Chark Blog - Teaching English

Saturday, August 26, 2006

My grumpy old man blog of yesterday touched a few nerves. After the enormous success of Eats,shoots & leaves I shouldn't be surprised that the subject of spelling and use of English is a popular issue. I suppose the problem starts in schools. And if it's difficult to teach British kids how much harder is it to teach English to non-native speakers.

About five years ago Macmillan Education launched onestopenglish to offer teaching resources, tips and support to teachers of English throughout the world. It has been a huge success with 350,000 registered users who come back time and again. The material is free and usage has not been restricted at all.

Fine and dandy and very web 2.0 but we needed to develop the site further, to pay top-class professional writers, teachers and developers and to create a web 3.0 level of service. This requires an income stream but we could not risk losing our loyal users. We therefore developed a subscription site, the Staff Room where we have responded to user feedback gathered via questionnaires, workshops and focus groups by generating new 'missing' material, enhanced search, comprehensive support materials and much else.

Teachers of English are not wealthy and we have therefore kept the subscription price to the lowest possible level - £2 per month - and onestopenglish users have already begun to convert in good numbers (we launched last Thursday). Do have a look at onestopenglish and if you are a teacher of English do take out a subscription to the Staff Room - it's worth a go.

8/27/2006 12:59:05 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

It's not just a matter of spelling and grammar of course, there's a lot more to it. There is composition and exposition. Organizing your thoughts. We talk, quite rightly, of the problem of sentence fragments. But what about the problem of paragraph fragments?

Apathy doesn't help matters any.

Neither does the idea that getting it right doesn't matter, what matters is being creative and feeling good about yourself. Puts a real damper on actually trying. We're ignoring the reason for being creative, and that is to communicate with others. To get our ideas and our visions across to others. You can't do that all of your creativity is even more useless than a bag of manure.

Encourage the kids to strive, it will serve them better than anything else we could ever devise.

Alan Kellogg

8/27/2006 9:27:23 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Sorry Mr Charkin, but the abuse of spelling and grammar was an issue to me before Eats, Shoots etc. ever made the published page.

If I'm on an kindly mode of being, I'd say that 95% of the generation of 30 years or less years of age can't hack it. If I'm feeling less kindly but still objective, make that 90%. Catch ne on a bad moment and both categories make it to 80% if they try...

The rules for "It's" and "its" have been put out to the crematorium by some. And it's a shame that people of my age have given up in this. I say "my age" because the younger generation has to be taught. They don't receive the message of rule because it was never sent.

When on earth did we become so tardy/lardy?

crimeficreader

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