Partnership formed to support growth of international education

Two major education companies, Pearson plc and The CollegeBound Network (CBN), announced last week that they had formed a partnership to support the growth of international education.

Under the partnership, CBN’s new international web portal, www.MyGlobalEducation.com, and Pearson’s new English language test, PTE Academic, will provide enhanced options for nonnative English speakers who plan on applying to higher education institutions.

CBN consists of 13 content-rich websites designed to connect learners with various educational opportunities, from boarding schools and career-focused learning, to traditional colleges and universities, online degrees, and more. Its latest launch, MyGlobalEducation.com, expands the company’s reach to international students seeking educational opportunities abroad.

“To help students navigate the application process to academic institutions that require proof of English proficiency, MyGlobalEducation.com is a perfect fit with PTE Academic,” Bill Colvin, director of international recruitment at The CollegeBound Network, said. “Pearson helps strengthen our depth and breadth of student services, and PTE Academic adds a new level of innovation to English language testing that brings great benefits to both schools and students.”

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Studying in cyberspace more flexible and collaborative, says UK education expert

By Tom Mendelsohn, The Independent.co.uk

The future is incontestably digital: the Internet is changing the way we do all sorts of things, from shopping to working to running our social lives. Education, though, has so far largely remained anchored in the old world – but even this is beginning to change.

Universities are fast becoming receptive to the new horizons and opportunities the Internet offers. Of course, distance learning is an established concept, but modern online learning is a far cry from old-style correspondence courses.

Flexibility and collaboration are the key advantages to the new style of online learning, according to Alan Southern, the director of postgraduate studies at the University of Liverpool’s management school. Classes are small and based around web forums. Students are given some reading or research, and can interact with their instructors and peers in evolving discussion threads. One-to-one access to tutors is readily available, and the beauty of the system means that classes do not have to happen in real time.

Discussions will be open for days at a time, meaning that students can ask their questions when their time zones and work schedules allow. It’s all done on a low-tech platform for people with slower internet connections.

“We are playing to the strengths of the technology – the real-time aspect doesn’t add anything online,” says Southern. “In this format, a student can go away and do some more reading or have a harder think about the subject before coming back and rejoining the discussion.

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English not enough for top EU foreign policy chief

BRUSSELS (AP)—Lady Catherine Ashton, under fire for being unqualified for her job as Europe’s foreign minister, has upset the French with her flawed command of what was once the language of international diplomacy. Her diplomatic response: I will learn better French.

Over the past two decades English has replaced French as the language most used in the halls of European Union institutions. So when Ashton was made head of EU foreign policy in November and predominantly used her native English, it hurt French pride. When she spoke French, it hurt their ears.

“She speaks French,” said Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner in response to a question about Ashton’s language skills. Then he added: “It is not a marvel.”

French Europe minister Pierre Lellouche invited Ashton during a friendly talk several weeks ago to the Millefeuille Provence language school close to the sun-splashed city of Avignon. He even followed it up with a more formal invitation. He also offered the opportunity to other top EU officials like European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek.

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Media need multiple platforms, revenue streams to thrive

NEW YORK (Agence France-Presse)—Multiple platforms and revenue streams are going to be key for media industry players hoping to survive and thrive in the fast-changing digital landscape, top media executives said here recently.

With advertising revenue eroding and free content abundant, media companies are going to need to adapt their strategies to the new environment ushered in by the Internet, they said at the Bloomberg BusinessWeek 2010 Media Summit.

“The brand has to transcend all of the different platforms,” said Renee Plato, the vice president of digital video distribution at Walt Disney Co., whose properties include the ABC television network and sports giant ESPN.

“Our main goal is to reach the fans wherever they are on the best available screen,” Plato said, whether that be on mobile screens, computer screens or TV screens.

“Perhaps there’s a way that consumers are paying for that access, that convenience, and perhaps not,” she said.

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TOEIC test chosen for English assessment of Shanghai World Expo volunteers

PRINCETON, NJ (Marketwire)—This May, nearly 70 million people will attend the World Expo in Shanghai, China, an event that requires thousands of English-speaking volunteers to provide information to visitors. Having received an overwhelming 600,000 applications for the available positions, World Expo organizers chose the TOEIC Test by Educational Testing Service (ETS) as a tool to assess the English-language proficiency of volunteer applicants.

In a January interview with CHO, Tao Shenxian, Vice Director of the Shanghai World Expo Coordination Bureau Training Centre, commented on the process of screening such a large pool of applicants: “The first step was to decide on an appropriate language proficiency assessment tool, and we soon realized that the ETS TOEIC method would well and truly satisfy the requirements of the Expo for the assessment of vocational language capabilities.”

After reviewing several language assessment tools from a number of worldwide institutions, World Expo organizers chose the TOEIC test because it met all of their needs. These included broad accessibility, wide acceptance and high standards of quality and fairness.

“We are excited to work with the Shanghai World Expo to provide a high-quality assessment that will assist in the screening of this year's volunteers," said Enghan Tan, China Country Manager for ETS Global.

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Boys read as much as girls but prefer the simpler books, survey shows

First the good news: boys are reading as much as girls. Now the bad: the books they choose are far less challenging and easier to comprehend than those selected by girls, and this gets worse as they grow older.

The findings of a major study of 100,000 children's reading habits coincide with national curriculum test results which show that – at all ages – girls score more highly on reading tests. “Boys are clearly reading nearly as much as girls, a finding that may surprise some onlookers,” said Professor Keith Topping, of the University of Dundee’s school of education, who headed the study. “But boys are tending to read easier books than girls. The general picture was of girls reading books of a consistently more difficult level than boys in the same year.”

The gap in the standard of their reading habits becomes most marked between the ages of 13 and 16, the report says. The favourite girl’s book in this age group is Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer, the first in the vampire romance series that has sold 85 million copies worldwide. This was ranked far more difficult to read than the boys’ favourite, The Dark Never Hides, from the British novelist Peter Lancett's Dark Man series, illustrated fantasy novels aimed at reluctant teens and young adults struggling to read.

The study notes that both sexes tend to choose books that are easier to read once they reach the age of 11 and transfer to secondary school. Compared with a similar study two years ago, the Harry Potter author JK Rowling has tumbled down the top 10 most popular children’s authors, from second to ninth place.

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Breaking down language barriers on the web

The Internet is rapidly expanding around the world, with thousands of non-English web pages being added daily.

The number of non-English websites is expected to grow as the web opens up to more people across the world and domain names expand to include native character sets.

In late 2009, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved the creation of internet addresses containing non-Latin characters.

The web provides billions of people with information, across a range of different languages. According to Internet World Stats (http://www.internetworldstats.com) in September 2009, the total number of English internet users made up only 27.6 percent of internet users around the world. Chinese language users followed closely behind with 22.1 percent.

Internet users speaking Spanish, Japanese, French, Portuguese, German, Arabic, Russian and Korean were in the top ten most used languages on the web.

Google introduced a new beta version of their Chrome web browser for Windows users on March 1 hoping to bridge the widening internet language gap and “make the world’s information universally accessible in an easy, frictionless way.”

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Scholar analyzes South Asia English

GIESSEN, Germany—English as spoken in South Asia is evolving, but there is no sign it is turning into a separate dialect that English speakers from other continents might not understand, according to Joybrato Mukherjee, a top German linguistics scholar.

The University of Giessen professor uses computer analysis, based on one-million-word samples of Indian and five other South Asian varieties of English, to discover their distinctive words as well as slight regional differences in grammar.

English spread around the globe with the British Empire. Linguists say there is no authoritative standard English. All the spinoffs exist side by side and are “right” for the people who speak them. English in India functions a little differently from English in England. Take the word, “prepone,” the opposite of postpone, which most other English speakers have never heard of.

“In British English you would have to say ‘bring forward in time’,” explained Mukherjee, who is of Indian origin.

“It shows Indian English speakers approach this very analytically. They use the prefix ‘pre’ and combine it with ‘pone.’ Actually, the question should be why there isn't any word 'prepone' in British English. It would be much easier,” he said. “Native languages are much more historically conditioned, whereas it's generally a tendency among post-colonial varieties that speakers handle their second language much more rationally.

“There are, for example, in Indian English lots and lots of words that end in -ee, like rewardee – the one who gets a reward – which is uncommon in British English, but very common in Indian English.”

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Colleges test Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader as study tool

Even before Apple announced the iPad, higher-education technologists predicted that e-book readers were on the brink of becoming a common accessory among college students; last fall, two-thirds of campus CIOs said they believed e-readers would become an "important platform for instructional resources" within five years, according to the Campus Computing Project.

Now, as several major universities finish analyzing data from pilot programs involving the latest version of the Amazon Kindle, officials are learning more about what students want out of their e-reader tablets. Generally, the colleges found that students missed some of the old-fashioned note-taking tools they enjoyed before. But they also noted that the shift had some key environmental benefits. Further, a minority of students embraced the Kindle fairly quickly as highly desirable for curricular use.

If one clear consensus emerged from the studies that have been finalized at Princeton University, Case Western Reserve University and the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, it is this: For students who were given the Kindle DX and tried to use it for coursework, the inability to easily highlight text was the biggest lowlight of the experience.

"Because it was difficult to take notes on the Kindle, because PDF documents could not be annotated or highlighted at all, and because it was hard to look at more than one document at once, the Kindle was occasionally a tool that was counter-productive to scholarship," Princeton researchers wrote in a summary of their study, released Monday.

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