.

And since the vast majority of our members are not in the United States, the discussion of language learning and social networking is only beginning in the US. So once again, huzzah to Anne Eisenberg and the New York Times for bringing the discussion to the front line of American media.