In his paper "Learning Ecologies of Contagion" first published in Languaging (2006) and recently republished as part of his collection, Teaching in Pursuit of Wow! (ABAX, 2012 but not in our online catalogue yet) Tim Murphey refers to learning ecologies. Here his focus is on the emotional interactive part of the ecology. But I'd like to wander off in another direction. What I want to meander towards is the richness of an ecology. Because that's what an ecology is, rich. Rich beyond rich with interaction. Indescribably rich. Indescribably… Which means of course that we do try to describe ecologies. In all sorts of fields. The ecologies of biosystems, Bateson's ecologies of understanding, economics, which tries to describe the ecology of human exchange. But any such descriptions are necessarily reductionist and hugely so. We try to describe a rich sea of interaction in terms of patterns we can discern. And this reductionism has been a huge intellectual boon. In terms of developing a descriptive science, it has worked extremely well—providing insight after insight into our understanding of interaction-rich systems. But they are descriptions to help us to understand a process, not descriptions to apply to the making or directing of a process. And herein lies the folly. In looking at the descriptive models developed we always need the humility of accepting that our descriptions are not complete. When we try to use our reductionist understanding to build a system, we inevitably fail. This in essence was the Austrian economist, Hayek's critique of Soviet-style command economies. And on this point at least he was right.

Top-down attempts to create or recreate biological ecosystems have been equally unsuccessful. The best we can do is tilt a system in a certain direction and stand back and let the interaction take place.

So too with learning ecologies…

Any learning system is rich with interactions. We can try to reduce and describe these. We can look at social interactions in the learning process, we can look at interactive elements in language development, we can look at the neuroscience of learning, and develop descriptions based on all these approaches. What we cannot do is create a successful approach predicated entirely on our inevitably partial understanding of any of these. We can be informed by our descriptive understandings but ultimately what works, works. And it may work because of elements our models don't yet include. A little humility is never a bad thing.

Photo courtesy of Evgeni Dinev at freedigitalphotos.net

This past month has seen us working hard getting ready a number of new titles for the spring print run. New this year will be two teacher's resources, The Coursebook and Beyond by Fiona Copland and Steve Mann, and Teaching in Pursuit of Wow! by Tim Murphey. This spring will also see the release of three new texts, Step into English 1 by Alastair Graham-Marr and Tanja McCandie, Business Spotlight 1 by Alastair Graham-Marr et al and a book just for the Japan market, Listening Skills for the Center Exam (センター試験のためのリスニング•スキル) by Top-Up Listening co-author, Chris Cleary. Also busy on custom books and custom versions of our books for a number of university customers. And soon, very soon, the second book in the Fiction in Action series, Spellbound.

Speaking of Spellbound, author Adam Gray is getting ready to leave for a five-city tour of Russia with our distributor, Онара (for more details on this, please go to our events page). And The Coursebook and Beyond co-author, Steve Mann, will soon be boarding a flight for Dubai where he will be presenting at TESOL Arabia with a talk of the same name. And in four weeks, we'll once again be displaying and presenting at America's annual TESOL convention.

We'll also soon be unveiling an overhauled Japan webpage - which will serve as a model for changes to come to this page sometime over the next year. And more soon too on ABAX involvement with an online learning system. 

Plus, we can announce a distributor in Mexico, Editorial Delti. Expect our books up on their site soon.

All round, a lot of movement. Not much to show yet. But soon a great deal!

Selah

Greatly looking forward to this event - as always. This year with the event being in Tokyo, expect that over 2,000 language teachers will attend. With hundreds of events and presentations scheduled, it's a full weekend for attendees.

ABAX will be displaying in Booth 14, across from our good friends at Language Solutions and the Books Doing Good display (which this year has more books than ever).

New this year will be the Coursebook and Beyond (well, an emergency print version of it) pictured above. Very happy to see this book out there!

Though disappointed that a number of items didn't make it. Teaching in Pursuit of Wow! by Tim Murphey, Fiction in Action: Spellbound by Adam Gray, Business Spotlight 1 by Alastair Graham-Marr et al and Step Into English by Alastair Graham-Marr and Tanja McCandie are all but done but (and this is what counts), not, not quite. If you do drop round, we can show you the almost completed versions of some of these books and everything will be out for early in 2012. Another disappointment is that we won't have an edition of the ABAX Addition newspaper ready for this year's event.

But going back to the plus side, you can see the videos made for the Communication Spotlight series, shot by Todd Rucynski in New York, Tokyo and Hawaii and check out the website and get information on a new company we're going to be working with, englishonline, who are offering use of their online teaching platform free to any teachers up through the end of March.

And we have presentations. On Saturday, November 19th, Alastair Graham-Marr will be presenting on the Intrinsic Motivational Effects of Output from 5.00-6.00 p.m. in Room 311 and Hugh Graham-Marr on Task-Based Narrow Reading from 5.35-6.00 p.m. in Room 308 (Marcos, whose presentation - along with Adam - this really is, will also be here (this much appreciated) to give support as he's not here as originally planned). On Sunday, November 20th, Communication Spotlight author, Alastair Graham-Marr, presents on Teaching Strategies and Skills for Communication from 11.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. in Room 307 and Hugh Graham-Marr on The Detective Story As a Way Into Critical Reading from 12.40-1.05 p.m. in Room 103. Tanja McCandie presents onSupplementary Activities Using ABC Cards from 4.55-5.55 in Room 301.

Finally, a word about ELT for Tohoku. All the publishers and distributors involved with this are putting on a Wine and Cheese Event on Sunday, November 20th from 16.30 to 18.30 at the Reception Hall in the International Exchange Building. The minimum donation to attend is ¥3,000 (and you're of course very welcome to give more!). Donations will be used to support children in Tohoku affected by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011

A great JALT, everyone!

Unfortunately these titles will not be out in time for next weekend's MEXTESOL conference in Morelia, Michoacan (where ABAX titles can be seen at the Delti display) but we will have them to show at the JALT Conference in Tokyo which runs from November 18-21st. 

Progress continues on a new Japan website which will be the model for a future abax.net site as well. The new site is scheduled for launch in mid-December.

And if you're in Russia, plans are afoot for an Adam Gray tour, March 10 through 18. Watch this space for more details.

1. ELT FOR TOHOKU: The first of these is ELT for Tohoku. 15 publishers have donated a total of 17,000 books to this effort. Books are given out in exchange for donations, proceeds of which will go towards rebuilding efforts in the part of Japan stricken by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11th. ELT for Tohoku books can be found on display at any of the ETJ conferences and at regional and national JALT conferences. They can also be ordered directly through speciality booksellers such as ELT Books or English Books. ABAX titles that have been donated to this effort are Fiction in Action: Whodunit and Come Fly With Us. We have also donated 200 copies of the Helbling Resource book, Language Hungry! by Tim Murphey. Minimum donation for a book is half price.

2. BOOKS DOING GOOD: The second activity we're involved with is Books Doing Good. This is the third time round for this. Once again, ABAX along with LSI  (with assistance from englishbooks.jp and NPO JALT—big thanks to both organizations!) will have a Books Doing Good space at the annual JALT conference (in the back of the ELT Materials Exhibition, opposite where you pick up the conference bags). Over the past two years we've raised almost ¥200,000 which we donated to the charity, NPO Lesa.  The money has been used to help with English books and other items for kids in Vietnam born with AIDs as well as being used to contribute to an English study scholarship fund in Vietnam. We are once again working with NPO-Lesa in 2011. 

How this works: You donate the books to us. We pay shipping and put the donated books out for display at the JALT conference. Books are available for a minimum donation of ¥100. Any left over books (there haven't been many!) are then shipped to Peace Boat to be passed out to villagers in East Africa. A caveat, books must NOT be language textbooks or resources books on teaching languages. Any other books written in English are very, very welcome!

Before the conference: If you have any books you'd like to donate to this cause, you can send them to:

     englishbooks.jp　〒880-0913宮崎県宮崎市恒久１丁目２－１８    

     englishbooks.jp, Tsunehisa 1-2-18, Miyazaki-shi, 880-0913
     Tel: 0985-41-6611

     Please label each box: Books Doing Good

At the conference: Paperback novels, nonfiction books, books for self help, business  and for children. All 100 yen each (though you're welcome to give more!). We'll be putting out new books each day. Stop by. Peruse and choose!

Earlier this month, I started to write about teaching the 'spotlights' in the Communication Spotlight series. The first 'spotlight' I looked at was the Spotlight on Listening. Today, I'm going to take a look at my favorite spotlight, the Spotlight on Memory. In feedback from students, one of their favorites too. Also it's the simplest of the 'spotlights,' something that greatly appeals to my minimalist streak. Look right above you. That's all there is to it. In the textbook, nothing but a pointer as to what to do; the activity itself just one of listening and recitation. Nothing in the text to refer to. In fact to introduce this activity, I usually have students put away their books entirely. 

So what is the Spotlight on Memory? Very simple really. Students listen to a short dialogue—perhaps three or four times—then try it out themselves. The dialogue itself essentially a slightly modified form of the adjacency pairs at the core of the dialogue in the longer listening that introduces each unit. So something like the following:

A: Have you seen the… What do you call it?

B: Uh-huh.

A: Long, green, like a pencil.

B: Asparagus?

In doing this simple activity, students are doing a number of things. First, they are very much focused on form, as they need the form to do the task.  Second, they are 'stretching' their short-term memories for English, a retentive skill necessary for any effective communication and something often not really looked at. Third, they are once again being implicitly reminded of the communication strategy that is the focus of the unit (more about that later). And doing this they are concentratedly focused on a variation of the adjacency pairs at the heart of the main listening—something that should be a student take-away from the unit.

As with the Spotlight on Listening, there are a number of different ways you can approach this activity. You can simply play the track on the CD the three or four (or however many) times it takes the students to get it. While doing this, you can mime out or shadow what the speakers are saying. Or you can dispense with the CD entirely and just act out the dialogue yourself. From here have the students practice the dialogue in pairs. To confirm student understanding of the dialogue, you can do it as a class recitation, perhaps breaking the components into smaller chunks, and then perform as a dialogue between the students as a group and the teacher. At this point too, you could board up the dialogue though I rarely find that necessary—most students have a pretty good grasp of it by now. Many of the dialogues also lend themselves well to substitution practice. In many cases (though not the one above which comes out of a unit in which the focus is on food), students can easily change the dialogue so it refers to something personal. 

All pretty simple, yeah? And lots of take-away value for the lower-level student.

Plus one of the things I really love about this 'spotlight' is how it bridges between the Spotlight on Listening and the Spotlight on Speaking. In the Spotlight on Listening, students are focused on form through listening and recognizing. The Spotlight on Memory in a way intensifies this activity in that now students are being asked to recognize form without any textual reference. This then bridges in to the focus of the Spotlight on Speaking (more on this in a later post), a section which explicitly introduces a speaking strategy from the main dialogue. Look at the dialogue above and you'll see contained within it the strategy for this unit: 'if you don't know a word or an expression, ask the listener for help.'

And that all this was born in a short conversation in an elevator, going from the ground floor to the 3rd floor.

But there are other ways to approach this section—particularly if it's the second time to look at the feature as is true with this particular example.  The activity can be done as a predict and check. After taking students through the example, students apply their understanding of stress to the four sample sentences. Playing the CD allows them to check their understanding. Or it can be done as a kind of deep-ending activity. For instance, with the text closed, the teacher could reproduce the four sentences with both the correct and the incorrect sentence stress patterns and have students identify which patterns seem 'right.' This can lead into a (brief!) discussion of why these patterns are 'right,' and students can the open their books and do a confirmation listening.

In practicing saying the sentences, you can do a group recitation before having the students practice together in pairs. Here one option is to practice saying sentences with the stressed words only before going into the full sentences so students can again notice the relationship between stress and meaning. So for instance, 'What...do?' 'What do you do?' What...teach?' 'What do you teach?' and so on...

Perhaps you can see other ways to 'springboard' off this activity?