Pig Sty Avenue

...is Pecha Kucha . A kind of PowerPoint haiku form. And Jing , which I like the look of for both teaching and having a laugh. And DimDim .

...the weird, of course, turn pro . Which is what I've done. It's not so bad. I'm doing one-to-one teaching with a wind energy man, and I've learned quite a lot about that industry. And I'm designing a course for 60 Chinese aeronautical graduates, which is going to feature quite a lot of TBL . Which is harder work than doing it from a book (we'll be doing that as well), but much more engaging. And my mate Charlie has pointed me in the direction of wetpaint as a place to create a wiki , to use as an ad hoc VLE . So, you can see, I'm on a decent learning curve here. I have been wondering if I would have been better keeping my mouth shut and getting on with another term at McEnglish in Glasgow - at least I would have been coming back to my own home each night. But I would have been learning almost nothing, beyond the theory and practice of kissing arse and keeping shtum. Fuck it - it's better as it is. I'm going to christen this workplace as B

I accepted a job with an English company for a job in Libya, which fell through. So they offered me work in their school in the East Midlands, and put me up in a guesthouse, and I thought wtf, a man's got to work. Just beginning to start week two of it and I'm not so sure. The big cheese seemed ok at the interview but now she seems to burst out of frequent meetings only to dash around the building, pointing at people, asking rhetorical questions, misunderstanding anything you might be foolish enough to utter, making tactless asides, and leaving only demoralization and puzzlement in her wake. It's as if she's got a big Mad Ideas Box in her office and she gets several out in a day and has to act on all of them immediately: in the most uninspiring and unconvincing ways, too. She reminds me of the bastard who owned Scabby College, a kind of Dotheboys Hall for middle class foreigners where Herself and I somehow managed to last a whole year. The big cheese owner of the s

Herself , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . ...I'm going to put the Leica in a drawer for a few months and just concentrate on the Sporti with HP5. One camera with one shutter speed (and two apertures) and one type of film. It'll be a right laugh.

Really busy with the Mod5 and new job. More when I have time to breath. By the bye, I reckon I might be going to binge on the Sporti with HP5 when time permits. That is all.

Reach Out! , originally uploaded by Kenny Maths . Normal Service Will Be Resumed When I Finish The Module 5 Assignment!

bye then George , originally uploaded by °๋§ ợ§ღєηŧ . Childish, I know...

You can get some incredible bargains in the early evening at Sainsbury's, like a punnet of fresh lychees for 10p the other night. The Bairn loves them. And we'll have a go at planting the big seeds, see what happens. I'll put four or five of them in a 4" pot with ordinary potting compost. From a supermarket, they could be infertile seeds from hybrid plants. I doubt they'll ever do well in a North Ayrshire garden, though.

"We appreciate that you chose eBay to list your auction-style listing(s). However, we have removed your (s) because it breaches our Drugs and Drug Paraphernalia policy. We notified members who placed bids on the item that the listing has been canceled. "110337526275 - Salvia Divinorum: large fully-rooted cutting "Why did we remove your listing? "In accordance with our User Agreement, items prohibited by law or by eBay policy are not allowed on eBay . "You're not allowed to list narcotics, steroids or other controlled drugs on eBay . In addition, you may not list any items that are primarily intended or designed for use in manufacturing, concealing or using a controlled substance. "For more information on copy this link into a new browser window: "http://pages. ebay .co.uk/help/ policies/drugs.html " Don't get me fucking started...

Salvia Cutting , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . Salvia plants will apparently grow for years - perhaps indefinitley, but they get really scrawny in their second year. So I've started to take cutting from mine in the Autumn, and compost the mother plants. This means you get several more new plants well established over the Winter on the windowsill, and ready to really start growing as the days begin to lengthen.

Major et al (2005) is interesting. The bottom line for my ideas is that "ESL listeners performed notably better on tests with lectures delivered in Standard American English and Southern American English than on tests with lectures delivered in ethnic or and international dialects." The ethnic and international dialects were AAVE, Australian and Indian. (Australian is used in IELTS). There is a danger of being swamped by the overlapping aspects of this study: P&P, testing theory, ICC and CDA... There's another point that came to mind when reading this article: the assumption that teachers having non-RP accents is A Good Thing. It might be, but whence the paradigm? Could it just be an example of what a succesful old school teacher described to me as touchy-feely-tefly-wanky, (or TFTW)? So I need to look at my basic methodology texts for that, and also some of the refs from the Major article. Major, R. C., Fitzmaurice, S. M., Bunta, F., & Balasubramanian, C.

Jarvella (2001) is interesting; [apologies for the exclusivity of academic publishing if you don't have an Athens account, dear reader]. The essential point for my current research is that 74% of the time, Danish Anglophones (unfortunately we do not know their level of English) were able to distinguish between English (northern and midlands), Irish, Scots and American speakers' accents. RP was excluded from this study, but Ladegaard (1998a) , dealt with it. (Ladegaard was clearly on a roll in 1998: Ladegaard (1998b) is on a similar theme, and appears to be open access.) The point, from the CDA of listening materials aspect, is that accent is conveyed to learners. I need to go away now and read the two Ladegaards. ______________________________________________________________ Jarvella, R.J, Bang, E., Jakobsen, A.L., Mees, I.M., (2001) Of mouths and men: non-native listeners' identification and evaluation of varieties of English. International Journal of Applied Linguisti

...all of which, decoded, means I'm off back to Libya. Half an hour wasted last night trying to unlock Sweet Tea and Handshakes . So I'm going to have to blog my adventures here, only this time with less surrounding paranoia. My new employer seems (so far) to be more normal than the last lot. I should be going out some time next month, inshallah. It's a new project and I'm to be a pioneer teacher. The school and accommodation is to the south west of Tripoli, in a district I'm not familiar with. So there's plenty of potential for An Interesting Experience.

I'm CDAing the listening texts from an IELTS coursebook, (O'Connell, 2002). Wodak (2001: 17) paraphrases Widdowson (1995: 169), CDA "selects for analysis such texts as will support the preferred interpretation." [no access to Athens this morning to get hold of the original Widdowson; the link is to the abstract]. Actually, I chose the IELTS text simply because it was the one I was using last term when I had to select the subject of my paper. The choice was reinforced by this statement on the IELTS website: Routine analysis of test data is conducted on test materials and test takers’ performance to ensure that IELTS remains fair and unbiased regardless of nationality, background, gender or lifestyle, and that IELTS encourages, reflects and respects international diversity. ( IELTS, 2008 ). Which is a rather courageous statement. IELTS, 2008. Teachers and Researchers. [Online][html incompatibility means cannot give full ref.] [accessed 5 January 2009] Widdowson, H.

...as I was, looking for links, I came across aNobii. But I don't know if I can be arsed with it. It might be good for automatic cross-referencing, further reading. Certainly, though, I haven't the time to go through the shelves inputting ISBNs.

Snowblind was great fun. "Cocaine is just the metaphor". Forsooth. And then I read something else, which I've clean forgotten... Then it was Louise Welsh's The Cutting Room . Which I also enjoyed a lot. Real Scottish noir. Its flaw was an unsurprising plot which left me glad to finish it. I also enjoyed the Last King of Scotland . There was a lot going on there: getting into bad situations out of the need for adventure, complicity, being charmed out of acknowleding evil. And last night I finished reading Wise Guy . How come I haven't read it before? (It was an old edition, the cover bearing the words "Soon to be a major film!") Incidentally, lack of space means I have to be selective with the what books I keep. Very strict criteria regarding likelihood of need-to-refer-to in the the future. Only Wise Guy made the cut of the above books, though it was close thing for Snowblind . Now I'm reading Thud! , to see if I can see what other people

No, really. Looks like an interesting place . But when you've a family to support, TEFL is all about bucks, kid. The rest is conversation.