Random Quote
"It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.'"
---- Sam Levenson
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
---- Pablo Picasso
To have another language is to possess a second soul.
---- Charlemagne
Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.”
---- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749 -1832)
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
---- Evan Esar
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
---- Robert Frost
As soon as I buy the moose head, I have to go pick up some KY jelly.
---- Mary Roninette Kowal
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
---- Thomas A. Edison
I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.
---- Albert Einstein
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of whom are absent.
---- Robert Copeland
Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
---- Edward R. Murrow
We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
---- Thomas A. Edison
The least of learning is done in the classrooms
---- Thomas Merton
Technology will not replace teachers...teachers who use technology will
probably replace teachers who do not.
---- Ray Clifford
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
---- Leonardo DaVinci (1452-1519)
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
---- M. Cartmill
If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.
---- Doug Larson
It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
---- Arnold Toynbee
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
---- George Orwell
This may be the most interesting blog theme I've ever seen. http://eflgeek.com/index.php Definitely in my top 5 at least.
---- Steve Dembo
Don't knock the weather. If it didn't change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn't start a conversation.
---- Kin Hubbard
Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs.
---- Jack Lynch
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
---- H. G. Wells
it's probably not a good idea to underestimate my ability to make an ass out of myself—just when I seem to have it under control, I'll turn around and surprise you.
---- Tenser said the Tensor
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
---- Gail Godwin
Success in EFL Writing
Gord Sellar has a long peice up about recent success he has had in an academic writing class he teaches. It’s a good read so head over there, read it and leave him a comment.
Gord also offers a solid peice of advice as well as the source he got it from for getting to students to understand why we cite and how it enhances writing.
As usual when I point readers to Gords site, I need to point out that Gord doesn’t often write about teaching, but when he does it’s well worth reading so you should subscribe to his site (I don’t post about his posts every time after all) or you’ll be missing out on some gems.
Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Saturday Dec 27, 2008 at 05:36 PM
Learning_Strategies | teaching_application |
gordsellar wrote 116 words on Wednesday Jan 21, 2009 at 04:37 PM
Thanks for the props, man. Yeah, I don’t write much about EFL. I might have some things to say about curriculum design and coordination, as I’m involved with some of that right now at work. Starting at first principles, basically, and trying to figure out what skills and expectations are held for each course in a progressive series of courses in our writing program. Which is absolutely necessary, else every class (beginner, intermediate, and advanced) becomes Essay Writing 101 as you fill the gaps for people who skipped previous levels… so they can backtrack and take it later on in the program.)
We’re hoping to stamp some of that out. Here’s to fighting the good fight!
David V. wrote 90 words on Thursday Jan 22, 2009 at 04:30 PM
Very interesting article Gord, thanks.
The biggest breakthrough we made where I work was actually asking faculties what they got the students to write, in terms of genre. Would you be surprised to learn that at no point were they ever asked to write the classic ‘intro / 2/3 main body paragraph / conclusion’ type essay? The key to any writing course must be to prepare the student for the kind of writing they’ll be required to do in the future, a factor that too many courses choose to ignore.
Gord Sellar wrote 183 words on Thursday Jan 22, 2009 at 10:56 PM
Yeah, diversifying the choices in terms of composition courses is something we’re doing slowly here too. This semester, “Journalistic Writing” (ie. writing articles in a non-academic style, ie. lots of general writing skills, style, structure, and generating interest, but without the burden of academic writing stuff).
A colleague and I were discussing this and also noted that a lot of students seem to want “Business Writing” skills, ie. resumes, cover letters, business proposals, reports, and presentation copy. (The idea I have for this is an intense working with formats and templates, mastering appropriate language for your field, and so on.)
The secret is there’s tons of skill-overlap between writing courses, but each course can especially strongly focus on a different region of the general skill set, in addition to teaching some unique skills to each area.
That said, I’m leery about expanding the number of comp courses in the department, because more than one per semester is murder on one’s prep time, and I don’t want to have to teach the extras. (Plus I know relatively less about business writing than other forms.)
David V. wrote 117 words on Monday Jan 26, 2009 at 08:52 PM
In the case of my institution, we discovered that a lot of the questions students were writing in faculty were of the ‘Describe what happened in / the properties of X in 80 to 100 words’ type, which require significantly different skills to the standard essay, the most important being to get to the bloody point.
Such a question requires an answer using the ‘CCC pattern’, namely ‘an X is a type of Y which is commonly characterised by features A, B and C. It’s amazing how many students will try to answer such a question by writing an 70-word introduction and then trying to answer the actual question in one sentence. So much for transferrable skills!