USING OPEN SOURCE ONLINE MULTIMEDIA RESOURCES TO CREATE E-LEARNING ACTIVITIES BASED ON A 'LEARNING OBJECTS' APPROACH

This report  gives an evaluative account of a project "Using open access online multimedia resources to create e-learning activities based on a 'learning objects'  approach" which was supported by the Fund for New Teaching Initiatives from October 2005 to March 2006.The project aimed to develop  and evaluate online teaching and assessment activities, using  open source multimedia resources . The activities were designed for the  School of Education's newly restructured MA in Applied Linguistics and TESOL , particularly for the  distance programme which will be delivered entirely online from September 2008. It also aimed to explore the process of producing online materials adopting a reusable learning objects approach. The intention was that both the learning objects themselves and the outcomes of the production process could be cascaded to other members of staff both in the department and wider University to disseminate knowledge and skills in developing e-learning resources.  Despite limited time and resources , the project largely fulfilled its three key objectives, ie1. To develop online learning and assessment activities exploiting open source multimedia resources 2. To evaluate the effectiveness of these activities3. To facilitate the process of distance materials development by adopting a reusable approach whereby these and future materials would form the basis of a bank of teaching, learning and assessment resources which could be adapted and reused, reducing  the risk of "reinventing the wheel"

Consultancy-Based Projects

This chapter will:; ; ; Show how consultancy work can inform business discourse teaching;; ; ; Discuss how needs analysis and communication audits can be used to generate recommendations for teaching and training;; ; ; Profile a number of consultancy-based business discourse projects and show how they have informed training and course development;; ; ; Provide a case study, together with a set of tasks appropriate for the business discourse classroom, and a set of further readings

The Future of Business Discourse Teaching

This chapter will:; ; ; Explore ways in which new media and digital technologies are shaping business communication and highlight the importance of digital communicative competence for learners and teachers;; ; ; Discuss ways in which the digital workplace can be brought into the business discourse classroom;; ; ; Discuss the role of Business English and other business languages in international business and what this means for business discourse teaching;; ; ; Consider how the multicultural workplace can inform business discourse teaching;; ; ; Provide a case study that illustrates some of the above developments, together with a set of tasks appropriate for the business discourse classroom, and a set of further readings

The compilation of a corpus of business English: syntactic variation

Selection and peer-review under responsibility of International Conference on Corpus Linguistics (CILC2013).[EN] This study focuses on the design of a real corpus extracted from a business environment. The compilation of a real corpus must be done in an objective way to extract samples of language used in an everyday context and with the minimum interference. The elaboration of a corpus based on texts from a business environment is somewhat problematic as companies are not used to providing information for linguistic research and the appropriate tagging of a real corpus is not an easy task. The tagging of a real corpus involves filtering the language selected, as it may contain some mistakes or variation. The objective of this paper is to describe the methodology followed in order to compile a real corpus and propose a tagging system of the syntactic variations found in a real corpus caused by the use of English as a second language. This proposal is made after the compilation of a corpus composed of one hundred and twenty e-mails written by Indian and Chinese employees who work in an international company. The corpus was tagged manually and several aspects were taken into account although in this paper we will focus on the tagging of variation.Carrió Pastor, ML.; Muñiz Calderón, R. (2013). The compilation of a corpus of business English: syntactic variation. Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences. 95:89-95. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.10.626S89959

How non-native English-speaking staff are evaluated in linguistically diverse organizations: A sociolinguistic perspective

The aim of this paper is to examine the effects of evaluations of non-native speaking staff?s spoken English in international business settings. We adopt a sociolinguistic perspective on power and inequalities in linguistically diverse organizations in an Anglophone environment. The interpretive qualitative study draws on 54 interviews with non-native English-speaking staff in 19 UK business schools. We analyze, along the dimensions of status, solidarity and dynamism, the ways in which non-native speakers, on the basis of their spoken English, are evaluated by themselves and by listeners. We show how such evaluations refer to issues beyond the speaker?s linguistic fluency, and have consequences for her or his actions. The study contributes to the literature on language and power in international business through offering fine-grained insights into and elucidating how the interconnected evaluative processes impact the formation and perpetuation of organizational power relations and inequalities. It also puts forward implications for managing the officially monolingual, yet linguistically diverse organizations

Research Methodologies and Business Discourse Teaching

This chapter will:; ; ; Define English for specific purposes and indicate the specific ways in which it has been influential on business discourse teaching;; ; ; Discuss the most relevant approaches to genre analysis that have been used in business discourse teaching;; ; ; Explore the most relevant approaches to critical discourse analysis and organizational rhetoric for business discourse teaching;; ; ; Identify the most relevant aspects of multimodal discourse analysis for business discourse teaching;; ; ; Provide a case study that illustrates the use of one approach to business discourse teaching, showing how practitioners can incorporate it into their classroom- or consultancy-based ideas

History of ESL Pronunciation Teaching

This chapter tells the story of over 150 years in the teaching of English as a second language (ESL) pronunciation. An analysis of historical resources may reveal a reliable history of pronunciation teaching. A consistent theme within the historical record is that prior to the second half of the nineteenth century pronunciation received little attention in L2 classrooms. Beginning in the 1850s and continuing for the next 30 years, early innovators such as Berlitz, Gouin, Marcel, and Predergast were rejecting and transitioning away from classical approaches. A change that resulted in pronunciation teaching\u27s considerably more consequential second wave was the formation in Paris during the period 1886-1889 of the International Phonetic Association. The 1950s-1970s coincide with a slow rise of attention to innovations in how to teach pronunciation. If we may speculate on the future of ESL pronunciation teaching, there is every reason to feel optimistic

Phonology and Phonetics Review

This unit reviews some of the key concepts and elements of English phonology and phonetics by providing a variety of multimedia resources and activities. Its aims are to help individuals to review segmental and suprasegmental elements of English phonology, practice phonemic transcription and analyse authentic speech data.