Jay Doubleyou

In the early ’90s, a New Zealand man named Neil Fleming decided to sort through something that had puzzled him during his time monitoring classrooms as a school inspector. In the course of watching 9,000 different classes, he noticed that only some teachers were able to reach each and every one of their students. What were they doing differently?
Fleming zeroed in on how it is that people like to be presented information. For example, when asking for directions, do you prefer to be told where to go or to have a map sketched for you?
Today, 16 questions like this comprise the VARK questionnaire that Fleming developed to determine someone’s “learning style.” VARK, which stands for “visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic,” sorts students into those who learn best visually, through aural or heard information, through reading, or through “kinesthetic” experiences.

Are ‘Learning Styles’ Real? - The Atlantic

Many people, including educators, believe learning styles are set at birth and predict both academic and career success even though there is no scientific evidence to support this common myth, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

Belief in learning styles myth may be detrimental

Instead, it's really all about memory strategies and about how they are thinking about the material which is presented - and about multimedia approaches:

The Biggest Myth In Education - YouTube

Friday, 1 October 2021

do the english speak english the best?

The Dutch are 'the best' speakers of English - according to rankings of 'students':

English Speakers in the World – Who Are the Best and Worst Students?

The Dutch are the best non-native English speakers in the world (again!) – DutchReview

In fact, it's now part of life in Holland and many other countries not part of the former British Empire:

English is no longer a foreign language in NL, but it has a unique character here - DutchNews.nl

There is of course 'international English' or English as a Lingua Franca:

Decades of research show that when a native English speaker enters a conversation among nonnative speakers, understanding goes down. Global communication specialist Heather Hansen tells us that's because the native speaker doesn't know how to do what nonnative speakers do naturally: speak in ways that are accessible to everyone, using simple words and phrases.
And yet, as Hansen points out, this more accessible way of speaking is often called "bad English." There are whole industries devoted to "correcting" English that doesn't sound like it came from a native British or American speaker. Try Googling "how to get rid of my accent," and see how many ads pop up.
It turns out that these definitions of "good" and "bad" English may be counterproductive if our goal is to communicate as effectively as possible.

Why Nonnative English Speakers Actually Speak The Best English : Goats and Soda : NPR

And you could also pick up the 'bad English' spoken by 'native speakers':

When we compare standard, correct English to what native speakers usually use in everyday life, there are plenty of discrepancies! Most people in the United States do not speak perfect English; in fact, many common mistakes are actually accepted forms of speech nowadays. Many native American English speakers break grammar rules, they use incorrect sentence structure, and they use vocabulary in what most people would consider the wrong way.

HOW TO SPEAK ENGLISH BETTER THAN MOST NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS 😃 | Go Natural English - YouTube

Finally, a nice little piece from Liz Granirer writing in the latest EL Gazette - with the latest research:

It will come as no surprise to anyone that in Europe, the country that speaks English the best and the most is the United Kingdom, though it’s not the only language here. Immigration has brought many other languages, so that, alongside other local languages such as Welsh and Cornish, 8% of the population speaks a language other than English (though, of course, they may speak English as well).
However, on the continent, the number one spot is taken by Sweden where, according to novinite.com, 91% of the population is fluent in English. The Netherlands is close behind with a whopping 90% of the population who can speak English. Proof of how fluent they are here is that English-language films aren’t shown with subtitles – which may go a long way in explaining why their accent leans towards North America.

Who speaks English best? | E L Gazette

Wednesday, 29 September 2021

bilingual teaching today

You can learn anything through English or any other language:

Content and language integrated learning - Wikipedia

CLIL has come a long way over the last decade:

Jay Doubleyou: clil: content and language integrated learning

If you google 'clil' today, most of the news pieces are in languages other than English:

clil - Google Search

It is of great interest all over the world - and an issue for great debate:

Bilingual Taiwan By 2030 – Doable? Necessary?

Under the push of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), the three hours of English class per week would extend learning English through other subjects, calling into question whether or not students could absorb comprehensive knowledge – of the subject matter being taught – through the language being used.

Bilingual Taiwan By 2030 - Doable? Necessary? - The Taiwan Times

Language experts and teachers in primary and secondary schools discuss the pros and cons of a system that many feel has failed to provide the desired skills

In recent years, an educational trend has gained new traction, one that holds that a pure British accent – the Queen’s English – no longer has to be the one that prevails when teaching, learning or using English to communicate. This trend, known as ELF (English as a lingua franca), favors a more neutral pronunciation where the goal is to get the message across.
“The important thing now is being able to communicate; the purity of the accent is a thing of the past,” holds María Luisa Pérez, a professor of English studies at Jaén University and a leading researcher on this issue.
This line of thinking bears a relationship to the debate on whether the bilingual Spanish-English education model used in some public schools in Spain is really up to par, considering that some regions – which have devolved powers over education – ask teachers for a B2 level, indicating fluency but not proficiency as defined by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL). Other regions require teachers to prove a C1 level, for proficient users of the language.
In recent years, nearly 90 centers have dropped out of the bilingual education system, viewing it as ineffective. But Pérez, just like other experts, warns that many people simply have the wrong idea of what a bilingual model really does. “It’s a mistake to think that children will end up speaking English just like they speak Spanish; the goal is for them to achieve a functional level that will let them communicate and work in the future,” she explains...

Learning English: Defenders of bilingual education in Spain: ‘It’s a mistake to think that students will speak English like they do Spanish’ | Society | EL PAÍS English Edition

More US schools teach in English and Spanish, but not enough to help Latino kids

Classes taught in both languages help students from various backgrounds, but many districts have fought to keep Spanish out of schools.

The programs can be tough to implement. Hurdles include a debate over the best way to teach English learners, public hostility against those who speak a native language other than English, shortages of bilingual teachers and even the fact that dual-language programs often grow fastest in areas where upper-income parents ask for them. That's good for children who participate, but it worries advocates who want to see language-minority students have equal access.

More US schools teach in Spanish, but not enough to help Latinos

A lot of language schools in the UK are offering specialist classes:

Overseas Teachers of English | Sidmouth International School

CLIL Courses for Teachers: Specialized TEFL/TESOL Certification in Content and Language Integrated Learning

Tuesday, 28 September 2021

english as a post-colonial language

This is from a very interesting piece from the latest issue of EL Gazette:

Can we disentangle TEFL from its colonial past?

By Alice Rodgers -28th September 2021

... it was actually during the historical period after colonialism (so-called ‘post-colonialism’, although the idea that there has ever really been a ‘post’ period to colonialism has been hotly contested by scholars and writers alike) that the spread of English as a lingua franca really flourished. Post-colonial theory maintains that this was a time during which empires were looking for methods of conserving the subservience of previously colonised countries (see Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction by Robert JC Young, 2016). As Suhanthie Motha explains in her book Race, Empire, and English Language Teaching (2014), this is what is stamped on the profession that we, as TEFL teachers, occupy today.

This idea that English is a tool for the enlightenment and civilisation of certain uneducated people still persists. A great deal of research has gone into analysing the prevalence of this sort of neo-colonialist thinking within TEFL materials (see Linguistic Colonialism in the English Language Textbooks of Multinational Publishing Houses by Jairo Eduardo Soto-Molina and Pilar Méndez, 2020, for example). It is common to see the reproduction of old colonial notions of Self and Other (a concept developed by Gayatri Spivak in her essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, 2010). We see presented a modern, forward- thinking, educated (English-speaking) society, which is contrasted with a society that is static, conservative and uneducated. One acts as an active transmitter of knowledge and the other a submissive receiver of knowledge. There is little room for interculturality and English is presented as the dominant, most economically useful global language.

Within this we see the glorification of the native speaker who, regardless of educational or professional experience, is appraised as the worthier teacher. This is something that Robert Phillipson famously discussed in his book Linguistic Imperialism (1992). He looked at how ‘native-speaker supremacy’, as well as English- only policies within the classroom and the idea that using other languages in the classroom reduces English standards contributes towards the hegemony of English...

Can we disentangle TEFL from its colonial past? | E L Gazette

With links to the books here:

Amazon.com: Race, Empire, and English Language Teaching: Creating Responsible and Ethical Anti-Racist Practice (Multicultural Education): 9780807755129: Motha, Suhanthie, Banks, James A.: Books

Linguistic Imperialism - Wikipedia

Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford Applied Linguistics): 9780194371469: Business Development Books @ Amazon.com

Linguistic Colonialism in the English Language Textbooks of Multinational Publishing Houses | HOW Journal

Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction | Wiley

Postcol onialism: An Historical Introduction: Young, Robert J. C.: 9781405120944: Amazon.com: Books

Can the Subaltern Speak? | Columbia University Press

Amazon.com: Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea: 9780231143851: Morris, Rosalind: Books

And more here:

Jay Doubleyou: empire 2.0 and the 'imperial nostalgia' driving the british culture war

Jay Doubleyou: what's a 'native speaker' of english? part two

Jay Doubleyou: othering

Jay Doubleyou: challenging white supremacism in australia and new zealand

Jay Doubleyou: "we need to insist on english as our language in this country."

Jay Doubleyou: racial issues

Thursday, 16 September 2021

a critique of psychology

Everyone likes to see 'history' in a certain way:

Jay Doubleyou: rewriting history

THE DATE 1917:

Of course a lot of dates are 'significant', but let's look at 1917:

The Windsor Family:

House of Windsor - Wikipedia

Britain’s King George V changes royal surname - HISTORY

British royal family change their name to Windsor - archive 1917 | Monarchy | The Guardian

Russian Revolution:

Putin Likes to Pretend the Russian Revolution Never Happened - The Atlantic

Putin, wary of political tumult, shuns Russian Revolution centenary | Reuters

Revolution, what revolution? Russians show little interest in 1917 centenary | Russia | The Guardian

Balfour Declaration:

More than a century on: The Balfour Declaration explained | Middle East | Al Jazeera

The contested centenary of Britain’s ‘calamitous promise’ | Israel | The Guardian

Britain's true motivation behind the Balfour Declaration - Opinion - Haaretz.com

Zionism, anti-semitism, and the Balfour Declaration | openDemocracy

USA entering WWI:

7 Ways U.S. Entry Into WWI Changed the World – Foreign Policy

The first world war helped shape modern America. Why is it so forgotten? | First world war | The Guardian

At A Hefty Cost, World War I Made The U.S. A Major Military Power : Parallels : NPR

Here's a little more on that last date:

Jay Doubleyou: the first world war: triumph and pride ... or ... tragedy and sorrow?

Jay Doubleyou: how is world war one seen in different countries

FREUD:

In particular, the psychology behind it:

Jay Doubleyou: propaganda, public relations and manufacturing consent

Freud transformed the way we think:

Curtis ends by saying that, "Although we feel we are free, in reality, we—like the politicians—have become the slaves of our own desires," and compares Britain and America to 'Democracity', an exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair created by Edward Bernays.

The Century of the Self - Wikipedia

The Century of the Self - Top Documentary Films

'It's much too easy really just to claim the old democratic patrician culture was better,' he says. 'People in a consumer society probably have more fun, certainly have more things, and we find those things comforting, enjoyable, and who is to say there is anything wrong with that? But we have also, perhaps, become trapped by an idea, and it has got into every corner of our lives.'

If you look around you, it is hard not to agree with this observation. The sovereignty of the Self is reflected back on us from every angle. Apart from the fact that the purchase of every canned drink or deodorant requires us to locate the hero inside ourself, our television, for example, is increasingly dedicated - from Trisha to Changing Rooms to Pop Idol - to Self-help and Self-improvement and Self-creation. We find collective comfort in celebrity; we like to colonise another Self, and treat it like our own. Our bestseller lists, from Harry Potter to Bridget Jones to A Boy Called It, reflect different kinds of wish-fulfilment.

Business culture, which expects more and more of its employees' time, also spends more and more money on making those employees feel self-empowered and self-motivated.

In this respect, the genie of the Self has already escaped the bottle. One logical conclusion of Curtis's argument is that business will eventually take over the functions of government, since it is much better, more effective, at simply satisfying people's desires than any politician ever was. This is something that Bernays predicted. In an interview when he was 100, the father of public relations allowed that he may have created something of a monster.

'Everyone has a press agent now,' he said, 'or a media consultant or communications director or whatever you want to call it. Sometimes,' he suggested, 'it seems sort of like having discovered a medicine to cure a disease, and then finding out that so much of it is being administered that people are getting sick from the overdoses.'

How Freud got under our skin | Education | The Guardian

He gave us the 'Third Revolution':

BBC Radio 4 - A History of Ideas, Historian Justin Champion on Francis Bacon, The Fourth Revolution

He definitely changed how we think - as this English lesson from the VOA shows:

How Sigmund Freud Changed What People Thought About the Mind

WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS:

Indeed, some would say he 'atomised' people:

Atomized individualism - definition of Atomized individualism by The Free Dictionary

Atomism (social) - Wikipedia

Individualism - Wikipedia

Microsoft Word - Individualisation

(PDF) Freud as an example of amplifying the individualistic view of the self | Qixiu Fu - Academia.edu

To what extent, then, are we responsible for our own problems - that we only have ourselves to blame?

Michael Sandel: The tyranny of merit | TED Talk

Jay Doubleyou: the tyranny of merit: we are not self-made or self-sufficient

Jay Doubleyou: meritocracy

Jay Doubleyou: don’t think you’re lucky? think again

THE MEDICALISATION OF LIFE'S PROBLEMS:

Perhaps one of the strongest criticisms of modern medicine, including psychiatry, is that it has 'medicalised' problems:

In the 1975 book Limits to medicine: Medical nemesis (1975), Ivan Illich put forth one of the earliest uses of the term "medicalization". Illich, a philosopher, argued that the medical profession harms people through iatrogenesis, a process in which illness and social problems increase due to medical intervention. Illich saw iatrogenesis occurring on three levels: the clinical, involving serious side effects worse than the original condition; the social, whereby the general public is made docile and reliant on the medical profession to cope with life in their society; and the structural, whereby the idea of aging and dying as medical illnesses effectively "medicalized" human life and left individuals and societies less able to deal with these "natural" processes.

Medicalization - Wikipedia

Medicalization of Social Problems | SpringerLink

When it comes to psychiatry, there's a whole list over what is 'normal/abnormal behaviour':

DSM-5 - Wikipedia

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - Wikipedia

Jay Doubleyou: how normal behavoiur becomes a mental disorder

BEHVAVIOURISM:

How can you 'engineer' people?

HUMAN RESOURCES Social Engineering In The 20th Century HQ FULL - YouTube

Jay Doubleyou: human resources as social engineering

By observing their behaviour - and predicting, and so controlling, their behaviour:

Behaviorism | Simply Psychology

Behaviorism - Wikipedia

Although it's been replaced by other therapies, behaviourism is still very influential:

A June 2002 survey listed Skinner as the most influential psychologist of the 20th century.[17]

B. F. Skinner - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It's all rather creepy:

5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted | Cracked.com

Jay Doubleyou: behaviourism >>> krashen... pinker... skinner... chomsky

And it's how education works today:

Researchers like Edward L. Thorndike build upon these foundations and, in particular, developed a S-R (stimulus-response) theory of learning. He noted that that responses (or behaviours) were strengthened or weakened by the consequences of behaviour. This notion was refined by Skinner and is perhaps better known as operant conditioning – reinforcing what you want people to do again; ignoring or punish what you want people to stop doing.

In terms of learning, according to James Hartley (1998) four key principles come to the fore:
Activity is important. Learning is better when the learner is active rather than passive. (‘Learning by doing’ is to be applauded).
Repetition, generalization and discrimination are important notions. Frequent practice – and practice in varied contexts – is necessary for learning to take place. Skills are not acquired without frequent practice.
Reinforcement is the cardinal motivator. Positive reinforcers like rewards and successes are preferable to negative events like punishments and failures.
Learning is helped when objectives are clear. Those who look to behaviourism in teaching will generally frame their activities by behavioural objectives e.g. ‘By the end of this session participants will be able to…’. With this comes a concern with competencies and product approaches to curriculum.
infed.org | The behaviourist orientation to learning

Jay Doubleyou: behaviourism >>> and learning objectives >>> and the common european framework

So, what are your 'learning objectives'?

Jay Doubleyou: a critique of learning objectives

Jay Doubleyou: 'learning by objectives' vs 'process-based learning' vs 'open-ended learning'

Jay Doubleyou: metrics, targets and measuring everything

PSYCHOLOGY IS EVERYWHERE TODAY:

It looks as though neuroscience, or 'neurobabble', is here to stay:

Jay Doubleyou: cognitive science and developmental neuroscience

Finally, psychology really is everywhere today:

Jay Doubleyou: how to define masculinity

Jay Doubleyou: is there a link between adhd and creative thinking?

Jay Doubleyou: paulo freire and the tabula rasa