SHARE
An Electronic
Magazine by Omar Villarreal and Marina Kirac ©
Year
5
Number 130 June 27th 2004
6350 SHARERS are
reading this issue of SHARE this
week
__________________________________________________________
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a
single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never
decreases by being SHARED
__________________________________________________________
Dear
SHARERS,
Wow!
This has been a busy week. Well, it still is: it´s Sunday 10:30 p.m. ( Yes,
p.m.!) and we are finishing this issue of SHARE. So we´ll kep this introduction
short and sweet. Straight to the point, then:
1.-
Omar and I are on the Organizing Committee of the INSPT-UTN 30th
Anniversary Conference together with a bunch of talented and hard-working
lecturers from the institution and
the support of all the other lecturers, students (present and past) and quite a
number of graduates that we have already established contact with. This leads to
numbers two and three.
2.-
If you are a graduate or past student (even if you never graduated) from
INSPT-UTN or a former lecturer and you receive this issue of SHARE, please send
us a mail to establish contact and receive “information for graduates and past
students”. Our mail addresses: omarvillarreal@speedy.com.ar
and marinakirac@speedy.com.ar
3.-
If you are NOT a graduate or past student from INSPT-UTN and you have received
this issue of SHARE and you know a graduate or past student or former lecturer
from INSPT –UTN who does not receive SHARE , please let him know about this
Conference and ask him or her to send us a mail to establish contact and receive
“information for graduates and past students”. Or send us his or her postal
address or telephone number and we will contact him or
her.
4.-
All graduates or past students as well as past lecturers are welcomed whether
they live in Argentina or abroad.
Love
Omar and Marina
______________________________________________________________________
In
SHARE 130
1.- Teaching
Receptive Skills to Young Learners.
2.-
Margaret Drabble on Speaking in Public and the Contemporary
Writer.
3.-
Drama for Pronunciation Practice (2nd
Round).
4.-
30th Anniversary of INSPT –UTN Conference.
5.-
XVIII ARTESOL Convention
.
6.-
Winter Course: Expanding your Horizons.
7.-
Dr. David Embick in Buenos Aires.
8.-
Omar in Paraguay for the PARATESOL Convention.
9.- Immersion Course in San Luis.
10.- English –
Argentina : A new e-group.
11.- The Tell- Tale Heart Cracks up!
12.- Second ELT Fair in the
West.
13.- Licenciatura en la Enseñanza
del Inglés.
14.- Primeras Jornadas de Cultura y
Literatura en Lengua Inglesa.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1.- TEACHING RECEPTIVE SKILLS TO YOUNG
LEARNERS
Our dear SHARER Costas Gabrielatos
has sent us this
article that he generously wants to SHARE with all of us.
Receptive Skills with Young Learners*
By Costas Gabrielatos
Introduction
In
this article I argue for the benefits of receptive skills development (i.e.
reading and listening) with children (aged 7-11) at beginner/ elementary levels
who are able to recognise words in print, outline the objectives of the teaching
programme, and discuss text and task selection.
My survey of
EFL coursebooks, as well as my observations of lessons and discussions with
teachers, indicate that courses for children at beginner/elementary levels
usually concentrate on vocabulary and grammar teaching. Texts are normally used
as vehicles for the presentation of new language, whereas systematic receptive
skills development is reserved for intermediate levels. Teaching materials may
involve some ‘comprehension’ tasks (usually questions), but this alone hardly
seems to constitute systematic skills development.
True,
texts can be
used for the presentation of language items,
but it is not
helpful to equate all text-based lessons with language work (see also McDonough
& Shaw, 1993: 103-105; Underwood, 1989: 23). The main objective of a
receptive skills programme is not
the teaching
of more
grammar and
vocabulary,
but the
development of the learners’ ability to understand/interpret texts using their
existing language knowledge.
Of course,
receptive skills development can be combined with language input
in the same lesson, but the
procedures need to be staged in such a way so that the ‘language’ component does
not cancel out the ‘skills’ one.
For example, explaining all unknown lexis before learners read or listen to a
text will cancel out training in inferring the meaning of lexis in the text
(see also
Gabrielatos, 1995a).
Rationale
Avoiding
later problems
When
systematic receptive skills development starts at low intermediate levels, the
learners’ reading/ listening behaviour is usually problematic. This is hardly
surprising, as learners are somehow thrown in at the deep end: they are asked to
read or listen to much longer and more complex texts and perform novel tasks
such as reading selectively, extracting the gist, locating specific information
and disregarding or inferring the meaning of unknown lexis.
Following is
an outline of those problematic areas which can be avoided by systematic
receptive skills development from an early stage on (adapted from Gabrielatos,
1995a&b).
Learners
read/listen for the words and not for the meaning.
Learners
get easily
discouraged by unknown lexis.
Learners
do not make
conscious
use of
their
background knowledge and experience.
The
main source of these problems seems to be the habit of explaining all unknown
lexis and/or translating texts. Research findings have suggested that “children
are very sensitive observers of teacher behaviour patterns in the classroom”
(Weinstein, 1989 in Williams & Burden, 1997: 98); therefore, teachers “need
to be aware ... that their words, their actions and their interactions form part
of every individual learner’s own construction of knowledge” (Williams &
Burden, 1997: 53). Based on such observations, learners (being already awestruck
by the amount of lexis there is to learn) may be led to reason along the
following lines:
Since
my teacher always goes to the trouble of explaining/translating all the words,
then the meaning of the text is the combination of the meanings of the words. So
we cannot understand the text if we don’t understand all the
words.
What
is more, if learners think that the meaning is strictly in the words, then they
may not see the need to utilise their background knowledge (for a discussion of
the role of background knowledge in comprehension see Brown & Yule, 1983a:
233-256; Carrell & Eisterhold, 1988: 75-81; Just & Carpenter, 1987:
170-176, 241-245).
Learners do not
read/listen selectively.
The reason may
lie in teachers’ habit of asking questions which are not of equal importance
(e.g. questions asking for important information in the same group with ones
asking for minor/unnecessary details), or simply asking learners to show total
comprehension at all times (e.g. always re-telling in detail stories presented
in class). What can compound the problem is the use of reading aloud as a means
of developing reading skills. I would like to clarify here that I don’t think
this technique is problematic per se,
as it can help beginners understand the relation between spelling and sound.
Nevertheless, its misuse/overuse can communicate the wrong idea about the nature
of reading (see Gabrielatos, 1996).
Learners
read/listen in
an unstructured way.
Learners find it
difficult to locate clues to meaning.
There
is more to a text than words and structures; there are equally important and
interrelated factors: type, layout
and organisation. Awareness of the layout and organisation of different
text-types can help readers extract information more effectively. To illustrate
the point, let me use the metaphor of a ‘mechanically-challenged’ and a
mechanically-minded driver examining a car engine: the first will be looking at
a shapeless blob of metal unable to even consider where to start; the second
will be recognising specific parts, functionally connected to each other. An
experienced reader with limited time, for instance,
will get the main points of a newspaper article reporting a crime by reading the
first and last paragraph.
Possible reasons
for the last two problems are: experience of a limited type of texts (usually
comic strips and dialogues), lack of awareness of the nature
and organisation of
different text-types, and use of short, (over)simplified texts only. As a
result, learners cannot navigate
successfully through the text when reading (e.g. they only read from the
beginning towards the end). Similarly, they may not break the text down into
smaller, more manageable chunks to facilitate understanding, but depend on a
rather vague global impression only, and may be unable to locate the place where
clues to meaning are given.
When
listening, they have problems identifying familiar
lexis.
During listening
they may not take account of the phonological clues available.
Possible
reasons are: lack of systematic ear training in recognising individual sounds or
clusters, stress patterns and tone of voice, and the practice of always giving
learners the text to read while listening (for examples of
transcript-based work on listening see Gabrielatos, 1995b,
1996).
Grammar,
Vocabulary & Pronunciation
Receptive
skills training brings additional benefits. If learners are not intimidated by
unknown lexis, and know how to find their way in a text, then discovery
techniques (i.e. when the
teacher provides learners with language data and guides them to discover the
‘rule’) will
be more successful and as a result grammar and vocabulary learning will be
enhanced (see also Devine, 1988: 269-270). Similarly, awareness of features of
connected speech, and ability to identify words in the stream of speech will
help learners improve their pronunciation.
Characteristics
of Young Learners
It would be wise
to avoid over-reliance on influential theories about the abilities and
limitations of children in different age groups. This can result in the
formation of rigid pre-conceptions, which may not reflect the group of learners
at hand, which in turn will limit the effectiveness of teaching. Relevant to our
discussion is Piaget’s theory of specific stages of intellectual development
(Gross, 1996: 629-640; McNally, 1977: 12-55), which has been criticised for
limitations regarding methodology, clarity and applicability (see for example
Gross, 1996: 640-641; Shorrocks, 1991: 263-265; Williams & Burden, 1997:
22-24).
Experimental
evidence indicates that “children may not have radically different capacities
from those of adults and in some ways, when they have appropriate experience,
their performance can be superior” (Shorrocks, 1991: 268). An example is the
ease with which some children understand computer operation, which baffles quite
a few adults. It seems more effective then to
examine the abilities of each learner individually. A matter of central
importance is that the learners’ limited language knowledge is not mistaken for
equally limited cognitive abilities (Eysenck & Keane, 1990: 362; see also
Holt, 1982: 189).
Fortunately,
there seem to be some non-controversial characteristics that are relevant to our
discussion (Brewster, 1991: 6-8; Scott & Ytreberg, 1990: 1-5; Williams,
1991: 207-210).
· Children can
justify choices and opinions.
· They
need to be supported in their understanding of the propositional content of a
message by moving from the concrete to the abstract.
· Their
attention span is limited. Therefore, tasks should be short, varied, motivating
and interesting, and should offer “concrete perceptual support” (Brewster, 1991:
6).
It
would be helpful to keep in mind that “training does produce improvement in
performance which can be considerable, long-lasting and pervasive” (Meadows,
1988 in Gross, 1996: 641). Research suggests that “even quite high level
thinking and cognitive skills can be taught” (Shorrocks, 1991: 268; see also
Gross, 1996: 640-641; Williams & Burden, 1997: 22-24).
During the first
stages of receptive skills development the learners’ reading/listening ability
may initially deteriorate instead of improving; this does not necessarily
indicate a problem with the method. A study on children’s problem-solving
(reported in Shorrocks, 1991: 269)
showed an initial decline of performance before final improvement. The
decline was attributed to the children’s experimenting with new strategies
before finally mastering them.
Objectives
Identifying
and using elements of context
Learners
should be able to use their knowledge of context (see Biber, 1988: 28-33; Brown
& Yule, 1983a: 35-46) to understand the text. In addition they should be
able to use available clues (title, visuals, key lexis etc.) to identify
elements of context.
Identifying
elements of text
Learners
should be able to:
·
Recognise
different text-types relevant to their experience (story, letter, advertisement,
encyclopedic entry, article, radio news, etc.).
·
Identify
possible sources of the text (magazine, newspaper, encyclopedia
etc.).
·
Understand
some types of organisation (time order, order of importance, from general to
specific etc.), as well as the way this organisation
is realised in the division of texts into sections;
·
Understand
the function of basic discourse markers (and, or, but, then, etc.).
Identifying
and using phonological
clues
Learners
should be able to:
·
Recognise
and distinguish between sounds which may sound similar to them (e.g. between
long and short vowels).
·
Be
aware of the importance of stress for meaning and listen mainly for the stressed
elements.
·
Be
aware of, and recognise, the ‘meaning’ carried by tone of
voice.
(See also
Brown, 1990: 59-60, 161-163).
Identifying
elements of content
Learners
should be able to:
·
Understand
main ideas / facts;
·
Identify
specific information, stated explicitly and located in one place in the
text;
·
Recognise
feelings (e.g. happiness, anger) and attitude (e.g. friendliness, hostility)
using phonological/lexical clues.
Text
Selection
Texts
that seem linguistically complex or long should not necessarily be rejected for
use with low levels; the teacher can determine the difficulty of the lesson by
manipulating the level of the task (see Nunan, 1989: 141-143, 196-198, 200-201).
What is more, learners can cope better with a complex text if the topic is
familiar to them (Anderson & Lynch, 1988: 49).
Length
It
would be beneficial if texts were longer than the ones used to present new
language. Successfully tackling longer texts will boost the learners’
confidence.
Language
& organisation
In
order to present appropriate challenge, texts need to be more complex than
‘presentation’
ones in terms of language, speed of delivery, phonological features and
organisation. Texts for native speakers of the same age may be too demanding,
but simplified pedagogical texts should at least try to simulate them
(for a
discussion see Davies, 1988; Parker & Parker, 1991;
Wallace, 1992: 76-81; Widdowson, 1978: 88-93). What is more, the learners’ low
linguistic level can be compensated for by the use of strategies
(for a
discussion on the interaction between language competence and reading ability
see Alderson, 1984; Clarke, 1988; Devine, 1988; Eskey, 1988; Hudson,
1988).
Layout
It
is important that texts mimic the layout of real-life text types and are
accompanied by visual materials (see Anderson & Lynch, 1988: 58; Brown &
Yule, 1983b: 85-86). Authentic-looking layout will help learners
recognise
different text types, and visuals will provide clear and helpful contextual
support.
Content
Apart
from the obvious fact that texts need to be relevant to the learners’ age and
interests, there are other factors to consider.
·
Content
may be familiar so that learners can feel secure and utilise their background
knowledge.
·
Texts
may offer new facts to learn; a process that simulates children’s real-life
experience.
·
Content
may be striking and/or fun to create interest and
motivation.
Task Types
Creating
expectations
These tasks
types help learners approach texts actively. Learners
·
Predict elements
of context/content by using visuals, title, key lexis
etc.
·
Predict the
continuation of a story.
Responding
to open-ended questions
It is
important that the question cannot be answered without real comprehension (e.g.
merely through use of grammar/ syntax).
Questions
asking for facts
·
Oral
answer. According to the competence of individual learners the answer may be a
sentence/ phrase, key lexis, or even an L1 response.
·
Underline
the answer in the text.
·
Identify
the section where clues can be found.
Questions asking for
feelings/attitude
·
Oral
answer (key lexis or L1).
·
Learners’
use of facial expressions/gestures.
·
Learners’
choice of teacher’s alternative facial
expressions/gestures.
Filling
in grids
Learners
complete grids with information about:
·
People,
animals, places or objects mentioned in the text(s)
·
Facts
or feelings regarding characters involved in a story
Grids
can be used flexibly to cater for mixed ability classes. Let us take the example
of a number of small texts giving information about three different animals.
Grid A is more challenging as it requires a linguistic response; Grid B is less
challenging as learners respond with only þ
or ý.
grid
a
|
|
colour(s) |
size |
food
etc. |
|
animal 1 |
|
|
|
|
animal 2 |
|
|
|
|
animal 3 |
|
|
|
grid
b
|
|
colour
etc. |
|
Brown |
White |
Black |
Grey etc. |
|
animal 1 |
|
|
|
|
|
animal 2 |
|
|
|
|
|
animal 3 |
|
|
|
|
Following
instructions
Learners
use the instructions or clues offered in the text to
·
Make
a simple object (e.g. a paper hat).
·
Draw
a shape, object, route on a map etc.
·
Add
missing elements in a given picture.
·
Solve
a mathematical problem or a logic quiz (Phillips, 1993:
54-56).
Key
lexis recognition
This
type of task aims to reinforce selective reading/listening.
·
Learners
are asked to indicate the lexical items they think are more important by
underlining when reading, or tapping on their desks when listening (see also Feedback below).
·
The
teacher tells a short story in which some of the original key words have been
replaced by ones, which do not make sense in the context; learners have to
identify those words (adapted from Brewster, 1991: 168).
Choosing
Here
learners are not asked to respond using language or gestures, but to select
among given options. The most common task types are Multiple Choice, True/False and Odd one out. Difficulty can be
manipulated by changing the number of options given. It is important that the
incorrect options are not distracting, and that the choice of the correct option
clearly indicates comprehension, or hints at the nature of the learners’
problems. (For a general discussion and examples see Nuttall, 1996: 194-200).
Options can
be:
·
Sentences,
phrases or lexis expressing facts or feelings/attitude.
·
Visuals
depicting shapes, objects, animals, people, facts, feelings,
attitude.
·
Alternative
titles, text-types, sources of texts, or contextual
elements.
·
Words
exemplifying different sounds or stress patterns.
Matching
Learners
are given one or more texts and asked to match …
·
Ingredients
to recipes (Phillips, 1993: 60-62);
·
Feelings/attitude
to characters;
·
Objects/animals
to their owners etc.;
·
Texts
to text-types;
·
Words
in the text to other given words, according to specific sounds (ear
training).
Re-ordering
/ sequencing
This
type is suited to raising and/or checking awareness of text organisation.
Learners can be given:
·
Jumbled
sentences/ paragraphs to create a text.
·
Visuals
depicting a story to put in order before and/or while reading or listening to
the story.
Counting
& repeating
Elements of
content/context: learners are
helped to read/listen selectively.
·
Learners count
the people, animals, objects or places mentioned.
Phonological
aspects: learners see
that words are not always pronounced clearly and that they are usually
‘squashed’ into each other (adapted from Ur, 1984:
42-43).
·
Play (or say) a
short phrase and ask learners to count how many words they have heard.
·
Stop the tape
and ask learners to repeat the last phrase. First ask for the phrase in 'ideal'
form (i.e. pronounced very clearly), and then ask them to repeat it as it was
pronounced by the speaker.
Feedback
During
feedback there needs to be constant reference to the text. This may seem
difficult with listening texts, but there are techniques, which make it
possible.
·
Teacher
as cassette recorder (adapted
from Phillips, 1993: 34-35): learners can ask the teacher to ‘stop’, ‘rewind’ or
‘fast forward’ so that they gain time to think, or listen again to specific
parts.
·
Tapping:
learners tap their pens on the desk when they hear the information needed or
helpful clues; the tape is stopped and learners discuss clues and strategies. In
case of disagreement the problematic section can be
repeated.
Such
techniques do not only hand the control over to the learners, but also give the
teacher helpful insights into the learners’ abilities and problems (see also
Underwood, 1989: 17).
Since
the main aim or reading/listening lessons is skills development (not language
input/practice) learner responses which demonstrate comprehension and use of
effective strategies should be considered satisfactory even if they are not
accurate. For example, during ear training the objective is accurate perception
of sounds, stress and intonation, not their production. There may be cases when
even L1 responses are deemed acceptable.
Only providing the correct
‘answer’ for them will not be of much help to learners. It would be unreasonable
to expect that learners (of any age) will automatically pinpoint problems and
perform the abstractions needed in order to draw conclusions. In order to become
aware of and adopt/develop appropriate strategies learners need tangible clues
and guidance. The main objective of feedback is elicitation of the source of
problems, as well as the strategies used, and then provision of guidance in the
form of tips and examples (see also Rost, 1990: 153-156; Shorrocks, 1991:
270-272; Williams & Burden, 1997: 49-51 & 73).
References
Alderson,
J. C. 1984. ‘Reading in a foreign language: a reading problem or a language
problem?’ In Alderson, J.C. & Urquhart., A.H.
Alderson,
J.C. & Urquhart, A.H. (eds.) 1984. Reading in a Foreign Language.
Longman.
Anderson,
A. & Lynch, T. 1988. Listening.
Oxford University Press.
Biber,
D. 1988. Variation Across Speech and
Writing. Cambridge University Press.
Brewster,
J. 1991. ‘Listening and the young learner.’ In Brumfit, C. et al.
Brown,
G. 1990 (2nd ed.) Listening to Spoken
English. Longman.
Brown,
G. & Yule, G. 1983a. Discourse
Analysis. Cambridge University Press.
Brown,
G. & Yule, G. 1983b. Teaching the
Spoken Language. Cambridge University Press.
Brumfit,
C., Moon, T. & Tongue, R. 1991. Teaching English to Children. Collins
ELT.
Carrell,
P.L. & Eisterhold, J.C. 1988. ‘Schema theory and ESL reading pedagogy’. In
Carrell P. L. et al.
Carrell,
P.L., Devine, J. & Eskey, D.E. (eds.). 1988. Interactive Approaches to Second Language
Reading. Cambridge University
Press.
Clarke,
M.A. 1988. ‘The short circuit hypothesis of ESL reading- or when language
competence interferes with
reading performance.’ In Carrell P. L. et al.
Davies,
A. 1988. ‘Simple, simplified, and simplification: what is authentic?’ In
Alderson, J. C. & A. H. Urquhart.
Devine,
J. 1988. ‘The relationship between general language competence and second
language reading proficiency: implications for teaching.’ In Carrell P. L. et
al.
Eskey,
D. E. 1988. ‘Holding in the bottom: an interactive approach to the language
problems of second language readers’. In Carrell P. L. et
al.
Eysenck,
M.W. & Keane, M.T. 1995 (3rd ed.) Cognitive Psychology. Psychology
Press.
Gabrielatos,
C. 1995a. ‘Two
Birds with one Stone: Reading skills development using testing materials.’ Current Issues 4-5 (double
issue).
Gabrielatos,
C. 1995b. ‘Two
Birds with one Stone 2: Listening skills development using testing materials.’
Current Issues 6.
Gabrielatos,
C. 1996. ‘Reading Allowed (?): Reading Aloud in TEFL.’ Current Issues 8 & 9. (Revised version available online:
www.gabrielatos.com/ReadingAloud.htm)
Gross,
R. D. 1996 (3rd ed.) Psychology: The
Science of Mind and Behaviour. Hodder &
Stoughton.
Holt,
J. 1982 (rev. ed.) How Children Fail.
Penguin Books.
Hudson,
T. 1988. ‘The effects of induced schemata on the “short circuit” in L2 reading:
non-decoding factors in L2 reading performance.’ In Carrell, P. L. et
al.
Just, M.A. &
Carpenter, P.A. 1987. The Psychology of
Reading and Language Comprehension. Allyn &
Bacon.
McDonough, J.
& Shaw, C. 1993. Materials and
Methods in ELT. Blackwell.
McNally,
D.W. 1973/1977. Piaget, Education &
Teaching. The Harvester Press.
Nunan, D. 1989.
Designing Tasks for the Communicative
Classroom. Cambridge
University Press.
Nuttall,
C. 1996 (2nd ed.) Teaching Reading Skills
in a Foreign Language. Heinemann.
Parker,
R. & Parker, R. 1991. ‘Real reading needs real books.’ In Brumfit C. et al.
Phillips,
S. 1993. Young Learners. Oxford
University Press.
Rost,
M. 1990. Listening in Language
Learning. Longman.
Scott,
W. A. & Ytreberg, L.H. 1990. Teaching
English to Children. Longman.
Shorrocks,
D. 1991 ‘The development of children’s thinking and understanding.’ In Brumfit
C. et al.
Underwood, M.
1989. Teaching Listening.
Longman.
Ur,
P. 1984. Teaching Listening
Comprehension. Cambridge University Press.
Wallace,
C. 1992. Reading. Oxford University
Press.
Widdowson,
H. 1978. Teaching Language as
Communication. Oxford University Press.
Williams,
M. 1991. ‘A framework for teaching English to young learners. In Brumfit, C. et
al.
Williams,
M. & Burden, R. 1997. Psychology for
Language Teachers. Cambridge University Press.
(*) This article
was published in Gika, A.S. & Berwick, D. (eds.) 1998. Working with Young Learners: A Way Ahead.
Whitstable, Kent: IATEFL, 52-60.
It is based on my seminar ‘Receptive Skills Development with
Mixed-Ability Young Learners’, which I conducted for Greek state school teachers
of English, September 1997 (organised by the Greek Ministry of Education and the British Council, Athens), and
my paper ‘Receptive Skills Development with Young Learners’, given at the 2nd IATEFL Greece
Symposium, Athens, March
1998.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
2.- MARGARET DRABBLE ON
SPEAKING IN PUBLIC AND THE CONTEMPORARY WRITER.
Public Speech and Public Silence
By Margaret
Drabble
This
lecture was delivered on October 18, 2001, in the Gulbenkian Lecture Hall in
Oxford, at the invitation of the Oxford English Faculty.
©
Margaret Drabble
This
lecture could begin in many places. It could begin with a quotation from
Nietzche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, about the shepherd with the serpent
hanging from his throat. Or it could begin with the unexpected trials of King
George the Sixth. (A royal anecdote still has much to recommend it in any public
lecture.) Or it could begin with the story of the first Writers' Conference at
the sixteenth Edinburgh Festival in the summer of 1962. With deference to the
fact that this lecture is by a writer, and sponsored by the English Faculty of
Oxford, it seems best to begin with the writers in Edinburgh. For that is my
most literary opening, and that is where much of the trouble began.
One
of my themes this evening is the changing status of the writer during the past
four decades, and, coincidentally, during my own writing and publishing career.
Most of you here will have observed the way in which, during this period,
writers have been transformed into public performers. They appear at festivals,
in bookshops, on book tours, on radio and TV programmes, in schools and
universities. They complain if their publicists urge them to appear, and they
complain if their publicists fail to urge them to appear. (That very word,
publicist, is new - we didn't have them when I began to publish.) The press
regularly carries items about older writers – often but not always male -
deploring the proliferation of photogenic and histrionic younger writers -
usually but not always female. We have become accustomed to this kind of
rivalry, which the media and the publishing industries promote for their own
ends. But not many of us are old enough to cast our minds back to the quiet
world before this situation arose. Let us, briefly, look backwards into the
recent past, before returning to Edinburgh.
In
the nineteenth century and the first half of this century, many successful and
much-admired authors were unknown to the general public and to their readers -
unknown in the sense that their appearance, their personalities, their habits,
and their private lives were indeed private. Some, like Jane Austen and the
Bront's, lived towards the extremity of privacy, anonymity, or pseudonymity,
both geographical and personal, and others, like George Eliot and Thomas Hardy
and Tennyson, might have been recognised in the streets of London, but did not
actively seek a public platform with a public face. Henry James, Somerset
Maugham, Arnold Bennett, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, T.S.Eliot and Graham
Greene were not household faces, though ironically Woolf was posthumously to
become one of the icons of our age. There were, of course, exceptions to this
rule, which will be springing irritably into your minds even as I speak - I do
know that Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw were all great showmen, all of
whom knew how to play the lecture circuit. An excessive love of performance was
more or less the death of Dickens, and Wilde, fatally, could not resist public
speech in the form of repartee. Nevertheless, the general statement stands. The
reasons are not far to seek - the age of mass communication and mechanical
reproduction was dawning, but slowly, and it was still easy for the shy,
retiring, fastidious or superior writer to avoid the masses.
Time
here for a quick aside about that dawning age. In the short stories of Edith
Wharton we find a characteristically shrewd analysis of the trend as heralded in
America, the land of advertising. In ‘Expiation' (1903) novice novelist Paula
Fetherel, having been mildly chastised and faintly praised by reviewers, shoots
to fame as a result of being denounced from the pulpit by her uncle the bishop:
when she sees her ‘New Edition with Author's Portrait (Hundred and Fiftieth
Thousand)' emblazoned on the station bookstall she cries out that ‘they've no
right to use my picture as a poster!'. But it is too late to return to private
life now. And in ‘The Descent of Man' entomologist Professor Linyard of
Hillbridge University is wryly astonished when his own production, ‘The Vital
Thing', becomes a huge commercial success, snapped up eagerly by readers who do
not notice that its intention is satiric. For him, the ultimate accolade and/or
disgrace will be the boxed set of "the ‘Vital Thing' series", and the appearance
of his face upon a hundred and fifty thousand biscuit tins.
The
biscuit tin as a means of publication and publicity preceded the Edinburgh
Festival by some sixty years. At the first Writers' Conference in 1962,
organised by publisher John Calder and George Orwell's widow Sonia Orwell, a
glittering array of writers appeared. Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Lawrence
Durrell, Kingsley Amis, Mary McCarthy, Muriel Spark, Rebecca West, Stephen
Spender, Alexander Trocchi and Angus Wilson were all there, along with many
others from Europe and further afield. The ringmaster of the circus was Malcolm
Muggeridge: Neal Ascherson reported upon it, and interviews based on it were
broadcast on the Third Programme. The atmosphere was heady. Heroin and
homosexuality were widely and very publicly debated, and Rebecca West wept at
finding herself sharing the platform with a pornographer. This was the beginning
of the 1960s, and the end of the dull post-war rationed sober claustrophobic
insular fifties. Writers, buttoned up through the war, and harnessed to
patriotic causes, were sniffing the air for new freedoms - the end of
censorship, sexual freedom, homosexual law reform, flower power, cheap air
travel, and invitations to literary festivals all over the world. (Feminism was
not yet on the agenda, but that is another issue.) Writers were beginning to
enjoy themselves, and to flaunt themselves in public before audiences of
thousands. Edinburgh then or now would not have been George Orwell's scene at
all, and elder statesman J.B.Priestley, though by no means averse to publicity
on his own terms, had given the whole affair a wide berth, and congratulated
himself on having done so.
The
success of this Edinburgh literary event was followed by other Edinburgh
literary occasions, at one of which a naked lady was wheeled across the stage in
a wheelbarrow - an event considered shocking in its day as Puppetry of the Penis
was the year before last - and by the proliferation of festivals round the land
and the world - in Cheltenham, Hay-on-Wye, Toronto, Adelaide, Ewell and Ilkley.
(Cheltenham in fact pre-dated Edinburgh, but began as a more genteel and smaller
scale affair.) Performance poetry, pioneered in this country by the
entrepreneurial Oxford-educated poet Michael Horovitz, achieved mass recognition
at the celebrated occasion in June 1965 when poets and their listeners filled
the Albert Hall to capacity. Underground poets, jazz poets, Liverpool poets, and
protest poets were swept along on a powerful tide of publicity in the wake of
the Beatles. Some poets demurred - Philip Larkin, for reasons we may explore
later, preferred the silence and shelter of the library to the public arena -
but most seized avidly upon the chance of expanding income, sales and territory.
Poets were tired of staying politely at home in discreet unmoving Movement
bedsitting rooms and basement flats. They wanted a bit of the action, and so
they created it for themselves. By the 1970s, poetry readings were no longer
inward-looking, minority, semi-private occasions - they had become part of the
job of being a poet. Poets were expected by their publishers to tour, and most
of them hit the trail with enthusiasm. They developed public personae and public
performance skills. They chanted and wailed and intoned, and eventually they
took to dread, beat and blood. They wrote poems for incantation, they got to
know their audiences, they played to the gallery. And where poets went, the
novelists were soon to follow.
I
blame my hero Angus Wilson for what happened next. He had been a willing and
enthusiastic part of the Edinburgh circus, flamboyantly dressed in striped shirt
and turquoise tie, and he began to see all sorts of opportunities for writers in
a wider world than that of the British Museum Reading Room where he had begun
his own literary career - though he had managed to make himself quite noticeable
there. (For a librarian, he had been very noisy: he did not seem to consider
that the Rule of Silence in the Reading Room applied to him.) In 1968 he became
Chair of the Literature Panel of the Arts Council, and the following year, at
the suggestion of panellist, novelist, playwright and wit Julian Mitchell, he
initiated the scheme of Writers' Tours, which took small groups of mixed writers
to the regions, where they entertained local audiences and one another with
public readings and discussions.
This,
as far as I can recall, was the first organised attempt to put prose writers on
the road, and I amongst others welcomed it as I embarked on the first tour to
icy North Wales in March 1969. Such a tour paid one a small and very welcome
fee, it took one out of the house for five days, it provided agreeable
intellectual company for five days (and in my case introduced me to a true and
lifelong friend). It gave one a chance to see a new part of the country, it
introduced one to potential readers and new material, and it gave one a snapshot
of the educational structure of a whole region. Some writers hated these
excursions - Shiva Naipaul for one was appalled by life in the provinces and
what seems to have been his first encounter with suburbia - but most found them
revealing and convivial.
The
Writers' Tour was not, one should emphasise, a marketing exercise. These tours
were not primarily intended to sell books. Writers did not travel with boxes of
books, and tours were not tied to the promotion of new titles. Those were
innocent days, when we believed in education and cultural diffusion. And,
significantly, these tours had, as I remember, a group spirit, a sense of group
commitment. Writers were not vying then, as they tend to do now, for centre
stage, or for top billing. There was no star system in operation - indeed, one
of the original intentions was to compose a travelling group of varied and
complementary rather than of conflicting or rival talents.
It
was not Angus's fault that his laudable desire to provide contact points between
reader and writer should have encouraged the development of the travelling
salesman approach to literature and literary festivals. But, ironically, I
believe it did.
Angus
Wilson himself was renowned as a witty speaker both off stage and on stage. He
was a brilliant lecturer, with, as one of his admirers on a British Council tour
of India exclaimed, ‘the true gift of the gab'. Listening to him when I was
younger, I always thought that the wit was effortless. He preferred to lecture
from notes rather than from a written text, and would risk this even in high
profile occasions with vast audiences - in 1961 he had given the Northcliffe
lectures, a series of four lectures on the subject of ‘Evil in the Novel' at
London University, to immense acclaim and an overflowing auditorium, and when
asked by his publisher Fred Warburg for a typescript, with a view to book
publication, he replied ‘What typescript? I have no typescript'. Which was true.
(He had already run into difficulties with the text of his largely
autobiographical and ground-breaking Ewing lectures, delivered with panache in
California in October 1960 - he was dismayed to learn that these had to be
published, and it took him some time to produce the text of The Wild
Garden, eventually published in 1963.)
I
had thought, as I said, that Angus Wilson enjoyed lecturing, and I think, at
times, he did. But I learned, when writing his biography, that he also found it
intensely stressful and exhausting. Friends tended to make fun of him when he
said that he found public speaking and being entertaining to strangers very
tiring, but he was speaking no less than the truth. One of the saddest notes in
his life came towards the end, when he and his partner Tony Garrett were living
at St Rémy in the South of France; Angus, now in his seventies, and with
insufficient financial security to retire comfortably, was suffering from
hydrocephalus and other disabling disorders. Tony says that Angus would
sometimes start up from his bed at night and collect a pile of papers, saying he
had to ‘go to give a lecture'. Tony would reassure him that there was no need,
that there was no lecture waiting to be delivered, and Angus would eventually
settle back to sleep.
This
story has haunted me, and must affect all of those who lecture and have lecture
nightmares - and can there be any who lecture who do not? I could even say that
this story of Tony's accounts for why this will be my last lecture. I cannot go
on living with these recurrent nightmares in which I arrive in a university
town, usually in the USA, to be told I am billed to lecture on something quite
unexpected - The Electra Syndrome in the Novels of Jane Austen was one of
the more recent of these, and I had, in my sleep, composed several stirring,
desperate and almost applicable sentences before I woke from my horror, and
remembered that my real title was Jane Austen and My father: Paternal
Authority in the Novels of Jane Austen, and that I had already written it,
and that it wasn't too bad. After this final address, I hope to sleep more
peacefully.
This
edges me towards the next aspect of my theme: and this is the challenge of
public speaking and giving public readings for those who have speech - or
indeed, I am told, hearing - difficulties. I do realise that I am jumbling up
here many aspects of speaking under the general heading of ‘Public Speech' -
poetry readings, prose readings, and bookshop readings are a very different
matter from the delivering of the Northcliffe lectures, or the Romanes lectures,
or the Gifford lectures, or the Reith lectures, and make very different demands
on the speaker. And I realise that no writer is obliged to do any public
speaking at all - indeed, is lucky ever to be asked. I do know that.
Nevertheless, the ability to speak fluently is a great asset in a literary
career, and one much prized by publishers and publicists. Nevertheless, many of
us find ourselves pressured or flattered or cajoled into making speeches against
our better judgement, and may have found ourselves in the position of Iris
Murdoch, who said to me once that she wished she'd never agreed to give the
Gifford lectures - she was at that time trying to write them and she said she
had found she had absolutely nothing new to say. No doubt she triumphantly
overcome this mood of despondency, but I believe we all know that mood. And if
we do not, maybe we are the less for it.
One
of the problems connected with the growth of the literary circuit and the
expansion of the book tour is that writers have become disorientated, like the
protagonists of recent novels by Amis and Ishiguro. We no longer know where we
are or what is expected of us. Are we intellectuals, jesters, stand-up comics,
artists, artistes? Are we meant to be giving an update on the reputation
of Derrida, or to be making people laugh? (Only the most brilliant, like the
late Malcom Bradbury, could do both at once.) Such random invitations come our
way - we may find ourselves sandwiched between a sports star and a duchess at a
literary lunch, or stranded alone behind a podium in a three-quarters empty
auditorium , or speaking to a select audience of three ladies and a dog in a
friendly bookshop. We are offered fees ranging from ‘zero and bring your own
refreshments', through fifty pounds and five hundred pounds to five thousand
pounds and more - no wonder most of us hate letters of invitation saying ‘State
your Fee'. We are not Mrs Thatcher nor Bill Clinton, nor Nick Leason, nor were
meant to be. We do not know what we owe our publishers, and are frightened to
say no. For some, the circus element has replaced the central activity - in a
fleeting visit to one of the best funded creative writing schools in the world I
met young people who seriously discussed how they would stand up to the stress
of a book tour before they had even written a book, let alone had one accepted
for publication. In Canada this spring - yes, at a festival - I met a successful
young writer who had been completely confused by the demands of her publicist.
Her first novel involved an undertaker, and she had been asked to pose as a
corpse in a coffin. Should she have said no? Was it demeaning to agree to go for
the photo opportunity? As I tried to assure her in my elder statesman way that
she had the right to say no, I recalled that a press photographer once long ago
asked me to jump off the top of a heaped pile of copies of the Oxford
Companion to English Literature. And I did it. Moreover, it was rather a
good photo - I was laughing wildly as I jumped, and the expression on my face
summed up the happy relief of having finished - at least temporarily - with that
demanding volume.
Speaking
is worse than being photographed. I was not cut out by my natural talents to be
a lecturer or a public speaker. From an early age – the age of three, I am told
- I suffered from a stammer, at times severe, though now very episodic and
temperamental. So I could take the line that both Arnold Bennett and Somerset
Maugham took when asked to speak in public, at after-dinner gatherings, or to
literary societies. Both were severe stammerers, and both insisted that they
didn't speak, they wrote. I could argue, though disingenuously, that my
objections to the modern commercial literary circus spring from the fact that I
entered it with a handicap, and that I feel that, as a writer, that I am being
expected to display skills or abilities that I do not possess.
This
is where King George the Sixth comes back into the story. He, as you know,
inherited the throne in 1936 because of the abdication of his older brother
Edward - just as, coincidentally, King Charles the First, another royal
stammerer, became king through the death of his older brother Henry. George the
Sixth was not born to the crown, he had the crown and the burden of public
broadcasting unexpectedly thrust upon him. Bertie, as George the Sixth was
known, is recorded to have stammered from the age of six, and his biographer
Robert Lacey relates that ‘His brothers and sister were allowed to make fun of
his stammer, ragging him without mercy after the style set by his father's
quarter-deck chaff, and he withdrew still more tightly into himself.' (Centuries
earlier Prince Henry, we are told, had mocked his little brother Prince
Charles.) As a child Bertie was prone to bouts of self-pity and fits of
explosive rage: he was also bottom of the class. And he was naturally left
handed - what is known as ‘a misplaced sinister' - was this, some speculated,
according to a current theory, the cause of his problem? Unlike a writer, he was
not allowed to choose public silence. He had to speak. He struggled bravely,
but, despite the help of an Australian-born speech therapist called Lionel
Logue, he never overcame his dislike of public speaking, and especially of
broadcasting. He rehearsed everything with Logue and dreaded last minute
alterations to his text: the Sovereign's Speech afforded him an added difficulty
as it had to be delivered sitting, not standing. Occasionally, he was able to be
pleased with his efforts: in 1940, his diary records that his he was very
pleased with the way he delivered his speech on Empire Day - ‘it was easily my
best effort. How I hate broadcasting.'
Why
did he find it easier to speak standing than sitting? Why do some situations
make stammerers worse? Why do more men stammer than women? Why does anyone
stammer at all? Why does nobody know the answers to these questions?
I
don't think anyone has ever done a study of speech difficulties specific to
writers, though I do have a correspondent who collects books by writers who
stammer, and about characters who stammer. The list of orally challenged writers
is distinguished and includes, arguably, Demosthenes and Virgil and Claudius and
Caedmon, and with more verification, Camille Desmoulins, Charles Lamb, Henry
James, Somerset Maugham, Arnold Bennett, Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Larkin, and
John Updike. Several interesting questions arise, at least to my mind. Did any
of these take to texte because of their difficulties with parole? Was
their literary style affected by the nature of their impediment? Why did or do
some of them avoid public situations, while others seek them? Do writers stammer
more when they speak in bad faith, or when they speak with sincerity, and does
the self-knowledge imparted by these warning signals affect what they write and
how they write it? Or what they think, and how they think it? Are you more or
less likely to think in the words you cannot speak?
Doris
Lessing's protagonist Anna Wulf, in The Golden Notebook, gives up
lecturing on art for the Communist Party because she finds herself in bad faith:
her set lecture takes a Marxist line about the individual and group
consciousness, and she says ‘About three months ago, in the middle of this
lecture, I began to stammer and couldn't finish. I have not given any more
lectures. I know what that stammer means.' (The Blue Notebook, p. 299 )
Real-life habitual stammerers may be less clear about what their stammer means,
in general, or in its specific manifestations. John Updike has written in his
Memoirs (Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, 1989: Chapter iii, ‘Getting the
Words Out') with much feeling about his own impediment, to which he bravely
adopts the ‘blessing-in-disguise' attitude - it has saved him, he says, from
many unwanted public engagements. But not from all - ‘It happens when I feel
myself in a false position. My worst recent public collapse, that I can bear to
remember, came at a May meeting of the august American Academy and Institute of
Arts and Letters, when I tried to read a number of award citations - hefty and
bloated, as citations tend to be - that I had not written. I could scarcely push
and batter my way through the politic words, and a woman in the audience loudly
laughed, as if I were doing ‘an act'.
This
incident might seem to endorse Anna Wulf's ‘Bad Faith' self - interpretation,
but Updike also offers apparently contradictory interpretations - he says that
fear, even of an electrician on the telephone, activates the defect in his
speech, but that anger tends to cancel it. He says ‘some hasty wish to please'
often betrays his flow of speech - yet claims that his speech eases ‘when I feel
I am already somewhat known and forgiven.' ‘I stutter', he says, ‘when I am "in
the wrong"' - but he puts the phrase "in the wrong" in inverted commas.
Conclusively, he claims that ‘The paralysis of stuttering stems from the dead
center of one's being, a deep doubt there.'
Fear,
bad faith, doubt, a sense of social inferiority? All these he suggests as
possible interpretations.
Billy
Budd was killed not by insincerity or uncertainty but by a fatal inborn
hesitation, followed by a fatal impulse.
Speaking
for myself, on a more frivolous level, I know that my broadcasting and lecturing
style, if not my prose style, has been curiously affected by my choice of
vocabulary. Like most stammerers, I know that there are some words with which I
am almost certain to have difficulty. On innumerable occasions I have
substituted the phrase ‘US' for ‘America' or ‘TV' for ‘television'. This is
clumsy and inelegant, but not disastrous. More problematic is the need to say
‘lady' instead of ‘woman' - this understandably causes offence and lands one in
a pit of political incorrectness. Then there is the problem, when broadcasting -
to confess to one's producer, or not to confess? To conceal and to remain in
denial, or to tell all in advance? When doing Desert Island Discs
recently, Sue Lawley was trying to corner me into saying that I had been
introduced listening to my chosen Brahms serenade while in Venice, as she knew
perfectly well from her researcher's notes that I had, but I simply couldn't get
that beautiful word out. Circumlocution followed circumlocution-‘ in Italy, by
the canal, in the home of the Doges, in the Bruges of the South, in Toni
Ballerin's great aunt's flat' - these substitute phrases all sprang to mind and
to my lips - and of course in reality it didn't matter what a mess I made of the
word, because the BBC can always edit the tape, cut off the hesitations and
stumblings, and make it sound fine. As the BBC could have done, now, on most
occasions, for George the Sixth. (Though there is a moral dilemma here - is it
right to adjust and mechanically to perfect one's defective speech? Is it an act
of denial, an act of betrayal? Is it worse than airbrushing out one's wrinkles?)
Henry
James was a master of circumlocution and elaboration and paraphrase. Did his
baroque speech infect his prose, or was it the other way round? I don't know the
answer to that.
Live
speaking on or off the air is different from broadcasting from a studio with a
technical safety net. One might assume, from what I have been saying, that
people like myself should avoid live public speech at all costs - but this
brings me to one of the most surprising aspects of this whole tangled speech
business. And this is the fact that many people who stammer seem actively drawn
to public speech, and some of them are very good at it. When I first started
planning this lecture, many months ago, I think I was going to try to take a
self-pitying line, so that you would all feel sorry for me and let me go - ‘how
long have I struggled, and how bravely', this would have been my line. But last
summer I met someone who undermined the possibility of this feeble approach. In
June, I taught for two weeks on the island of Skyros, in a holistic health and
holiday centre established twenty years ago by Dina Glouberman, whom I met there
for the first time. Dina also stammers, and had clearly, as a therapist, thought
deeply about the issue. In July, she sent me an email full of interesting
suggestions, which contained this key passage: ‘Stammerers tend to have high
expectations and do jobs that require them to speak in public, which you would
have thought they'd have avoided - also they tend to have a strong Hurry Up
driver inside .I remember a description of a stammerer driving, and getting
nervous about the person in the back and wanting to go faster, and so getting in
a mess and finally causing an accident.'
Yes,
I thought, yes. Dina Glouberman is right. We are not all passive victims who
have public speaking thrust upon us by a maniacally fluent Angus Wilson hero
figure - some of us actively and somewhat perversely seek situations which we
know will create difficulties for us. There are some powerful illustrations of
this. Hilary Mantel, in her fine novel of the French revolution, A Place of
Greater Safety, gives an impressive portrait of the journalist, orator and
demagogue, Camille Desmoulins, who, according to her suggestion, may have needed
to reach a certain pitch of excitement before he became fluent. His handicap
spurred him on - to his death, you could argue. In this passage, Danton reflects
on his friend Camille's speech pattern; ‘In the old days, [Camille] claimed that
his stutter was a complete obstacle to successful pleading. Of course, when one
is used to it, it might discomfit, irritate or embarrass. But Hérault has
pointed out that Camille has wrung some extraordinary verdicts from distraught
judges. Certainly I have observed that Camille's stutter comes and goes. It goes
when he is angry or wishes forcibly to make a point; it comes when he feels put
upon, and when he wishes to show people that he is in fact a nice person who is
really not quite able to cope...''(p.402) And here is Camille himself, at the
Jacobins: ‘When the time come he will make his way slowly towards the tribune,
because patriots will step out of their places to embrace him, and from the dark
parts of the gallery where the sansculottes gather there will be applause and
coarse shouts of encouragement. Then silence; and as he begins, thinking
carefully ahead so that he can control any tendency to stutter, so that he can
circumvent words and pluck them out and slot in others, he will be thinking, no
wonder this business is such a bloody mess, no one ever knows what anyone else
is saying. No one knew at Versailles; no one knows now; when we are dead and a
few years have passed they will grow tired of trying to hear us, they will say,
what does it matter? We have elected our own place in the silences of history,
with out weak lungs and our speech impediments and our rooms that were designed
for something else.' (p.651-2)
Nearer
home, and less dramatically, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, (who could not
pronounce the word ‘Mother', her own mother having died when she was thirteen),
nevertheless loved the telephone, which many stammerers avoid, and enjoyed
lecturing for the British Council and the BBC on milder subjects such as
landscape and literature. The British Council in an internal memo (1950)
described her as ‘a most successful lecturer with a most successful stammer'
‘not at all disturbing…endearing rather than distracting' (V. Glendinning,
1977). Those were gentle days.
A
more energetic example of wilful speaking may be found in the form of Jonathan
Miller, one of the best, most fluent, wittiest and most sought after public
speakers of our time. He is a dazzling performer, after the Cambridge manner -
he tends to end each lecture not with a conclusion but with a query or even with
an unfinished sentence, as Dr Leavis used to do. His technique is superb, but
how much of his eloquence springs from avoidance? When a bad word looms, find
twenty other better ones to take its place - that seems to be his highly
successful solution. Yet even he can get into difficulties. He admits to being
forced on occasion to omit from certain discourses names or titles which would
illustrate his point because they begin, inconveniently, with impossible
consonants. You can't improvise or substitute a name - or only up to a point.
(Jonathan, I might add, is, like me, a co-patron of the British Stammering
Association, which is represented here this evening.) Interestingly, Jonathan
Miller seems to be much happier with parole than with text - he has published a
fair amount of text in his time, but most of it is image or speech related, and
his books tend to be heavily illustrated.
My
final example of a writer who at least initially sought an apparently unsuitable
occupation is that of Mrs Elizabeth Inchbald, novelist, playwright, translator,
adapter and editor of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. She
wanted to be an actress, and clearly had talent as well as beauty, but some kind
of rather vaguely documented speech impediment (as well as some amorous
complications) checked her professional advancement, and she took, instead, to a
highly successful career as a lady of letters. Her good-natured comedies, in
which the foolishly generous tend to redeem the mean, show a sweetness of
spirit, and her novels are still in print and still readable. But what was it
that drew her, in the first place, to the stage? Was it her beauty? Was it her
wit? Was it simply a passionate desire to get out of Stanningfield in Suffolk,
and to escape from the restrictions of her life as one of the many children of a
farmer? She was something of an adventurer, before she settled down to a life of
hard working and respectable author: she would make a good subject for a
historical novelist.
And
what made her stammer in the first place? What makes anyone stammer?
Left-handedness falsely corrected, overweening ambition, muddled brain
hemispheres, stress, or a weakness in the speech production mechanism? I repeat,
nobody knows. Stammering has reasonably been called ‘the most complex
disorganisation of functioning in the field of medicine and psychiatry'. When I
asked an analyst for suggestions as to causes, she said that maybe it was a way
of drawing attention to myself and to what I had to say. Oh yes, came my
immediate (though silent) angry reaction - like a club foot, or a hare lip, or
an unsightly birthmark are ways of drawing attention to one's appearance? The
last thing a stammerer wants to do is to stammer, and Somerset Maugham quite
legitimately, in Of Human Bondage, handicapped his hero Philip with a
clubfoot instead of a stammer. (Though it has to be said that clubfeet are more
romantic and Byronic than speech impediments.)
On
cooler reflection, however, I very reluctantly concede that this analyst may
have had some kind of a point. A stammer is not a physical disability, nor even
a motor disfunction, and that is that. All those cruel experiments with vocal
cords and the slitting of tongues and the binding of left hands were a total
waste of time. The nice elocution lessons I went to as a child in Sheffield were
largely a waste of time, though I did learn some good poetry through them. The
problem – and it is a problem, not a blessing in disguise, for most of us -
remains a mystery. Maybe there is, in some of us, a deep confusion between the
need for attention, and the means of obtaining it. A birthmark is a physical
accident, and we carry it from birth, and from before birth. But speech is
learned, and we do not stammer in the womb.
I
have mentioned the British Stammering Association, which campaigns to improve
awareness of speech difficulties in schools and in the work place, and would
like to conclude by drawing our attention to the current expectations of fluency
in the National Curriculum - expectations which, if articulated, would certainly
have made life even more taxing for a child like myself. Of course it is
desirable for children to be able to express themselves with confidence and
fluency, but, for some, this is simply not a realisable goal. Those who place
‘an unthinking emphasis on oracy' - I borrow that phrase from Cherry Hughes, the
Education Officer of the BSA - simply do not know and cannot imagine what it is
like to open your mouth, and not to know what, if any, sound will issue forth.
One may long to be able to speak fluently - one may even long to be asked to
read aloud in class - but one may not be able to do it. There are many
horror stories of children in school being bullied not by fellow pupils only,
but by teachers - ‘pull yourself together, speak clearly, don't mumble' are not
very helpful injunctions to a small child, and they would not have been very
helpful to the adult George the Sixth. Children suffer torments through their
disability, and employ immense ingenuity in trying to outwit themselves. Some
speak better standing, some sitting: some are more fluent if they slow down,
whereas others need to get a running jump at words they dislike. Some achieve a
measure of security by rehearsing endlessly, others are better if taken by
surprise by words on the page.
Some
substitute, some avoid, some deny, some improvise. All would be daunted the Key
Stage Three speaking requirements of the National Curriculum, which are listed
thus:
The
teacher should ensure that pupils can speak fluently and appropriately in
different contexts, adapting their talk for a range of purposes and audiences,
including the more formal. To this end, pupils should be taught to
structure their talk clearly,
using markers so that their listeners can follow the line of thought
use illustrations, evidence and
anecdote to enrich and explain their ideas use gesture, tone, pace and rhetorical
devices for emphasis use visual aids and images to enhance
communication vary
word choices, including technical vocabulary, and sentence structure for
different audiences use spoken standard English fluently in
different contexts evaluate the effectiveness of their speech
and consider how to adapt it to a range of situations.
And
all this, one is meant to achieve by the age of fourteen. This
speaking by numbers or letters would have been beyond me then, and is beyond me
now. I have been struggling for more than forty years to express myself, and I
am secretly hoping that this public declaration of public silence will unlock my
throat, so that, at least in private, I will be safe at last - but if it
doesn't, who cares? I have nothing to lose. Never again will I have to worry
about lecture titles, or interactive sound systems, or microphones, or missing
aeroplanes, or missing audiences, or the lack of visual aids or literary jokes
to enhance my argument.
I
intend to end this lecture with a quotation - with a striking, portentous,
pretentious, and somewhat mystifying quotation from Nietzsche. It is always a
good idea to know how to end a lecture - unless, of course, one is Jonathan
Miller. And a quotation makes a good ending. One of the ironies of my speaking
life is that I actually speak better - as did Angus Wilson - from notes, without
a text, but as I have grown older, the anxiety of doing this has increased, and
has made me speak worse. Hence this text, and this concluding quotation.
I
found this quotation in a very good little book from the BSA library, by the
prolific writer David Compton, who says his attention was directed to it by a
friend in Devon. I hand it on, in turn. (Stammering: Its Nature, History,
Causes and Cures. 1993) Compton says that although Nietzsche presents this
episode as a riddle - it seems to have been associated with the death of his
father - any stammerer will know what he means by it. Here it is. It is from
Thus Spake Zarathustra, in the translation by Alexander Tille:
And verily, the sight I saw, its like I
had never seen. I saw a young Shepherd, writhing, choking, quivering, with face
distorted, from whose mouth a black and heavy snake hung down.
Saw
I ever so much loathing and wan horror in one face? My hand tore at the serpent
and tore - in vain! I could not tear the serpent from his throat. Then a voice
within me cried: Bite! Bite!
Bite
off its head! Bite! - thus cried the voice of my horror, my hate, my loathing,
my pity, all the good and evil in me cried out…
The
Shepherd bit, as my cry counselled him: he bit with all his strength! He spat
the snake's head far from him - then sprang up, no longer a shepherd, no longer
a man, but one transfigured, light-encompassed, one that laughed!
Copyright
Margaret Drabble, October 2001
------------------------------------------------------------------------
3.- USING DRAMA FOR
PRONUNCIATION PRACTICE (2nd ROUND)
Our dear SHARER
Ken Wilson has sent us this letter with reference to the article “Using Drama
for Pronunciation Practice” by Dr Gray Carkin that we published in SHARE 129.
Dear Omar and
gang,
Thanks for
another sparkling and interesting SHARE. I was interested to read Gray Carkin's
piece about Drama for Pronunciation Practice, and even more interested to note
that he has been using sketches from our book of English Teaching Theatre
sketches “Off-Stage” as his base material.
In the article,
he states correctly that “Off-Stage” is out of print. However, almost all (23
out of 25) the sketches from “Off-Stage” and the follow-up book “Further
Off-Stage”, plus an additional nine sketches, are available in two more recent
publications, “English Sketches” 1 and 2, published by Macmillan.
I would
appreciate it if you could let your readers know about
this.
Keep up the
Good Work!
Best
wishes,
Ken
Wilson
Director
- English Teaching Theatre
----------------------------------------------------------
4.- 30th
ANNIVERSARY OF INSPT- UTN CONFERENCE.
On
Saturday 16th of October 2004, the Instituto Nacional Superior del
Profesorado Técnico de la Universidad Tecnológica Nacional will celebrate its
30th Anniversary with a Professional Development Conference “30 Years Shaping
the Future of ELT in Argentina”.
The
Conference will consist of 50 workshops and 5 semi-plenary presentations
organized according to the following schedule:
08:00 - 09:30
Registration.
09:30 - 10:00
Opening Cremony
10:00
- 11:00 Semi-plenary
and 10 workshops.
11:00 - 11:30 Coffee
Break
11:30
- 12:30
Semi-plenary and 10 workshops.
12:30
- 13:00
Commercial Presentations
13:00
- 14:30 Lunch
Break
14:30
- 15:30 Semi-plenary
and 10 workshops.
15:30 - 16:00
Coffee Break
16:00
- 17:00
Semi-plenary and 10 workshops.
17:00 - 17:30
Coffee Break
17:30
- 18:30
Semi-plenary and 10 workshops.
18:30 - 19:00
Certificates
19:00
– 21:00
Farewell Cocktail
Mega-raffle.
A
large number of National Universities as well as professional organizations and
other institutions will sponsor the event. The commercial sponsors include the
major publishers,
examination
boards and other companies offering services allied to
ELT.
The
list of plenary speakers and workshop leaders includes some of the best
well-known and liked names in ELT in our country. Notably, among them Prof. Alfredo Jaeger, former Head of the
English Section. The complete list will be published shortly.
Fees:
(first enrolment)
INSPT-
UTN graduates: $ 15
INSPT-
UTN students: $
10
All
others: $ 20
For
additional information, write to: omarvillarreal@speedy.com.ar
------------------------------------------------------------
5.- XVIII
ARTESOL CONVENTION
Our
dear SHARER Mabel Gallo has an announcement to make:
XVIII ARTESOL Convention
Expanding our Professional Role
At
Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, Universidad de Buenos
Aires
Puan
470, Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
Friday,
July 16 - Saturday, July 17,
2004
Friday,
July 16
08.30
Registration
09.00
- 10.15
Opening Plenary:
Martha Grace Low
Letting
Your Precepts Guide Your Teaching
10.30 - 11.45 Concurrent
Sessions. Demonstrations / Workshops
11.45
- 12.15 coffee
break
12.15
- 13.00
Commercial Presentations. Publishers
13.00
- 14.15
lunch break
14.30
- 15.45
Concurrent Sessions. Demonstrations / Workshops
15.45
- 16.30 Plenary
Session: The
US Educational System
16.30
- 17.00 coffee
break
17.00
-
18.15 Plenary Session:
Martha Grace Low
Basing
Writing Rubrics on Actual Student Writing
Saturday,
July 17
08.30
Registration
09.00 - 10.15 Concurrent
Sessions. Demonstrations / Workshops
10.15
- 10.45 coffee
break
10.45
- 11.15 Plenary
Session: TESOL
Matters
11.15
- 12.45 Plenary
Session:
Martha Grace Low
Leadership
Development for ESOL Professionals- Part 1
12.45
- 14.00 lunch break
14.00
- 15.15 Plenary
Session:
Martha Grace Low
Leadership
Development for ESOL Professionals - Part 2
15.15
- 16.00
Conclusions / Closing
Registration
fees: Convention $20
Convention
+ ARTESOL Membership $
25
Please
e-mail: artesol@bcl.edu.ar or Call (11)
5382-1554
Plenary
Abstracts.
Speaker:
Grace Martha Low
Friday,
July 16
Letting
Your Precepts Drive Your Teaching
What
drives the courses that we teach?
Our
teaching can be transformed if we base it on the precepts that we really believe
rather than simply working through the textbook. The presenter will give
examples of such precepts and explain how they can be applied to any
course.
Friday,
July 16
Basing
Writing Rubrics on Actual Student Writing
A
writing placement rubric is most effective if based on features that appear in
actual student work rather than on a teacher´s intuitions of such features.
Creating such a rubric is a satisfying and sometimes surprising project. The
distinctions along the continuum in given categories (development, vocabulary,
grammar, general comprehensibility) sometimes run counter to
intuition.
Saturday,
July 17
Leadership
Development for ESOL Professionals, Part One:
Discovering
the Leader in You
Is it
true that there is a hidden leader in everyone? How can you tap into your own
unique qualities and discover your potential for leadership? The presenter will
discuss principles of effective leadership, models of leadership, and
applications that all participants can find useful and satisfying.
Saturday,
July 17
Leadership
Development for ESOL Professionals, Part Two:
The
Busy Leader
Many
of us would like to contribute more to our workplace and our profession, but we
feel we just do not have the time. How can busy leaders manage our time, build
teams, and bring out the best in others? This presentation will offer
guidelines, models, and applications that everyone can
use.
------------------------------------------------------------
6.- WINTER
COURSE: EXPANDING YOUR HORIZONS
TOOLS FOR TEACHERS announces its
winter course called Expanding your
Horizons on July 19 and 20, 2004 as indicated below preceded by
a one day meeting called Minding the Body, Minding
the Soul. Details below:
Monday
July 19
10:00 to 13:00 Correcting Errors: a different
perspective
In this session we will quickly
review how attitudes towards errors have changed over the past twenty years,
fundamentally from a psycholinguistic point of view. We will then proceed
to present a humanistic pespective
which
is applicable not only in language teaching/learning, but in the whole spectrum
of education and in the art of living.
14:00 to 17:30 Visualize to Learn
Visualization can be put to good
use not only to learn vocabulary items or grammatical structures, but also to
provide opportunities for developing oral and writing skills. It can also be
used to introduce reading texts and for review purposes. Over and above that, it
can be used to assist students in setting outcomes and developing
self-confidence. This practical session will tell you
how.
Tuesday, July
20
10:00 to 13:00 Empowering students to become better
learners
To empower someone means to
enable him/her to achieve his objectives. We will touch upon the role of
beliefs, language, and anchors, among others which limit or facilitate
the blossoming of the students' talents.
14:00 to
17:00 Colloquial
English as heard on TV sit coms
Short of actually living in a
country where English is spoken and mixing with native speakers, sit coms
(comedies) are an invaluable source for the study of colloquial and idiomatic
English. We will review a number of lexical items usually heard on TV series and
discuss their meanings and levels of style.
In
this session Oriel will be assisted by a native speaker of
English.
All sessions will be held at
SBS, Coronel Diaz 1747, Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Vacancies are limited and are on first come, first served basis.
Admission fee for each session is $20.
Three sessions are $50 and all four sessions $60. To ensure a seat, register in
advance at any of the SBS bookshops (addresses at www.sbs.com.ar).
Sunday, July 18 from 10 to
17:00
Minding the Body,
Minding the Soul, from 10:00 to
17:00
A unique opportunity to engage
in personal growth through meditation, yoga assanas, chi kung exercises,
meditation and touching as a way of
healing.
For the yoga asanas, Oriel will
be assisted by Sonia Dalio,
certified yoga
teacher.
Venue for this session to be
announced. Admision fee: $ 30.
All sessions are given by
Oriel E. Villagarcia,
M.A.
in Linguistics for English Language Teaching, University of
Lancaster, Master Practitioner of NLP, Certificate of Completion, NLP
University, Santa Cruz, California, Certified Administrator of the MBTI,
Florida, Certified Practitioner of Breema, Oakland, California, Fulbright and
British Council Scholar. Oriel has taught at the Catholic University of Salta,
National University of Rio Cuarto and National University of Santiago del Estero
and is co-founder of ASPI (Asocociación Salteña de
Profesores de Inglés) and FAAPI (Federación Argentina de Asociaciones de
Profesores de Inglés).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
7-
DR.
DAVID EMBICK IN BUENOS AIRES
Estimados
colegas,
Queremos
informarles que el Dr. David Embick, University of Pennsylvania, dictará un
seminario de doctorado en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UBA, los
días 26, 27, 29, 30 de julio y 2, 3, 5, 6 de agosto de 2004, en el
horario de 15 a 18 hs. El seminario "Morfología Distribuida" será
dictado en inglés y tendrá una carga horaria de 25 horas.
Adjuntamos
el programa con los contenidos y la bibliografía inicial.
Sugerimos
realizar la inscripción antes del 1º de julio en el edificio de
Posgrado de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Puán 430). Cualquier información
adicional pueden contactarse con esta dirección o con posgrado40@hotmail.com
Cordialmente,
Moira
Alvarez
------------------------------------------------------------
8.- OMAR
IN PARAGUAY FOR PARATESOL 2004
It is a pleasure for us to announce that
Omar has been invited by the PARATESOL Committee to give two plenary
presentations at the next PARATESOL Convention on July 22nd aan
23rd at the Centro Cultural Paraguayo-Norteamericano (CCPA) in
Asunción del Paraguay:
Plenaries by Lic.
Omar
Villarreal – Universidad
Tecnológica Nacional- Argentina
Let the Sun of
Learning shine in !!
Let the
enchanting words of a poem, the magic of your students' smiles as they put their
English "on stage", the energy of movement and the bewitching effect of music
bring a gust of fresh air into your classroom...Let the sun of learning shine in
!
In this
presentation, Professor Villarreal will share with you a bagful of ready-made
activities you can use with your students (ages 9 through 15 ) as from the next
Monday morning after PARATESOL to make your lessons enjoyable and
memorable.
A
Chicken without bones or the use of magic in ELT.
We all want our students to
communicate. We all want our students to be flexible and fluent in their actual
“use” of the language but we often
shy away from grammar, or we believe in the magic of “grammar boxes” and
“grammar summaries” strategically placed at the end of the book.
After all, we have been told once and again that “while we focus on
communication, grammar will take care of itself”. But will it? If it won´t, how much grammar should we
teach and how? Should we start writing grammar with a capital “G” again?
For
more information on the PARATESOL Convention, contact:
Mr.
Eduardo Olivieri
Telephone:
595-21-224-831 Ext. 124 - 595-21-224-772 Ext. 218
595-961-636-599
- Fax: 595-21-214-544
------------------------------------------------------------
9.- IMMERSION COURSE IN
SAN LUIS
Our
dear SHARER Laurie Sullivan from S & F has an invitation for all
SHARERS:
S
& F Teaching Resources
6th,
7th and 8th of August 2004
Special
Immersion Course for Teachers and Advanced Students of
English
In
response to many requests from teachers and institutes, we are organizing a
special immersion course of 3 days for teachers and students of English in
Merlo, San Luis.
The
idea is to provide the opportunity not only to practise English at the advanced
level which we need for our professional development, but also to examine the
methodological approach needed for our students.
Every
class or activity in this course, has these two aims in view, and the programme
has been designed to provide you with the chance to develop linguistically and
professionally, while enriching your cultural and academic attainment.
Programme
Friday
6th August
8.30 Words of welcome,
introduction, and organization of groups.
9.00 Keep on Talking. Using contemporary texts from magazines,
newspapers or internet we will be looking for meaning, and ways of expressing
our ideas fluently and coherently.
Then, we will be asking ourselves how we can apply our difficulties and
successes to the needs of our students at their different levels.
10.30 Break.
11.00 Is Writing Always Boring ? While it certainly can be, both to teach
and to learn. In this class, we
will be trying out our own writing skills, some new ideas, and inter-changing
opinions.
12.30 Break.
13.00 Lunch.
14.00 Excursion in English. Trip to the top of the mountains,
passing through the tourist attractions of El Rincón, Mirador del Sol and
Mirador de los Cóndores. The
language of this excursion is strictly English, both for you and for
us.
15.30 Once we have arrived at the top and you
have recovered your breath, we will be playing the first of the Great English
Fun Games, with spectacular prizes for the winners. Participation is certainly not optional.
17.30 Tea-time. Chatting, conversation and comments.
19.00 Arrival in
Merlo.
Saturday
7th August
9.00 The Whys, the Hows and
the Whats of Grammar. We will be
running over the rather nastier parts of English grammar, brushing up your
knowledge and looking at the methodology we need to do the same for our
students.
10.30 Break.
11.00 The Misabuse of English. Learning grammar is one thing, learning
the correct use of English is quite another.
12.30 Break.
13.00 Lunch.
14.00 Excursion in English. Trip to the San Ignacio Waterfall. The language of this excursion, once
again, is strictly English, both for you and for us and you will be expected to
prepare yourselves for the ...
15.30 Second of the Great English Fun
Games , with more spectacular prizes for the winners. Participation is certainly not optional
but at least this time you won't be on your own !
17.00 Picnic Tea-time. Chatting, conversation and comments, or
profound silence if you prefer.
19.00
Arrival in
Merlo.
Sunday
8th August
9.00 Are you
listening?. And, more important,
are they listening? Some listening
comprehension exercises for you and a look at the methodology.
10.30 Break.
11.00 What? Sorry! Pardon! Idiomatic and colloquial English or to
put it in other words... a one-off chance to put some grease on the lingo of
Sexy Will and get street-wise.
12.30 Break.
13.00 Lunch.
14.00 Last Excursion in English. Your suffering is nearly over! Trip to Loma Bola. We don{t want to repeat ourselves, but
the language of this excursion is strictly English, both for you and for
us. This is so true, than unless
you speak English you get no scones, and your portion of chocolate cake goes to
the organizers.
15.00 Great English Fun Games , - yes,
again!, and again with more spectacular prizes for the winners. We won't tell you about participation
because by this time you should be brain-washed.
17.00 English Tea. Presentation of
Certificates.
19.30 Arrival in
Merlo.
Despite
the jocular tone of the programme, this course requires the linguistic skills of
a trained teacher of English or a student in their final year of the Teacher's
Training Course.
For
this course you will be provided with:
* 9
hours of intensive class tuition taught by a native
speaker.
* 10
hours of recreational activity in English.
* All
material needed for the course.
*
Certificate of attendance.
* Bed
and Breakfast (Residencial sharing
double rooms).
*
3-course lunch served in the place of lectures.
*
Excursion teas.
*
Transport for 3 excursions with guide.
Total Cost: $
210.-
For
groups of 3 or more coming from the same institution there will be a discount of
10% for each person. There are also discounts for those travelling by Empresa
Chevallier.
Inscription
in the course can be made by reservation only, accompanied by the payment of
$50.- for each person reserved.
For
further information and Registration, write to: Laurie
Sullivan
------------------------------------------------------------------------
10.-
ENGLISH – ARGENTINA : A NEW E-GROUP
Our dear SHARER and friend Douglas Andrew Town writes to
us:
Dear Omar,
Could you let SHARE
readers know about English Argentina? This is a Yahoo Group for people in
Argentina wishing to buy, sell, lend, borrow, swap or find books, magazines,
DVDs, etc. in English. Membership of this group is free. You can subscribe
following this link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/English-Argentina/
Since
you were one of the very first members of the group I thought you might want to
invite your SHARERS to join us. I'm sure both teachers and students will find it
useful.
Love to Marina and yourself
Douglas
--------------------------------------------------------------
11- THE TELL-TALE HEART
CRACKS UP!
Our dear SHARER Alfred Hopkins
writes to us:
These
aren't times to talk about killing people, but after all it has been a favorite
human sport since the dawn of history. In this case it's Poe's tale about a guy
who can't stand the look in his companion's eye. So what does he do? He cuts him
to pieces and shoves him under the rug. (How many things do we shove under the
rug?) Then he has something like a panic attack. Or perhaps it was guilt. So his
heart begins to pound so much that he thinks the poor victim is still
alive...the rest of the story you can see on July 7th...Oh, just to have a bit
more fun, this version takes a laugh at the whole idea. Black humor, you might
say:
"What
a Gag!
The
Tell-Tale Heart Cracks up!"
adapted
from "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe
Directed,
acted and retold by Mr. Alfred Seymour Hopkins
7.00
p.m. July 7th 2004 - Florida 141
2nd floor
Entrance
fee: $ 5
(Any
resemblance to reality is pure artistic coincidence!)
--------------------------------------------------------------------
12- SECOND ELT FAIR IN THE
WEST
Our dear
SHARER Cecilia Ramirez announces:
Hello
everyone!
I am
writing to you in order to inform you that the Second ELT Fair in the West will
take place on Saturday , September 18th
from 9:30 to 17 hs in San Antonio de Padua.
The
idea is to give teachers and trainees ready-to-use ideas which can be
immediately applied in the classrooms.
Call
for Presentations is now open until July 15th.
There
will be several well- known presenters that will help you motivate yourself and
keep up-dated with the latest techniques.
Closing
Plenary: Games for a Reason.
The
use of games, stories, music and game-like activities for the development of
linguistic and communicative competence within a coherent and realistic EFL
programme.
Lic.
Omar Villarreal
Profesor
de Inglés e Inglés Técnico –Instituto Nacional Superior del Profesorado Técnico
de la UTN.
Licenciado
en Ciencias de la Educación con especialización en Educación Formal – Facultad
de Humanidades de la Universidad Católica de La Plata.
Licenciado
en Tecnología Educativa – FRA Universidad Tecnológica
Nacional.
Registration
is open.
Fee:
$20 ( until July 30th) - $ 30 ( after July 30th)
Vacancies
are limited. Don't miss this opportunity!!!
Contact
me for further details.
Cecilia
Ramirez de Ricci - CR ELT Services
TE:
0220 4859714
--------------------------------------------------------------------
13-
LICENCIATURA EN LA ENSEÑANZA DEL INGLÉS
La
Coordinación Académica de la Licenciatura en la Enseñanza del Inglés (Res.Min.
93/02) de la Universidad Católica de la Plata anuncia la apertura de la
inscripción de una nueva cohorte por comenzar en el segundo cuatrimestre de
2004. Habrá una charla informativa gratuita el Sábado 7 de Agosto a las 10:30 en
Facultad de Humanidades -UCALP- Calle
13 # 1227 - La Plata
Destinatarios
Podrán
realizar esta la carrera los profesores de Inglés con Títulos otorgados
por
Universidades
Nacionales, de Gestión Estatal o Privada.-Institutos de Enseñanza Superior no
Universitaria, de carrera de cuatro años de duración.
Alcances
profesionales de la Licenciatura
•
Realizar tareas de investigación en el campo de la Enseñanza del Inglés.
•
Realizar estudios y diagnósticos sobre distintos aspectos de la Enseñanza del
Inglés y sus impactos en la realidad social y educativa.
•
Desarrollar actividades de planificación y evaluación de proyectos y programas
de Enseñanza del Inglés.
Articulación
académica
El
Título habilita para el ingreso directo a Especializaciones, Maestrías y
Doctorados Universitarios y a la Carrera de
Investigador.
Actividad
Académica: Las clases serán dictadas los días Sábados de 8 a 18 hs
Asignaturas
Primer
cuatrimestre
1.1.
Antropología Filosófica
1.2. Filosofía de la Educación
1.3.
Metodología de la Investigación
1.4.
Corrientes de la Literatura en Lengua Inglesa
1.5.
Psicolingüística
1.6.
Gramática Española
Segundo
Cuatrimestre
2.1.
Teología
2.2.
Filosofía del Lenguaje
2.3.
Análisis del Discurso
2.4.
Literatura Inglesa I: Seminario
2.5.
Estructuras Lingüísticas Comparadas: Español-Inglés
Tercer
Cuatrimestre
3.1.
Ética y Deontología
3.2.
Investigación Educativa Aplicada
3.3.
Enseñanza de la Lengua Inglesa para propósitos específicos
3.4.
Literatura Inglesa II: Seminario
3.5.
Diseño y Desarrollo de cursos aplicados a la Enseñanza del Inglés
Cuarto
Cuatrimestre
4.1.
Pasantías-Tutorías-Adscripciones en el nivel superior
4.2.
Tesis
Titulo
Licenciado
en la Enseñanza del Inglés
Para
Mayores Informes dirigirse a : Facultad de Humanidades
-UCALP-
Calle
13 # 1227 - (1900) La Plata Tel. (0221) 422-7100 int.128
O
escribir a la Coordinadora de la Carrera: Francisca Abdala francisca@netverk.com.ar
--------------------------------------------------------------------
14-
PRIMERAS JORNADAS DE CULTURA Y LITERATURA EN LENGUA INGLESA
Our
dear SHARER Maria Daniela Lacosta has sent us this circular on behalf of the
organizers:
Universidad
Nacional de La Plata
Facultad
de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación
Departamento
de Lenguas y Literaturas Modernas
Departamento
de Letras
Las cátedras de Literatura Inglesa,
Literatura Norteamericana, Cultura Inglesa y Traducción Literaria tienen el
agrado de invitar a las
Primeras
Jornadas de Cultura y Literatura en Lengua Inglesa
Una
larga tradición de estudios y enseñanza de la cultura en lengua inglesa, más
específicamente de la literatura, constituye la motivación central de estas
jornadas. El hecho de que esa cultura ha sido asimilada y enseñada también por
medio de traducciones se refleja en la incorporación de temas relacionados con
la traducción y los estudios culturales.
Fecha:
7, 8 y 9 de octubre
Lugar:
Centro Cultural Islas Malvinas (calle 19 y 50 La Plata)
Las
Jornadas contarán con conferencias plenarias y mesas de
ponencias.
Contenidos
Literatura
en lengua inglesa.
Literatura
en lengua inglesa en la Argentina.
Estudios
culturales.
Traducción
de literatura en lengua inglesa.
Enseñanza
de la literatura y de la traducción en lengua inglesa en el nivel
superior.
Conferencias
Plenarias
Han
comprometido su participación los Dres. Cristina Elgue de Martini (UNC) y
Rolando Costa Picazo (UBA)
Presentación
de Trabajos
Los
trabajos deben ser inéditos y no excederán las ocho páginas (tamaño A4 -Letra
Times New Roman - punto 12, interlineado 1,5) en una sola cara incluyendo notas
y bibliografía. Las notas irán numeradas correlativamente y colocadas al final.
Las ponencias podrán ser presentadas en idioma español o inglés. El tiempo de
lectura será estrictamente de 20 minutos.
En
la próxima circular se darán los detalles del formato en el cual deberán
enviarse los trabajos para su publicación en las Actas de las Jornadas y la
fecha límite para la presentación de los trabajos.
Aranceles
Expositores:
$ 50
Asistentes: $ 25
Estudiantes:
sin cargo
Contacto:
Correo
electrónico: Gabriel Matelo mago@speedy.com.ar
Dirección
de correo postal:
Departamento
de Lenguas y Literaturas Modernas
Calle
48 entre 6 y 7 4º piso - (1900) La
Plata
Departamento
de Letras
Calle
48 entre 6 y 7 5ºpiso – (1900) La
Plata
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We would like to finish this issue of
SHARE with a super short quotation:
Nostalgia is like a grammar
lesson...you find the present tense and the past perfect.
HAVE A
WONDERFUL WEEK!
Omar and Marina.
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SHARE
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also absolutely free of charge. We do not endorse any of the services announced
or the views expressed by the contributors. For more information about the
characteristics and readership of SHARE visit: http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/ShareMagazine
VISIT
OUR WEBSITE : http://www.ShareEducation.com.ar
There you can read all past issues of SHARE in the section SHARE ARCHIVES.
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