IN Magazine April 2014 by IATEFL Slovenia

IATEFL Slovenia Magazine Summer issue 2014, no. 61

The fall and rise of the Welsh language Activity 1 Summaries Match the six numbered paragrpahs in the article to the summarising statements below. a Sometimes funny mistakes are made when translating English to Welsh ___ b Where the Welsh language is used on TV and in the arts ___ c Welsh and other languages are spoken in Britain as well as English ___ d The origins of Welsh and some statistics about the Welsh language ___ e Some examples of Welsh words ___ f

Where the Welsh language is used in public and on the internet ___

Activity 2: Collocations

That’s the name of a small town in Wales and, in English, it means ‘The Church of Saint Mary in the hollow of the white hazel tree near the rapid whirlpool and the church of Saint Tysilio near a red cave’. 3 Welsh looks and sounds so different from English because it’s a Celtic language. Celtic cultures still exist around the edges of the UK – in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and also in parts of France. For hundreds of years, almost everyone in Wales spoke Welsh but nowadays there are about 500,000 Welsh speakers - about 20 per cent of the population. 4 So is Welsh dying out? Not at all. Nowadays all schoolchildren in Wales study Welsh and many choose to go to an all Welsh speaking school. Because, by law, Welsh is as important as English, it means you can get public information in Welsh, speak Welsh in court or study a course at university in Welsh. You can surf the net in Welsh, look up things in the Welsh Wikipedia, keep up with friends on facebook and write your blog in Welsh.

And by the way, ‘Croeso i Gymru!’ means ‘Welcome to Wales’ – I hope you’ll be able to visit one day.

Match the verbs with the nouns to form phrases from the article. One answer is given. 1 cross over

a friends

2 keep up with

b a radio station

3 study

c the border

4 tune in to

d a course

5 hire

e the net

6 put up

f a sign

7 surf

g a DVD

8 write

h a blog

Activity 3: categories – read, listen or both Put the following words into the correct category. Write (R) for things people read, (L) for things people listen to or (B) for both if people listen to them and read them. 1 road signs (R)

5 a newspaper

2 languages

6 a music festival

3 Wikipedia

7 a radio station

4 a blog

Activity 4: Reﬂection Do you think we should try to preserve minority languages? What are the benefits of being bilingual? Are there any disadvantages?

Fun Corner Wales facts: The population of Wales is 3,000,000 The capital city is Cardiff.

Activity 3 1R2B3R4R5R 6L7L

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

For more fun activities to help you learn English visit www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglish

Answers

2 Perhaps the ﬁrst Welsh word you’ll see on the road into Wales is ARAF. There’s a helpful English translation next to it – SLOW. As you can see, Welsh looks quite different to English. It sounds very different too. If you think English pronunciation is difﬁcult, try this:

6 The number of Welsh speakers and opportunities to use Welsh is growing in Wales but is it always easy to have two ofﬁcial languages in one small country? Most of the time everything goes smoothly but occasionally things don’t quite go to plan. For example, a few years ago somebody in charge of road signs sent for the Welsh version of, ‘No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only’. As soon as they got the reply from the translation service they enthusiastically made the sign and put it up. A few days later some Welsh speakers told them what the sign said - ‘I am not in the ofﬁce at the moment. Send any work to be translated’. It was only then that they realised they had made a big mistake. In the same year, a sign in Cardiff might have caused some nasty accidents for pedestrians. In English it clearly said ‘Look Right’, but in Welsh it said ‘Look Left’!

Activity 1 1c2e3d4f5b6a

1 When you cross over the border from England into Wales you don’t have to show your passport but you do notice a difference immediately. All the road markings and signs are shown in two languages – English and Welsh. Not all visitors to Britain know that other languages are spoken in the country. There’s the Gaelic language in Scotland and a few people speak Cornish in the south west of England but the most widely spoken language in the UK apart from English is Welsh.

5 What else do Welsh speakers do in their free time? Well, they can watch the award winning Welsh soap opera, ‘People of the Valley’ on TV, read a weekly newspaper or magazine or tune in to a Welsh radio station. They can even go to their local video store and hire their favourite Welsh language DVD, like Oscar nominated ‘Hedd Wyn’ or ‘Solomon & Gaenor’. In the summer they can choose from the many Welsh festivals to go to, but the biggest and best is probably the National Eisteddfod where around 150,000 people come together for 8 days to see over 6000 people taking part in music and poetry competitions.

Activity 2 1c 2 a 3 d 4 b 5 g 6 f 7e 8 h

‘Croeso i Gymru!’ If you don’t know what this means, read on to find out more.

The Welsh flag has a red dragon on a green and white background. The most common surname in Wales is Jones One of the national symbols is a yellow flower called a daffodil The national day is March 1st – St David’s day. The national song is called ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’ (Land of My Fathers)

IATEFL Slovenia Magazine Vol. 13, No 61, Summer issue 2014 Published by: IATEFL Slovenia, p. p. 1677, 1001 Ljubljana Email: infoiatefl.si www.iatefl.si tel: 041 907065 IN editor: Dolores Malić President: Alenka Tratnik Email: alenka.tratnikiatefl.si Vice president: Sandra Vida Language editor: Oliver Sims Printed by: Design Studio, d.o.o. Graphics: Petra Turk Articles, letters and other contributions should be addressed to IATEFL, p. p. 1677, 1001 Ljubljana Email: infoiatefl.si

Dear readers, This year we have made a slight change to our schedule, so this issue is with you a little bit earlier.

IATEFL Slovenia Board Members: Janja Čolić Dolores Malić Peter Oletič Alenka Tratnik Sandra Vida

The conference in Topolšica was a great success as usual and I hope you had the chance to be there.

Front-page photo: Boris Oblak

I hope the rest of the school year goes by as stresslessly as possible!

ISSN 1855-6833

Enjoy your summer :)

We’re also thinking about our work in the future - there are board member elections coming up, so please take the opportunity to participate actively in our community.

A Touch of Spice by Danny Singh ....................................................................................................................................................................... 4 Mother Europe by Danny Singh .......................................................................................................................................................................... 6 ELF: a simpliﬁed version of Standard English for the new millennium by Mojca Belak ....................................................................................... 8 “To Boldly Go”: new approaches to the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Maribor by Victor Kennedy .......................................... 12 Into Lessons without Stress! With Neuro Linguistic Learning and Coaching by Vesna Gros ............................................................................... 16 Camp California – the best summer experience, A story of a counselor ........................................................................................................... 22 Teaching Young Learners English Can Be Fun by Mija Selič, MA ..................................................................................................................... 24 Little Ideas for Great Changes – Report on Attending the 21st IATEFL Slovenia Conference, by Danka Kezunović .......................................... 28 IATEFL Slovenia Conference 2014, by Dardan Shabani ................................................................................................................................... 30 The Big Two – TESOL 2014 Portland by Lea Sobočan ...................................................................................................................................... 32 The Big Two – IATEFL by Lea Sobočan ............................................................................................................................................................ 33 Vanessa Reis Esteves at the 15th OUP Conference in Ljubljana by Vesna Gros .................................................................................................... 34 Poročilo o tekmovanju angleščine za učence 7. razreda osnovne šole ................................................................................................................. 36 Poročilo o tekmovanju iz angleškega jezika za učence 8. razreda osnovne šole ................................................................................................... 37 Poročilo o tekmovanju v znanju angleščine za 2. letnike ................................................................................................................................... 38 Poročilo o tekmovanju iz znanja angleščine za dijake 3. letnika ......................................................................................................................... 39

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A Touch of Spice by Danny Singh Danny Singh, born and raised in London, but now based in Rome, gives creative English language lessons and teacher training courses all over Italy and abroad. He also oﬀers stimulating monthly presentations on language related issues at Rome’s biggest international bookshop and is visible on web TV www.inmagicartwebtv.eu with a series of interactive English video lessons. He regularly attends Pilgrims TT summer courses as a Guest Speaker. Website: www.laughnlearn.net e-mail: singh_danny@hotmail.com

Menu • Politics and identity • Astronomy through gastronomy • Spicing up a dish • Turkish delight • Spicing up a lesson • Conclusion

Politics and identity As cinema is one of my great interests, I have hitherto experienced an enormous variety and quantity of ﬁlms. With that in mind, I can clearly say that this Greek/Turkish production is one of the most beautiful and poetical ﬁlms that I have ever seen. It was made 11 years ago, back in 2003, yet I

can still remember many of the most intricate details. Like many of my favourite films, it combines serious events with lighter and more humorous issues. The serious political issue mentioned in the film is that of the Greek minority living in Istanbul, many of whom were deported to Greece, despite the fact that they hadn’t previously lived there. This was due to the Ankara government decision to renege on the 1930 Greek/Turkish Ankara convention. Hence, the Greek community in Istanbul was reduced from 135,000 to 7,000 between 1955 and 1978, after which, Greek/Turkish relations improved, but for the average citizen, the damage had already been done. The lighter, but equally important subjects dealt with in the film, are predominantly linked to the use of spices; in cooking, in education and in love. Although not a commercial film, it had huge success in Greece, as the story of the huge number of Greeks who were deported from Istanbul in the mid-60’s is not that well-publicised. The director of the film, Tassos Boulmetis, whose own family was forced out of the city that had been its home for several generations decided to tell the story after returning to his childhood home in later years. The film looks at the prejudices in both countries and among the different communities, the Turks in Istanbul, the Greeks in Istanbul and the Greeks in Greece. Tassos Boulmetis the director says, “We left Turkey as Greeks and we were greeted here as Turks. We were caught in the middle, confused and ill at ease in a homeland that wasn’t really our home.” Is the film about politics, cuisine or love? Or maybe a mix of all three? The Greek title of the film is, Politiki Kouzina (Kitchen Politics). The English title is, A Touch of Spice and the Italian title is, Un Tocco di Zenzero (A Touch of Ginger), so you can make your own mind up on that.

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Astronomy through Gastronomy Fanis spends his early life as a small boy in his Grandfather’s store in Istanbul. This is his seat of learning, where he develops his skills necessary to face the world outside. In one early scene, a middle-aged lady tells Vassilis (the Grandfather) that her husband has lost all interest in making love. Vassilis gives her a secret ingredient and tells her to use this in her cooking. A few days later, she returns thanking him for the gift that has reawakened the passions that lay hidden within her previously unwilling husband. Learning in a shop is not just about doing sums, giving the correct change and balancing the books. As a culinary philosopher, Vassilis uses spices to teach Fanis about the planets of the solar system. “Gastronomy rhymes with astronomy,” he tells his grandson Fanis. “Pepper is like the sun, hot. Mercury is cayenne, that’s hot, too. Venus is cinnamon, sweet and bitter, like a woman, and the earth, can you guess which spice the earth is? Salt. Everything comes to life under its inﬂuence.” Vassilis relates everything in his life to spices and demonstrates his passion for teaching, for learning and for life, as only the best teachers can.

Spicing up a dish Having someone like Vassilis as his teacher, parent and mentor, Fanis naturally developed his own passion for cuisine and had remarkable skills for a young boy. Every time there was a wedding, the young Greek girls were expected to participate in the preparation of a grand buﬀet. It can clearly be seen that they are doing it as an obligation, hence while some of them might be quite good at it, none of them are exceptional. Naturally, some of the older males occasionally complained that the food was lacking taste and the older women would start panicking and shouting at the younger girls to do something about it. On more than one occasion, Fanis intervened, adding some kind of spice to an otherwise tasteless dish and the results were clearly visible. The facial expressions of even the most critical diners changed, as they sampled what had been brought to them. Smiles emerged and grew, as the satisfaction increased from the mix of ﬂavours and tastes that the secret ingredients had managed to create.

Later in the ﬁlm, Fanis and most of his family were compelled to leave Istanbul for Greece. His grandfather Vassilis was able to stay as he didn’t have dual nationality. Fanis became a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, although his real passion was still cooking. Inevitably, Fanis had trouble adapting to life in Greece and so tried to spend most of his time cooking in the kitchen, as this was one strong link between him and his homeland. This bothered his mother and we see various scenes in the ﬁlm, where she assumes that he is either homosexual, extremely depressed, or both!

Turkish delight While Fanis was helping the girls in the kitchen, there was one young Turkish girl who noticed his skills and desperately needed his help to spice up a dish, which was being prepared for special guests. Saime was extremely attractive, with a dark complexion, long dark wavy hair and a beautiful smile, a Turkish delight. She begged him to assist her, with a secret ingredient, a special aromatic spice which would make the difference. Before having the opportunity to reply, she added that she would do absolutely anything he wanted, in exchange for this spice. What do you do when the girl you love presents herself and offers you anything you want? What do you ask her for? What do you ask her to do? He asked her to do the most beautiful thing that any girl can do for a boy, or that any woman can do for a man! He asked her to dance for him! And she did! It was so amazing to watch, I was in a trance myself as she danced in front of him and satisfied his strongest desires. This is my favourite scene from the film, contrasting with the moment when they say goodbye at the train station, as Fanis is forced to leave with his family, to go to a country where they have nothing and no-one. Saime in a typically sweet way and with her youthful innocence, dances in front of him again, trying to force a smile out of him, as he looks so sad and desolate. Fanis didn’t manage to return to Istanbul until he was well into his 40’s. Vassilis had promised to visit him in Greece, but never did and when Fanis did get back to Istanbul, he managed to see his Grandfather just before his death. He also found Saime, an adult lady, married with two children. They reflected together on their lives and on how politics could influence the

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course of one’s life. I won’t give away how the ﬁlm ends, just to say that it is not a sentimental love story, but the ending, like the rest of the ﬁlm, has its own beauty.

Mother Europe by Danny Singh

Spicing up a lesson The didactic scene where Vassilis explains the planets of the solar system using spices, influenced me to try and spice up one of my lessons. I was teaching two sisters for about 20 hours, an eight year old and an eleven year old. I was later told that the older girl was dyslexic, although I had no visible signs of this during my lessons. I prepared some spices for them to use during one of the lessons. I used salt, curry powder, ginger, cinnamon, basil and black pepper. I decided to give my students a multisensorial experience using the spices. They described the spices, visually, what they looked like, their shapes and colours, their touch, how they felt in their hands, they listened to the sounds as they dropped onto paper, they smelt the spices individually and finally, they tasted them all. The older sister insisted that the salt was her favourite taste. The younger sister and I looked at each other bemused, but we tried again. The taste was disgusting! At least it was for us, as the older sister continued to eat the salt. The younger sister selected the curry powder as her favourite taste, while I chose cinnamon. At the end of the activity, the two girls attached the remaining spices to their notebooks using sellotape and wrote the name of each spice in addition to all the vocabulary which had been produced from this very simple activity. This activity can be done with any number of spices and indeed, any number of students. It stimulates the senses and produces a plethora of words and vocabulary. The fact that students experience and feel all the spices, facilitates their ability to retain the information learned during the lesson. The particular spice that is chosen by each student as their favourite is subject to change if the activity is done at different times and in differing situations.

Conclusion I hope that this article has whet your appetite to watch certain parts of this film, if not, in its entirety. The didactic methods of teaching, the dancing scenes, the gloriously flavoured food. It may stimulate you to add cinnamon to your meatballs, or to pay a visit to Istanbul (Constantinople), to research the Greek/Turkish conflict, or to reflect on what damage governments can do with their creation of borders and changing people’s nationalities at random, a subject all too common in many parts of the world. Most of all, it shows how a creative film can influence you in your teaching, offering you a variety of ideas, which make learning and teaching far more interesting and effective. 6

Menu • Rotterdam ﬁlm festival 2014 • Mother Europe

Rotterdam film festival 2014 The Rotterdam film festival is my favourite film festival and up to now, the only one that I am willing to attend at every opportunity. Low budget, independent films, documentaries, no special effects, the very antithesis of Hollywood and Bollywood. This year’s festival was no different. I saw a plethora of films, not all 300+, but certainly a good number. Here, I rarely if ever, see a film that I dislike. Even the slowest, most difficult, least audience friendly films always have some educational element. It is perhaps, hardly surprising then, that a large number of the audience come from the field of education. The most difficult film this year was an Indonesian one about a poet who had been imprisoned in 1965 during a period of political turmoil. The whole film was set in a prison, showing the pain and suffering of the prisoners. Difficult, yes! However, I now know about the political turmoil in Indonesia in 1965 and even more importantly, of this great poet, should I decide I wish to further pursue study of his work. Another exceedingly difficult film was an Austrian film about a very rare disease. The main character in the film actually suffers from this very disease and it wasn’t pleasant viewing at all. However, once again, I now have a basic knowledge of this disease and can deepen my knowledge of the subject, if I so desire! My second favourite film was a Turkish one, “I am not him”. This was a humorous story of double identity, a subject which was dealt with by the great Kieslowski in, The Double life of Veronique and has been used in various other films. However, on this occasion, it went a bit further. This leads me on to my favourite film of the festival, which also deals with the problem of identity.

Mother Europe The main character in the film Mother Europe is a five year old girl appropriately named Terra. She has a Slovenian mother, Petra, who is the director of the film and a MacedonianCuban father Brand, who is the cameraman. Most of the film centres on spontaneous conversations between mother and child. Even if the mother Petra, may have had particular in-

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tentions when planning the ﬁlm, Terra has no script and so is playing herself and not another person’s role. We see the ﬁlm through the eyes of Terra, a world full of borders.

hood memories, we see some archive material from the period, including the London Treaty, which brings home the reality, if we are still in any doubt.

As the director herself says, “After Slovenia became part of EU and entered Schengen, our nomadic life became quite complicated. I am Slovenian and my partner and cinematographer, Brand, is Macedonian. Brand needed a visa for every Country apart from his father’s home Cuba and the Balkan countries, with the exception of Slovenia. A visa application procedure was a long waiting queue in front of embassies, that could last for days. It was an endless struggle to be able to travel with my partner – even after Terra was born. But this never stopped us from travelling from one festival to another, ﬁnding shooting sets at some friends places. When Terra was two months old, she already had 14 stamps in her passport.”

Another interesting man is Branko Baric. He is a nature lover, hence lives well away from the city. His sense of humour, irony and wit has the audience laughing for long periods as he recounts his amazing story. He was born in a country that does not exist. Wherever he goes, he is considered as diﬀerent. When he goes to Italy, he is regarded as Slovenian, when he is in Slovenia, he is considered a Croat, when in Croatia, they see him as a Serb and so on. These experiences have caused him to develop a closer relationship with his dog Max and his chicken Cvetka than with human beings. “How great this world would be without human beings on Earth”, he says.

One of the main issues of the film is borders and how governments are willing to mess up the lives of ordinary people, their relationships and their identity, all for the glory of borders. The film analyses the meaning of borders, the politics, the use of history, the absurdity of bureaucracy, the mistakes of education, on a journey through Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Greece and back. This is all that Terra knows, fences, barriers and border controls, while Petra tries to explain how different life was in the past, when this was all one country and no passports, visas and police checks were necessary to go from one place to another. All through the film Terra is drawing, because she can express herself better while she is illustrating her point of view. After making a map from her home to her grandmother’s place, she decides to illustrate her travel through all the European countries she has visited. Finally she draws a map of Europe, finding out that it is more complicated than drawing the whole planet Earth. To try and help Terra understand the past and how it was, we are introduced to a series of fascinating characters. One of the most important is Boris Pahor, a famous centurion Slovenian writer, who takes us back to Trieste in 1918. As a child back then, he realized that borders had changed his life. He was forbidden by the Fascist government to use his mother tongue in public. He explains how many things changed overnight for non-Italians in Trieste, which used to be the biggest multicultural trade city in central Europe. Aside from his detailed descriptions and flashbacks of child-

We are also introduced to some fishermen who search for the tri-border on the Adriatic sea between Slovenia, Italy and Croatia. Terra gets to meet Vasko and Tina from the Anarchic punk band, Bernays Propoganda and we see and hear them playing some of their songs. Terra discovers however, that even these younger friends of hers (late 20’s/early30’s) are going through incredible bureaucratic procedures to obtain visas for their tour and a passport for their dog, Chuckey. She tries to help by sending a letter to the bureaucratic headquarters in Brussels. The problem of borders, identity and the mistreating of people by governments is often depicted in films and so it should be, as it is a reality. In the film, A Touch of Spice, we saw how a government can decide to expel you from a country at the touch of a button, changing your life and your relationships forever. This film deals with a deadly serious matter, however, its brilliance is in the fact that it is made audience friendly, thanks largely to the role of Terra, with her wide-eyed innocence, her drawing, pictures, use of colours, as well as the other fascinating personalities that we are introduced to. The songs and music of the punk band also gives it a different dimension. The archive material used in the film is hugely significant and this was indeed one of the discussion points at the question and answer session at the Rotterdam festival. Does it make the film better or not? In my opinion and (talking to other members of the audience), it definitely does!

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ELF: a simpliﬁed version of Standard English for the new millennium by Mojca Belak

What ELF is and what it isn’t An elf (plural elves) is a divine being of Germanic mythology, which has magical powers. In science ELF stands for Electron Localization Function, a concept in quantum mechanics, or Extremely Low Frequency, the band of radio frequencies from 3 to 30 Hertz. There are at least two organisations that call themselves ELF: the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental movement in the UK, and The Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, which studies the invented languages of J.R.R. Tolkien. And finally, ELF (or Elf ) also stands for English as a Lingua Franca, the language used among non-native speakers of different varieties of English to communicate with each other. There’s much more to this last meaning of Elf than meets the eye. It is important to remember that mythical elves traditionally used their magical powers to benefit and also injure humankind, which is why they were divided into light and dark elves. One of the aims of this article is to find whether Elf is a bringer of light or darkness in the world of language learning, language teaching and languages in general.

How English found itself spread all around the globe A very much simplified explanation of the process would be that there were two big dispersals of English in its history. The first one includes migrations from England to America, Australia and New Zealand from early 17th to the mid 19th century: it resulted in new mother tongue varieties of English. The second dispersal was triggered by establishing colonies in south Africa, south Asia and south Pacific during 18th and 19th centuries. From it sprang new second language varieties of English because indigenous peo-

ple tried to communicate with the proudly monolingual English newcomers. According to Braj Bihari Kachru speakers of different kinds of English fall into three categories: the inner, the outer and the expanding circle. The inner circle includes the speakers from countries with English used as the native language, which is norm-providing. Many native speakers of English are monolingual and surprisingly proud of it, expecting the rest of the world to use English as the only means of communication. The outer circle is represented by the former British colonies, the countries in which English is spoken as the second language. Most native people learned English as they went along, usually from non-native English speakers. They mixed it with their languages or their language needs, which is why the sounds and words gradually turned into the local variants of English reflecting native tongues of the area. In Malaysian English, for example, I’m eating has turned into I still eat, while in Philippines the sentence Math is only one of the subjects got transformed into Math is only one of de subject. My personal favourite is Hello in Singaporean and Malaysian English: Have you eaten already? * The third group of English speakers, the expanding circle, is by far the largest. It includes non-English speaking European countries plus China, Japan and Saudi Arabia. These speakers are taught English as a foreign language and in using it they depend on the norm set by the first and partly the second circle.

The ‘many Englishes’ debate In the 1990s teachers and linguists got interested in various Englishes and raised the question of who owns English. The English, maybe feeling a bit guilty be-

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cause of large numbers of monolingual speakers, went to the other extreme by claiming that everybody owns English. They also suggested that the standards of English should be broadened to accommodate at least the outer circle Englishes. In 1992 Robert Phillipson wrote a book entitled Linguistic imperialism and claimed that it is through their language that native speakers of English impose their culture on non-native speakers. He called English the masters’ language. The controversy over the legitimacy of non-native varieties of English became very obvious in a debate in the pages of English Today. What set it oﬀ was an article by the venerable Charles Randolph Quirk, in which the author claimed that “The teacher’s ‘duty’ /…/ is not to question notions of correct and incorrect use, but to teach standard English.” Quirk called mistakes in English made by speakers from the Expanding Circle as half-baked quackery. As a result about half of the ELT community got angry or upset (or both), while the other half sided with Quirk and quietly praised him for having said aloud what many thought but dared not put in words. In response to Quirk’s article Barbara Seidelhofer, one of the main researchers into Elf, claimed that it was Quirk’s view that was “half-baked quackery”, because it was grounded in an out-of-date monolithic view of English. In a much more diplomatic way David Crystal later stressed that “We are about to enter a new era of ELT, in which previously held and comfortably familiar values are going to be replaced. /…/ It will be a challenging and exciting time, and there will be much anxiety in the ranks…” In 1997, while the discussion about the ownership of English continued, Crystal published English as a Global Language, a book which explored this phenomenon further. Two years later David Graddol wrote about World English – the emergence of a global language and foresaw international de-standardisation of English. In the summer of 1999 IATEFL dedicated more than half of IATEFL Newsletter – now called IATEFL Voices - to the topic of “the changing language”. The whole debate boiled down to the following: 1. An innovation in the language of a native speaker of English is viewed as innovation, while an innovation in the language of a non-native speaker of English is branded either as a mistake or as uneducated usage. 2. English should be adapted to the uses of non-native speakers, because they outnumber native speakers of English.

3. Non-native teachers of English are often better than their native speaker counterparts because they have themselves been through the process of acquiring the language and can help others more effectively. Such discussions contributed to the birth of Elf sometime between 2000 and 2001. At the 38th IATEFL Conference in Liverpool in April 2004 a heated debate on Elf filled a big plenary room in the Adelphi Hotel. When it ended, teachers’ views were still firmly divided.

Characteristics of Elf English as a Lingua Franca is a variety of English which helps speakers of different first languages to communicate with each other. A typical Elf conversation may involve an Italian and a Swede chatting over a coffee at an international conference in Portugal, a Czech tourist asking the way in Spain, and many other similar situations. What they all have in common is that getting the message across is more important than correctness. Here’s an example of my Elfish exchange at the railway station in Graz: A: B: A: B: A: B: A: B:

Excuse me, do you speak English? Little. A return to Weiz, please. Dis vill be ten Euro. Thank you. Here. Your ticket. Danke. Please.

Elf is based on the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) and some additional research. Here are some of its basic characteristics – while the unenlightened would call them “mistakes”, Elf happily tolerates them: • dropping the –s in the third person of the Present Indefinite Tense: She speak Elf well. • confusing the relative pronouns who and which: Elf is the language who everybody can master. • omitting definite and indefinite articles: Elf is oversimplified language. • failing to use correct forms in tag questions: Hercule Poirot would be delighted to hear this, no? • inserting redundant prepositions: Now finally Slovenians can climb on mountains and discuss about problems.

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• using infinitives instead of gerunds: I look forward to see you tomorrow • using full forms over their reduced versions: we are instead of we’re. Elfish pronunciation, too, should be made simpler. Certain sounds in English rarely occur in other languages, so they should be replaced by their more easily-pronounced equivalents, namely ð and θ should turn into d and t. Dis will help us talk about dis and dat widout feeling ridiculous. Introducing Elf, I shouldn’t forget its two basic characteristics: accommodation and code switching. Accommodation is a communication skill in which the speaker adapts their own use of Elf to the level of English of the person they are talking to. In other words, the reply to She like hers room, yes? should NOT be You’re quite right. She finds it absolutely delightful and she’s ever so grateful to you, but rather Yes, she very happy vid it. Tenk you. Code switching, on the other hand, takes place when two speakers of Elf both know one more language and use words from it to get the message across. For example, when I talked to a colleague from Austria about the falling standards in secondary education, I used the term gymnasium (pronounced as it is pronounced in German) and not ‘grammar school’ for “gimnazija” as this was a far more precise term. We share the same cultural background, so we both knew what I was referring to. However, Elf is much more than just some basic guidelines I’ve just introduced, because its beauty is in the fact that there exist as many varieties of Elf as there are languages. As far as its variations are concerned, de sky is de limit.

Slovenian Elf Slovenians, too, have contributed to this big Elﬁsh family by developing our own variety of English. It is based on most typical and most frequent mistakes. But careful, in Elf mistakes are not mistakes, only “inventions”. Here are some Slovenian vocabulary inventions: informations, advices, feedbacks and homeworks, Slovenians go into the nature (and not to the countryside), students go to the faculty (and not to university). The following examples are perfectly legitimate indicators of a well-developed Elf variation: Be quiet or you will be asked. (…be asked WHAT?) My brother is a good cooker. One of my students has made this picture – I think she is a brilliant drawer.

Slovenians also need words for what we are used to expressing in our mother tongue, for example conker and chestnut, lime or linden tree, and names for different mushrooms. The reason is obvious: an average Slovenian lives closer to nature than an average Brit, and therefore needs these expressions to be able to put their thoughts into words. Grammar-wise Slovenian Elf practically ignores the Present Perfect Tense (I work here since October) and uses articles rather erratically. Pronunciation, too, is a bit diﬀerent, particularly when it comes to words such as biscuit, comfortable, chocolate or leasing and conservative, as well as live or love – to name but a few.

De dark side of Elf When a person learns arithmetic they either do sums correctly or they know they have made a mistake because their calculations don’t get the desired result. If the people involved in the building of the Channel Tunnel had been good at some Elfish kind of arithmetic, the builders of the tunnels may never have met half way through. But when it comes to language, all seems to be possible as long as A knows what B means when B says something. I think that communication is much more than this. The full message lies in the nuances of meaning as well as in the culture that is behind every language. One of the less conscious aspects of culture is also the attitude towards making mistakes. Some cultures are more and some less lenient towards them, and in the case of Slovenians mistakes are viewed as bad. Deep in their unconscious mind a Slovenian hates making mistakes and loves order. Elfish mistakes generally bother people on the sunny side of the Alps, and we are not going to change these deep values that are at the core of our national identity just because some ELR circles find Elf fascinating. I don’t think Slovenians are in this alone: there are many other cultures which won’t be happy or able to adapt to tolerating mistakes.

The advance of the stupid The worldwide spread of English and the fact that it is now learned by practically everybody brings forth a new sort of learners: uneducated and unintelligent, who will never master any language apart from their own. They use Elf because they are not capable of learning English well. This wonderful idea that Elf

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speakers, no matter how basic their language is, are not learners any longer, but have already reached their goal, really suits them. These learners somehow master the basics and then use this impoverished, simpliﬁed language as if they really spoke English. I wouldn’t be surprised if very soon it may not be politically correct to claim that somebody’s English is only elementary to lower intermediate (or, to use CEFRese, at level A2).

SLif - Slovenian as a Lingua Franca Slovenians are touchy on the topic of language, partly because we live in the “mistakes are bad” region of Europe, and partly because it is the language that most strongly defines us as a nation. Slovenian is part of our identity, and it matters greatly to us. We take a dignified view of bad speakers of Slovenian, but NOT because we were predominantly monolingual. Far from it: we honour foreign languages and use them a lot. Most Slovenians are at least bilingual, many speak more than two languages. Unlike monolingual speakers of English, we do not expect the whole world to speak Slovenian. What we do expect, however, is that our language be treated with respect. We clearly dislike it if foreigners who have lived here for years never get past “Enou kavou prousim”. Traditionally, people who don’t speak a foreign language well are supposed to be considered learners of this language. The expression learner in this case indicates some hope that the situation is to improve. In Elf, however, no such expectations are made. Speakers of Elf are not learners. They have arrived at their final destination. They are fine where they are. Same goes for speakers of SLif: after thirty years of living in this country, my neighbour still communicates like this: Kam pa greš, gospa? A v trgovino? Ja sam že šla tam. Jao je gužva danas. Is this Slovenian? No, it’s half-baked quackery. There is a thin line between using and abusing a language.

And ﬁnally

dard English, and they may have strong historical reasons for this. However, in our often painful national history Slovenians never really encountered the British, which is one of the reasons why we hold them in such high esteem. We see them as old-fashioned and a little eccentric, having got our knowledge of them through literature, films and direct contact with middle-aged middle-class tourists who come to marvel at Lake Bled and Ljubljana. It is therefore hard for a Slovenian to understand why somebody would not want to learn about British culture/s together with the language. The rejection of the culture that naturally goes with its language may be justified in the case of English, however, it will be other languages that will also feel the consequences of this major shift in attitude towards language learning. The Germans already experience half-baked quackery that Turkish workers and their descendents use instead of German. The same has been noted by the Swedes: their foreign workers, predominantly Turks and Southern Slaves, use halfbaked quackery instead of Swedish. Slovenians have never had colonies, other people have never died because of us in the course of history. We have never imposed our language on anybody else, and similarly, we have never set on erasing other languages. On the contrary, in many cases we were at the receiving end of such treatment. However, if Elf gets well established in the world, we will experience the same negative attitude towards our language that non-native speakers of English in former colonies now seem to have towards English. In other words, foreigners will keep coming to live and work in Slovenia, but they will be happy to learn only the basics of our language. Even if I put aside all other reservations about Elf that I have introduced in this article, viewed from this very Slovenian angle, Elf is not the bringer of light. It may make English more accessible to the cerebrally challenged masses, but at the same time it is likely to allow for the simplification and degradation of English and consequently other languages, including Slovenian.

Languages go where English leads. If English is put aside in favour of Elf, learners of other languages will treat their target languages the way elﬁsh learners treat English: they will learn the basics and then adapt them to their communication needs. People living in former British colonies may nurture hatred towards the British and reject learning Stan-

* Most examples are taken from JENIKNS, Jennifer. World Englishes, A resource book for students. Oxon (UK); New York (USA and Canada): Routledge, 2009.

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“To Boldly Go”: new approaches to the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Maribor by Victor Kennedy Department of English and American Studies, University of Maribor Since 2006, the University of Maribor has offered programs designed under the new Bologna system guidelines. In the English department at the Filozofska fakulteta, we have created completely new courses; the literature section replaced the old chronologically ordered system that started with Beowulf in first year and progressed to postmodern poetry in the fourth. We now offer courses in reading and writing about literature, and courses that would previously been considered cultural and cross-disciplinary studies. The aim of these courses is not to give a list of readings to potential teachers who would never use them anyway, but to provide a solid background and context to second-language speakers of English to help them better use and understand English as it is spoken and written as a global means of communication. In this talk I will focus on the development of two of these new courses, Znanstvena in fantastika, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Temelji koncepti filma, Basic Concepts of Film. One of my colleagues was sitting in her office the other day, reading The Crucible, when a student poked her head in the door and, in an astonished tone of voice, said “You have homework?” It’s surprising to us that our students are surprised that professors have to work to keep up-to-date in their field after they graduate, but we believe that to be a good teacher, you have to be a good student; not only a good student, but a lifelong student. Over the years, we have both been asked to participate in teacher upgrading seminars. One of the ingrained beliefs of some of our student teachers that we try to overcome is that “you can’t teach what you haven’t been taught.” Some of our colleagues also seem to believe that you can only teach something you learned in school. Some also appear to believe, perhaps based on what they were taught in schools, that the way to give a lecture is to open the textbook and start reading. In our opinion, this causes stagnation and boredom in the classroom. We believe that in order to maintain any sort of enthusiasm for a subject, a teacher has to always be discovering something new, and incorporating those discoveries into his or her teaching. 12

This results in interesting classes. Sometimes it’s interesting because everything comes together and the class is filled with exciting discoveries and new insights; sometimes it’s interesting because it flops; sometimes it’s interesting because someone in the room knows more about the subject than the teacher. Many teachers dread the last two possibilities, and go to great lengths to avoid them, but I suggest they are not so bad as it seems at first, provided the teacher stays calm. Nobody knows everything, in spite of what some of your professors may have told you. I’m sure that at the end of this presentation somebody is going to ask me a question I can’t answer. At the beginning of my career this would have put me in a cold sweat, but long ago I learned that the appropriate response is, “Good question! I never thought of that!!” The proper procedure following the presentation is to write down the question and try to answer it in the paper that follows the presentation. Teaching, in my opinion, should be a learning experience. I learned the most valuable lesson of my career when I moved to Slovenia and started trying to learn Slovene (which is a process, not a product). Soon, I had an epiphany (or maybe just a reminder): if learning Slovene is hard for me, learning English is just as hard for my students. I think this is something all teachers should try to remember. We tend to take what we know for granted, and some of us tend to grow impatient with students who have problems with what we find so easy. One of the topics I teach at teacher training seminars is “Music in the Classroom”. I choose a few of my favorite songs, write down and print out the words, and hand them out to the class. My teachers did the same thing when I was in high school. You can analyze song lyrics like poetry, looking for images, symbols and metaphors. You can ask the students if the music affects the meaning of the words, and vice versa. If you’re adventurous, you can look for musical metaphors. In the Age of PowerPoint, you can find some images on the internet to go along with the song. If you have a child or children, you can ask them to help you animate the PowerPoint. The first time through, I showed my songs to the audience, and we went though the exercises described above. I went home, proud of my adventurousness and innovation.

Next year, a couple of the same teachers appeared at the seminar, came up to me and said, “we tried to use songs in the classroom, but it didn’t work.” Confused and disappointed, I asked them why, and discovered they had used the songs I demonstrated. DOH! I told them they should choose their own songs, whereupon they told me “but you can’t teach what you haven’t been taught.” But how could they use my songs effectively? I grew up with those songs. There’s a lot of subtext in there. I use Blue Oyster Cult’s song “Godzilla” in my classroom because I’ve seen every Godzilla movie, both Japanese originals and the Hollywood remake; I’ve seen dinosaur skeletons at the Royal Ontario Museum; I played with plastic dinosaurs when I was a kid; I’ve read dozens of Scientific American articles about dinosaurs; I saw Jurassic Park, etc, etc. I seem to remember a class in grade seven where I was taught about dinosaurs, but for the rest, I’m self-taught. I’m not a paleontologist, but then I’m not teaching paleontology. I’m teaching English literature, which I have been taught, and Cultural Studies, a subject in which I’m mostly self-taught. I suppose, based on my knowledge of teaching procedure, that I could teach an English translation of a France Prešeren poem,1 since I did take a course on Romantic Poets in graduate school, but I’d think twice about trying it in a roomful of Slovene professors. Armed with this insight, I tried an experiment in Temelji koncepti filma, a course I taught for the first time in spring 2010. I’ve never formally studied film, but have compared novels to their film versions for years. I took a couple of courses in drama in grad school, and I know something about plot, theme, character, setting, staging, stage directions, and script editing. For the first assignment I asked my students to subtitle a music video of their choice. I was a little surprised that some of my students seem to like Celine Dion and Michael Bolton, but I was gratified to discover that I like some new music from bands I hadn’t heard of, like Muse and DanD. (Unfortunately, I am still not adept in rap). My students did an exercise they enjoyed, learned something about making videos on a computer, and taught me something about their (global) culture. For their next assignment, I asked them to write some dialogue for a three minute scene taken from a well-known movie, and then to subtitle the scene. They had a little help from another source, too. The film is a well-known recent film, Der Untergang (Downfall), about the last days of the Third Reich, and the scene is the much-parodied-on-Youtube Hitler Rant scene, where Hitler is finally told by his generals that Germany has lost the war, and proceeds to blow his stack. Many Youtube videos provide parody subtitles to go along with the original German dialogue (a complaint from the movie’s distributor, Constantin film, forced Youtube to take them all off the internet, but after intense international pressure they relented, perhaps realizing that becoming a vi-

Slovenia’s answer to Shakespeare.

ral sensation was good advertising for their film). I asked my students to watch some of these parodies, then write their own. The results were clever and inventive; all were at least a little bit funny, and some were truly inspired. In one of my favorites, Hitler rants because he sent one of his generals to buy him a ticket to a Susan Boyle concert, but the general used the tickets to see the concert himself. Another had the Führer pining for Lady Gaga. Subsequent assignments asked students to write reviews of classic and current movies, analyze scenes, then team up to write a storyboard for a one-minute commercial and film the commercial, then write a storyboard and film a three-minute documentary. Overall, the aim of the course was to encourage the students to learn the basics of filmmaking by learning from example, watching films and thinking and writing critically about them, and then doing by making their own films, step-by-step. A few students dropped the course, but those who stayed learned something by doing it. So did I; I had never made a movie with a computer before, so I was doing the assignments at the same time they were. After the course was over, I was pleased to find a magazine article (that I read on a plane), detailing how an American biology professor had revamped his old course curriculum and designed a new biology program that works in pretty much the same way my film-making course did: get students to jump in and start actually doing the subject from the very beginning, instead of listening for years to someone describe how it is done (Lindgren, 2010). Lindgren uses the example of Tommy Tuba, who signs up for a four-year music course, only to spend the first year learning the History of the Tuba, the second the Theory of the Tuba, and the third listening to other people playing the tuba. Only in his last year does he get the chance to actually play the tuba, and then he learns that he doesn’t really like it after all. That imaginary scenario pretty much reflects our department’s old literature program: first year, Old English; second, Shakespeare; third, Nineteenth century novel; fourth, 20th century poetry. Students had oral exams, in which they were expected to recite their memorized lecture notes. Over the course of many years I tried to change the system, and was repeatedly ordered not to do so. That program had been approved by the Ministry in Ljubljana! When we were asked to design the new Bologna program, we jumped at the chance, and replaced the old chronologically based curriculum with a new one based on active student participation. In each year, our students now get courses in reading, writing, and analyzing literature; they also have electives, a new development at our faculty, including courses in science fiction, children’s literature, and film studies. After the film course was over, some of the students told me that they had enjoyed it. Over the years, other students in Maribor have mentioned that it was unusual in their experience that a professor asked them what they thought, rather than what they had memorized. I think that if students are going to get any real lasting benefit out of their studies, it won’t be what facts they manage to remember, but the feeling they get

when they learn something new. The feeling was expressed recently in an interview by American guitarist Jim Campilongo: • I can only tell your readers this: if any of them have ever bought or rented an instructional DVD and learned a new idea then they know how great that feels. It’s like getting six new suits and an overcoat and a pair of new shoes, I mean you just feel like a new man. And that’s how I feel when I got to my lessons. It’s like “wow, I never saw this particular thing from that angle.” (Williams, Jim Campilongo interview). Getting our students to experience that feeling is what I think teachers should be aiming for. Our new course, Književnost in fantastika (Fantasy and Science Fiction), works in a similar way. For several years, I have taught Fantasy and Science Fiction in our postgraduate program, but last year I taught the course to undergraduates for the first time. Instead of a final exam at the end, students write a short in-class quiz every other week on one of the stories in our textbook, The Norton Book of Science Fiction, and several movie reviews of classic and modern science fiction. The big assignment in the course is to write an essay on “The Science in Science Fiction”. My classes are mostly female, and a big groan went up when they first heard the topic, but so far, the exercise has gone well. Most students come into the course claiming that they don’t know anything about science fiction, and never read or watch it. For most, the only science fiction they know is Star Wars. The first story on our syllabus is Pat Murphy’s “His Vegetable Wife”. Students came into class and said “that’s not science fiction! I like that!” Then we talked about the different sciences examined in science fiction stories, biology, genetics, psychology, computer science, etc. One of my postgraduate students wrote a diploma on math fiction a few years ago, and is now starting her masters’ thesis on cryptography in literature, but sadly, no one else has boldly gone there. Then we talk about what science stories they have heard or read on the news. It seems that many of my students know all about Justin Bieber’s problems, and some have even heard of Rob Ford, but none of them keeps up to date with the Large Hadron Collider. Everybody knew about the lady who needed a face transplant after the chimp incident, though, and since about half the class wears contact lenses, and they all watch Extreme Makeover, we had a start on talking about prosthetic surgery and implants. The big challenge with students is getting them to put things in context. Many automatically dismiss literature or films more than ten years old as “boring”. They would rather go to the dentist than watch a black and white movie. There was another chorus of groans in Basic Concepts of Film when I assigned a review of a classic movie, but after they were forced to watch one, there were some gratifying comments: • It may not be possible for a film to be without any mistakes, but The Godfather certainly comes close. Since the release of the 1972 classic, all “gangster movies” have been judged by the standards of this one. 14

• Psycho is definitely one of the best films I’ve ever seen. The story, the setting, the music and the cast are all incredible and the film just stands out in its category. It stood the test of time well and deserves to be called ‘a classic’. Cinema at its best. • Although an old production, the movie has great horror elements. The atmosphere is creepy and the music is used brilliantly – it bursts out loudly at key moments. Another great element is the color – the movie is in black&white but the portrait is shown in color. (The Picture of Dorian Gray – 1945) • Black and white movie? No way! Shot in year 1942. It is the time of Second World War so it may be interesting. Combination of drama, romance, and war? It seems even better. All the facts except black and white movie are great. So I decided to watch it. I have to admit that the movie is great even though is black and white... To conclude, black and white movies can be good. I have to say that Casablanca is a great movie and it also becomes one of my favorite movies. The point of all this concerns the reason we teach literature at university. One weekend my daughter and her friend went to see the movie Hibrid (Splice) at the Kolosej (the local Cineplex). When they came back I asked them how they liked it and they said “it was awful”. I had read some mixed reviews, so I decided to see it myself and thought it was pretty good. Later that week I asked some of my students if they had seen it and what they thought. “I didn’t like it.” “Why?” “It was hokey.” One of my postgraduate students came to see me yesterday, and said she wanted to do a project in science fiction, so I gave her an assignment: go see Splice and write a report. I gave her some hints: look for allusions to Frankenstein, Jurassic Park, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Oedipus Complex, Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando, Rosemary’s Baby, Beowulf, and King Lear (the names of the main characters in Splice are Clive and Elsa; they create a monster through genetic engineering; the monster changes sex; both have sex with the monster; the monster kills Clive; Elsa gets pregnant; both Clive and Elsa are fond of asking “What’s the worst that could happen?”, echoing Edgar in King Lear; the movie brings a new meaning to the line “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is To have a thankless child!”; in the climactic scene, Dren is conflated into all three monsters in Beowulf (the dragon, Grendel, and Grendel’s mother), and Clive morphs from Dr. Frankenstein into the Geat hero). After I wrote this, I asked my daughter to elaborate on her review. She said “It was stupid. I didn’t like it.” This was interesting, because many times we’ve gone to see movies we liked, and she’ll talk all the way home about it. But this time I didn’t press her.

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The reason I keep trying to teach literature at university is to try to instill in students the ability to think and judge for themselves. Some resist the attempt, because they don’t want to read assigned texts; they want summaries they can memorize and recite. Even after they graduate and go to work as teachers, some come back to look for pre-pared lessons they can use in the classroom. The library and internet are full of journal articles that can be quoted to say whether a work is good or bad, worth teaching or not. I prefer that my students (and teachers) can tell me why something is good or bad based on their own analysis. I prefer that they try to look at the world from different points of view, and that they try to develop the ability to imagine other people’s points of view. That’s why I give them texts to read like Craig Raine’s “A Martin Sends a Postcard Home” and Edwin Morgan’s “The Loch Ness Monster’s Song.” Next semester, I plan to teach a novel that starts like this: • One winter, seventy odd year ago – I think – I was born up a close at 126 Birdhall Road – out in the east end of the city of Glasgow. My mother had a wee dog that was called Gip, till it ran out on the road, an’ got knocked down wi’ a brickworks lorry. It could’ve got knocked down wi’ a horse an’ cart jist the same, but progress was happenin’ then. They said progress was happenin’ It went right under the wheels, an’ got shot out a’ mashed at the back like mince, an’ squirmin’ about on the road, hauf deid wi’ blood out its mouth. An’ my mother was screamin’. – Aw Gip, ma wee Gip! she was screamin’, till two o’ the neighbours put their arms round about her, an’ took her away, an big Vinny McWilliams next door got a half brick, an’ shut his eyes, an’ put the wee thing out its misery wi’ two hard thumps tae the heid. They shoveled it intae an old tottie bag, an’ the next time it rained it washed the blood away off the street. That was in the summer. In the winter ma mother had me, an’ she never needed tae buy another dog. (John Kay, Remembering Glasgow, p.1) Is this good, or bad? You won’t find the answer online, or in print, because this novel hasn’t been published yet. I think it’s great. Like Duncan MacPhail, the narrator of the novel, and like the author, I moved from Scotland to Toronto in the 1950s (I didn’t have a choice, though, as I was three at the time). Almost every Scottish person I know (including my father) has or had a dog name Gip. Many Scots have a fatalistic outlook on life, like Dunky (my uncle Duncan goes by the same nickname). Most Scots also have his love of black humour too. In this kind of humour, many things are left unspoken. To those who know the context, the meaning is understood. Look again at the last line quoted above.

Ursula Leguin, in the introduction to the Norton Book of Science Fiction, quotes Samuel L. Delany’s definition of science fiction’s place in literature: History tells what happened; fiction tells what didn’t happen; fantasy tells what couldn’t happen; and science fiction tells what hasn’t happened yet. At this conference the Unsaid has been turned into the Said, and what remains Unsaid just hasn’t been said yet.

List of Works Cited • Crichton, Michael. Jurassic Park. New York: Knopf, 1990. • Hirschbiegel, Oliver, dir. Der Untergang (Downfall). Constantin Film, 2004. • Kay, John. Remembering Glasgow. A Rant. 2008. • Lindgren, Clark. “Teaching by Doing: turning a biology curriculum upside down.” Skeptic. 15(4), 2010, 35-37. • Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. Penguin, 2003 (originally published 1953). • Murphy, Pat. “His Vegetable Wife”. In LeGuin, Ursula and Brian Attebury (eds). The Norton Book of Science Fiction. New York: Norton, 1993. • Natali, Vincenzo, dir. Splice. Dark Castle Entertainment/Warner Bros., 2009. Polanski, Roman, dir. Rosemary’s Baby. Paramount, 1968. • Roeser, Donald. “Godzilla.” Spectres. Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 1977. • Shakespeare, William. King Lear. In The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed David Bevington, 5th edition. Longman, 2003. • Sharman, Jim, dir. The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 20th Century Fox, 1975. • Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, 1818. • “Slovenia”. EuroEducation.net: the European Education Directory. http://www.euroeducation. net/prof/slnco.htm (viewed July 30, 2010). • Spielberg, Steven, dir. Jurassic Park. Universal Pictures, 1993. • Whale, James, dir. Frankenstein. Universal Pictures, 1931. • Williams, Brian. “Jim Campilongo - The Virtual Woodshed Interview”. http://www. virtualwoodshed.com/jim-campilongo-interview/ (viewed Sept. 1, 2010). • Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. Wordsworth Classics 1995 (originally published 1928).

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Into Lessons without Stress! With Neuro Linguistic Learning and Coaching by Vesna Gros The recipe begins like this: Take 25 total strangers of diﬀerent nationalities and ages who have nothing but one thing in common – the love of teaching. Make each of them ﬁnd two similarities with other participants, however trivial they may be, and write them down on a big sheet of paper until an illegible mumbo jumbo springs to life. Take the stress away and a new adventure of lifelong learning can begin. Serve while still hot.

That is exactly what the introduction to the seminar entitled “Into Lessons without Stress! With Neuro Linguistic Learning and Coaching” looked like. I attended the seminar this January with the help of a Comenius grant, firstly because I felt my professional as well as private life was getting out of hand due to stress I kept imposing on myself by trying to do a gazillion things at a time, and secondly because I had been longing to know more about the buzz word “NLP” for quite a while. Oh, but your job is not stressful at all: look at all the days you get off for the holidays and you don’t have to sit at an office from 9 to 5 or work long hours, my friends would often say. I got tired of explaining to them that my day actually looks rather like that of the hyperactive Duracell bunny of long ago. Not to mention that this is also what your students and their parents expect from you, along with making their lessons interesting and creative, so that they can enjoy the daily show. But even the best bunnies have to be recharged from time to time. What’s more, I have recently learned that stress and creativity don’t go well together. Laura Patsko1 demonstrated at a recent Rokus conference that when two groups are challenged with a simple creativity task, where one group is told they have three minutes to accomplish it and the other group just one minute, the latter will provide considerably less creative solutions, even when both groups are in fact stopped after a minute. In order to enable creativity to happen, you have to take your time, take another look, and take breaks. Nevertheless, Woodrow Wilson once said that originality is simply a fresh pair of eyes, and I think we can agree that more than beauty sleep is needed for that. After scoring worryingly high on a psychological test measuring stress in different fields of life, I was given some useful tips as how to reduce it. The test results comprised five different categories: 1

laurapatsko.wordpress.com

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

drive for perfection need for speed giving one’s best in life need to please everyone prevalence of one’s strong points

I’m now going to unveil the secret of how to tackle each of these five stress-related categories. If you’re too driven with doing everything flawlessly, you should learn how to make mistakes, accept them and learn from them. Write it on a post-it note that you don’t always have to go all in and that sometimes 90% (or even less) of your effort is also reasonable. If you are always in a hurry, chasing deadlines and not taking time to breathe, this will inevitably result in a burnt out or physically unwell version of you. Therefore, you must take time for yourself (no excuses allowed) and sometimes meet your obligations at a slower pace. As for giving your best in your professional and personal life, there’s nothing wrong with this as long as you don’t end up (subconsciously) hating your job or yourself. Do as much as you are able to do without straining yourself over the edge. Don’t work by force or convulsively, but with ease and a light-hearted attitude. The penultimate category is about always showing yourself in the best possible light and doing anything for others – if you give too much of yourself, there will soon be nothing left of you, and if you shine too brightly, your bulb will eventually burn out. There’s nothing wrong with admitting to yourself that there are people out there who just don’t like you all that much. What is important is that you accept yourself and stand firmly behind your beliefs. Don’t forget to pamper yourself occasionally (again, no excuses allowed). Last but not least, face the fact that you are not always as strong as you appear on the outside. If you cannot handle all the work, ask your colleagues for help. Remember that it’s OK to sometimes say no to extra work and that showing your emotions is not a sign of weakness. Out goes stress, in come new ideas about NLP and coaching. I am sure there are more than a few left out there who still shrug their shoulders at NLP, dismissing

it as merely a Slovene term for a UFO. In short, NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) is a tool for communication and learning centred on people. It began as a research project in the early 1970s at the University of California in Santa Cruz. John Grinder, a professor of linguistics, and Richard Bendler, at that time a student of mathematics and later a psychologist, conducted a research project on what exactly makes certain therapists in the ﬁeld of hypnotherapy, gestalt therapy and family therapy excel at their work. They observed and analysed their shared traits and modelled their strategies, methods and aims into what they called Neuro Linguistic Programming. NLP is not a scientiﬁc theory, but rather a practical use of highly successful strategies that can be applied instantly in almost every situation. Every individual can use certain NLP techniques in accordance with their own concepts and beliefs. Thus NLP is at its core resource- and goal-oriented. It assumes that every person possesses the skills to achieve their goals and solve their problems.

The term itself was coined in connection with brain research (Neuro), the use of language in communication (Linguistic), and patterns of our behaviour and thinking, including breaking habits, turning them into new and positive learning experiences (Programming). Nowadays, its use is widespread in business, psychology, politics, teaching and elsewhere. Basically, it can be applied in any ﬁeld, because of its universal nature. The basis of NLP is solution- and goal-oriented thinking, improvement of perception and acquisition of effective strategies for action. This can be achieved through conscious observation of the surroundings. Information gained this way helps people to react ﬂexibly, depending on their interlocutor or situation. You might be wondering what this has to do with your job as a teacher. My answer is simple: everything! The process of learning is seen as holistic from the viewpoint of NLP. The transfer of information at both the conscious and the subconscious levels enables maximum success. Our brain has two hemispheres: the left hemisphere is more rational, while the right contains emotions, images, motivation and symbols. Therefore

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it makes sense to use both hemispheres in the process of learning. Many teachers use NLP, since is oﬀers numerous learning techniques. One branch of NLP deals primarily with diﬀerent types of learners: auditory, visual, kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory. If a teacher is aware of the student types, they can approach individual students better. See the guidelines below to decide whether a particular student of yours is more auditory, visual, kinaesthetic or a combination of the three.

“I would die without Skype.” “When I write down a word, I pay a lot of attention to how it is pronounced.” “I memorise the content of a lecture through listening.” “I remember most about the topic if I talk about it with someone else afterwards.” “I like to read my course book aloud when I revise for a test.” “I quickly learn songs on the radio by heart.” “I learn well if I listen to an MP3 player while studying.” “I prefer it when others explain the rules of a game to me.” “When I watch a ﬁlm, I remember mostly dialogues and music.”

VISUAL Some statements that apply to visual students: “I admire people who look really stunning.” “I learn through observation.” “I have a clear vision of my future.” “I prefer learning with images and infographics.” “I love reading.” “I need a clear overview of the topic if I want to learn it properly.” “I use markers to underline important parts in my student’s book.” “I like drawing.” “I learn easily.” “My favourite colours are of great importance when choosing clothes.” “I love mentally challenging tasks.” “I read the game instructions or user manual carefully when I get a new boarding game or a gadget.” “I make no spelling mistakes.” “When I watch a ﬁlm, I remember settings, characters and costumes very vividly.” “I would be a great ﬁlm director.” “I like mind mapping.”

KINAESTHETIC Some statements that apply to kinaesthetic students: “I like hanging out with my friends and doing all sorts of things with them.” “Only after I try things out myself do I understand how they function.” “A room has first and foremost to be cosy.” “I learn best when I write things down.” “I always play around with something (my hair, a stress ball, a kinder surprise toy, etc.) or doodle when I study.” “I rewrite the most important bits of the text when revising.” “I absolutely can’t learn when I’m in a bad mood.” “When I watch a film, I remember mostly the emotions that overflowed me while I was watching it.” “I’m very skilful at practical tasks.” “I have to try out a new game or a gadget immediately.” “My clothing has to be comfortable.” “I walk around in my room while studying.” “Gathering one’s own experiences is of high importance for me.” “I like being in motion.” “I learn better if my teacher is friendly.” “My favourite school subjects are PE and arts and crafts.”

AUDITORY Some statements that apply to auditory students: “In my free time I chat with my friends a lot.” “When I learn how to spell I word I need to hear it as well.” “I like to take part in talks and discussions.” “Simple explanations are suﬃcient for me.” “I learn best when someone explains the topic to me.” “When I write something down, I often say it out loud simultaneously.” “I prefer teachers who tell a lot of stories.”

You could print and mix the statements, hand them out to your students and tell them to stack them up in two piles: those that apply to them and those that don’t. Then they count how many visual, auditory and kinaesthetic cards they have and see which their prevalent type is. In order to help students to learn better, their learning type should be taken into consideration. What works best for each type? Visual students learn well with ﬂashcards and mind maps. They are able to produce

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vivid mental images, so it’s good to prompt them to do so. Worksheets for visual learners should contain as much visual material as possible. We should encourage them to use coloured markers and pens in order to be able to organise their notes according to their taste. If possible, they should sit at the front of the classroom, since there are fewer distractions in the first row and that way they can focus better on what is written or projected on the board. At the seminar, I also found out about a useful method of learning vocabulary for visual learners. It is called visual spelling, as students have to see the word with their inner eye as they learn it. According to this method, there are several steps involved in learning a word. First, there is a short warming up exercise before visual spelling can take place. The teacher asks a student if they can spell their name (or any other easily spelt word for that matter). The student doesn’t have to write the word, a nod in confirmation is enough. Now, the student is asked to feel the spelling of that word, imagine it in their mind, embrace it and try to decide it the word feels right, i.e. if it fits within its spelling. Of course, your name usually feels right, but this exercise is all about letting the basic feeling of visualising the spelling sink in. Once this has been done, any new word is pronounced carefully by the teacher so that the student can hear it clearly and then a flashcard with the word nicely spelt out is given to the student. The student is allowed to hold the flashcard for as long as they feel is needed. The only important thing is that they hold it at arm’s length in the upper right-hand corner of their field of vision. The student is then asked to mentally store the word and, once they are certain they have stored the correct image, they return the flashcard to the teacher. Now the student is asked to spell the word slowly and carefully backwards as they still hold the mental image of the word in their mind (they can

close their eyes if they want to). The final step is to write the word down on a blank sheet of paper (preferably, papers are coloured and round) and compare it with the mental image (does the word feel right?). If the word is spelt correctly (to be confirmed by the teacher), the process of visual spelling has been successful. If a mistake occurs, the whole cycle is to be repeated until the word is learned correctly. Once the spelling is correct, the student is asked to write the word one more time on a new blank sheet of paper, as if to click “save”. I must admit I found the method rather odd at first, since I was never good at visually imagining words. However, I can say from my own experience that I have successfully stored and learned some Polish, Spanish and Russian words from other participants which I can still spell and write down correctly today, even though I have never learnt the Russian (Cyrillic) or Spanish alphabets. As for the auditory students, it is best to ensure that they can hear the subject matter properly. Eliminate background noise and avoid too many visual stimuli. Use as many audio tracks and listening tasks as possible, teach through stories, chants and rhymes and avoid monotonous speech. Auditory student are usually good at storytelling themselves, so make use of it. Not to mention that they normally excel at foreign languages, especially in speaking. It is not unusual to find an auditory student murmuring or whispering to themselves. As sometimes they cannot help it, it is futile to forbid them to do so. Just make sure they don’t bother the rest of the class. This habit can sometimes be problematic during tests, so if they insist on reading questions and answers silently to themselves, put them in a part of the classroom where they cannot be heard by others.

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Kinaesthetic learners are often considered disruptive by some teachers as they can normally not sit still. They might keep tapping with their fingers on the desk or playing with their stationery without realising it. Try to channel their energy in other directions – for example, they can be the ones responsible for wiping the board, handing out the worksheets or fetching chalk. If their movement gets too loud, remind them that they have to take their classmates into consideration and provide ideas for alternative silent movements, for example moving their feet under the desk. It’s best if they sit at the back, because this way their movement will least disrupt a class. These students will enjoy and excel at drama activities in class, mime games, running dictations, etc. Therefore try to incorporate some movement in your lessons. You will be surprised that they will learn to cherish your effort and repay you in unexpected ways. Another important point is that a successful learning process should be free from anxiety and stress. This is the preoccupation of suggestopædia approach. The suggestopædia theory is based on the presupposition that many memories, perceptions and images can in fact be transformed to mental anchors in the state of relaxation. Once stored, they can be brought forward whenever a person finds themselves in a learning position, thus enabling up to five times greater memorisation. In short, learning can be enhanced by using the power of suggestion. A similar effect can also be achieved through breaking of negative patterns and habits, “unlearning” of mistakes or learning things in a new way. Brain gymnastics can be done in several ways, be it simple changes in our daily routine or some more demanding tasks of body and mind coordination. To keep things simple, try getting up on the other foot from usual in the morning, tying up the shoelaces on “the other shoe” first, or brushing your teeth with the other hand – you’ll be surprised how by the end of the week they don’t feel wrong any more.

Moving on to the last key word of this article: coaching. The term “coach” was established in the English language as a means of transport in the 16th century. A coach is something that enables you to travel from one place to another, which is exactly what coaching is about in a metaphorical sense. A coach in the field of coaching is a warlock of change who supports clients in order to make them change themselves for the better. Since the 19th century, the term “coaching” has been used to signify instructing, advising and directing. Coaching has also been successfully applied to the personal development of professional athletes – to help them get past mental blocks and thus enable them to fulfil their sporting potential. In the field of teaching, coaching is seen as added value to other kinds of human resources development. Schools need people with an open mind, people who foster friendly dialogue. We teachers of course play an important role in the educational system. However, we are often faced with difficult challenges for which we have not been sufficiently prepared in our educational careers. We sometimes lack effective communicative tools when dealing with difficult learners or parents. This is where modern coaching techniques from brain research and psychology step in. Coaching brings forward the best in us and helps us find the right way forward. With only a few little tricks you can do away with all sorts of blocks. I’m sure you‘ve already heard of the sandwich technique, where you are supposed to give praise before you criticise and finish off with some more praise in order to make your students feel better about themselves. Here’s another one: try replacing each “but” with an “and”. This also works well during parent–teacher meetings. Instead of telling a parent off that their child keeps forgetting homework, which usually goes something like: X has relatively good grades, BUT he/she never does his/her homework, you might rephrase it as: X has relatively good grades AND if he/she did homework regularly, he/she could improve further. As you see, it’s all about bringing out the positive. Even in problem-solving, a similar technique can be adapted when you find yourself in the position of coach (for example as a class teacher). Instead of problem-oriented questions, use solution-oriented questions to guide your pupils towards a eureka moment of what’s best for them. Instead of questioning about a problem (What is your problem? Can you deal with it yourself? How can you solve it without making things even worse? Why is that a problem at all? Who is to be blamed? etc.), focus

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on the solution (When and how often is the problem not present? What are you doing diﬀerently when the problem isn’t there? How could you achieve a preferable course of events? What speciﬁcally do you need to overcome the problem? Who can help you? What is your next step going to be? etc.).

IATEFL Slovenia Saturday Seminar 10th May 2014 IATEFL Slovenia will be oﬀering a seminar, all turning around little ideas for great changes, the ideas born or learned at the conference. A part of the seminar will be about using rods at all levels of teaching. Each participant will get a pack of 80 handmade wooden rods, so make sure you apply early enough (the rods can’t be made in less than 3 days). The seminar will be held in Ljubljana for starters, the exact place and program will be made known closer to the date. The registration fee for members is 20 eur and 60 eur for non members (again a great time to become a member...) and it includes the pack of rods and refreshments during the day.

In order for coaching to be successful, there is one important prerequisite, which is that the coach has to establish rapport with the coachee. Rapport is by definition a friendly relationship in which people understand each other very well. This can initially be achieved by assuming similar body language as your interlocutor, using the same pace of speech and adapting your choice of words to those of your coachee. In coaching, this is called “pacing”. Pacing is nothing more than calibrating yourself in accordance with the people around you. You can try it out with your colleagues just for fun. Approach a senior (or younger) colleague of yours who acts, talks and behaves differently to you and try to adapt your behaviour to theirs. After a while you will, without doubt, both feel more comfortable about your chat than you would normally do. I know it’s a lot to take in, and you cannot flip a switch just like that. So try it step by step. But do try it, because you have to test it for yourself to see that it works. I had read a lot about NLP (not so much about coaching) before attending the seminar, but nothing is as worthwhile as trying it out in practice. http://www.iatefl.si/sl/events/saturday-workshops/item/ 154-iatefl-slovenia-saturday-seminar-10th-may-2014.html

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Camp California – the best summer experience A story of a counselor For four years now, summer camp has been at the centre of my life. It’s a place where the outside world just doesn’t exist, you’re focused solely on camp life itself, and with this in mind, it is sometimes easy to forget that this is actually a job, one that you’re lucky enough to be getting paid for, where the emphasis is on creating smiling faces and happy memories.I’ll admit, at first, the thought of going to camp was a scary one. It took me a while before I finally decided for sure that I actually wanted to become a campcounselor. Nothing similar even seems to exist in England, and as such, I had no idea of what to expect. All I knew was that I’d be travelling abroad on my own for the very first time, into a world of uncertainty. Would I even like my co-counselors, for example? My director gave me the details of some of the guys who would be heading to camp from my area, and we started sending a few emails. We talked for weeks over the internet and my fears of becoming lonely and isolated disappeared the moment that I met a few other counselors in a hostel a few days before travelling to camp together. Upon arriving at camp I was greeted by tens of like-minded, outgoing, fun counselors, and they instantly became my new family away from home. I loved every single one of them. They had so many stories to tell and there was an eclectic mix of personalities who all had something to offer me.

Camp quickly swung into life, and began for us with a training week, which gave us the opportunity to grow as a group and learn how to teach activities and deal with campers, so we didn’t get thrown in at the deep end. Every returnee counselor I encountered was also at hand to help me with literally anything I could think of, and before I knew it I was more than comfortable looking after a cabin of campers.When the first campers arrived, I was a combination of nervous and excited, but I instantly bonded with the group of bright eyed, excited children in front of me, who I became friends with almost immediately. By this stage I felt like a big brother to my cabin. I was fiercely protective of them and their needs and it was my job to ensure that I was there for them, from organisation at meal times and activities to running inter-cabin games and stories. My days at camp focused on a huge range of activities that offered something for everybody. I initially started by teaching the activities in which I had the most experience from my home life. I had no qualifications as such, but I had a large amount of knowledge in outdoor activities such as climbing and kayaking as well as traditional sports like football. This was great as I already had the skills necessary to jump straight in and have fun with the campers. It is genuinely so rewarding to encourage a scared camper to beat their fears and reach the summit of the climbing tower, or to see an often shy camper celebrate scoring a goal at football like they’ve just won the world cup. In addition to these activities I also learnt how to teach fencing during training week, a sport I knew literally nothing about, but grew to love over the summer. It added another string to my bow, and provided me with a new interest to pursue. I later repeated this by learning how to windsurf which has become one of my favourite sports, even if I do still lose my balance an awful lot.

The fun doesn’t stop once the day’s activities have finished either, as camp runs an evening entertainment program which is different every night for two weeks, which helped to keep me fresh and interested. If you can see the funny side in things, enjoy slightly cheesy situations and occasionally making a fool out of yourself then this is a great part of camp. In my time at camp I’ve hosted lip sync events, been painted an array of colours that multiple showers struggle to remove, dressed up as a caterpillar and hidden in a wooden box, worn dresseswhich do nothing for my masculinity and have performed in countless crazy dance routines. Everything seems a little bit daft, but it’s great fun, and everyone is in it together, like a big family, so Ihave never once felt embarrassed whatever the situation. The kids are absolutely fantastic too. For them, it’s their big summer holiday so naturally they’re full of enthusiasm and can’t wait to meet friends old and new, which I found includedme and my fellow counselors in our new roles. Spending two weeks with a group of campers really helped me get to know them and although you are obviously in a position of responsibility to them, you do find yourself releasing your inner child and just being really silly on a more or less hourly basis. It is important to stress that life at camp differs hugely from normal life at home. Electricity and internet connectivity are limited, but this is a chance to embrace simplicity. You can’t just head to a bar or go out to socialise with friends whenever you fancy and you certainly shouldn’t expect to have any privacy for the summer. However, instead of heading to school or to work and spending the day staring out of the window, your new office is a place of outstanding natural beauty, where you’ll be active from the second you wake up in the morning, and able to breath in fresh air and feel the summer sun on your back. Every day is a joy. It also has to be said that despite what it may seem, camp should not be thought of as a holiday. I was working hard and I was working for long hours, often facing responsibilities around the clock, much more so than a ‘normal’ job. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the work being asked of me though; it is great fun waking up at 7.15am in the knowledge that if you can force your aching limbs out of bed, you

get to spend the day bouncing around on the waterpark with boisterous campers, teaching them how to windsurf, and playing football alongside them. When I inevitably did tire and feel like it would be impossible to continue, the sheer enthusiasm of the other staff and the campers themselves was more than enough to keep me going until my own energy levels returned. For the staff, the experience didn’t end when camp is over and the campers had all gone home. After all we had just survived a whole summer of intense work, which had involved getting to intimately know a group of staff who had shared in our experience. Naturally, I grew close to the majority of these, and although there were painful goodbyes following the close of camp, I knew I had made friends for life, who I got to go travelling with, meet up with during the year to reminisce about our experiences and also to Skype with on a weekly basis. I have made friends all over the world, many of whom I’ve stayed with in their home country, and I have even lived briefly with a friend I met on camp, which goes to show the strength of the bonds I have been lucky enough to make. It wasn’t justthe new friends and some fabulous memories that Icame away from camp with either. I grew as a person the moment I walked through the camp gates, have become more confident in myself, gained a sense of independence and meaning, and completed an experience which has been a major help in me finding employment after camp. I would recommend becoming a camp counselor to absolutely anyone and everyone, and it is an experience that you shouldn’t miss out on. My advice would be to be brave, take the plunge, and you won’t regret it. I have a fantastic life at home, a great job, amazing family, and the best friends I could ask for, but I still find myself counting down the days until I can next get on the plane and head out to camp for the summer. To put it simply, I can’t wait, and neither should you.

Camp California is an international summer camp in Croatia, aimed to provide the best summer experience to kids aged 7-17. For more details about the camp, head over to www.campcalifornia.si or www.campcalifornia.com.

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Teaching Young Learners English Can Be Fun by Mija Selič

The greatest challenge in my many years of teaching English to young children has been to find a workbook that would be ‘the right one’ for the young learner. No matter how many books I tried, none of them did justice to the task. Not that there was anything wrong with the books – on the contrary, they were of good quality and well structured. It is simply that the young learner too quickly becomes bored with a workbook, and the teacher needs to be constantly in a state of readiness to change the activity in order to maintain the children’s attention and motivation. The lack of other materials that would support and enrich the workbook, as well as the ‘obligation’ to cover the book entirely, was somehow an obstacle to me. I have found that lessons can in fact be even better carried out without a workbook, providing you have a broad base of a variety of worksheets (preferably doodles for the young) and didactic accessories that can support topics from different angles and in different ways. Only then does the teacher have enough material to enable her/him to quickly adapt to each situation and choose the right material for the specific need. Throughout the last 22 years, I have been gradually preparing and collecting different kinds of materials. The collection is now broad enough to cover the basic needs of any teacher who teaches the young and can cover any chosen topic. What I use in my classes are two ‘Cool Houses’ (Picture 1) and the ‘CoolTool’, which is based on a selection of words with matching illustrations. Together, they function as a picture dictionary for the young, made up of 700 of the most frequently used words, covering all the topics usually found in workbooks for this age group. Each word has its own card (a word and a picture) in three different versions. They enable a range of social games and are very handy for different types of cooperative learning. Moreover, the same ‘dictionary’ enables children to learn how to read and write at an early age through play activities. (You can read more about all this at www.c00lsch00l.eu.)

Picture 1: The Alphabet House and the Theme House have their windows turned into pockets. The cards (words) can be kept either alphabetically or under diﬀerent topics. All of the materials can be very eﬀectively used in the classroom as vital accessories in a teaching process that is based on: • Projects; • Communication: • Storytelling and drama; • Social games based on cooperative learning; • The target language as a means of communication; • Developing reading and pre-writing skills based on convergent pedagogy (global and structural approach) (Wambach and Wambach, 1999). I have named the approach ‘CoolPool’ (AAS, 15.4.2013, R67/13).

A practical approach to teaching young learners (age 4 to 9) At the beginning of the school year, the name of the ‘cover project’ should be chosen. A workbook is, in truth, unnecessary for this, though some teachers may choose to use one because it provides them with a framework of topics. The obstacle of ‘covering the book entirely’ could therefore still be present.

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Let’s say, for the sake of a more vivid illustration, that the cover project is called ‘It’s a Jungle Out There!’ and binds the ﬁrst few grades together (grades 1 to 4; in my country, Slovenia, that would be the age group 6 to 9). The name of the project covers ‘animals’ on the one hand and ‘chaos among people or children’ on the other.

Projects Those who have chosen to use a workbook already have the topics laid out for them, and would therefore stick to them. For others, their own enthusiasm is their guide. Sub-projects are then chosen from the topics to be covered. If we decide to use the CoolPool approach, stories and songs forming the context for every topic should be chosen. Thus the stories or songs selected can be the names of the sub-projects. In other words, every topic is opened with a story or song. As there is an abundance of stories and songs available, those should be selected that could be introduced to support the cover project ‘It’s a Jungle Out There!’ For example, one might choose (1) You Can Be My Friend by Lauren Child for the topic ‘Introduction’, (2) Quiet! by Paul Bright for the topic ‘Family’, (3) The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle for the topic ‘Colours’, (4) The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr for the topic ‘Pets’, (5) Giraﬀes Can’t Dance by Giles Andreae for the topic ‘My Body’, (6) I Would Actually Like to Keep It by Lauren Child for the topic ‘My Toys’, and (7) Workshops for the topics ‘Christmas’, ‘Birthdays’ and ‘Easter’.

Picture 2: Games are a very serious business for children in the ﬁrst triad (Marjanovič Umek, 2004). Children can get thoroughly involved irrespective of the language they are using. All teachers who teach young learners should bear this in mind. Once ‘the ice is broken’, stories are a ‘language’ any child can accept. Picture books should deﬁnitely be used in the youngchildren classroom, i.e. books in which the whole story is illustrated in such a way that merely looking at the illustrations in the correct order would give the general idea of the plot. In such books, the additional support provided by the narration is merely a contribution that the children do not consider as a ‘lesson’, but rather as an interesting and enjoyable event at school. Once one manages to create a relaxing atmosphere in the classroom, any additional work is considered as an enjoyable and well-accepted activity. Let’s imagine the introduction to the new topic – ‘Pets’ – in the classroom.

Storytelling, drama, social games and cooperative learning as part of the lesson

Step one: The story The Tiger Who Came to Tea The story is told with the support of the illustrations. The ﬁrst goal to be achieved is a general understanding of the plot. The children need to become familiar with the idea of the story. In order to assess their comprehension, one could use randomly ordered illustrations that the children put in the correct order, or the children could simply act the story out, non-verbally, of course.

I have found that the most important thing for a child’s first contact with a foreign language in the classroom environment, irrespective of their age, is that at the beginning the language should be the only new (unfamiliar) parameter. Firstly, therefore, the teacher should introduce her/himself prior to the actual scheduled lessons (alternatively, the first lesson should be carried out in the children’s mother tongue). Secondly, the first few lessons should not follow a workbook but rather focus on the children’s familiar activities (well known and well accepted) carried out in the target language. This way, it is easier for the children to become familiar with the target language, while they are, at the same time, given ample opportunity to grasp the new approach by focusing on the non-verbal communication that is used by the teacher in order to convey the message to them.

Picture 3: Storytelling

The choice of books and songs is of course open to choice based on each teacher’s imagination and personal taste, though within the framework of the curriculum naturally!

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Picture 3: Storytelling

Picture 5: A cooperative card game.

Further steps: Any activity can be chosen that could ‘upgrade’ the story The Tiger Who Came to Tea. There are doodles available for this, such as ‘Who is hiding in the jungle?’, ‘What would animals have for tea?’, ‘Who would you invite to tea?’, etc. The use of the picture dictionary in these doodles is very handy and convenient.

• Individually: • Write the names next to the animals (upgrading the doodles); • Gap-ﬁlling (after the written story has been introduced). The picture dictionary can also be used even if the workbook is the teacher’s only framework, regardless of the workbook selected.

Picture 4: The doodle ‘My animal world’ was the result of learning Old MacDonald Had a Farm (for kindergarten children). Some of the activities with the picture dictionary (CoolTool and Cool Houses) are, for example: • In pairs: • Ask and answer – the names of the chosen animals (picture 5); • Memory game (two options: with pictures or a combination of a picture and a word); • Find the animal (cards are hidden in the classroom), etc.

Picture 6: The doodle ‘Hang out your washing’, with writing the names of the clothes by using the picture dictionary as an upgrading activity after having heard the story Aliens Love Underpants by Claire Freedman (2nd grade). Developing reading and pre-writing skills based on convergent pedagogy (global and structural approach) In my opinion, the most important thing one has to bear in mind is that all of the reading and pre-writing activities should be carried out in a context that is already familiar to the child. Therefore, upgrading the stories with such activities is highly appropriate.

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Finding the correct word

Gap-ﬁlling

Younger children who are still in the process of learning how to read and write ﬁrstly need to become familiar with the use of the picture dictionary. This is a set of two ﬂat ‘houses’ made of cloth, with the windows turned into pockets where the cards (CoolTool) are kept. One house is called the ‘Cool Theme House’, where the illustrated words on cards are kept in theme groups (such as ‘family’, ‘weather’, etc.), while the other is called the ‘Cool Alphabet House’, where the illustrated words on cards are kept alphabetically (for example, an alligator and an apple are kept in the ‘window’ under the letter ‘A’).

This type of exercise is relatively challenging for the young, but it is very well accepted and carried out by children from around the age of eight. Once again, it needs to be stressed that the topic for such an exercise has to be covered and understood pretty well. The words that are missing in the text could be found in either of the ‘houses’ – it is up to the child to decide whether to search for it in the Theme House or the Alphabet House.

Picture 7: CoolTool – an illustrated card Type A, where the word and the illustration cover the face of the card. The word can be found under the letter ‘W’ in the Cool Alphabet House and under the topic ‘Nature’ in the Cool Theme House. In order for children to start using the library correctly, some exercises should be provided, such as: • Children need to find the correct card for the characters who appear in the story (a grandmother, a girl, etc.); • When writing the names of the objects on doodles, children need to find the correct card and copy the word from it; • When choosing their own word to be used in a braingym-like activity, the children themselves need to find the correct card with the chosen word and picture on it, etc.

Story-writing Once a topic is covered up to a certain level, an introduction to story-writing is recommended. The text is written on a poster by the teacher, with the children helping her/him with ideas and words. It is the teacher who makes sure that the text is written and structured correctly. The activity that follows the actual writing, and for which the cards are used, is ﬁnding a correct word in the text (the searched word is written on a card).

Conclusion To sum up the CoolPool approach, I may simply say that, in my 22 years of practice, none of the approaches I have employed has been more appreciated or better accepted by the children (or indeed by the parents, as the children present their knowledge to their parents at the end of each school year in a ‘cooperative manner’). Consequently, the children’s enthusiasm has given me an enormous amount of energy to push further, in the sense of searching for the method’s limits. I haven’t found any yet, however. Once a teacher is truly a teacher with her/his whole heart, devoted to her/his profession and her/his belief in children’s abilities, she/he soon realises that limits are only created by a lack of knowledge or obstacles constructed in their own heads through lack of belief. Children are, in this sense, unspoiled. P.S. If you want to learn more about the teaching aids for young children, please visit http://www.c00lsch00l.eu/ and sign up for the presentation.

Further reading: • Kagan, S. & Kagan, M. (2009). Kagan Cooperative Learning. San Clemente: Kagan Publishing. • Marjanovič Umek, L. & Zupančič, M. (2004). Razvojna psihologija. Ljubljana: Znanstvenoraziskovalni inštitut Filozofske fakultete. • Selič, M. (2012). “Sodelovalno učenje pri tujem in maternem jeziku v prvem triletju osnovne šole”, Magistrsko delo. Ljubljana: Univerza v Ljubljani. • Selič, M. (2013). “Celostna didaktičnometodološka podpora zgodnjemu učenju tujega jezika”. AAS, 15.4.2013, R-67/13 • Wambach, M. & Wambach, B. (1999). Drugačna šola: Konvergentna pedagogika v osnovni šoli. Ljubljana: DZS.

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Little Ideas for Great Changes – Report on Attending the 21st IATEFL Slovenia Conference by Danka Kezunović, Bosnia and Herzegovina “Little Ideas for Great Changes” was the theme of the 21st IATEFL Slovenia international conference, held from 6 to 9 March 2014 in Terme Topolšica. As members of TETA (the Tuzla English Teaching Association), Elma Velić and I were honoured to represent our association at the conference. The conference programme required our arrival in Ljubljana on Wednesday 5 March by 2.00 pm. First we were installed in the lively Celica hostel in the centre of the city. The aim of our early arrival was to meet other participants and association representatives from KETNET (Kosovo) and ELTA (Albania). After enjoying a beautiful poetry evening hosted by Jeremy Harmer and Steve Bingham, Nina Jerončić (IATEFL Slovenia) and I presented the action plans for our associations. Nina’s plan is to include more students and young teachers into the organisation, while mine is to grow TETA from a regional to a national association. On the Thursday morning, representatives from Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Albania discussed issues relating to the organisation of conferences, budgeting, attracting new people and engaging with fresh ideas within our associations. In the afternoon, we departed for Terme Topolšica for our ﬁrst workshops. Friday morning started in the swimming pool for a session of guided aerobics. Fully ﬁt, we attended the opening plenary led by Edmund Dudley, “Teaching as daily routine”, which opened a lot of questions concerning the problem of routines in the classroom. The Q&A sessions after each plenary gave participants the

opportunity to talk to the speakers, discuss their ideas and express their own opinions. The Regional English Language Office (RELO) for Central and Southeastern Europe officer George M. Chinnery explained to the teachers about RELO’s teacher exchange programmes and grant opportunities and about other teaching resources. The evening was reserved for a workshop led by my colleague Elma Velić – “Differentiate learning – Reading and writing in primary school”. Elma demonstrated lots of ideas and materials ready to use in the classroom. There were two highlights on Saturday – my own workshop (!) and signing a two-year contract with IATEFL Slovenia. It was the perfect end to a perfect day! The successful conference closed with a useful discussion where all the presenters shared their ideas, comments and opinions about the conference. ELT conferences give teachers a chance to get together and discuss not only the latest innovations, but also some of the “old-fashioned” practices in our field. “Little Ideas for Great Changes” offered participants not only a lot of great speakers with great ideas for great changes, but also the sense of community within the field. As teachers we all share the same fears and hopes, regardless of whether we use blackboard and chalk or modern technology, regardless of whether we are novice teachers or experienced ones, regardless of whether we come from Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, Hungary, Italy, or beyond.

The attendance of these participants was made possible with the help of the RELO Regional English Language Oﬃce.

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IATEFL Slovenia Conference

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IATEFL Slovenia Conference 2014 by Dardan Shabani

In Topolšica, one of the most relaxing sights of Slovenia, a venue combined with two extremes: a peaceful location and an invaluable sight of nature contrasted with the modern comfort offered by the hotel; teachers from around the world were warmly welcomed by the organizing staff and students helpers of IATEFL 21st International Slovenia Conference titled Little Ideas for Great Changes. It was a four day precious experience of meeting new teachers, sharing experiences, motivation and contradictive discussions about language learning and teaching. The chosen venue was a very thoughtful decision. The organisers set the event in a rural place where there was little or no opportunity to have access to other attractions except the ones in the hotel. This conditioned the teachers who were present to get to know each other really well and acclimatized high focus on the event. Hundreds of teachers from different countries such as Slovenia, Albania, Kosovo, Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia, Austria and China created a perfect international environment. All of them had the chance to get to know each other more through leisure activities such as swimming, wellness centre and other fun activities organized such as music performances and dancing sessions taught by professional choreographers. The highlight of the conference was the presence of Jeremy Harmer as a plenary speaker. Amongst the plenary speakers were also Edmund Dudley, Jamie Keddie and Anthony Gaughan whose presentations offered very critical and controversial ideas between old and modern theories related to language learning and teaching. Worth to mention is the presentation given by Anthony Gaughan who defended traditional methods that have presently been seen as useless for English classes. Drilling, translation and L1 usage in class are three of the ‘7 Deadly sins’ of contemporary linguists which Gaughan in contrary encourages to use in class in a purposefully and communicative manner.

to this Gaughan suggested that drilling ends up being uncommunicative if the teacher chooses to drill something uncommunicative and that asking students questions that a teacher knows the students know the answer to is rather uncommunicative. ‘Drilling should be mindful’ Jeremy Harmer claimed. He was very supportive on Gaughan’s theories and also gave a presentation on the topic of drilling, questioning whether it is indeed something useless and not compatible to language learning. He gives different techniques on how drilling can be effective. Reading aloud was another point to which both Harmer and Gaughan were very supportive to, arguing that it offers phonetic practice and helps many students to really understand what they are reading. Finally, the peak of the whole topic was Gaughan’s distrust on Teacher Talking Time, and he was also in dispute with the nonTeacher Centred approach. He believed that students need to be opposed to language, ‘so what’ if the teacher talks more than the students, ‘so what’ if the lesson is a Teacher Centred oriented lesson? Except many deep issues in language learning such as those mentioned above, there were many practical workshops and presentations offered as well. Workshops on how to use technology in classroom were among the most frequented ones. Using memes, videos and barcodes in a language learning context were very helpful. Fun games and activities were not excluded. The complete event was well-organised and all details were carefully thought through, starting from basics such as the venue to the presentations’ ideas which offered a very energetic and criticality. One could see the importance of attending conferences like this and their role in keeping updated to teaching trends, establishment of a teacher’s unique teaching approach and professional development. The article was first published in “teachers’ avenue”.

Translation helps students to compare between L1 and L2, L1 usage in class saves time for other work and effective communicative drilling generates automation which breeds a habit, and language is a habit hence it is an eﬀective tool. Drilling is considered to be uncommunicative by contemporary linguists, as an argument

The attendance of these participants was made possible with the help of the RELO Regional English Language Oﬃce.

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The Big Two – TESOL 2014 Portland by Lea Sobočan

Until a month ago (at the time of writing) I had never, even in my wildest dreams, where rivers flow with chocolate that doesn’t make you fat, thought I’d present at TESOL Convention. The TESOL Convention is huge. Overwhelmingly so, for someone whose experience of conferences doesn’t exceed 500 participants. The TESOL website sets the number of participants at roughly 6, 500. I’m very glad I didn’t check the exact number beforehand, because the thought of that made me slightly dizzy. How did this experience come to happen? A year or so ago I gave a workshop at ELTA in Belgrade on teaching technologies and one of the participants was the former president of TESOL, Suzanne Lydic Panferov, who offered very kind words and even requested to use some of my materials. So I thought, hey, let’s submit a speaker’s proposal for a workshop in ‘Merica, maybe in time I’ll progress enough to actually get it accepted. So I sat down, thought hard about what teachers might find useful in class and wrote up a proposal. I then tried very hard to forget about it until November. Imagine my surprise when the acceptance email came! Over the moon might be an understatement. I think there was a tear shed at one point. Surprisingly enough, it was more stressful to get on the plane than it was to address a room full of people with PhDs. Only after a week of imagining horrible ways in which the plane would meet its demise I came to terms with the fact that there’s no two ways about it, do or die I suppose, stiff upper lip, what! Next problem: funding. TESOL themselves have quite a number of opportunities for funding participants from overseas, so anyone thinking of submitting a proposal, go through the opportunities, perhaps you’ll find something. I wasn’t successful, so I turned to the Regional English Language Office (RELO) in Budapest. They were kind enough to sponsor my TESOL Experience and I can’t thank them enough. Without them, I’d surely stay home feeling very sorry for myself indeed, because even to buy a plane ticket would be beyond my financial means. So, all papers in order and my optimism hat on I embarked the plane, helped by assurances of love from those near and dear and some natural remedies. I learnt, during the long, 24

hour trip to Portland that a human being can get used to a lot of things, but not being hurled at high speed through the atmosphere. My next shock came after my too-short night, when I figured that the best way to get over my jet-lag would be to have a little stroll around the city. Everything was so big! The buildings were big, the sandwiches were big, the smiles were big… My Slavic nature rebelled the minute I walked into a store to buy my fix of Twinkies and the cashier asked me how I was doing. Do we know each other from somewhere? Nope, just being friendly. I could definitely get used to this! My next stop was the Convention Centre, to see where all the knowledge sharing will be taking place. Oh. My. You guessed correctly, it was big. Walking inside I did a little jig and sang under my breath “You’re in ‘Merica, you’re in ‘Merica!” It was a standard reaction every time I spotted an American flag, which reminded me I am on a continent half-way across the world. I registered, still grinning like an idiot and went to bed with huge expectations for the next day when the Convention proper began. To make a long story short, I’ve never seen so many people all in one place just to discuss teaching. The number of workshops was quite overwhelming and it took me two days just to familiarise myself with the Conference Brochure. Luckily, TESOL offered a session on getting the most of the conference for first-time participants. First, we had a little getting-toknow you activity, where we tried to find, for example, people who travelled the furthest to get to the conference, people who work in rural schools, people who work in public education and similar. I liked the fact that the session was very interactive, we got a list of tasks we had to perform (“Where can you find a list of evening events?”) and we worked together to find our answers. It made the task much more meaningful that just saying where the information is hidden. The rest of the conference passed by very uneventfully up until my session, but I did make a few general observations on how this event is different than our regional conferences. First difference was that a majority of the sessions I attended were very research-based. At first I was disappointed, because I believed we are all professionals and we need practical ideas, but I’ve since adapted my thinking somewhat. In a recent blog post by

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The Secret DOS, he lamented the lack of academic research in our profession. I think TESOL might be just the ticket for anyone thinking there’s a lack of academia in ELT! Secondly, even though there were so many university professors, the best-attended sessions were those that provided practical activities and just a mention of underlying theory. This proved to me that no matter how high up in academic world you are, you still need practical ideas the most. The third lesson was, don’t forget to go out of the Convention Centre! I made many cultural notes and talked to a lot of interesting people by stepping out the Centre, sitting behind the bar and striking up a conversation with servers, baristas, cashiers and random people in a park. Best conversation starter? The Voodoo Doughnuts pink box. Walk across the city with one of those in your hands and you’ll have made three new friends just by existing! There’s a huge deal in getting a box of those, mainly because they are immensely popular, seen as one of the iconic things in Portland and you have to stand in a HUGE line just to get your hands on them. Honestly, they taste just like average donuts, which annoyed me to no end. But it’s part of the experience I guess. My fourth lesson was don’t get spooked! I held a session on teaching technologies and I had a series of mishaps. First, the attendant was quite surprised when I asked him if the sound is connected. It turned out there was a mix-up in the dates, but I was assured everything will be in perfect order. Next, I waltz in, all enthusiastic, and see there’s a person with Google Glass waiting to hear what I wanted to say. So, I’ll be talking about technology to a person who already has a gadget that maybe a fraction of a percentage of a population has. Perfect. The man turned out to be very friendly and we ended up having a long and fruitful conversation after my session on what to do with tech in the class. He was a very productive participant, sharing his expertise with everyone and asking very meaningful questions – the kind of participant you dream about having in your session! My last mishap was the fact that the sound, despite assurances to the contrary, did not work. No worries, it happens all the time in the class and we could develop a nice discussion on what to do when technology fails. Lesson learned, stay conﬁdent and don’t stress and everything will be perfect. Looking back, I have to say it was one of the best sessions I gave, mainly because even though I had 1 hour 45minutes, I still managed to keep a lot of my audience for the duration. In a conference where it is normal to pop in a session for 20 minutes and then go somewhere else, it’s a success. The experience was one of the most profound I had as an educator and I think everyone should try to submit their proposal to an international conference, just to get the feel of what they look like. Having said that, being a part of such a huge event reinforced my conviction that it is indeed the people who make the conference. I knew next to no-one and so I missed talking to friends about the ideas I heard and the event itself. Smaller, regional conferences are much better in that respect and our speakers are just as good as those on big conferences.

Martin Luther King statue in front of the convention Center, where I routinely stopped to double-check I have my brochure with me...

First look at the centre - squeal!

Lacking water, just like teachers lack funding.

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The Big Two – IATEFL by Lea Sobočan I may have a bit of a time management problem. I am quite confident that I can manage it, is what I’m trying to say, when all evidence points to the contrary. So when IATEFL Slovenia offered to send me to the BIG IATEFL conference in Harrogate, I looked at the dates, saw it was just after my TESOL workshop and said “Sure, no worries, I should be fine.” Lesson learnt: Do not go from one conference to another if you don’t have a day of rest in between. Especially if you calculate the trip will take you more than two days to complete. Feeling only slightly the worse for wear I arrived in Harrogate after 45 hours of travelling and a night at what is now my least favourite airport in the world, my otherwise sunny disposition approaching a natural disaster. A hastily gulped cup of coffee and a short shower later I was in the Holiday Inn room, listening intently to the associates and pretending food and tea can replace sleep. I am not at all sorry to have sacrificed a day of rest, the ideas we heard during Associate’s Day and the colleagues I met there more than made up for the woozy sleepy feeling that was my constant companion in the next week. I especially liked the idea of the representative of one of the South American Associates – a regional conference! It was great to hear how Associates all over the world organise their work and how they connect with their members. I was also beaming with pride when I heard the Hungarian representative, Beatrix Price, describe our own Slovenian conference as one of the best in the region. Thank you, Bea, for your constant support! The next few days were dedicated to reconnecting with old friends and making new ones, dashing and rushing from one session to another and sampling all that Harrogate has to offer. It’s the people that make the conference and I was much more active in Harrogate simply because I knew more people. In Portland I spent a lot of time taking pictures, writing up Facebook statuses, talking to family and reading the brochure, simply because I was alone and had a lot of time. Harrogate was a series of talks, coffees, conversations, workshops, evening beers and socializing. As a contrast, the IATEFL conference has an overwhelmingly larger percentage of practical workshops, which is useful for my context but might lead some to suspect there’s not enough research in ELT. Still, it made the choice of what session to attend much more difficult and much easier at the same time. Easier, because I knew I’d be getting practical activities that I can use on Monday, and more difficult because there were so many to choose from. Another thing I found extremely useful is the way IATEFL organised their brochure. They had pages where you could write up the workshops you wanted to take and pages with overviews of the day – a single A3 page for a day, which makes it much easier to organise your time. Also, the sections were clearly separated with markers. In the bro-

chure design, TESOL could take a leaf out of IATEFL’s book. My day was much easier to organise in Harrogate. Another thing I missed in Portland was evening entertainment. IATEFL had an event every evening where you could socialise with the participants and reinforce the acquaintances you’ve made during the day. In my mind, that made the conference more friendly. TESOL will be associated with seriousness and academic achievement, IATEFL with connecting with professionals in my field. There was, however, one thing I missed at the IATEFL conference and that was the extra-curriculars during the day. TESOL offered a larger variety of short trips, like evening trips to food pods, a visit to the largest independent bookstore, a breakfast at Voodoo Donuts and many more. The number of participants was limited, but it gave us a chance to connect in a more intimate environment. IATEFL did offer a walk around Harrogate, but the variety of activities was much larger at TESOL. It helped me get a real feel for the city and I appreciated the local volunteers’ stories. It is important to come back from a foreign country with a sense of how the people of the city think, what makes them tick, so to say. It gives you a very valuable insight into the culture of other nations and helps you develop as a person and as a teacher. My highlights were Sinead Laffan’s workshop, where she explained how her teacher trainees blossomed after she gave them more freedom; SugataMitra’s plenary, which proved we are capable of getting collectively riled-up and disagree constructively; Marcela Cintra’s Teaching Unplugged in a technological era, which showed me the way to a materials free lesson while still using my favourite tech toys; and above all the conversations and musings with colleagues. The best part about attending conferences with friends is that you don’t only hear ideas from the presenters you chose, you also benefit from your friends going to sessions you missed and hearing the ideas from them. It makes for a very satisfying conference experience. I would never have learnt about RussellMayne if it weren’t for my friends who attended his session. He is very interested in the evidence surrounding some of the most famous theories of English language teaching. In retrospect, I am very sorry to have missed that particular talk. Luckily, it was recorded, so I urge everyone to go to IATEFL’s site and listen to it. He argues that a lot of what we take for granted in the language classroom, like learning styles and brain gym, are pseudo-science. There was also a lively discussion on Facebook and Twitter, with opinions flying everywhere. Best thing to do, listen to the talk and make up your own minds. And that, my dearies, is the best bit about conferences. Feeling connected with your professional network, keeping up with what the community is talking about, reaching out to other teachers and getting so much more back than what you give. See you in Manchester for IATEFL 2015!

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Vanessa Reis Esteves at the 15th OUP Conference in Ljubljana by Vesna Gros

Amidst the early December frenzy, teachers galore gathered yet gain at the Smelt congress venue to attend the 15th OUP Conference in Ljubljana. As it would be a great shame if no one handed the ideas from the lively session by Vanessa Reis Esteves down to colleagues who could not make it to the conference, we are glad to present the following overview, which is a medley of notes from conscientious IATEFL Slovenia members.

The question is thus not whether to teach vocabulary or not. Rather, we should focus on how to challenge our students to learn and memorise what to them sometimes seems like crazy nonsense in a diﬀerent language. Vanessa’s guidelines comprise the following key points:

As the ﬁrst guest speaker of the day, energetic Vanessa claimed the stage with a daring sentence: “It takes two seconds for the brain to stop doing one thing and start focusing on something else. If you are a child, that is. However, it takes a bit longer if you are a teenager.” It follows that we have to prevent our pupils from focusing on their gizmos and gadgets or new highlights in their classmate’s hair rather than on our lesson. That can be done effectively by keeping them busy and interested in the topic. Vanessa’s talk focused primarily on teaching vocabulary in a mixed ability classroom while making it a fun and engaging experience for everyone. Some teachers put too much stress on grammar, forgetting that English is all about words, words, words. A pupil needs to hear a word at least 8 times before they remember it. Therefore teaching vocabulary should never be superﬂuous. We can play around with grammar and our message will still get through more-or-less unchanged, but when we play around with vocabulary, it all sounds gibberish. Take this example: How easily can you make out the meaning of the following two sentences? A: Air quality in the town be not good and there are lot of litter in streets. (grammar problems) B: The hair quality in the towel is not food and there is a lot of butter on the sheets. (vocabulary problems)

Create a meaningful context

Introduce vocab

Model the vocab

Let them practice it

“A meaningful context” means both teaching our students learning strategies and providing the context on the spot. The former can be illustrated by a story. Imagine you have to remember a series of abbreviations: FBI, CIA, PhD, USA, IBM. Why not try to use them in a meaningful text? Vanessa’s story goes like this: Once upon a time in a faraway country there lived a family – mom, dad and their son. One day dad was thinking of what his son should become when he grows up. Dad’s idea was for his son to become an FBI member. On the other hand, mom, who didn’t like FBI that much, suggested that the boy become a CIA member. But unfortunately their child wanted neither – he wanted to get his PhD and he desperately wanted to study in the USA, because one day he wanted to work for the huge computer ﬁrm IBM. As far as providing the context during the lesson, this normally includes realia (especially for young learners). If you were to teach vocabulary connected with a birthday party, you could bring a magic bag into classroom and have your students pull out diﬀerent objects – a birthday card, a cake, a candle, a balloon, etc.

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When teachers use a large variety of practical activities, all students feel challenged and eager to participate, regardless of their language ability or conﬁdence. In addition, activities such as those listed above use diﬀerent learning strategies (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic) and at the same time ensure enough repetition and practice. Students recycle the chosen vocabulary further when they create their own materials. If you have a special classroom or at least an English corner dedicated to the English language, this creates a great opportunity to organise and store your vocabulary (posters, mind maps, word mobiles, etc.). But remember that it is still essential that students practise, recycle and organise their vocabulary, otherwise they lose it.

Then you can engage your students further: one student clicks an object on a smartboard, another one picks up the corresponding object with their “magic hands” (a pair of large tweezers or kitchen tongs) and the rest of the class repeats the word in a parrot-like voice[three times. As follow-up activities you can use flashcards, but not the old-school way. Vanessa offers many ideas on how to spice it up: you can either flash them really quickly to awaken students’ curiosity or show just a part of the picture; you can make up rhymes, incorporate clapping and snapping, play around with rhythm, organise a rap battle, play the fly-swatter game1, have your students create bingo cards2 or word search tasks3, or invent your very own games – the sky is the limit. c

goose dog

You need 2 players, 2 referees, 2 point counters, 2 fly swatters and flashcards. The class shouts out the words and the players have to swat the corresponding flashcards. The faster player is awarded one point counter per word, while the referees make sure there is no cheating.

Students take a blank sheet of paper and fold it 4 times so that they get a 4 by 4 grid. The teacher writes the vocabulary (16 words) on the board and students write the individual words anywhere in the grid. When the student has crossed out 3 words in a row, they stand up (this builds up suspense) and when they have 4, they shout “bingo!” You can agree on special symbols (e.g. a little tick for the ﬁrst round, a heart for the second, etc.) and reuse the bingo cards to be more eco-friendly.

Students choose 5 words and use each in a sentence. The teacher hands out word search grids (preferably a 7 by 7 grid for young learners). Students write their words in the grid and ﬁll the remaining blank spaces with arbitrary letters. They also write their 5 sentences under the grid, replacing the hidden words with lines. They sign their exercise (Word search made by: __________) and give it to a classmate, who also signs it (Word search solved by: ___________). Students can also give each other feedback about their word searches.

2. A ___________ barks.

4. You eat ___________ on your birthday. 5. An ___________ is juicy and orange.

tiger

If you have any further questions or comments, you can reach Vanessa at: vcreis.esteves@gmail.com.

1. Otto is a ___________.

3. A ___________ imitates people.

mouse

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Poročilo o tekmovanju iz znanja angleščine za sedmošolce Letos je že tretjič zapored potekalo tekmovanje v znanju angleškega jezika za 7. razrede. Tekmovanje je bilo organizirano na dveh ravneh, šolski in državni. Šolsko tekmovanje je potekalo 31. januarja 2014, državno pa 26. februarja 2014. Vsaka šola je lahko na državno tekmovanje prijavila največ tri skupine. Sprememba od lanskega leta je bila, da smo letos vsa priznanja (bronasta, srebrna in zlata) podelili na državni ravni. Ker je vsako leto več poudarka na personalizaciji pri pouku tujega jezika, smo se odločili, da letos učenci na tekmovanju za sedmošolce predstavijo svoj najljubši izbor. Izbor česa, je bilo povsem prepuščeno njihovim preferencam in domišljiji. Letošnje tekmovanje smo naslovili THESE ARE MY FAVOURITE... Namenoma smo pustili odprt naslov, z edinim poudarkom, naj skupina svoje ideje poveže v zaključeno celoto z izvirnim naslovom. Sedmošolci so tako pod vodstvom svojih mentorjev v spletni aplikaciji Voicethread predstavljali svoje najljubše stvari, živali, junake knjižnih in ﬁlmskih uspešnic, najljubše kraje, letne čase, šolske predmete, aplikacije za pametne telefone, naj športe, države in prostočasne aktivnosti, svoje najljubše sorodnike, rože in prijatelje, izbor najboljših znamk čevljev, hobijev in krajev, najboljša ličila, plese, superheroje, najljubše spomine, popevke in slavne osebnosti in še in še bi lahko naštevali. Veseli nas, da smo z letošnjo temo privabili širok nabor tekmovalcev iz vse Slovenije. Vaš odziv je bil ponovno velik in tako je naša komisija na državnem tekmovanju ocenila 98 izdelkov. Tudi letos so bile skupine sestavljene iz dveh do petih članov, na državnem tekmovanju pa je sodelovalo 319 tekmovalcev pod vodstvom 58 mentorjev iz 56 osnovnih šol. Mentorji so izdelke objavili na spletnem odložišču, kar je nekaterim povzročalo težave. Problem je bil predvsem v tem, da je za dostop do spletnega odložišča treba zaprositi vsako leto na novo, saj mesto po preteku roka za oddajo izdelkov zapremo. Preglavice so povzročale tudi povezave do nekaterih izdelkov, saj je kar nekaj skupin objavilo nedelujoče povezave. S sprotnim pregledom smo pri vseh skupinah razen pri eni, ki povezave ni popravila, rešili problem. Nekaj mentorjev je potožilo, da učenci v Voicethread aplikacijo niso mogli naložiti posnetkov, ki so jih naredili s kame-

Vesna Gros, koordinatorica tekmovanja

rami ali mobilnimi telefoni, saj aplikacija za nekatere elemente zahteva nadgradnjo. Da se že v naprej izognemo morebitnim težavam pri izdelavi in objavi izdelkov, bomo zato za naslednje šolsko leto najverjetneje pripravili podrobnejša navodila s slikovno podporo ali video vodičem. Prispele izdelke je tekmovalna komisija ocenjevala glede na naslednje kriterije: vsebino oz. sporočilno vrednost, slovnično oz. jezikovno pravilnost, bogastvo besedišča in pravopis, pravilno izgovorjavo in gladkost, strukturo izdelka, ustreznost njegove dolžine ter splošni vtis. Za bronasto priznanje je bilo treba osvojiti 70 % točk, za srebrno 80 % točk ter za zlato 90 % točk. Bronasto priznanje je letos osvojilo 31 skupin oz. 106 tekmovalcev, srebrno 16 skupin oz. 50 tekmovalcev, zlato priznanje pa 7 skupin oz. 23 tekmovalcev. Statistika na kratko: • Število sodelujočih šol: 56 • Število izdelkov, ki smo jih prejeli za državno tekmovanje: 98 • Število vseh tekmovalcev: 319 • Število bronastih priznanj: 31 skupin (106 tekmovalcev) • Število srebrnih priznanj: 16 skupin (50 tekmovalcev) • Število zlatih priznanj: 7 skupin (23 tekmovalcev) • Število mentorjev: 58 • Vse izdelke si lahko ogledate na povezavi, ki je objavljena na spletni strani društva IATEFL Slovenia (www.iateﬂ.si). Sedmošolci so ponovno pokazali visok nivo znanja angleškega jezika in veliko mero izvirnosti in domiselnosti. Njihovi izdelki so bili zabavni, a hkrati vsebinsko bogati in poučni ter kot taki uporabni pri pouku ali kot pripomoček za učenje doma. To nam predstavlja potrditev, da delamo dobro, sproščeno vzdušje, ki veje iz izdelkov, pa nas hkrati motivira, da tekmovanje v taki obliki ohranimo tudi v prihodnje. V svojem imenu, predvsem pa v imenu tekmovalne komisije vsem tekmovalcem iskreno čestitam za njihove dosežke, mentorjem pa se najlepše zahvaljujem za njihovo sodelovanje in podporo. Vabim vas, da se nam ponovno pridružite prihodnje leto.

mag. Alenka Tratnik, predsednica društva

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Poročilo o tekmovanju iz znanja angleščine za osmošolce Letošnjega petega tekmovanja osmošolcev pod okriljem Slovenskega društva učiteljev angleškega jezika IATEFL Slovenia se je udeležilo 4464 tekmovalcev s 335 šol. Pod mentorstvom 459 učiteljev je priznanja prejelo 1599 učencev. Na državnem tekmovanju je 54 učencev doseglo zlato priznanje, srebrno priznanje je prejelo 74 tekmovalcev, bronasto pa 1471 tekmovalcev. Tekmovanje je ohranilo dve ravni, šolsko in državno, prvič sta bili vnaprej objavljeni temi obeh tekmovanj. Šolska raven je potekala v ponedeljek, 21. 10. 2013, udeležilo se ga je največje število tekmovalcev doslej. Tekmovalci in mentorji so se letos prvič srečali z novim sistemom za podporo tekmovanju, društvo je namreč za sistemsko podporo tekmovanju izbralo Infoserver DMFA Slovenije (Društvo matematikov, ﬁzikov in astronomov). Uspešno smo sodelovali tudi z Zavodom za slepo in slabovidno mladino Ljubljana ter Državnim izpitnim centrom in omogočili prilagoditev tekmovalne pole tekmovalki s posebnimi potrebami.

skih šolah. Vabilu za organizacijo državnega tekmovanja se je odzvalo več šol po vsej Sloveniji. Izbranih 14 šol je pripravilo in organiziralo tekmovanje v ponedeljek, 25. 11. 2013, udeležilo se ga je 427 učencev. Vsem, ki ste sodelovali pri izvedbi se tudi na tem mestu zahvaljujemo. Vrednotenje državnega tekmovanja je potekalo 29. in 30. 11. 2013 v Topolšici, izvedla ga je skupina popravljalcev, ki je po objavi neuradnih rezultatov v določenem roku poskrbela tudi za obravnavo ugovorov na vrednotenje. Tekmovalci in mentorji bodo v mesecu maju prejeli priznanja in potrdila za tekmovanje v šolskem letu 2013/2014, predvsem mentorje pa že zdaj vabimo, da se pridružijo tekmovanju tudi v prihodnjem šolskem letu, in sicer najprej kot mentorji svojim tekmovalcem, pa tudi kot organizatorji državne ravni tekmovanja.

Uvedene pa so bile tudi spremembe pri izvedbi državnega tekmovanja, ki je prvič potekalo na 14 izbranih regij-

S pomočjo mentorjev in pod okriljem sekcije za OŠ bomo v društvu še naprej skrbeli, da bo tekmovanje ohranilo in nadgradilo kvaliteto in profesionalnost ter doseglo čim večje število tekmovalcev in tako pripomoglo k dvigu nivoja znanja angleškega jezika.

Barbara Dvornik, koordinatorica tekmovanja

mag. Alenka Tratnik, predsednica društva

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Poročilo o tekmovanju v znanju angleščine za 2. letnike Slovensko društvo učiteljev angleškega jezika IATEFL Slovenia je v šolskem letu 2013/2014 že peto šolsko leto zapored uspešno izvedlo tekmovanje za dijake 2. letnikov srednjih šol. Razpis, pravilnik tekmovanja, navodila za tekmovanje in kriteriji za ocenjevanje so bili objavljeni konec julija na spletni strani www.iateﬂ.si, prav tako pa so bili vsi dokumenti poslani članom IATEFL Slovenia po elektronski pošti. Tekmovanje je potekalo na dveh ravneh, in sicer je bilo na posameznih šolah najprej izvedeno šolsko tekmovanje (18. 11. 2013), nato pa so izmed prijavljenih izdelkov šole poslale najboljše na državno tekmovanje (9. 12. 2013).

KATEGORIJA A: 1. Gimnazija Ptuj s posnetkom A Stroll Through the History of Ptuj (Adam Veselič, Mitja Kostanjevec, Nina Strelec, Benjamin Borojevič, Tilen Terbuc) mentorica: Manja Bratuž 2. Gimnazija Poljane s posnetkom The Legend of the Waterman (Urška Ambrožič, Ema Kapelj, Iva Vogroč) mentorica: Irena Klander

Letošnja tematika tekmovanja je bila »Our hometown«, s katero smo dijakom in dijakinjam želeli dati priložnost, da se pokažejo kot dobri poznavalci svojih domačih krajev. Določen je bil žanr posnetega prispevka, in sicer so morali dijaki posneti reportažo, kar jim je dalo precej možnosti za uporabo lastne domišljije in količine razpoložljivih virov na predpisano tematiko. Predpisanih je bilo tudi po 10 besed v posamezni kategoriji, ki so jih morali dijaki smiselno uporabiti v posnetem prispevku. Besede so bile naslednje: Kategorija A/C: SCINTILLA (n), VERGE (n), FURY (n), LEAP (n/v), FORTUNATE (adj), FRAGILE (adj), DAINTY (adj), GLEAM (v), COPE (v), HASTILY (adv) Kategorija B/D: BUNDLE (n), FORTUNE (n), LEAP (n/ v), HAVEN (n), BLANK (adj), ROUGH (adj), CURIOUS (adj), SPOT (v), ENRICH (v), ABRUPTLY (adv)

3. I. Gimnazija Celje s posnetkom Our Hometown (Maja Ravnikar Zabukovšek, Urška Andrenšek, Matej Leskovšek, Žiga Rožič) mentorica: Metka Rems Pilko

Kriteriji pri izbiri najboljše skupine (tako na šolski kot na državni ravni) so bili naslednji: pravilnost uporabe podanih besed, ustvarjalnost/domiselnost pri uporabi podanih besed, jezik, izgovorjava, informativnost prispevka, splošni vtis in tehnična izvedba.

3. Srednja šola za gostinstvo in turizem Radenci s posnetkom My Hometown Radenci (Tina Bencak, Lara Lebar, Doroteja Lupša, Anja Šrajner) mentorica: Darja Zlatnik

Državnega tekmovanja se je udeležilo 13 šol, in sicer je v 21 skupinah tekmovalo skupno 112 dijakov. Dijaki so tudi letos žal tekmovali samo v kategorijah A in B, čeprav so imeli možnost tekmovati tudi tisti, ki spadajo v kategorijo C ali D. Letos ni bila diskvaliﬁcirana nobena skupina, kar kaže na dosledno upoštevanje kriterijev in navodil za pripravo posnetkov in lahko tako vse sodelujoče dijake in dijakinje le pohvalimo. Še posebej je treba pohvaliti in izpostaviti njihov trud pri pripravi spremnega besedila kakor tudi pri rekvizitih, prostorih itd., ki so jih uporabili pri snemanju posnetka. V vsem tem se kaže velika zagnanost, motivacija za predpisane tematike, kar tudi nam kot pripravljalcem tekmovanja potrjuje, da delamo v pravi smeri in da dijaki na takem tekmovanju radi sodelujejo. Število priznanj po kategorijah Priznanje zlato srebrno bronasto skupaj

Najbolje so se odrezale naslednje šole oz. skupine dijakov (prva tri mesta v posamični kategoriji):

A 1 9 5 15

B 1 1 1 3

skupaj 2 10 6 18

KATEGORIJA B: 1. Vegova Ljubljana s posnetkom Ljubljana The City of the Dragon (Martin Liberšar, Jan Dermota, Jaka Lozar, Andraž Melacher, Luka Ilinčič) mentorica: Lea Sobočan 2. Srednja elektro-računalniška šola Maribor s posnetkom Maribor - The City of Radars (Marcel Borak, Sven Martič, Niko Pavlinek, Jaka Žagar) mentorica: Sanela Magerl Majhenič

V želji po širitvi tekmovanja na mednarodnem nivoju smo letos k sodelovanju povabili tudi sosednje države. Tako smo se povezali z društvi učiteljev angleščine v Srbiji, na Hrvaškem in Madžarskem. Povabilu so se letos odzvali na Hrvaškem in v Srbiji, kjer so tako prvič izvedli tekmovanje za dijake 2. letnikov srednjih šol. Do konca šolskega leta bomo tako izvedli tudi mednarodno tekmovanje, na katerega so se uvrstile po tri najboljše skupine iz vsake kategorije. Zmagovalne ﬁlmčke slovenskih dijakov bodo na mednarodnem nivoju ponovno ocenile komisije iz sodelujočih držav. Držimo pesti za naše skupine! Rezultate mednarodnega tekmovanja bomo objavili takoj po končanem ocenjevanju. Na koncu še enkrat iskreno čestitamo vsem sodelujočim, vsem mentorjem pa se najlepše zahvaljujemo za pomoč pri izpeljavi tekmovanj. Nasvidenje do prihodnjega leta!

Jasna Džambić, koordinatorica tekmovanja

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mag. Alenka Tratnik, predsednica društva

Poročilo o tekmovanju v znanju angleščine za 3. letnike Slovensko društvo učiteljev angleškega jezika IATEFL Slovenia je ponovno izvedlo tekmovanje za dijake 3. letnikov na dveh ravneh – regijski in državni. Regijsko tekmovanje je zaradi izrednih vremenskih razmer potekalo en teden kasneje od načrtovanega datuma, in sicer 10. 2. 2014 na sedmih regijskih šolah (Gimnazija Nova Gorica, Gimnazija Vič, Gimnazija Jesenice, Grm Novo mesto – Center biotehnike in turizma, Srednja šola Slovenska Bistrica, II. gimnazija Maribor, Gimnazija Murska Sobota), državno tekmovanje pa 17. 3. 2013 na Gimnaziji Vič v Ljubljani. Razpis tekmovanja smo na naši spletni strani objavili v juliju 2013 in ga preko elektronske pošte posredovali tudi mentorjem. Razpis je med drugim vseboval tudi podatke o strukturi tekmovanja, ki je bila enaka kot v letu 2013.

Na regijsko tekmovanje je bilo prijavljenih 660 s 79-ih šol oz. šolskih centrov. Veseli smo, da je bilo tekmovalcev več kot eno leto prej (617 dijakov s 65-ih šol oz. šolskih centrov). Razdeljeni so bili v pet kategorij – A1 (splošne gimnazije), A2 (strokovne gimnazije), A3 (mednarodni oddelki in dijaki, ki so več kot eno leto bivali na angleško govorečem področju), B (strokovne šole) in C (angleščina kot drugi tuji jezik). Na državno tekmovanje se je skupno uvrstilo 105 dijakov. Naloge po posameznih kategorijah so se skoraj v celoti razlikovale. Naloga s področja kulture je bila enaka v vseh kategorijah. Tema na letošnjem regijskem tekmovanju je bila The Roaring Twenties in the USA.

Ne državnem tekmovanju so se najbolje uvrstili naslednji dijaki (navajamo najboljše tri dijake v posamezni kategoriji): Kat.

1. mesto

2. mesto

3. mesto

MIHA PAPIČ Gimnazija Vič Mentorica: Blanka Klobučar

NIKA ALEŠA STRLE Gimnazija Vič Mentor: Anže Perne

JERNEJ PUC Škoﬁjska klasična gimnazija Ljubljana Mentorica: Alenka Battelino

LEON GORJUP Srednja elektro-računalniška šola Maribor Mentorica: Branka Klarič

GAŠPER HAUPTMAN Biotehniški center Naklo Mentorica: Sandra Žvagen

NEŽA PEROVŠEK Srednja šola za oblikovanje in fotograﬁjo Ljubljana Mentorica: Andreja Kuščer

LARA OBLAK Gimnazija Kranj Mentor: Biba Kodek

TINA DROBNIČ II. gimnazija Maribor Mentor: Emil Pečnik

LANA PRAPROTNIK II. gimnazija Maribor Mentor: Emil Pečnik

LANA ARIH Srednja šola za oblikovanje in fotograﬁjo Ljubljana Mentorica: Brigita Peklaj

2. mesto: MIŠA MUHIČ Šolski center Novo mesto, Srednja zdravstvena in kemijska šola Mentorica: Barbara Cesar LANA TOŠKAN Srednja šola za oblikovanje in fotograﬁjo Ljubljana Mentorica: Sandra Žeželj

TIM IVAJNŠIČ Gimnazija Franca Miklošiča Ljutomer Mentorica: Liljana Košič

NEŽA FRAS Gimnazija Franca Miklošiča Ljutomer Mentorica: Liljana Košič

KLAVDIJA DENŠA Gimnazija Murska Sobota Mentorica: Cvetka Jošar Matić

Ostali rezultati so objavljeni v sistemu DMFA. Skupaj smo podelili 20 zlatih priznanj. Spodnjo mejo točk za srebrno tekmovanje je določila Državna tekmovalna komisija. Skupaj smo podelili 31 srebrnih priznanj. Preostalih 54 dijakov prejme bronasto priznanje. Vsem dijakom se zahvaljujemo za udeležbo na tekmovanju. Iskreno se zahvaljujemo mentorjem in regijskim koordinatorjem, ki so prijazno pomagali pri izvedbi tekmovanja. Anže Perne, predsednik Državne tekmovalne komisije

Glavni sponzor tekmovanja: Mint International House Ljubljana

mag. Alenka Tratnik, predsednica društva

Sponzor tekmovanja: Znanstveno raziskovalna založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani

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! n o d n o L v i t e l z i 58_d odliÄ?ni a 12, 1000 Ljubljana Twin, Zemljemerska ulic 1025, 040 187 830 080 20, 28 280 01 : Tel. www.twintur.com e-poĹĄta: twin@siol.net,

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potovanj, ponujamo odliÄ?no in preverjeno izvedbo. NaĹĄe cene tudi Ĺže vkljuÄ?ujejo javni prevoz in obvezne vstopnine. Cene so odvisne predvsem od termina odhoda in vaĹĄe fleksibilnosti pri odhodu.

Pavla Ĺ tepic, Zagorje ob

Savi.

Zakaj s Twin-om v London: 1. 2.

Pogosti in redni, zagotovljeni odhodi v London. Twin organizira ĹĄolska potovanja v London Ĺže 18 let, v povpreÄ?ju imamo na mesec vsaj 3 zagotovljene odhode v London. OdliÄ?no vodstvo. Pri Twinu se zavedamo, da je odliÄ?no poznavanje obiÄ?ajev in turistiÄ?nih znamenitosti LondonÄ?anov le prvi korak k odliÄ?ni izvedbi. NaĹĄi vodniki imajo dolgoletne izkuĹĄnje pri vodenju ĹĄolske mladine, zato odliÄ?no poznajo vse sestavine programa, saj jih sami pripravljajo. Tudi zato je vodenje/izvedba toliko bolj fleksibilna glede na Ĺželje skupine. Naj ĹĄe omenimo, da boste v Sloveniji teĹžko naĹĄli vodnike, ki v London vodijo tako pogosto kot Twinovi vodniki. Nastanitev, ki presega obiÄ?ajno turistiÄ?no kategorijo. Pri Twinu se zavedamo, da je dober spanec pomembna sestavina izleta. Vsi naĹĄi hoteli so hoteli s 3* in pri veÄ?ini udeleĹžencev preseĹžejo njihova priÄ?akovanja. Kot specialist za London lahko zagotovimo vsaj en bogat angleĹĄki zajtrk (obiÄ?ajnih zajtrki v Londonu so skromni kontinentalni). Nikoli naknadno ne spreminjamo pogojev. NaĹĄa cena je vedno znana Ĺže ob prijavi in se nikoli ne spremeni zaradi spremembe

cen dobaviteljev, goriva, manjĹĄega ĹĄtevila prijavljenih ali drugih razlogov v drobnem tisku.

6. 7.

Vedno ponudimo kakĹĄno dodatno storitev â&#x20AC;&#x201C; brezplaÄ?no. S program zagotavljamo minimalni obseg storitev oz. ogledov, vendar nikoli ne izvedemo samo minimalnega obsega â&#x20AC;&#x201C; vedno, pri vsaki skupini dodamo nekaj posebnega, kar ni zapisano v programu. Prav tako v naĹĄih programih nikoli ne zapiĹĄemo â&#x20AC;&#x153;Ä?e bo Ä?as dopuĹĄÄ?alâ&#x20AC;?, kajti vse naĹĄe programe vedno v celoti izvedemo. In ker si London zelo pogosto ogledujemo, poznamo tudi optimalno zaporedje ogledov brez nepotrebnega hitenja. Vsaj 183 osnovnih in srednjih ĹĄol je Ĺže potovalo z nami. VeÄ? kot 50 ĹĄol potuje vsaj enkrat povpreÄ?no na vsaki 2 leti. Ä&#x152;e Ĺželite neobvezujoÄ?e vzpostaviti stik z organizatorjem na eni od ĹĄol, ki je Ĺže potovala z nami, vam bomo z veseljem posredovali kontakt. Ponujamo 4-dnevni program, kjer je zajamÄ?eno potreben le en dan izostanka od pouka. VeÄ? informacij na www.twintur.com ali na brezplaÄ?nem telefonu 080 1025 ali v poslovalnici na Zemljemerski ulici 12 v Ljubjani.

To be up-to-date with what is going on, visit our website: www.iateďŹ&#x201A;.si