January '09 Newsletter  

Hello to everyone Out There   I hope your January is as filled with revolutionary zeal and mischief making as mine is. This is what I have for you this month:  

Unique teaching and learning materials finally on our website Language stuff - the thought provoking scientific bit

TEFLtastic! - Alex Case of TEFL.net interviews me about the Guardian thing (ouch!), and asks me my honest opinion of the TEFL industry

'Lies, damned lies and statistics' - long lost stats from a sample of our first 700 English Out There students from 2001-2003, did they actually learn anything?

Robot teachers - the answer to all our language learning needs, the experts discuss

Did they really say that? The 'retiring' George W Bush    

Happy New Year and a very warm welcome to the first newsletter from our new website which finally, after seven years, two relationships and a couple of 'miscarriages', contains our unique teaching and learning materials which can be searched for any topic, language focus or set of skills used. Ah, like a breath of fresh air, go to:   www.languagesoutthere.com and use the nifty (i.e. quick and easy) search facility top right, it will amaze you!  

Done? Now...think hard about this:  

"The connectedness of words to real people and things, and not just to information about those people and things, has a practical application".  Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought.

I want to provoke some thoughts in all of you. The kind of thoughts that make you question the way we learn, acquire, pick-up... call it what you like, a second language.

Pinker's world of psycholinguistics has known for sometime that words and their meanings are linked to real people, events and things.

So, why do virtually all language programmes take place exclusively inside classrooms? Inside the same four walls, involving the same people, the same place and the same things, every single day.

I think I can honestly say that no other language teaching and learning materials deliberately link words with meanings and sounds like ours do.

Out There materials link those meanings and sounds with real events, real people and real things, every single lesson.  

They use real world and highly focused communicative experiences to make the meanings and the sounds of English that much more meaningful, and therefore that much more memorable.

I want these newsletters to be very regular, hopefully weekly, and to contain thoughts and links to information about language, language learning and teaching and the global language industry.

This week...

...read my interview with Alex Case of TEFLtastic fame on TEFL.net in which I answer questions about Guardian Languages and put the TEFL world to rights.  

...read some long forgotten student statistics from the first two years of teaching English Out There in London, see what learners thought about the amount they had improved.

...read a report from Keri Facer of NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts in the UK) in which twenty language and linguistics experts come up with a blueprint for the ideal use of technology in language learning.

...an audio and text interview with Nick Chaplin, an Englishman who learnt Thai fluently inside two years by attending an unusual course in Bangkok.

...an audio and text interview with Elisa Delaini, education manager of Myngle.com, in which I ask her how she learned to speak nine languages.

...snippets (i.e. little bits) of discussion and analysis with interesting people who research, write about, teach, organise and sell language related things.

If you become a member of Languages Out There you get:   Unlimited access to all of our unique materials which you can download, print and copy, even start your own business with, using Meetup.com or Wiziq.com and use for focused language exchange at Italki.com.  

If you become a member you get an affiliate link (a link unique to you that tracks people back to your membership account) which you can put on your Facebook profile or in your emails and if your friends click on it and become a member too I will know and I will pay you 25%.  Just four friends and you have free membership for a year. More friends and you're actually making money.  

Membership gives you 33% off our course in London, which you can book and pay for online now.   Crikey, you can now:   1. Set up your own English Out There school, anywhere. Space is free all around you! 2. Brand it with our logos that you can download from the members' area 4. Teach EOT on and offline to paying students 5. Become an agent and earn commission from new members you find and courses you book for students  

The opportunities are there, they are real and they are increasing. You really don't need to do what you have always done, change is in the air, hell, even America voted for a black man with a foreign sounding name!  

If what I have described above interests you and you think it might interest some of your friends, do please forward this newsletter to them.   I want these newsletters to contain comment from you, the readers and members of the Languages Out There website, so do please send me your comments.  

Did they really say that?  

"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but
I don't always agree with them" - George W Bush (Retire In Peace)   Until next time...

Cheers

Jason