R.I.Chalmers Passionate About English

After just 3 months of intense work generating some of the best online video English lessons, YouTube has granted Linguaspectrum a partnership. What this means is that my hard work has been vindicated and my YouTube channel has now been successfully integrated into my website. The experience of switching from Linguaspectrum.com to Linguaspectrum’s YouTube channel is now seamless.

From my research on the web it appears that not only is a YouTube partnership the Holy Grail for YouTubers, but getting a partnership normally takes from 12 to 24 months. Yet Linguaspectrum has done it in three months.

There are reports of people applying for a partnership and having to wait months to be told no. I suspect that these people are the ones who ignore the automatic channel assessment at YouTube that always seems to tell you that your channel does not meet its minimum criteria and that to apply would be futile waste of time. It also warns that applicants who are unsuccessful will not be allowed to reapply for two months.

I had been getting this message every time I looked at the partner application link. I did research, but nobody seems to know how many subscribers or channel views you need to be accepted for a partnership. All I can say for certain is that I got a partnership with 764 subscribers, 9259 channel views and 53173 video views.

My advice for getting a YouTube partnership is to create the most interesting and engaging content you can, create more of it every few days, tell as many people as possible that your content exists.

Posted under Teaching, Technology

I have the flu. I have had the flu for the past couple of days. I have all the symptoms of flu: a fever in excess of 38°C, aches, chills, tiredness, a dry cough, and a lack of appetite. I have no doubt that I am suffering from influenza, however I have no idea whether I am suffering from swine flu or a seasonal flu.

How do you know? How do the doctors know? If the symptoms of seasonal flu and of swine flu are the same, how can anybody track the incidence of either?

I spent most of the day today in bed. I’ve been taking paracetamol, which has helped a little with the aches, and I’ve been drinking plenty of fluids. Tomorrow I had been due to attend a conference here in Seville about the future of language teaching. Thanks to a virus that is smaller than I could see even with a powerful microscope my plans have been changed against my wishes. We humans think we are so powerful. We can put men on the moon; we can send spacecraft beyond the edge of the solar system and into deep space; we can move mountains; we can fly; we can extract the riches of the Earth from wherever they lie; but we are laid low by something a billion times smaller than us.

I have no doubt that however ill I feel at this present moment I will make a full recovery, swine flu or seasonal flu. It would be nice to know, however, if my suffering is caused by standard influenza or an H?N? variety, purely out of curiosity.

Posted under Health, Lifestyle, Society

My apologies for any errors you might find on these pages in the next few days.

I am migrating this site away from UK2.net, as I have become totally disillusioned with their level of customer service and technical support.

I renewed my domain name a few days ago and they changed the DNS settings meaning that nobody could visit the site. They take several days to respond to technical support tickets, and then reply with a standard reply which makes it obvious that they haven’t looked into the problem.

My new host, Hostgator, respond to technical support queries in minutes and go out of their way to put things right as quickly as possible.

If you are looking for a host for your website, avoid UK2.net. I have been with them for years, but their level of service has deteriorated so much that I am moving all of my sites away from them. You have to ask why, in this present economic climate, the company is willing to lose customers through poor customer care.

Posted under Technology

Why is it that academics are so keen to use obscure jargon in their written works and in any presentations that they give? Don’t they realise that jargon is an exclusive language that excludes rather than includes the reader or listener? Use an obscure word that your audience is unfamiliar with and you immediately stop them listening to your message while they struggle to understand what you have said.

The use of obscure jargon is particularly prevalent in the TEFL world. It’s one aspect of TEFL that I have really detested since becoming a teacher. I have sat through numerous presentations by well-known and lesser-known people who have attempted to pass on their information to their listeners. Many have failed miserably, leaving the listeners bored at best and at worst downright angry at having had their time wasted. So many times the speaker has used current or timeworn buzzwords that, though they have specific meaning for the sadly initiated, are confusing for the majority.

The other day I received an e-mail from Sandy Mac at The TEFL Tradesman and within this I found a short paragraph which I will partly quote: “organisations expect teachers to be highly conscientious, always open to self improvement, and prepared to read up on or attend the gut-wrenchingly dull methodology seminars/literature (often apparently created by people on the autistic spectrum), while most companies /schools for are just in it for cash”. My eye was particularly drawn to the words “the gut-wrenchingly dull methodology seminars/literature” which indicated to me that I was not alone in feeling as I do.

Considering that the majority of TEFL teachers are young people who are taking a year or so out between university and the real world and whose training in teaching, its methodology, and it’s jargon is limited to a four-week teacher training course designed not so much to maximise the teachers capabilities as to maximise the training school’s profit margins, they should not be expected to have been exposed to such jargon. Is it any wonder then that teacher training conferences provoke during the sessions so many blank faces and fidgety feet and afterwards so many negative post-conference private discussions?

Many young people just out of University trying their hand at teaching English in an exotic location have an appalling grasp of the English language. They struggle with the grammar, terrified that their students will discover their complete lack of understanding of basic grammatical terminology. I have witnessed many teachers making basic errors that their students, even the most elementary, would not themselves make simply because they have never been taught the rudiments of grammar. There is a common misapprehension that a native English speaker is by their very nature an expert on their own language.

So you’re asking these people who are struggling to grasp the basics of their own grammar to assimilate a whole new world of unnecessary jargon. They can’t; they won’t; they shouldn’t have to. Those who purport to be teacher trainers ought to train themselves in expressing themselves coherently, simply, and in plain, easy to understand English.

Let’s have no more “phatic” when “social language” would serve. Let’s have no more “ludic” when “playful, undirected language” would do. Let’s leave the jargon to the academic books that sit gathering dust on the shelves. Let’s use instead the language that you find in popular fiction; language that is easy to understand and digest, and is enjoyable to read and listen to.

I heartily recommend all academic types to join the Plain English Campaign.

Posted under Teaching, Writing

A short while ago I reported that Linguaspectrum’s YouTube channel had reached 328 subscribers. Last night, Halloween, we saw our 700th subscriber. In the past 3 weeks we have been adding around 100 subscribers a week. If the trend continues, we should see around 6000 subscribers within 12 months. This is quite an achievement.

The secret to success? High-quality content that is educational, valuable and engaging. The visitors keep coming back and they tell their friends.

There are now 32 videos on the Channel and they are now being watched an average of 1200 times a day. The viewing figures are increasing daily, as more people spread the word about the quality of the videos.

My One Minute English videos are very popular. Particularly popular has been the Halloween video that has had well over 2000 views in just 5 days.

Posted under Teaching, Technology

“[By 1985], machines [computers] will be capable of doing any work Man can do.”
Herbert A. Simon, of Carnegie Mellon University, one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence – speaking in 1965

He wasn’t quite right with his timing, but I have to agree with his prediction if we move it forward a few years. But why won’t there be any language schools in the future? Because computers are becoming more powerful daily and this progress is unlikely to stop…ever.

From the fictitious Encyclopaedia Galactica – from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s  Guide to the Galaxy: “The Babel fish is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.”

Last year I wrote an article for ETp and in it said: “The history of machine translation by computer began with a 1954 experiment in which sixty Russian sentences were translated into English at the Georgetown University in the USA. Though widely and enthusiastically reported in the press, such is the complexity of language that the journalists’ enthusiasm proved to be little more than premature extrapolation.”

Google Translator Toolkit can currently translate 345 languages between 10,664 language pairs.

Dragon Naturally Speaking types my work for me on my computer as I speak with 99% accuracy. Text Aloud reads it back to me with astonishing clarity and excellent pronunciation. Accurate speech-to-text and text-to-speech are already here. We even have to speak to machines on the telephone – and they speak back, too.

Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization (TIDES) was being developed by military departments before 2002. This project is the development of “advanced language processing technology to enable English speakers to find and interpret critical information in multiple languages without requiring knowledge of those languages.”Speech-to-speech translation in the form of an electronic Babel fish might seem a long way off, but may not be so. We would not want to make predictions like that made by Dennis Gabor, British physicist and author of Inventing the Future, in 1962 when he predicted: “Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition.” Since then the fax has come and almost gone, superseded by email and other electronic data transfer systems.

Remember the advent of the digital calculator? I do. I had one of the first programmable ones way back in 1976. I wrote a BASIC program for it with which I could play a Lunar Lander game. Back in 1976 I could buy something in a shop for 9.65, hand over 10.65 and be given the 1.00 in change without the shop assistant so much as stopping for breath. Try that today in Carrefour, Sainsbury, Tesco or whatever shop you have near to you. Better still, hand over the 10.00 and wait until the shop assistant has punched it into the till, and then offer the 65 pence, cents or whatever. Watch the panic form on their face as they desperately try to figure out what they are supposed to do. The till is telling them to give you 0.35 change from your 10.00 note. Even with a calculator to hand they will struggle to work it out. There is no longer any way to get rid of the loose change in your purse.

The electronic calculator removed the need to do simple mental arithmetic and thus spelt the end of humanity’s ability to do simple mental arithmetic.

My prediction in this post is that Google Translate, Babylon, and other such language tools will eventually become so sophisticated that they will have the same effect as the pocket calculator – they will remove the need to have the skill of speaking another language.

They may not be capable of speech-to-speech translation yet, nor may be able for some time, but this group is concerned with the question of private language schools of the future. In the future, dear reader, I can promise you that accurate speech-to-speech translation in real-time will be a reality.

The danger for the language school of the not-too-distant future lies close at hand. I regularly read Russian, Chinese, Arabic web pages translated very accurately, as far as I can tell, into English. I often communicate with my online students by email in English, but sometimes provide a Google translation into the student’s own language where necessary for clarity. Keep the sentences simple and Google does a wonderful job.

Just as the world stopped wasting time learning to do mental arithmetic after 1976, might it not also stop wasting time learning a foreign language when any document, or spoken word, can be quickly and accurately translated by machine?

How wonderful a Babel fish device inserted into my ear and connected to my iPhone, or whatever electronic wizardry might happen to be in my pocket, such as by bluetooth, would be if it could automatically translate the spoken word from Spanish to English and vice-versa! This is the future, have no doubt. Would I waste my time learning Spanish or any other language with this resource at my disposal? Absolutely not!

So, I’m afraid that there won’t be any language schools to look at in the future, private or otherwise, and the TEFL industry had better start looking for a new cash cow to milk.

Posted under Teaching, Technology