Learning to speak ‘merican

Many thanks to the kind folks from around the world who responded to my Facebook plea and who now star in this video. It was lots of fun to work with you and make.

I’ve been wondering how animations might help students with grammar. If English teachers could have a penny for every time we’ve been asked ‘How you say…?’ or ‘What means…?” we’d all be very rich, so this video seemed to provide a good opportunity to experiment, and highlight some useful words and phrases for talking about language too like stress, syllable, abbreviation etc. So there are two short videos here – one on how to say cheers in 10 different languages and a second one with some grammar animations. All thoughts and suggestions grateful received.

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A young TEFL teacher goes to South Korea for a year, comes home and writes a novel about it that’s funny, sad, and full of great characters.

Here’s an 3 minute interview with the author – Jonathan Last.

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I’ve mentioned before that something that used to surprise me is that when that an American sees a random person walking along the street, they’re quite likely to ask, ‘How are you doing?’ This is someone they don’t know and who they’re unlikely to meet again. Aside from the intrusiveness of the question, do they really want to know?

Foreign visitors are often surprised by American friendliness too. ‘Is it fake?’ they ask. I don’t think so. I think it’s rather like a Tagalog speaker who greets people with ‘Where are you going?’ expecting the answer ‘Over there’; or a Taiwanese speaker who greets you with ‘Have you eaten yet?’, when they have no intention of inviting you for a meal; In China, a greeting might go ‘Old Zhang, are you busy today?’ Rather than ‘Less of the old, please’ the standard response is ‘Very busy’ or ‘Not very busy’. What we’re looking at here are rituals, procedures we all follow without thinking about them.

The ritual for greeting a passer-by is different in the UK. As a rule, we don’t. It’s not that we want to be unsociable but they might be engaged in their own thoughts and we wouldn’t want to intrude. Should something embarrassing happen, like our eyes accidentally meeting, a brief nod or ‘Morning’ enables us both to swiftly pass on.

The British non-intrusion approach and also operates when we’re at an event like a party, even though everyone knows the purpose for being there is to socialize. After fortifying ourselves with a couple of glasses of wine, we might signal our willingness to talk by passing a comment on the weather, or food or something happening in the room at the time. But we haven’t yet mastered the art of going up to strangers, sticking out our hand and saying, ‘Hi I’m Vicki from Pennsylvania.’ I was astonished with the aplomb with which Americans handled it when I came here.

Another similar post on farewells: http://www.vickihollett.com/?p=1406

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Many thanks to all the kind and patient folks who came to my online session at the Virtual Round Table conference yesterday. Technology was not kind, and the video clips I wanted to show couldn’t be played.
So instead I have created a youtube playlist of sample videos for EFL and ESL teachers. http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5D8F4ED9AEE2C590&feature=plcp

While there, please click the subscribe button for my youtube channel to get notified of new videos as I post them. There are lots in the pipeline.

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Well fancy who we met at the Rocky statue this morning. For a moment I thought it was Sylvester Stallone himself, but it turned out to be his look alike.

What a salesman!

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If you visit Philadelphia (as many English teachers did last week for the TESOL conference), a ‘must do’ activity is to run up the 72 stone steps in front of the Art Museum.

Why?

Well, it’s a sort of ritual re-enactment of a classic scene from a ‘Rocky’ movie. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s about a downbeat boxer (Sylvester Stallone) who’s run to seed and given up on life. He decides to get back in the swing and get fit, so near the start we see him huffing and puffing when he tries to run up the steps. As he gets fitter, so it becomes easier.

It turned out to be a doddle for my friend and fellow Business English teacher, Evan Frendo too. Bravo Evan! You can see him in action here:

Some other stuff about the Rocky statue and steps:

• You get a terrific view of the Bejamin Franklin Parkway and City Hall from the top of the steps – definitely worth the climb.
• We’ve found the Art Museum steps are great place to make vox pop movies because people from all over the world come there, and they’re generally in a good mood and have time to talk to us.
• The statue of Rocky is a big tourist attraction but its location has been a source of controversy. It was a prop in the movie Rocky III in which it was positioned at the top of the steps. Stallone donated to the city after the movie and some say he expected them to leave it where it was. But it was immediatly moved to the sports stadiums in the south of the city by the Philadelphia Art Commission, which didn’t consider it art. However this wasn’t good for tourism. After twenty years of wrangling, a compromise was reached and it’s now positioned at street level, to the right of the Art Museum steps.
• There have been lots of parodies of the movie scene in ads and TV shows like the Simpsons.
• The movie was made at a time when they’d just invented steadi-cams – cameras that you could carry and still keep shots relatively steady and smooth.  Just as well with 72 steps, eh? The camera was invented by a Philadelphian cameraman called Garrett Brown.
• Syllvester Stallone plays an Italian American from South Philly in the movie so he greets people with ‘yo’ and uses the plural  form of ‘you’ -’yous’. Many Philadelphians looks on him as one of their own, but actually he’s a New Yorker.

You can see the original movie scene with Rocky running up the Art Museums steps here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NubH5BDOaD8

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Oh it’s nice to sleep in my own bed again! I’m catching up on emails and stuff and hope to get back to blogging soon but in the meantime, here’s a link to a pecha kucha I gave at IATEFL in Glasgow on ‘Learning to speak ‘merican.’ http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2012/sessions/2012-03-22/pecha-kucha-part-1

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I’m about to hit the road and I’m looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones in London, Munich, Stuttgart, Berlin, Prague, Bratislava, Edinburgh – and then hopefully from all over the world at the IATEFL conference in Glasgow.

The 2012 Glasgow IATEFL Conference takes place between 19th and 23rd March 2012 and “Glasgow Online” has already started at: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2012. I’ll be doing a BESIG preconference event with Mark Powell, Chia Suan Chong, and Almut Koester, taking part in a panel discussion on 21^st Century Skills and also (a first for me) an pecha kucha <gulp>.

Coming home will be exciting too. The American TESOL conference will be starting in Philadelphia, in my home town, just 10 blocks up the road. There I’m speaking about my favorite topic – learning to speak ’merican! Wehey!

If you spot me anywhere during the next month, I hope you’ll come and say ‘Hi’. Who are you? I’d love to know. I look at the stats for this blog and wonder “Who are these people?” and “Haven’t they got anything better to do?”. But mostly I think “It’d be great to meet you and learn more about you.”

Here’s an early draft of a trailer for Pearson’s 21^st Century Skills Signature event:

English as a lingua franca, teaching | Comments (0)

When I first moved to the US, many things struck me as curious. Amongst them:

• How come are there so many American flags flying from buildings?
• Why is burning a flag a big issue here?
• Why does the word ‘American’ appear so often in advertisements?
• Why do people refer to  ”Japanese Americans”, “African Americans”, “Italian Americans” etc, etc ?
• Why is the national anthem played at the start of many public meetings?
• Why do people put their hands on their hearts when it’s played?

Am I living in a land of wild patriotic fervour, I wondered. A close friend became an American citizen recently and invited us along to her naturalization ceremony. It helped me understand. For most of us, our nationality is an accident of birth. But when you consciously choose your citizenship, it becomes a much more meaningful state of being. A big thank you and many congratulations to Geri!

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Alex Case of the wonderful Tefltastic blog wrote to me a little while ago with some questions about teaching functional language and English as a lingua Franca. Oooooo, two irresistable topics that were bound to get me started. It resulted in a long piece that you can read on his blog here: Me vs Vicki Hollett on ELF

I’ll be taking part in a whole day on the subject of ELF and BELF at a pre-conference event prior to the BESIG conference in Glasgow. (Today is the last day to get the early bird discount for that so sign up now if you can.) Chia Suan Chong and Mark Powell will both be speaking too, and what’s exciting about that is we’ll be trying to move the discussion on from theory to practice, something that has come up in this blog before.

And finally, to refresh your memories on some of the issues, here’s another link to the video about ELF and BELF that I made for a webinar we had last year. Hope to see y’all at IATEFL.

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