February '09 Newsletter (1)
 
Hello to everyone Out There and welcome to our new members and newsletter subscribers...
 
I hope your February has got off to a better start than it did for the transport system in the UK.
 
This is what I have for you today:
 
Weather exercise
EOT structured language exchange in London
Start your own EOT business
Pinker on metaphor and some colourful language
 
Here's a bit of fun with the language of weather:
 

 
We have been experimenting with the website Meetup.com, the website that helped to get Barack Obama elected. It is very useful and we think it could play a big part in the future of Out There because it enables you to schedule, recruit students and manage face-to-face meetings (lessons?!) of any kind, in any place, at any time. And that fits very nicely with Out There.
 
Last Tuesday, Maria organised and ran our structured language exchange in London. It is structured because learners download self-study lesson plans from the Meetup.com website, study them or read them on the tube and then use the language and questions from the lesson plan to start conversations when they get to the language exchange.  It helps to break the ice and makes the practice much more focused.  You can see what it was like and read some comments here;
 
http://www.meetup.com/English-Out-There-London-English-conversation/

Can you see, this is all quite interesting, and opens up some possibilities for people to start their own EOT businesses, for very little investment? 
 
So, another part of the experiment is for us to see if teachers and other people interested in Out There would like to start their own structured language exchanges and even schedule and teach full EOT lessons using Meetup.com.  There are thousands of English learners all over the world looking for language exchanges organised by Meetup.com organisers (who can be anyone at all, not just teachers). 
 
We have put some new information on the website about the number of learners waiting for a language exchange or lessons and where they are in the world:
 
http://www.languagesoutthere.com/categories/earn-money-teaching-english
 
In Madrid there are 255 people who want someone, anyone, to start a language exchange, that's amazing, and if you start one today, Meetup.com will email them all and tell them to become your members. How about that? With our lesson plans and worksheets you could have your own small EOT business in Madrid in just a few minutes.
 
We have also put some free classifed advertisements around the internet to see if people are interested in supporting the Out There philosophy of 'teach anywhere, anytime, anyplace'. Visit the listing we placed on iList (with video and images and full details of the oppportunities) at:
 
https://ilist.com/listings/exciting-and-innovative-english-teaching-opportunit

 
I've been reading 'The Stuff of Thought' by Steven Pinker and it is amazing.  Especially the chapter on metaphor. Basically he describes the prospect of a whole new grammar that explains why English, or any language, can be difficult to master. He says that meaning is hidden in metaphors that people can only start to understand when they have both a close physical and cultural experience of the environment in which the words are used. Here's a quotation from the book:
 
" A lot is at stake in the question of how the mind handles conceptual metaphors. For one thing, the answer may shed a good deal of light on cognitive development and education...conceptual metaphors point to an obvious way in which people could learn to reason about new abstract concepts. They could notice, or have pointed out to them, a parallel between a physical realm they already understand and conceptual realm they don't yet understand. This would explain not only how children learn difficult ideas as they grow up but how people of any age learn them...analogies would be more than pedogogical devices; they would be the mechanisms that the mind uses to understand otherwise inaccessible concepts".
 
In celebration of this insight into how we learn the tough stuff and to give you a taste of what the Languages Out There book will be like here is a poem that won second prize in a tube advertisement competition last year.  The copywriter is Jaime Diskin, who has written the up-coming book, it is called 'Colourful'.
 

Great, isn't it?
 
And together with what Steve Pinker says it illustrates that the physical and the 'being there and doing it' can never be replaced or bettered by sitting in a classroom trying to learn something that in just a few moments in the real world seems suddenly all too obvious and is much more memorable as a result.
 
Until next time...

Cheers
Jason