I wrote this as a response to a journalist’s query for things travelers are thankful for. It wasn’t used in the article, so I thought I’d share it here. I really meant it! I am thankful for English. It bums me out how many people there are in the world who I’m separated from by a language barrier, and luckily, that number is dropping. OK, here’s what I wrote.

When it comes to travel, this year I give thanks for English. I’m bilingual (Spanish) and all for learning languages, but there’s no way to learn all of them. The emergence of English as a global language is invaluable to global travelers.

My company sent a team to make videos and do guerrilla marketing at the Olympics in Beijing. We were amazed how easy it was to find English-speaking Chinese people to be in our videos. Here’s a montage of all the people we interviewed.

Earlier in the year, I went to Istanbul to attend the wedding of a Turkish man and Ukrainian woman who met on our website, englishbaby.com. I actually made great friends with the groom. He and his wife’s story is really inspirational, and, honestly, I feel like it helped me manifest love in the months after the trip. Of course, none of this would have been possible without English. Here’s the video I made of their wedding.

Basically, I’m glad that I can talk to more people around the world than ever before.

At my house, we begin every Thanksgiving meal the same way. Everyone at the table has to say one thing that they are thankful for. It usually goes something like this:

“I am thankful for the food.”

“I am thankful for being alive.”

“I am thankful for having wonderful family.”

“I am thankful for work.”

And on it goes. It takes a while to go around the Thanksgiving table. We usually have fifteen people for dinner and each person must say something unique.

But I realized I could do something like this in my ESL class to teach Gerund as well as the real meaning of Thanksgiving. (Believe it or not Thanksgiving isn’t all about food.) Gerunds look like verbs, for example being, but they act like nouns. So in our “I am thankful for…” examples we have two gerunds. We can see from the examples that gerunds are in the same place as nouns and that they really do act like nouns.

So you might want to use the “I am thankful for…” as an introduction or as practice in your next gerund lesson.  Students could even use this as a writing prompt. It will bring in a little bit of culture and a little bit of fun to a traditionally boring grammar topic.

More on gerunds here: Gerund Summary with lots of quizzes, Printable Gerund Board Game, and more Gerund Quizzes

This thursday is Thanksgiving Day in the United States, a holiday on which people get together with family and friends for a big meal and give thanks for all the good things in their lives.

Lots of cultures have a similar holiday. The generally accepted story behind ours is that a small group of Europeans known as the pilgrims came to North America in 1621 and almost starved during their first winter. They were helped by the local Indian population. So, when the harvest was good the following year, they had a big feast with the Indians to celebrate both the good harvest and their survival of the previous winter.

In October, we taped a lesson on Thanksgiving, but when I went to edit it and put it on English, baby!, I discovered it probably wouldn’t make for a very good lesson. We taped it near the end of the day and we gotten really silly by then. When Devan asked Beren to explain the story of Thanksgiving, she told a whole bunch of lies!

Take a listen to the audio if you want to hear something funny. Everyone burst out laughing after the recorder had stopped. Beren says that the pilgrims arrived in 1892 and were asked to pardon a turkey by the local Indians, which is why the president pardons a turkey every year. Then the pilgrims died, so the holiday is to remember the pilgrims. Pretty funny stuff, but too confusing for an ESL lesson. If you want to know more about the real Thanksgiving story, click here.

Anyway, I thought Beren’s  improv skills were pretty good there. I’m not sure if I could come up with an alternate Thanksgiving story on the spot like that!

A lot of people around the world have a lot of expectations for Barack Obama. We even started a page to share these hopes. But one thing the world’s English-learning population may not expect to get from Obama’s presidency but almost certainly will is improvements in their grammar.

When I was choosing which candidate to vote for, one of the things I asked myself was, “Who would I rather hear on the radio every day for the next four years?” And while the American president is certianly covered less-often in foreign media, there are still plenty of quotes and soundbites to be found around the world, I’m sure.

But this hilarious satire column by Andy Borowitz got me thinking about how confusing the last eight must have been for people who are learning English. How many ESL students are out there mispronouning “nuclear” courtesy of George W. Bush?

And when, as a native speaker, I sometimes struggle to follow Sarah Palin’s sentence structure, I can’t help but wonder how many more gerunds would have been misused if she and John McCain had won (see the Palin quote at the end of Borowitz’s article for pretty realistic represtation of the Alaska Governor’s passion for misplaced -ings).

So, the world wanted Barack Obama to win the election by about a 60% percent margin. And even if you with the one-fifth of the world who liked John McCain better, you will likely Obama in part to thank when that Moroccan rug salesman haggles with you in complete sentences, or the business call from India is perfectly intelligible.

Do you teach your students language learning strategies? Well, I do. I have started integrating a few strategies into each lesson. I feel like I am empowering students by teaching them how to learn. If you don’t know much about language learning strategies a good place to start would be with Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning. It is a simple questionnaire that assesses how many and which strategies you use.

Even as a teacher, I found my results on the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) to be very helpful. I discovered that I use surprisingly few strategies for managing my emotions. Looking back on my language learning experiences, my emotions were often debilitating in the classroom because I wasn’t using strategies to manage them. So on a person level, I wish someone would have taught me about language learning strategies.

After teaching some strategies,  I can tell you that students really like it. They love to know the different ways they can learn. The SILL offers a bunch of different ways to remember things. You can demonstrate these in the classroom and have students use them.

The most important thing with strategy instruction is reflection. Because some strategies don’t work for everyone, have your students reflect on what they do now and on what new strategies work well for them. Read more ideas about teaching language learning strategies here. I think, it can be very powerful instruction. So give it a try and leave me a comment about how it went.

Below is the full text from the interview I did with Hutch Harris from the Thermals for Monday’s English lesson. It was the second time I’ve interviewed a band for an English lesson, and this time, there wasn’t a specific topic for vocab (like drinking last time). So I did my best to reach the perspective on American culture and vocab terms that Hutch could offer and I think it went pretty well.

But first, the Thermals’ tour dates.

12.04.08 Chop Suey Seattle, WA
12.05.08 Doug Fir Portland, OR 21
12.06.08 Doug Fir Portland, OR All Ages, early show
12.12.08 Primavera Club, Barcelona, ES
12.13.08 Primavera Club, Madrid, ES
12.14.08 KCLSU, London, UK
12.17.08 Ekko, Utrecht, NL
12.18.08 Vera, Gronigen, NL

Jason: Since your last album [The Body, the Blood, the Machine] was, in some ways, a comment on American politics and society, I just wanted to ask you about how you feel about Obama’s victory and if it’s affected your world view.

Hutch: Dude, I’m stoked. I’m so stoked. I was scared until the last minute, really. I didn’t even have a drink. I wasn’t going to get drunk at some Obama party and have it turned around and have McCain steal it or something. As soon as he took Ohio though, it really seemed like was gonna happen.

So yeah, it totally changes my world view because choosing Obama wasn’t choosing the lesser of two evils. It wasn’t like if we would have gotten John Kerry. And it would be quite different if we had McCain and Palin going in there right now. Everyone knows that. Not just did we get a great president, we also dodged a bullet with those other two. And the whole world was rooting for Obama. So obviously the world is going to be very different and it looks to be positive.

Jason: How do you think it affects the Christian/fascist state that you were imagining on your last album?

Hutch: The most disgusting thing right now are people who think that Obama is the antichrist. I mean this is serious. I hate even talking about it because it’s almost like we shouldn’t give these people any credibility at all. I don’t know. What’s wrong with people? Obama is a good Christian. People, I think are confused as to what the president actually does and what he has the power to do. Yeah, I don’t know what to say about the nuts. I try to think about that less. I turned myself off on thinking about religion and being wrapped up in it after that last record. But obviously you can’t. I just try not to obsess about it and let it get me down like it used to.

Jason: Totally. For a lot of our members, I’m guessing that “punk” and “garage rock” are going to be relatively new terms. So your first couple of albums were described as low-fi and more recently there’s been a lot of talk of the Thermals pop sensibilities and I wondered how your sound has evolved and what we can expect on the next record.

Hutch: It’s just what you said. It’s pop sensibilities for sure. I think as pop songs, these songs are written the best of all our songs. I think the structures are really solid. They’re really catchy. I’m really proud of the lyrics because again I feel like the lyrics have some gravity to them, but at the same time, they work really well on the surface, if you’re just thinking about it as a pop song or something you can sing along too. There is another layer without being too pretentious about it.

Jason: Do you think “lo-fi” was a term that applied to you at a point in time?

Hutch: We called it “no-fi” for the first record because the first record, you know, was just on cassette. “Lo-fi” would have been an over statement for that record. But we’ve been going through a natural progression since then where we don’t take huge leaps in fidelity, but we try to make each record sound better than the last one. For us to just put out records on a four-track cassette would just be ridiculous.

Jason: So you do a lot of touring internationally, and I wonder, what’s your favorite country to play in?

Hutch: I kind of think it’s got to be Germany. Even before we were getting successful here and in the UK and other countries, Germany and the Netherlands jumped on it right away and we had some of the most exciting shows in Germany. If we’re talking about all countries, it has to be the US. The best shows of our lives have been mostly in the US, either in Portland or Seattle or New York. But we have fun shows everywhere. It’s hard to pick one. We love touring Europe. Touring Europe is a lot more fun than touring the US. You’re treated much better. Hospitality…no matter what your level, you’re just cared for a lot more. And a lot of times it’s easier because the countries are so much smaller, the drives are a lot shorter. I mean in the west [of the US], driving like 9 hours a day with a show every day? That’s crazy.  We just did only UK shows for two weeks. It was beautiful, it was like two hour drives every day. But touring the UK is much more like touring the US. I’m talking about mainland Europe when I’m talking about them feeding you and putting you up, etc.

Jason: Have you picked up any German from your shows there?

Hutch: I know a little bit. I know some short words. It’s a really intense language. I was actually to a German band one time…Because most German bands we play with, they’re all singing in English. And of course they speak English. Their English is better than ours. It’s more grammatically correct. They say “months” instead of “munts.” They say “second” instead of “sekind.” But anyway, I was talking a German man and he was saying that the English language, the thing is you have so many more words to choose from than in German that you can be way more expressive.

Jason: And then the last thing I wanted to ask you, since I think it will be a new word for a lot of our members, is what are thermals and how did you pick that as your band name?

Hutch: The real definition of a thermal is hot air. Like if you’re hang gliding…or birds, will ride a thermal. That’s not why we picked it. But it’s associated with heat, so you say thermal underwear or long Johns. Which to me, that style, people wearing their thermals to rock shows, that’s a really Northwest thing. And we were totally into flannel when Nirvana was big. You’d have black cut off shorts and wear your thermals underneath with boots or whatever. That wasn’t me. I’m thinking more of girls, actually, but it was something I always thought was really cute. So we’re named after underwear. But it works to say that it’s just a lot of hot air.

One of the beauties of teaching adults English is that they are more than students. ESOL students are wives, fathers, business professionals, and hospital workers. So unlike their youthful counterparts, adult ESOL learners need to learn English for a variety of contexts, including work. I vividly experienced an ESOL learners’ work context this week: the hospital.

What I thought was a little stomach ache turned out to be appendicitis.  Suddenly, I was being rushed into an operating room and having my appendix removed. Before I got cut open, I learned a little bit about how hospitals work and about the profession of hospital transportation. Most of the hospital transportation people that I met were intermediate English language learners. They graciously pushed me around the hospital. Literally. There job, as far as I could tell, was to push people’s beds from one location to another.

I was so delighted by their conversation skills and medical knowledge. They were so comforting: “Don’t worry the CT scan won’t hurt.”  And so polite: “May I take that cup from you?” The ESOL Hospital Transportation staff were so well versed in how to take care of a patient and the English vocabulary you need to do so.

And it got me thinking about their language acquisition. How had they learned the medical terminology? Was it on the job training? An English class? If it was a general ESL class that helped them, I bet they really paid attention to the polite forms of speech. As a teacher, I know, I don’t really pay that much attention to my students’ work life. But I am going to start bringing in readings from occupational contexts and making a point to link class learning objectives to work. All of my students work, so it seems stupid that I wasn’t integrating their work life into class. In most cases, to be successful at work they are going to need specific English skills. I want to help give them that knowledge so that they can become the knowledgable, polite, professional, and friendly English language learners that helped me at the hospital.

I just finished putting up a lesson about the election results. Since the cast only meets once a month to record our improvised English lesson dialogs, it had to be taped in advance, and since we didn’t know how the election was going to go, we taped a few versions (although interestingly enough, the English vocab for each was roughly the same).

The first one we did was if McCain won the election. Mason and Marni did a great job of pretending–so great in fact that they kind of scared themselves. “That was really eerie,” Marni said afterward. Keep in mind, these are unedited sound files, and not up the usual Ebaby! standard of quality.

Then we did the one we wound up using, the version for an Obama victory. The acting was really good on this one too. Although it was taped in advance, I think it really captured the mood of the day after the election. People were shooting off fireworks and honking their car horns well into the night in Portland.

After we made the first two lessons, we realized there was a third possibility. Everyone remembers 2000, when the election was a toss-up for a full month. So we recorded another version to be used in the event of another such quagmire. Notice how Marni just randomly decides that it’s Ohio that’s delaying the results. I guess I would have had to edit that out if it were New Mexico.

Thank goodness I knew exactly which sound file I’d be editing today! The thought of going through another month of indecision made me weary.