Watching myself present (1): waving my hands about

At the end of last week, I was sent the video recording of my presentation at IATEFL in Glasgow back in March. The nice folks at Collins (who the talk was for) wanted me to okay it before they put it up on digital media. It’s always odd watching yourself on video and although I’ve got a bit used to it lately (what with doing webinars), the process was still accompanied by various dismayed exclamations and covering of my face with my hands at the worst points! Everyone has their own personal cringe points – overly repeated phrases, silly facial expressions – for me it’s hand-waving. 

 

Way back when I did my very first conference presentation (at IATEFL in Dublin in 2000), I went on a two-day presentation skills course first. At the start of the course, we were each videoed doing a mini presentation, then we watched it back to see what we wanted to improve. For me, I decided I had to stop waving my hands around like a maniac – a habit, no doubt, picked up through years of EFL teaching and living in countries where I didn’t speak the language very well! So with the course tutor, we worked on tactics that would keep my hands a bit under control. We finally settled on clasping my hands in front of me while I spoke. When it got to the end-of-course video presentation though, the results were absolutely hilarious … yes, I kept my hands clasped in front of me, but it didn’t stop me waving them about like some kind of demented rumba routine! I decided at that point that maybe it was better to just be myself, to stop worrying about the hands and just do my own thing.

In the intervening years though, I fear the hand-waving’s become more exaggerated without me noticing. Watching back my presentation, it looked like I was conducting the whole thing in sign language! Eva, my contact at Collins, very kindly said in response to my emailed reaction; “I think your hands just show that you’re passionate about what you’re talking about”. Personally though, I think it’s something I need to get under control and I’m going to be making a concerted effort to cut it down. I’ll let you know how I get on …

Watch the video and judge for yourself here: Breaking down the AWL - IATEFL 2012
 

Glasgow 2012

I'm just settling back at my desk, and ploughing through my inbox, after an absolutely exhausting, but incredibly useful time at the IATEFL conference in Glasgow last week. There's so much I could say about what was a very intense week, but I have a big backlog of work to get on with, so here's just a summary.

Getting out there:

As a freelancer working away at my desk, my days generally follow a fairly low-key sort of routine, so to suddenly find myself out all day (Tues started at 9am and finished around midnight!), surrounded by people; chatting, having meetings, going to sessions and socialising in the evenings was a radical change of pace and absolutely shattering! It also made a really nice change though and it was lovely to be so sociable. I caught up with lots of people I know, collected over 20 years in ELT. A surprisingly large number of old teaching colleagues from my early days in Athens and Prague now seem to work for ELT publishers, then there were folks from my time in Cambridge (working in-house at CUP) and a myriad of other people who I've worked with and for in 12+ years of freelancing. It's lovely to catch up with old friends, but it's also incredibly good for business too; renewing old contacts, chatting about what I'm doing and what they're doing and crucially, about what what we might be able to work together on in the future.

Stirring the grey matter:

In amongst all the schmoozing, I did also get to a few sessions. After many years of IATEFL conferences, I tend to be quite selective, but I managed 3 or 4 sessions a day. I'm not going to run through a review of each thing I went to, but I think each one succeeded in sparking at least one new idea to take away with me. And oddly, it was some of the sessions that had the least impact at the time that have lingered and been pondered on the most since.

The talk:

I think my talk on Thursday morning went okay - after I'd worked out what to do with a radio mic when you're wearing a dress with no waistband!! It was a fairly straightforward, academic sort of presentation, describing how we went about selecting and grading vocabulary for the COBUILD Key Words For IELTS series. I talked through my slides without missing out anything major, I waved my hands about as usual, but remembered not to wander around too much for the cameraman filming the session.

I noticed a few members of the audience smiling and nodding in recognition at various points, but when I got to the end, I wasn't altogether sure how it'd gone down. I finished in good time, so I rather nervously invited questions. I say 'nervously' because at several of the sessions I'd been to, especially the larger ones, invitations for questions had just been met by a general shuffling and people starting to leave. So I was relieved when a good sprinkling of hands went up and we had a good 10 minutes of really interesting questions. Afterwards, a couple of people commented that I dealt well with some tricky questions, but actually, I think it was the part I enjoyed most. It's quite difficult to prepare a talk at something like IATEFL where your audience is likely to be a mix of fellow (and rival!) publishers and writers, along with some 'real' teachers from a huge range of backgrounds. So it's really nice to get a bit of proper interaction and a chance to talk about the things that are really of interest to the people there.

Thank you to everyone who came along and to the lovely folks from Collins ELT who helped it all run smoothly. If you're interested, my PowerPoint slides and the handout to go with my talk are now available on the Glasgow online website. I understand the video of the talk will be edited over the next couple of weeks and may well end up on a website - I'll post the link if and when.

Preparing to present

In a couple of weeks' time, I'm due to give a presentation at the Annual IATEFL Conference in Glasgow. I'm going to be talking about how we put together the wordlists for the Collins COBUILD Key Words for IELTS series that I worked on as senior editor (Breaking down the AWL; Thurs morning, 10.25). I generally really enjoy presenting and I've given talks at IATEFL several times before, so I know more-or-less what to expect. I had to put in my proposal back in September, so I thought about my topic and a general outline back then. It's sort of been in the back of my mind since and occasionally something crops up that I mentally file under "possible talk material", but generally, I haven't thought too much about it. It always seems to me that there's no point preparing miles ahead then forgetting it all.

With the conference just a couple of weeks away though, I'd set aside some time this week to sit down and prepare in earnest, especially as the folks at Collins want me to send them a copy of my presentation by next week. I started off yesterday by pulling out my proposal and various notes about the project and jotting down some rough ideas on paper. Then I spent the rest of the morning wandering around the house talking to myself! Anyone walking past and glancing through the window would've thought I was mad, especially as I can't talk without using my hands. I tried out different sections, wording and rewording, then checking out stats or examples, so that each chunk of the talk gradually came together. I then went off and did other stuff for the rest of the afternoon and let everything bubble away in the back of my mind.

This morning, I sat down and started to translate everything into a set of PowerPoint slides, putting all my chunks into a sequence and filling in any gaps and links. Then it was time for a trial run to check out the timing. I put my slides on my laptop on the ironing board (just because it's a good height!) and set the kitchen timer. I also took the opportunity to test out the new boots I've bought to wear - I haven't worn them yet and I wanted to check they were comfy and didn't rub anywhere! And off I went ...

My first full run-through came out at about 35 minutes, which is great as I've got a 45-minute slot and that gives me a few minutes late starting and a good 5 minutes for questions/overrun time. So I think I'm more-or-less set. I'll have another look through my PowerPoint slides tomorrow before I send them off. I'll save everything onto a memory stick as well as my laptop. I've got my outfit sorted, including the boots which were still fairly comfy after a full afternoon's wear including a walk round to the supermarket! Now I'll wait until the day before my presentation to have one last look through. I'm really pleased to have a morning slot - I don't get very nervous before presentations, but there's still nothing worse than hanging around all day waiting to speak. Apparently, the talk's going to be filmed, so if you're not in Glasgow, I'll try and put up a link to it later.

EAP: inspiration & confirmation

On Saturday, I spent the day at a BALEAP PIM at Bristol University - a kind of one-day mini-conference for EAP teachers. It was a good opportunity to catch up with colleagues and to meet some new people too. The various presentations also provided both some new ideas and confirmation of some of the things I'd been thinking and doing myself recently, which is always nice.

The overarching theme of the day was teaching EAP to lower level learners and Debbie Mann's mini-presentation came up with some really neat ideas for putting across important academic concepts to lower level learners using simple, strikingly designed materials. Another talk from which I'll definitely steal ideas for my pre-sessional teaching in the summer, was from Elizabeth Long who presented lots of practical ideas for helping new students adapt to a British academic context.

I also found Neil Harris's session about using the AWL (academic word list) with lower level learners really interesting, because a lot of what he talked about crossed over so much with my own recent work on the Collins COBUILD Key Words for IELTS books, trying to spread the vocabulary from the AWL across three books aimed at different levels. He pointed out that while the AWL is divided into sublists, with the most frequent words in list 1, going through to the least frequent in list 10, because the words are grouped into word families, you often find more frequent and less frequent items within the same list. So, whilst you might want to teach individual, a sublist 1 word, fairly early on and you might link that to individually, you probably won't want to confuse a lower level learner by throwing in individuality, individualism, individualist and individualistic at the same time.

When compiling the headword lists for the Key Words for IELTS books, we started off with the idea of including the most frequent AWL sublists in the lower level book and working our way up, but soon found that we had to consider individual words within word families separately, based on their individual frequencies. At the same time though, we didn't want to lose the important links between words from the same family/root. A key skill for EAP students is being able to play with different forms of a word to see what fits best in a particular context. We got around this by including an element of repetition and building, so for example we dealt with the sublist 1 word family significant as follows:
Book 1 (Starter level): significant (single basic sense)
Book 2 (Improver level): significant (two senses) + significantly + significance and insignificant
Book 3 (Advanced level): signify

It had seemed like the most logical way to deal with the problem at the time, but it's really nice to have someone else independently talk about a similar way of tackling the AWL.

Thanks to everyone involved for an enjoyable and stimulating day!

Happy New Year!

I got back this week from a Christmas/New Year trip to Cambodia (above at Angkor Wat) and I've spent a couple of days trying to get over the jet lag and pottering about; doing lots of washing, sorting out photos, dealing with my inbox and sending out a few work messages. It's also inevitably a time for thinking back and looking forward ...

Highlights of 2010

• 2010 started with the publication of Global which had been a big feature of my working year in 2009. There was the launch at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in February and then in November, the trip to Buckingham Palace to pick up the ESU award for the e-workbook along with several of my Global co-writers - a day to remember!
  
• The summer saw the publication of the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English - the first big native speaker dictionary project I've worked on, so an exciting milestone.
• This year's big project though was work on the Collins COBUILD Key Words for IELTS books. It was, in many ways, a dream project for me, combining my lexicography skills with my recent interest in EAP and IELTS. The project also marked a bit of a step forward in career terms as I was working as senior editor for the three books; a challenging, but really interesting experience.

Resolutions for 2011

Well, there's only one really and that's to break out of the cycle of getting involved in one big project in the year that ends up being more work than I can cope with in the time available, so that my RSI flares up really badly, leaving me in lots of pain and frustrated, and then having to take time off to recover. I don't want to give up those 'big' projects, because they're usually the most interesting. But there really has to be a way of working that means that I can control my hours and work through something at a reasonable pace - as opposed to the usual promises to start on a particular date which then moves and moves and moves, until I'm left with the same amount of work to do (and usually more than expected) in half the amount of time!

So here's looking forward to an interesting, productive and sensibly-paced year ahead in 2011.

Key Words for IELTS

Last week, I received advanced copies of three books I worked on earlier in the year - Collins COBUILD Key Words for IELTS. I was involved with the books right from the early stages; planning the layout, developing the features and putting together the word lists, so it was quite exciting to see the finished product.

The books kind of bridge the gap between a vocabulary practice book and a specialised dictionary. Each of the three titles (Starter, Improver and Advanced) contain vocabulary that's aimed at helping students move from using general English towards the more formal, academic-style language needed for the IELTS exam. The words are presented in expanded dictionary entries, with definitions relevant to the academic usage of the word, examples, collocations, synonyms and usage notes.

I know that my own IELTS/EAP students sometimes find standard advanced learner's dictionaries a bit frustrating because the more formal and academic senses and derivatives of words often get little or no coverage - because they're less frequent in everyday usage. In these books, the more unusual senses and formal parts of speech (such as the abstract nouns so common in academic English) get equal coverage and IELTS-style examples.

Also at this level, it's often the case that the first word a student comes up with doesn't quite work in the context, so they need to be able to play around with vocabulary. For this reason, we've shown different parts of speech together (because sometimes a noun form works where a verb doesn't fit) along with possible synonyms that might fit in better.

The books are out in January and I'm going to be really interested to see how they go down with teachers and students. As a writer/editor, you really hope that all the ideas you put into a book will be obvious to the user and that they'll get as much out of it as you'd hoped. Keeping fingers crossed and looking forward to feedback in the New Year.