Image courtesy of Jason Howie How can you use digital technology to bring course material to life in the classroom? Thomas Healy, co-author of Smart Choice Second Edition, shares his ideas ahead of his webinar on 23 & 25 September on the subject. It’s an old joke that although the Internet is one of the most important inventions since the wheel, most people just use it to look at pictures of puppies. Certainly, I believed that people, especially younger people, wasted a lot of time on the Internet and on their smart devices. Then I observed an eighteen-year-old student in my class trying to enlarge an illustration in her textbook by pinching it, like an image on a touch screen. This was a wake up call for me. Having grown up with the technology, this student actually expected content to be digital. As someone who prided himself on providing interesting, motivating as well as enriching materials, I looked at my photocopied supplemental activities and wondered how she, and indeed the entire class, must be experiencing them. Her smart device, along with everyone else’s, was in a pile collected at the start of the class, next to a computer that I rarely used. When I considered using smart devices and social media networks with my students, I wanted to devise activities that the class would immediately recognize as being central to the goals of the lesson. If the activities were just games or ‘fillers’, then I imagined that students would naturally gravitate to games such as Candy Crush that they already had on their devices. I also wanted to harness what most of my students seemed to be doing on their smart phones when not playing games: writing messages and taking photos and videos, which they shared with their peers. Using Social Media as a Learning Management System 21st Century learners live in a world where they are constantly producing, sharing and commenting on content. In order to have a place where we can share messages, images, videos and word files, I create a Facebook group for each class. I use this platform because all of my students are already active members. Within Facebook, a group is a private, members-only space. Students can join a group without becoming my friend. When creating activities for Facebook, I started by looking at the supplemental materials I already used in class. Many of these activities practiced, expanded, or personalized the contents of the textbook. Could these be enhanced or transformed by being completed in the digital world? Using Smartphones with Facebook A smartphone is like a portable recording studio. Students can readily practice and personalize the target language of the textbook by using the video function. In one activity I use, after teaching a unit about clothing and colors, students go to their favorite store and describe the clothes and colors that they see while videoing the manikins. I ask students to post the videos to the Facebook group, and comment on others’ videos. This ability to make and narrate videos can bring important but potentially ‘dry’ units to life: those that deal with rooms and furniture, directions, or food. Sharing the videos online provides a lot of additional, fun interaction between students, as well opportunities for language, accuracy and pronunciation analysis. Making a Digital Projector Interactive Since 21st Century learners are engaged by content that they can interact with, I have tried to make the digital projector an active rather than passive experience for my students.  Together with the projector, I use an audience response app, Socrative, which students download for free.  For example, as we work through grammar activities in the textbook, Socrative enables me to project additional practice items on the screen, which students complete on their smart phones. The app automatically checks answers and provides feedback to the class in real-time. Used in this way, digital technology is not merely engaging but plays a central part in achieving the goals of the lesson. Making Digital Technology an essential rather than peripheral tool My students sometimes forget their textbooks, but they never forget their phones. Therefore, every classroom we use is a technology-enhanced space. Smart phones, social media platforms and apps have allowed me to bring my materials to life. I can create colorful, interactive activities and I can encourage students to bring the real world into the class by using the video and photo functions of their classrooms. Instead of having students put their devices on a table by the door, I now ask them to make sure their phones are fully charged when they come to class. They understand that we are not using digital technology and social media for ‘fun’, or when we need to take a breather. Together, we have made digital technology a key part of their learning experience. Take part in Thomas Healy’s live webinar to further explore and discuss how the digital technology your students love to use can become a key part of their learning experience. Register today!Filed under: Adults / Young Adults, Multimedia & Digital Tagged: 21st Century skills, Activities, mlearning, Smart devices, Smartphones, Social Media, Thomas Healy

I had to chortle. I have a Google alert set to look for references to Learning Anorak (well, I can't have you lot talking behind my back, now, can I?). Recently, this returned a reference to this post about Warhammer.It seems the god of learning in this fantasy world is called Anorak, and it was he (he?) who taught the humans magic. Sadly, he was killed using the very magic that he had taught these ungrateful wretches.But how deliciously ironic!I only wish that there had been a picture to share with you. Failing that, you'll have to settle for my picture, as the living learning anorak ;o)

Image courtesy of Giulia Forsythe This is the first article of a three-part series on giving EAP students effective feedback. Julie Moore, an ELT writer and researcher, shares her thoughts on how to give your students constructive feedback on their writing. Although I’ve been working in ELT publishing for some 15 years, co-authoring Oxford EAP Advanced was the first time I’ve been involved in writing a whole coursebook. It was a very steep learning curve in all kinds of ways, but perhaps one of the most challenging parts of the whole experience was the process of having my writing edited. I’d spend long hours at my desk writing a unit, then I’d email my completed draft off to my editor and wait with trepidation for her feedback. When I opened up her reply, my heart would often sink at the sight of those tightly-packed comments squeezed down the margin of every page and the prospect of ploughing my way through them! So when I finally got away from my desk and back into the classroom again last summer to teach on a pre-sessional EAP course, I approached giving feedback on my students’ own writing with a fresh perspective. But what lessons had I learnt? Less is more In an EAP context, writing is a key skill and as teachers, we have a tendency to want to give as much feedback on written work as possible. Our intentions are good - we want to help our students improve - but the effect can sometimes be the opposite. Students are so overwhelmed by all the feedback that they either get demotivated and lose confidence, or they skim through to find the grade or the final comment and then file away all our careful feedback, largely unread. Having experienced how daunting masses of feedback can be for a writer, I was determined to make the process less scary and more productive for my students. I turned to publishing again for a way of breaking it down into more manageable steps: content editing - focus on what is written, rather than how copyediting - focus on style, voice, flow, etc. proofreading - tidying up surface errors In this article, I’m going to talk about the first stage of the editing/feedback process: Focus on content For many students new to EAP, their experience of writing in English has been mostly of short, functional letters and emails, and if they have written essays, they’ll have been of the rather simple, formulaic kind which are designed essentially to practise or test the student’s language abilities. In an ELT context, the focus is often not really on what you write so much as the language you manage to display. A student can produce a fairly inane piece of writing, saying really very little of any substance, but if they show a range of vocabulary, reasonably accurate grammar and throw in a few nice discourse markers, they can get a good mark. This simply won’t cut it in an academic context where: "After all, we teach college students to write not because we expect them to become writers, but because writing is the evidence that they are mastering intellectual concepts." (McBride, 2012). So in the first few writing activities I did with my EAP students, I focused very much on content: on what they were expected to write. In my feedback, I ignored the surface language issues and commented only on how well they’d tackled the task. Had they answered the question? Had they put forward a clear argument and supporting evidence? Had they offered analysis and evaluation as well as simple description? As we worked on some of these key principles of academic writing, I encouraged students to evaluate the content of their own writing, establishing routines and checklists they could use to edit their writing in the future. For example, the following criteria to check a main body paragraph of an essay: Have you stated the main argument clearly? Do supporting points flow logically? Are key concepts/terms clearly defined and/or explained? Does the evidence support the main argument? Have you included comment and/or evaluation to make your own stance clear? (Adapted from Oxford EAP Advanced) The initial reaction from some students was uneasy - surely it was my job to correct all their language errors, wasn’t it? It was important that I explained clearly what I was doing and why. I kept copies of students’ writing to use examples (anonymously) as part of other activities on specific language points. I also reassured them that I’d be giving feedback at a more micro-level on their individual writing as the course went on. And did the approach work? Overall, I think it did. By concentrating first on what they were expected to write, it laid a solid base on which to build the details of how to write as the course went on. In my next article, I’ll talk about copy-editing and feedback techniques for helping students achieve that all-important academic style. References de Chazal & Moore (2013) Oxford EAP Advanced/C1 (OUP) McBride (2012) ‘Patchwriting’ is more common than plagiarism, just as dishonest http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/everyday-ethics/188789/patchwriting-is-more- common-than-plagiarism-just-as-dishonest/   This article first appeared in the January 2014 edition of the Teaching Adults Newsletter - a round-up of news, interviews and resources specifically for teachers of adults. If you teach adults, subscribe to the Teaching Adults Newsletter now.Filed under: Business & English for Specific Purposes, Professional Development Tagged: EAP, English for Academic Purposes, Feedback, Julie Moore, Methodology, Teacher Development, Teaching EAP

Ben Shearon, the Presenting Skills consultant for our brand new course Stretch, shares his thoughts on the benefits of integrating presenting skills into EFL and ESL classes. Many people are terrified of speaking in public, even though it probably isn’t true that it edges out death at the top of the list of most common fears.  My first presentation was over ten years ago at a local conference for English teachers. I was very nervous and not at all confident speaking in front of my peers. I don’t really remember much about the presentation, but since then I’ve gone on to give more than 100 talks at conferences, events, and seminars. I’m now pretty happy in front of a room full of strangers, and presenting has become one of the most enjoyable parts of my job. There are several good reasons to introduce presentation and public speaking practice into our EFL and ESL classes. The first and most important is that effective presentation and public speaking skills are a valuable life skill. Many of our learners will need them in the future, and appreciate the chance to practice them now. Presentation practice also allows teachers to introduce personalisation and different topics into classes. Learners can choose the content they present, and this brings a variety of information and ideas into the classroom. Learners can learn more about each other, and presentations can also be an easy way to break up a course and provide a change of pace. Before giving a presentation, learners will have to spend time drafting, editing, memorizing, and practicing their content. This allows them to really internalize the language without the tedium or staleness sometimes associated with drilling and memorization. In addition, learners are able to listen to their classmates talking about variations on a topic, giving them useful extensive listening practice. Becoming an effective presenter requires awareness of effective presenting techniques, having meaningful content to deliver, and most of all, lots of practice. We can provide our learners with the first and third of these, and guide them as they attempt to provide the second. Developing presentation skills One of the most practical ways to teach presenting skills is to break the complex and sometimes overwhelming experience down into discrete skills. This makes it easy to introduce and practice them gradually. Some examples of these skills would be posture (standing in a confident and open manner), making eye contact, using appropriate volume and speed when speaking, choosing content, use of rhetorical techniques, planning and structuring the talk, and use of visual aids. The presenting sub-skills can be introduced one at a time and students can focus on certain skills as they gain more experience presenting. In general, the physical skills are easier to explain and harder to get right, so I usually recommend students start there in order to get the most practice with them. After that they can go on to content selection and organization, visual aids, and rhetorical techniques. Some teachers might hesitate to introduce presentation skills into language classes, especially if they don’t have experience teaching them, but in my experience it is well worth attempting and your students will probably thank you for it! For more ideas on how to integrate presentation into your classes, take a look at Stretch, the new course that features a dedicated presenting skills strand. To celebrate the launch of Stretch I’m asking students all over the world to enter The Stretch Presenting Skills Competition by submitting a two-minute presentation - and I’d love to see your students taking part! Get your students presenting in class and one of them could win a two-week scholarship to Regent Oxford, a renowned English school in Oxford, as well as a classroom set of Stretch for you. Watch my video below to find out more: Why not get your students presenting in class by entering The Stretch Presenting Skills Competition 2014-15? One of your students could win a two-week all-expenses paid scholarship to Regent Oxford, a renowned English school in Oxford, as well as a class set of Stretch for you. Closing date: January 2, 2015. Enter today!Filed under: Adults / Young Adults, Skills Tagged: 21st Century skills, AMELT, American English, Ben Shearon, ELT competition, Integrated skills, presentation activities, presentations skills, presenting skills, Professional English, Stretch competition

I've been thinking about the different forms there are of a single language, and how we need to master so many of them during a lifetime.For example, the language I use at home with my family isn't the same as the language I would use in an academic paper (not that I ever mastered that particular form of English, it has to be said!).My kids happily use 1337 (leet) speak online with their friends and even in their text messages to one another. Occasionally, they will use elements of 1337 when texting me. Elements of 1337 have informed lolcat (follow the link and have a bit of fun, I dare you!). Even my pedantic septuagenarian mother has adopted some of the shortcut spellings when sending text messages (her most recent message to me included the word 'fite', for example... I never thought I'd see the day!).My last employer owned the rights to a few courses in business English in a range of delivery media.Here are some anecdotes that illustrate misapplication of contextual terminology:A neurosurgery theatre nurse recently told me about a wonderfully talented Vietnamese neurosurgeon who had very little English when he joined the team at the hospital where she works. Being an intelligent and determined man, he learned quickly by listening to and imitating his colleagues. But he learned the hard way that it is inappropriate to tell a patient's family, "Oh, he's toast."When my husband arrived in South Africa as a child, at the prompting of his classmates, he went and told his teacher to "Go jump in the lake" (although you can be pretty sure what he actually said was "gaw yump in de lake"). She remembered that with fondness when he phoned her some 25 years later to wish her well on her retirement.A pastor friend of mine went to preach at a church in Mexico, where one or two teenagers, passionately devout about their Christian faith, sported T-shirts with the most profane of slogans, utterly oblivious to the meaning of the words writ large across their chests.If there are this many forms of the language of which I am a native speaker, goodness knows how many forms there are of the languages of which I am not a native speaker. I wonder how many times I have put my foot in it. I know of one occasion when I politely advised a Swede that my Swedish was poor, but that I could follow if only they would speak 'more badly'. I'm sure there have been countless other occasions.As national and cultural boundaries are breached by social media, we find ourselves in daily contact with non-native speakers of our language. We might need to remember to cut them a little slack... there may be times when they say something grossly offensive without meaning to do so!

Image courtesy of PixelAnarchy Stuart Redman, teacher trainer and OUP author, introduces his upcoming webinar on 30th September entitled: "Don’t Give Up on Idioms and Phrasal Verbs." Teachers often have strong views about teaching (or not teaching) idioms and phrasal verbs. Read through a cross-section of views below. Which statements do you most identify with? Are there any that you strongly disagree with? ‘I tend to steer clear of idioms and phrasal verbs for low-level learners. They have other priorities, and I don’t want to confuse the students too much.’ ‘I teach phrasal verbs and idioms as they come up, even to low-level learners; for example, they need to understand items like ‘write it down’ or ‘take it in turns’ as part of the classroom language I use.’ ‘I teach quite a few phrasal verbs, but I don’t really teach idioms. They don’t seem to crop up very much in the course books I use.’ ‘Generally speaking, the students I teach are learning English for academic purposes, so I don’t teach many idioms and phrasal verbs because they’re too informal. I just stick to teaching more latinate vocabulary, because that’s what they need for reading, essays and that sort of thing.’ ‘I’m quite confused about how to organise the teaching of idioms and phrasal verbs. I always go over the grammar of phrasal verbs, but after that, I’m not sure how to go about it in a systematic way.’ ‘I often focus on idioms associated with parts of the body, for instance, ‘have a chip on your shoulder’, ‘put your foot in it’; or animal idioms such as ‘let the cat out of the bag’ and ‘the black sheep of the family’. It’s always fun, so that helps students remember it.’ ‘When I studied English at school, we used to learn long lists of phrasal verbs organised by the root verb, for example, ‘take in, ‘take out’, take over’, etc. As a student I found this quite confusing and I felt overloaded.’ ‘It’s all very well teaching idioms and phrasal verbs, but the big problem is how to practise them. I think students get bored by just doing gap fill exercises, and that’s the kind of thing I come across most often.’ ‘I don’t bother much with teaching idioms because a lot of learners tend to use them inappropriately or they just stand out like a sore thumb.’ Look again at the statements. Can you find fourteen idioms and phrasal verbs, not including the examples given in inverted commas, e.g write it down and take it in turns? During my upcoming webinar we will look at ways of organising and contextualizing idioms and phrasal verbs for teaching purposes. We’ll also be looking at material from the Oxford Word Skills series and the Oxford Learner’s Pocket series.Filed under: Dictionaries & Reference, Grammar & Vocabulary Tagged: Grammar, Idioms, oxford pocket, Oxford Word Skills, Phrasal verbs, Vocabulary

For the past few weeks, I have experienced a level of powerlessness I have not known for a long time. The frustration it has caused me and my family has spilled over into other areas of my life.It caused me to think again of the workplace learner.My frustration started with something as pleasant as the prospect of our family holiday. We decided to go to Lanzarote, which (for those who don't know) is a Spanish territory, and therefore within the EU.Because I am married to an EU citizen, I have never before had problems getting a visa to travel in the EU. Things were different this time. The visa service has been outsourced to an organisation which appears to have become a law unto itself.Previously, because I was already on record at the Swedish embassy, I could apply for a visa through the mail and would receive it within seven days. No problem. This is no longer the case. The requirement now is that I should attend an interview in London and there were no available appointments until after the start of our holiday. When I contacted them to point out the problem this presented, they were utterly unsympathetic. "Reschedule your holiday," was the solution they offered, as if this were the easiest and most obvious thing in the world.I began casting about for ways to get my visa more quickly when I came across EU directive 38/2004 article 10 which states that, as the (1) spouse of an EU citizen and (2) having indefinite leave to remain (permanent residence) in an EU member state, I am allowed to travel anywhere within the EU in the company of my husband for a period of up to 90 days.I contacted the visa service with this information. They already knew about it, it seems, but they still insist that I need a visa and they are still unable to assist me. So much for another provision of the directive which says that the spouses of EU citizens will be given priority treatment.I was sure that they were mistaken and tried to contact the Spanish embassy for confirmation. They never answered either their phones or their emails.My husband and I searched online and found all manner of precedent:http://ec.europa.eu/youreurope/nav/en/citizens/living/entry-procedures/for-family-members-who-are-not-citizens/index_en.htmlhttp://www.uklgig.org.uk/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2452http://eumovement.wordpress.com/info-spain/http://sid.usal.es/idocs/F3/LYN10709/3-10709.pdfhttp://www.immigrationboards.com/viewtopic.php?t=30020http://www.maec.es/subwebs/Consulados/Londres/en/MenuPpal/Servicios/Visados/Paginas/novisaenter_services.aspxhttp://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2004:158:0077:0123:EN:PDF The visa agency remained unmoved.We were advised by various sources that it would be illegal to prevent me from boarding the plane and that I should take my original marriage certificate and a copy of the EU directive with me. But I had my doubts about the effectiveness of these pieces of evidence on the person on border control with no authority and a set of rules handed down from on high.I have made a host of telephone calls and have at last been advised by the border control folks at the UK airport that they will not stop me from boarding the plane. I have also been advised by the folks in Lanzarote that they will not stop me from entering the island.I don't think I will actually believe it until I am safely ensconced in my villa!But this saga isn't so very different from the experience of someone trying to upskill in order to be able to do something differently or better in the workplace. We've all been there.You're not eligible to attend this course. Yes, I know what the employee's handbook says, but you're still not eligible.You can attend this course, but the next one is running in 6 months. You'll have to reschedule that project.You need an enrollment key/password to access that material, but we aren't issuing any at the moment.In the end, we go subversive, or we find ways around the obstacle.Or, at least, some of us do. I have never been very good at taking no for an answer. I have pushed back all my life. It's one of my most annoying characteristics. But I have seen 'impossible' things happen. Documents that should take 12 weeks to obtain have miraculously appeared with 24 hours. Jobs that have supposedly been lost have been reinstated. Doctors who are unavailable have suddenly become available. Doors that are supposedly sealed shut have swung wide. Of course, there are times when I deem it best to cut my losses and turn away, but these are conscious choices.But I am stubborn and bloody-minded.What about those who are not? What about the more gentle-natured people in the organisation? When they identify a development need and are stonewalled, what are they to do? This is a surefire way to generate a team of 'jobsworths' who punch the clock and look forward to retirement.I can't bear the thought of willingness to learn going to waste. We simply have to find ways to empower people to access the learning that they need in order to do their jobs and do them well, or to upskill to take on another role, if they so desire.We need to prise open some creaky doors. Of course, there will be resistance, but that's why there are people like (you and) me in this field: to push back against all that 'no-ness', to ask 'why' a lot until the lack of good reason causes the obstacles to crumble.Ugh! I'm feeling right rebellious today.

Angela Buckingham, language teacher, writer and teacher trainer, introduces her upcoming webinar on 24th & 26th September entitled: "Oral Error Correction in the English Language Classroom." As part of my role as a teacher trainer, I have observed many ELT lessons over the years: some given by new and inexperienced trainees, others by experienced members of staff who have been teaching language for many years. One area that interests me is the teacher response to learner mistakes in a lesson and what steps are taken towards oral error correction. Even if we haven’t thought about this consciously, our stance is usually writ loud and clear. What is evident to the observer is that teacher attitudes to learner mistakes can have a profound impact on behaviours in class. Here’s my Top Ten list for ensuring that your quiet language students will be even quieter, simply by adopting some or all of these simple classroom techniques: Always correct every error you hear Ensure that you correct in a stern way; Do Not Smile Make sure that you never praise your learners for answers given in incorrect English Don’t give thinking time - where possible, make sure you supply the answer yourself When learners do answer, respond to the language only, not to the content of the response Spend most of your lesson facing the board, computer, or looking at the textbook. Avoid eye contact with your students Ask questions to the whole class but always accept early answers from the most confident students, who should get the answer right If a student is hesitant, don’t give them time to finish. Show in your body language that you are bored listening to their attempts Seize every error as a teaching opportunity - don’t move on until everyone in the class is absolutely clear what the mistake was Be prepared to interrupt your students’ interactions at any time, so that they are using Perfect English Or… you might want to think about doing things differently. Error correction in the language classroom is important - my students definitely want to be corrected, and can feel irritated if they aren’t. But for teachers, what to correct, when to correct, and how to go about it are issues we grapple with on a day-to-day basis.  How can we help our learners in an encouraging way? In my upcoming webinar we’ll explore how to categorise oral language errors and examine strategies for dealing with them, as well as evaluating practical ideas for immediate use in class. Join the webinar, Oral Error Correction in the English Language Classroom on 24th and 26th September to find out more.Filed under: Grammar & Vocabulary, Pronunciation, Skills Tagged: Angela Buckingham, Classroom strategies, EFL, English Language Teaching, Error correction, ESL, oral error correction

This is the second article of a three-part series on giving EAP students effective feedback. Julie Moore, an ELT writer and researcher, shares her thoughts on how teachers can encourage students to act on feedback. In my last article, I wrote about how overwhelming it can be for new student writers to get back a piece of writing covered in feedback. They can often feel like getting their writing up to scratch is going to be such an uphill battle that they just give up and ignore the feedback altogether. I suggested that by giving less feedback and breaking it down into more manageable chunks, students can focus on a specific area at a time and make realistic progress. With my own EAP students last summer, I started off by focusing on the content of their writing, ignoring language errors and giving feedback on whether they’d answered the question, whether they’d provided sufficient support for their arguments, or whether their overall message was clear. Copy-editing Once we’d established what they were expected to write, I turned next to the how. Many students new to EAP arrive with what I describe as a high-school style of essay-writing. That is, their language is rather simplistic: it is not sophisticated enough to communicate the more subtle details and perspectives involved especially at higher levels of academic study. The purpose of teaching students to write in a more academic style is not to make them sound more ‘fancy’ or ‘impressive’, but to give them the tools to do justice to their subject knowledge and ideas. Explaining the why of features of academic style is as important as demonstrating the how. Group feedback As you read through writing that a class has handed in, you’ll often find that a particular task has thrown up the same issue for a lot of students, in which case, group feedback is the most efficient way to address it. One rule I always try to stick to is to work on the feedback activity before I hand back students’ individual writing. That way you’re more likely to have their attention, they’re not so caught up in their individual feedback and more concerned about some other feature you’ve mentioned on their paper. One problem for my students centred around the use of impersonal language in academic writing. In early writing tasks, many of them were still using a lot of personal pronouns to refer to people in general (we, you): If we restrict access to media like internet for young people, it is possible that they will find another way to gain related information. So I started off with this example from a student essay on the board (anonymously) and asked who the ‘we’ referred to. Of course, the class came back with various different answers - society, the government, parents, ISPs - so identifying the problem for themselves (i.e. vagueness). Next, we looked back at the text we’d read as input for the writing task (from an academic textbook) and picked out the subject of each sentence. We found that these were invariably noun phrases (often plural nouns to refer to specific groups), thus identifying how expert academic writers deal with this situation. Then in small groups, students looked at some more similar examples from their own writing, identified the problem in each case and suggested rewrites. Responding to feedback As well as staging group activities to highlight problems and features, I also tried to get students to engage more actively with individual feedback. So I’d focus on two or three key errors in a piece of writing and frame my feedback in the form of a question to be answered. I then asked students to email me their rewrites of just the highlighted sentences. For example, this was an exchange with a business studies student just after we’d been talking about hedging and the appropriate use of confident and tentative language: Student’s first draft: This paper demonstrates how the main management methods… My feedback comment: Is demonstrate the best verb here - a little too confident? Student redraft: This paper attempts to argue that the main management methods… My feedback: Great! This is really good and sounds just right for a student writer. By making feedback a collaborative process between student writer and you as editor - rather than a passive one - you can help students to better understand why we use certain linguistic features in academic writing and hopefully, help them to find their own voice as a novice academic writer. In my next article, I’ll talk about teaching proofreading techniques to help students polish up their final draft. This article first appeared in the February 2014 edition of the Teaching Adults Newsletter - a round-up of news, interviews and resources specifically for teachers of adults. If you teach adults, subscribe to the Teaching Adults Newsletter now.Filed under: Business & English for Specific Purposes, Professional Development Tagged: EAP, English for Academic Purposes, Feedback, Julie Moore, Methodology, Teacher Development, Teaching EAP

Like most people, I have a strong need to belong. To feel accepted. Like most people, I am also picky about where it is that I am accepted and by whom.When I originally started blogging, I stood in awe of the likes of Kathy Sierra and Stephen Downes (among others). I hovered on the sidelines of the spaces they inhabited and then grew brave enough to contribute my twopenn'orth to the conversations they were having. For different reasons, neither of these two people are particularly strong on responding to blog comments - Kathy (who no longer blogs, to my knowledge) received so many comments that she was physically unable to respond to them all; Stephen believes that his readers' comments have validity in and of themselves, without needing his affirmation or validation (or so I seem to recall from somewhere... blowed if I can find where he said it). At one point, I posted something that took an opposing stance to something Stephen had said and almost fell off my chair when he spread a little link love and referred to my post in his OLDaily the next day.It was this kind of acceptance that made me feel as if I belonged. And social media are great for this. They are such levellers. For example, to extend the Downes story for a moment, the nature of the relationship I have with Stephen has become increasingly relaxed over the years, as we have become connected in a wider range of social media spaces, to the point where we engage on personal issues as well as shared professional interests.Switching tack for a moment, let's look at this belonging thing from a slightly different angle:Because of a quirk of genetics, I always found it very difficult to find clothes that fitted me. I was the woman who hated clothes shopping, because after three stores full of nothing that fitted me, I began to feel like a freak. Things that fitted here, didn't close there, and things that closed there, hung like a sack everywhere else.Then a wonderful woman called Sarah Tremellen established Bravissimo, an outlet for... well, check it out for yourself.I don't know who developed her marketing plan, or whether she is naturally insightful, but she has formed a community for women who - like me - had to put up with all the strife that goes with being the shape that we are: quite apart from the struggle to find decent clothing, there are the assumptions about our morals and our intelligence levels, the ribald remarks, the failed attempts to conduct professional conversations with men who later wouldn't recognise your face if their lives depended on it.I was an early adopter of Bravissimo and am a fan of just about everything about it: the decor in the stores, the defiant quotes on the walls, the professional fitting service. But most of all, I love that I can walk out of their stores feeling like a shapely woman, rather than a freak.Recently, I was in one of their fitting rooms, when I overheard a woman in the next cubicle make a discovery: due to significant recent weight loss, she no longer fell within Bravissimo's target audience. The store no longer catered to her. She was utterly crestfallen as she said, "It looks like I'm just not a Bravissimo girl any more."Why do I relate this story?Because, in spite of the fact that the woman in question had achieved goal weight and all the attendant health and aesthetic benefits, in spite of the fact that she could now buy clothing from any high street store at a significantly lower price, she had effectively ousted herself from the community, and that was causing her genuine distress. And yet, one becomes a member of the Bravissimo community in the first place as a consequence of being excluded from all manner of other communities.The difference is that Bravissimo deliberately fosters that sense of community, that sense of belonging.As we build our learning environments and create our communication spaces, let's look for ways to foster that same sense of being part of something that make a person feel special. Something they will be reluctant to leave.