SOL NEWSLETTER
December 2011



 

Whether you are celebrating Christmas at the end of this week or two weeks later, everyone at SOL wishes you a very happy time, hopefully surrounded by friends and family.    As for the New Year, well a lot of doom and gloom is in the air with the financial crisis uppermost in people’s minds.  From SOL’s position, although our numbers were quite a bit down, we are confident of seeing even more of you in the coming year, and it is looking a very good one for us at the moment.   As you will read shortly, we promise to make any visit to North Devon even more memorable for all teachers bringing their students.    We understand that for many parents it is even more difficult to afford the cost of the trip so for this is a real added incentive to make it really worth it.

We were heartened to hear that one parent whose two children came on an open course in the summer have booked them in again in 2012 and cancelled their regular conversation lessons with a native speaker because our course is much more effective (and the same price)!

Changes at SOL

With the departure of Yvonne in the autumn, some change was inevitable.  In the event, as so often happens, a new opportunity arises and for SOL, with the economic crisis affecting those student numbers, a fresh look at our courses has been taking place.   Those families who have hosted either of the last two groups as well as those who check our Facebook page (anyone can!), will know what changes have already been tested!

Essentially, we are simply trying to make the visits more interesting and valuable for the students.  We were realising that some of them were not speaking English at all during the visits, and with so much time given to this part of the programme we knew the students were missing out.  We knew we could improve on this.

So, with Mark Andrews, who writes below, joining us for a few weeks this autumn, and with his tremendous background in teacher training (not just our summer courses) and cultural studies, we have tried to engage the students in a way we have never done before.   Supported by Tim’s excellent guiding, we have been able to look at many other things during the visits to involve the students with.  It will mean a few more questions for them to ask host families but that in itself will also improve their English further!

During these last two courses, a lot of filming was done on the visits and Mark was able to edit these each evening and upload them to You Tube, and then onto our SOL Facebook page, with comments.  If you have not seen these videos yet, then please do have a look.  You will see how the students are engaged directly in visits either by listening to someone working at the place visited or by being asked questions on what they see (or asking questions themselves).   The preparation for the panto with this last group was also an important feature of the time in the centre at Bridge Chambers.   It is clearly not possible to film this way with every group, but it documents our new approach and so much of what you see now will form part of each course.

The staff in all three centres, as well as our coordinators abroad (who are the ones promoting us) are involved in the discussions but what is certain is that the visits and the time in the host families are being made centre stage in our programmes, rather than the classroom.  This should not be misinterpreted though – their language development is going to be greater than before!  With a greater emphasis on what the students themselves experience whilst they are with us, rather than things we choose to tell them, the motivation and interest levels for using English will be that much higher - and they will get more practice in speaking as well. 

It will also involve the local communities and their organisations more and that also excites us a lot.  The lifeboat stations at Ilfracombe and Appledore, the Lifeboat shop, the Maritime Museum in Appledore, Frankmarsh Stores, Walter’s Emporium, the Exeter Cathedral shop and others have all been willing to engage with our students in recent courses.  We are grateful to them for this support which gives our students the chance to discover English ways of life, different from their own, from the inside!  We feel that there will be mutual benefit from all this and the reaction so far has certainly suggested this!

One other benefit we hope will be realised is that where visas are required, that the British Embassies abroad will see what we offer as very much a cultural programme rather than a study course where the students are in class most of the time.  For the latter, we’d have to be formally accredited as a language school in order to provide invitations.   We’d also have to follow a curriculum we know is not what is wanted.   We do not want to replicate the work of their own teachers who come with them, but we want to do what they cannot do back home and that is use the English Experience as the core of the programme.

Our courses always were very distinctive.  Now they will be even better - and unique in the UK.  The person appointed next month to be our Course/Programme Director will have an exciting time developing these programmes.

Here are some glimpses of activity during the Slovak group’s visit last month – at Woolacombe, at Lynmouth and the replica of Louisa lifeboat, which hauled 25km by 100 men and 20 horses in a dramatic rescue in 1899, at Clovelly for the Christmas lights and preparing the panto 

Timişoara, Romania

There are two reasons for including Timişoara in this newsletter.  Firstly, last month the annual national conference of teachers of English in Romania was held in the city and SOL had a very strong presence there.  5 of our excellent team of teachers abroad were present and two of them, Hannah Halder and Gary van Meter gave presentations in the programme, as also did Simon Parker, our current coordinator in Romania and summer tutor, and myself.  I think this was the first time we had had four presenters on a conference programme, but each one was well received.     Here are Gary and Hannah during their presentations.  
 

The second reason is one I am equally proud of and that was the first 4 day in-service training course run in conjunction with SOL for teachers in their own country.   Simon Parker was the inspiration behind this and with Mark engaged with us in Devon, he asked a very well-known figure in ELT, Andy Hockley, to co-tutor the course.  This was based on the successful “The Reflective Teacher”, run in Barnstaple in July, but without the visits.   Priced at well below anything else it was a high quality course which 21 teachers took part in and the feedback has been 100% positive.     We hope to repeat this course again in other places, and it is not restricted to Romania!   The picture shows one group in action during the course:   
 

Morocco

For a lot of the year, we have the capacity to welcome more groups than are with us at the time.  We suffer greatly from the insistence of Governments or Head teachers that any visit to England has to be relegated to holiday time, even though it may be the best educational experience a young person has in their school career.   Well SOL could not exist if everyone insisted on that.  Fortunately there are some enlightened countries and schools but we’d still like a better spread.

Last year we had our first group from Morocco into Tiverton and also 5 teachers from there came on our summer teacher courses.   There was much interest in what we could offer and so I agreed to visit Morocco for 4 days last month to see the schools and universities interested and to discuss what might be possible.   As a result, we will be welcoming at least four groups this Spring and with potential agreements with university authorities there is the hope for more in the future.

So, we have not forgotten our roots in the eastern half of Europe, but our Moroccan groups will be as welcome as anyone, and especially out of season – plus with more groups coming as a result over the year, this helps secure our long term future.    Here I am talking to a group of students in one of the schools, Yassamine, about the programme they would have in Devon.  

A letter from Mark Andrews on his experiences with SOL 

I never thought in June 2009, when Grenville asked me to teach on a summer course in Barnstaple, that I would find myself in the second half of 2011 teaching on student courses, developing materials for those courses, working on staff development, doing SOL workshops at conferences and drawing out lucky winners of the SOL summer courses in the conference raffles... and recording it all on video!

Well that’s how 2011 is ending for me.  I’ve just finished working on a course with Slovak students from Bratislava with Sam Meeson as my co-tutor, Tim Brownings as the guide and Fred Ovey as support teacher.  The trips and classroom work are being integrated much more than ever before at SOL and key concepts are being recycled throughout the programmes so that the students begin to get a deeper understanding of the values, beliefs and attitudes of people in Britain, as well as a much better chance to use their English.   Charity, the Sea and Remembrance were topics which we consciously worked on last week and recycled throughout the course and I look forward to reading the students’ final reflections on how their picture of Britain has changed as a result of their 10 day immersion and how their motivation for learning English has been developed and their confidence boosted.  Many of their diaries, which I looked through three times and commented on, were fantastic.

I have been involved in this kind of language and culture work ever since 1994 in the Czech Republic when I took a group of Czech teachers to the North East of England where we interviewed students and teachers in local schools, plus Pavel Srníček, who was the Czech goalkeeper for Newcastle United at the time, and local shop workers about their lives, education and life in Britain in general.

I first met Grenville 16 years ago at the Croatian teaches of English conference in Brela in 1995, shortly before I came to work in Hungary on a British Council language and culture project.  We found much common ground from the start.  I was involved in a British Council funded project which resulted in the publishing of a course book for learners of English in Hungary.   Once this book “Zoom In on Britain” came out (it was a shared enterprise between Hungarian teachers, myself and Uwe Pohl, one of my fellow tutors on the first teachers’ course in summer this year), Grenville saw a role for me in helping SOL teachers abroad in their initiation into teaching in Central and Eastern Europe. I used the book in these workshops and in many ways it is a surprise that I didn’t get involved with SOL earlier as so much of my professional work had been developing intercultural skills in young people and structuring fieldwork experience abroad.

I am really looking forward to working closely with the in-country co-ordinators next year in further developing the methodology of the student programmes. I shall also be working with Simon Parker, our Romanian co-ordinator both in Romania and in Britain on our “Reflective Teacher” course.  Luke Meddings, who is well known in ELT circles, will also be working with us on a “Devon Unplugged” course shortly after the London Olympics. These are exciting times to be involved with SOL and I’d like to wish everybody a very happy Christmas and look forward to meeting some of you and your students next year, in a classroom, on a bus, in the pub or in the sea maybe!   
 
Other news

We welcome two groups of business students to Barnstaple in January and to help us in these courses I am delighted that we have re-established the co-operation we had in the 90’s with Torridge Training, another charitable organisation.  Now, under the banner of TTS group and based in the Keystone Centre in Gammaton Road Bideford, we have re-established links and with these business student groups they will be able to see the importance of training within a British context but in the long term we hope that we may be able to access EU funds for special programmes together.

Ziggy has been an important part of our North Devon teaching team over recent years and last February was given a full time post supporting Yvonne.   However the cost of this arrangement was unsustainable and so the trustees have had to terminate the position.  We wish him well and thank him for his considerable contribution to our work in the past.

Already there are more bookings for 2012 than we had for the whole of 2011 and so we look ahead optimistically.  We know all too well the difficulties, both political and financial, faced by many of our readers, but we hope that next year will be a brighter one and whether a host family, a teacher of English or just a friend of SOL, we hope that we stay in touch and our good wishes go to everyone!

Grenville

SOL 2 Bridge Chambers The Strand Barnstaple, England EX31 1HB UK Read the VerticalResponse marketing policy.