SITE DEDICATED TO LANGUAGE LEARNING PROBLEMS

written by Anthony Bamber mail@middlesmoor.com bamber@languagelearningproblems.net

The photos on each sections' "homepage" are of Middlesmoor, Yorkshire where children come for our summer courses. www.middlesmoor.com The paintings at the beginning of each section are by Anthony Bamber

THE FOLLOWING ARE THE 8 CHAPTER DIVISIONS OF THIS WEBSITE

01.1 CV AND EXPERIENCES 01.2 Anthony's Teacher training CV 01.3 Valentina's CV and Teacher training

02.1 COMMON EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK Background 02.2 Talk on Framework at British Council 2003 teacher conference. Arcireale 02.3 Quotations and extracts from Framework considered

03.1 EUROPEAN PORTFOLIO OF LANGUAGES. Background 03.2 Talk on Portfolio at British Council 2004 conference. Venice 03.3 "Can't we work with Portfolio" answered? 03.4 Critique of a set of Portfolio boxes

04.1 A RADICAL ALTERNATIVE 04.2 A new systemising of teaching material 04.3 Grammar, bad and good 04.4 Description of our "Make Grammar Talk" for "superiore" 04.5 Brief principles in language teaching 04.6 Some examples of grammar "plays" for acting 04.7 Some examples of "Grammared" newspaper articles 04.8 Some examples of my "Express grammar" 04.9 What is CLIL (Content Language Integrated Learning: ie.Vehicular English in subject teaching)

05.1 25 YEARS OF SUMMER COURSES AT MIDDLESMOOR 05.2 Comments of children who have been to Middlesmoor

06.1 OUR COURSES IN ITALIAN SCHOOLS. Introduction 06.2 Program for our visits to schools in 2002-04 (in italiano) 06.3 Proposal for a more ambitious program of visits (in italiano) 06.4 Comments from 18 year olds in a "superiore" in Bolzano 06.5 Comments from a "media" in Capriolo in Bresica 06.6 Comments from a "media" in Lumezzane in Brescia 06.7 Comments from a "medis" in Taio in Trentino 06.8 Comments from teachers who have seen our work 06.9 25 page diary of visits to 5 schools 06.10 Problems of teaching English in "superiore" 06.11 Problems of teaching English in "media" 06.12 Problems of teaching English in "elementare"

07.1 SCHEME: TEENAGE THINKING introduction 07.2 Plan of the 30 categories for teenage thinking project

08.1 MY RESOURCE BOOK THE TEACHERS' KALEIDOSCOPE 08.2 My request for financial support to make a website for teachers

photos of Yorkshire related website www.middlesmoor.com ( for foreign children summer courses and adult courses at other times of year). Also much more teaching material on middlesmoor.com

BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO THE SITE

I have taught for 35 years. We have run a very small summer language school (in our house) for 25 years and taught extensively in Italian schools. What I have to say on this site is what I feel is almost a duty to express. I could just forget about the larger teaching context in which I am so small a voice. I raise my voice out of sympathy for both the students and the teachers.

The site is dedicated to language learning problems. I think that a very useful introduction would be to take the following paper given by Wilfried Decoo as a reminder of just how many false dawns (and even repeated false dawns!) there have been in language learning. "On the mortality of language learning methods", given as the James L. Barker lecture on November 8 th 2001 at Brigham Young University byWilfried Decoo: to read the whole paper. The original of the Decoo paper can also be found on www.didascalia.be where people can also find another interesting article on "The Induction-Deduction Opposition", in which he clarifies and relativizes some other traditional concepts.

The whole "Mortality" paper, which rewiews the history of methods, should be a lesson in humility: no one has yet discovered THE valid method, though many have announced it.

There was one passage in the Decoo paper which struck me particularly and which I think well introduces my website and gives some explanation for why my approach falls outside the norm presumed by Portfolio and most text books.

this is the extract from Decoo "Some post-communicative methods like to oppose "lower-order thinking", which they equate to rote memorization, to "higher-order" skills. The former are to be avoided, the latter are the core objective. Recent experimental research by Hulstijn and his team at the Kohnstamm Institute (University of Amsterdam ) indicates that higher-order skills cannot function properly in the foreign language without well developed levels of lower-order automatization (Hulstijn 1999).

This I take as an encouragement to my own purely private findings which have arisen out of steady trial and eror and from which the material on this website derives.

One of the reasons for making this website is to oppose the kind of "solution" promised for language learning by The "EUROPEAN PORTFOLIO OF LANGAUGES". It is a typically bureaucratic, paper-heavy "solution" for poor learning and it in no way remedies the situation. This is logical upon the fact that it is itself significantly representative of what is wrong. I also dislike its hocus pocus of "empowering" the student to navuigate "his own learning" in the Portfolio maze.

No one should criticise, as I do without also offering alternatives (see 04) that can be in their turn questioned. It is this very questioning that I think has been excluded by this great dinosauer of Portfolio. Portfolio is in fact a continuation, despite all the brohaha, of precisely that which has not worked in the last 20 plus years; (natural language "acquisition" in class), yet its propogaters regard it as a solution! Strange world.

The Portfolio grew out of the previous committee work from Brussels: the "Common European Framework". This in turn had grown from the perceived need to "rationalise" pan European systems of testing and to codify what is central to langauge use. The portfolio carries the signs of this birth line.

The question that remains differently answered by practioners is: "Is it an open to all methods or is Portfolio the indicator for an improved didactics"? In my opinion the Portfolio is at best only the draft of a possible phrase book. Like all the conventional ideas about teaching of the last 20 odd years, it follows the fallacy that students can ACQUIRE a language in classroom. Even if that were possible, there remains another defect: Portfolio offers a very boring content for teachiong. eg DAILY ROUTINES. What do you do in the morning. I brush my teeth, eat my breakfast and other such fun material.

Though the Portfolio in itself is just a harmless though mad categorisation, its danger is that as a pan-European busy body, gorged on funds extracted on the grounds of what it PROMISES, it muddies the waters terribly.

You could say the web site is dedicated to a defence of what Decoo calls "lower order skills" that have been neglected by delusionary concentration on "higher order skills" which have failed to stick.

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