Dexway English Magazine: C1 – Edition 2

Dogme

Like any group of professionals, the tutoring team at dexway love professional development. In an area where the rules keep changing, keeping up with the latest educational developments is a challenge. But as you will often hear us saying “time spent in training is never wasted”. The dexway tutoring often share the latest developments in language education creating a pool of experts with our fingers well and truly in the ESL (English as a Second Language) pie.

A few months ago we started to hear about a new ESL educational methodology and normally the latest craze, such as learning English in 1000 words is dismissed as a clever trick designed to catch students out. But the latest craze and the hottest topic of discussion in the ESL world is based on a sound educational principle and a set of tried and tested methods. Few of you have yet to hear about Dogme, but Dogme is setting the ESL world on fire and certainly stirring up a storm with the ESL traditionalists.

Dogme can be described as both a methodology and a movement, we would go a little further and say it’s the beginning of a new era in language learning, for most of us this is an idea that we have been following for a while, but is now only catching on in the ESL world. Dogme has its beginnings in communicative language teaching, which became popular in the 80s due to the sudden increase in migration around Europe.

The idea that we could cram the inner workings of the English language into a child’s brain was dismissed, while this might work for children who start studying at 3 years of age, it didn’t work with adults who need to gain mastery of the language now.

The root of the communicative approach was real-life situations, moving away from learning not only grammar but the meaning of words within their context in functional situations, essentially we were unable to create real-life situations in the ESL classroom and what’s the point of buying new shoes if you’re going to keep them in your wardrobe!

Communicative learning asked the students to take risks, rather than repeating what had been learnt by root in the classroom – risk, as we know, is needed to help construct new learning.

Teachers developed task-based learning as a vehicle for communicative learning, we asked students to put themselves in real-life situations to test and push the vocabulary, but still we relied on textbooks which quickly grew into a multi-billion euro industry but Dogme says “no” to textbooks, Dogme says we don´t need your textbook to learn and in doing this those that follow the new strategy have themselves an enemy.
Dogme has three underlining principles: 1 conversation is good, 2 materials are not needed and the third that language is emergent, language emerges it is not acquired. How does this change the way we work?

Teachers have many roles within the classroom and Dogme, as well as the communicative approach, asks for teachers to be facilitators to organise and run activities that make students speak and to also give them the vocabulary with structures that provide the confidence.

In many ways to do what we have always done!

Total experience concept

The total experience concept is a long and complicated modal, that tries to classify how tourists see experiences from the second they leave home to the second they return it includes many factors and much interplay. These include:

Emotional elements: at its most basic level tourists use services to make themselves feel good. They go to the spa or spend time in a sun. If the tourist has a positive experience they normally agree that they made it that way, but if a tourist has a bad experience, then it is normalLY down to somebody else.

Environmental: Tourism providers can only provide a set of circumstances, the tourist creates their experiences within these circumstances, with so much competition the old saying “If you build it, they will come” is no longer valid. The theory suggests several factors which must be present, these include experiences that provide pleasure, experience that are novel or unique, experiences that provide escape, comfort and safety.

To have a good experience it is suggested that we should amazes and surprise all five senses of a tourist in a continuous way.

The total experience concept needs the interplay or interaction between hardware, humanware and software to provide the experience that tourists are looking for. We must continuously review the built environment (hardware), the employees who interact with customers (Humanware) and the technology and small process management that enable everything to work (software).

Bystander effect

WHO WILL HELP FIRST?

A social phonemon this one! First tested and discovered in 1968 by these two; John Darley and Bibb Latané. The bystander effect says that if we see an accident or a problem in the street and the more people we see attending to the problem the less likely we are to help.

Darley and Latané staged an accident and measured the number of people who went to help and what they found was that 70% of people who were on their own went to help, where when other people were present only 40% of people went to help.

Darley and Latané suggested that bystanders go through a cognitive thought process.

Notice that something is going on
Interpret the situation as being an emergency
Degree of responsibility felt
Form of assistance
Implement the action choice
Depending if they are on our own or with a group we go through the thought process differently. Bystanders monitor each other and if we see that nobody else is reacting we are unlikely to react as we don´t interpret the situation as being an emergency. Darley and Latané carried out their experiments under non-emergency conditions, a separate study in 2006 tested bystander effect in emergency situations and found the more serious the emergency the more likely we were to react to that.

Carbon Footprint

Every time we get in our cars or turn the air conditioning on we are adding to our global carbon footprint. In a nutshell a carbon footprint is the mark we leave as individuals on the world, the size of your footprint is a direct reflection of the amount of carbon we use. A person´s carbon footprint is measured as a yearly number. It takes into account driving to work, the power needed to produce the food you eat, lighting and heating of your home etc… The world average is about 6 tonnes of CO2 per person per year. The biggest culprit of our high levels of greenhouse emissions is our electricity consumption.

We are told that carbon is responsible for climate change, when carbon is mixed with the correct amount of oxygen we form a compound called CO2 or Carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas. Oil, Gas and coal all have carbon and when burnt in our cars, in our homes and in our offices produce CO2.

The long term picture is very worrying, we are told to expect more storms in the future and a drastic change in temperature, this will lead to some areas of the world becoming inhabitable giving us climate change refugees, people who can no longer live in their home or region. The growing reliance on the Internet is a major driver of climate change as the energy needed to power everyone´s computer s, communication networks and data storage is expected to double by 2020.