Nov
19
Written by:
Michael A. Tighe
Monday, November 19, 2007 11:37 AM
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I attended the BESIG (Business English Special Interest Group) Conference in Berlin for the first time from November 16-19th. The conference is well worth attending from the business English and networking perspectives. I went to a few sessions on blended learning there, but these were either intended for a non-specialist audience or were outright product promotions for ‘blended learning’ platforms hosted by business English publishers. In general, the conference is extremely useful to anyone involved in the Business English training area.
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David Graddol’s plenary session on The future of ‘English for Business’ and ‘The Business of English’ was a thought-provoking talk on projections of the role English will play in the globalized world. David Graddol, applied linguist, is author of English Next, a comprehensive overview of global English published by the British Council in 2006. Some of the graphs are real eye-openers. This is an excellent publication and it was a pleasure to get to know the author a little.
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Some of the more interesting presentations that I attended were:
- Marianna Crestani’s Communication between the East and West. An insight into the effects of language and culture in business exchanges between British and Chinese people. This was particularly interesting for me, especially since my recent return from China.
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Vicki Hollett: Learning to speak ’merican. Vicki is such an animated and fantastic speaker, this presentation was simply awesome – although she would have a little trouble with a compliment like that! This was an extremely funny intercultural examination of the differences in communication between Americans and Brits. English is not always English. Despite the entertaining delivery, there was great depth in her perceptions and intercultural analysis.
Vicki Hollett at BESIG
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Pete Sharma: New technology in Business English: in search of the perfect blend. This was an outline of some newer tools and their effectiveness in various learning scenarios. He provided a fairly concise outline of the pros and cons of a variety of web-based and other tools. I have followed Pete’s work for years so it was enjoyable to finally meet him.
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Ian McMaster: So who can’t you understand and why? This was a fascinating presentation on the results of a survey conducted by business Spotlight to discover which aspects of communication are the most serious impediments to comprehension. The results were surprising to those of us who unquestionably follow the “official” line that most non-native speakers experience the most difficulty when communicating with native speakers. Thank you for your scepticism and drive to discover the real facts!
Ian McMaster at BESIG
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Deborah Capras and Meg Englemann: Confidence-building blended learning telephone projects. This was a lively and engaging, hands-on workshop on incorporating telephone, skype, podcasts and other media into an effective blend designed to instil confidence in learners. Talk about multi-media: Meg even showed us toilet paper for learning vocabulary with! You can imagine the puns that arose from that little demonstration ;-)
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One of the new contacts I made at BESIG was with Dr. Revathi Viswanathan of the ICFAI National College in Chennai, India. Revathi won this year's BESIG travel grant. It was so exciting to hear about the projects she is leading in India involving technological tools like blogs, podcasts webquests and nicenet to promote language learning. I hope to explore all of their activities in more depth in the future. If you are a U.S. English Services news follower, you will know that I am very enthusiastic indeed about India. Hopefully, this meeting is only the beginning of a very interesting exchange. I think I am due for a visit to India again soon….
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