I am not sure how many of you come from a language teaching background. But if there is an area where terms, sometimes several meaning the same thing, abound that is language teaching. I started off as behaviourist teacher, which could be called a learning perspective teacher, or a "listen and repeat" teacher. Every school will market their methodology as unique and name it as "Someone's Method" although they will basically use the same methodology with tweaks here and there.
>From my experience as a teacher in a market such as the Latin-American (big, big, big and profitable), it would be a bit of a waste of time trying to imprint a definition of the field and educate decision-makers about the specifics of language learning or a language teaching methodology and how and what makes it similar or different from this and that method. The definition is irrelevant. Giving people a clear definition of what a language teaching method was wouldn't make any difference either. People are filling up schools because of a perceived need of learning English to get better jobs and make more money, ok some are doing it for the cultural and educational prospects and others are doing it for love (damn gringos stealing our women :) ), but my point is that from a user perspective, the motivators are more important than the methods and definition of these methods, being that most are blind with (or focused towards) the prospect of the positive results, which are the motivators in first place. If a school says that they do not teach a language but a "way of being" which includes language, culture and street smarts and another says that they "teach the language to work around your personality just like your native language" and both schools throw their marketing and pedagogical structure to make themselves known for these, that is what it is: marketing and definitely pedagogical innovation but which amount of students really understand this at first? After all, for them, it still is a language course whether it is being taught by Noam Chomsky or yours truly. They will be checking if there is a DVD player in each room, a computer lab, a good library, extra-curricular language clubs, the teachers are all native speakers or lived abroad for a long time and other things that they perceive (mistakenly perhaps since very few do use the libraries and spend time in the computer labs and extra-curricular language clubs) as the facilitators of their expected outcome. Talking about languages, I believe if we could split a bit of the time dedicated for finding a definition for UCD to analyse things such as linguistic accessibility and the impact on usability and thinking of ways of researching taxonomies for card sorting activities with users giving the terms to be sorted from the start that would be equally beneficial. Cheers, Luis "I don't care if user centered design isn't the exact right phrase/term. I just don't think it's worth the effort to put a different label on the same thing and reeducate people about it." ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
