Articles

Georgetown, Guyana – a lost city?

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A letter published in the Stabroek News, Guyana,
on November 3rd, 2013, headed:

Forty years on, most of the splendour of the Garden City has gone

31st October, 2013
Dear Editor,

I have just been on my first visit to Guyana in 40 years. From 1968 to 1969, I was a VSO working for Broadcasts to Schools in Georgetown, and I came back in January 1970 to marry Wordsworth McAndrew and teach at St Joseph’s High School.  Our daughter Shiri was born in 1972; I completed my Diploma in Education at UG the following summer, and only returned to England after our divorce in September 1973.

Since then, all through my exile, I have held fond memories of the beautiful Garden City that was Georgetown. I loved the elegant white wooden houses with their jalousies and delicate fretwork, in gardens overflowing with bougainvillea, hibiscus and oleander.  I loved the wide avenues lined with sweeping flamboyant trees and canals sparkling in the sun.  I loved the bridges over trenches to little wooden cottages on stilts, in yards brimming with palm trees and callaloo.  Continue reading →

The Woman Upstairs

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Immediately above us lived a young couple called Sandra and Nige.  When they first moved in, still unmarried, I wondered how they could possibly be contemplating cementing a relationship which, judging from the frequency and volume of their arguments  (confined mainly to the small hours of the morning and the exercise of a certain adjective beginning with F) was far from idyllic.   But marry they did, and their arguments continued, thus sanctified, though admittedly with a temporary lessening of ferocity. Continue reading →

The Gattegno Effect – my contribution

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I was delighted to be asked to contribute an article to
“The Gattegno Effect: 100 Voices on One of History’s Greatest Educators”,
which was published by Educational Solutions in 2011.

Here is the article:
gattegno-tribute-rosie-mcandrew

For those unfamiliar with Gattegno’s Silent Way of Teaching Languages,
I’ll add a couple of details here to clarify references in the article itself.

(By the way, please note that the data shown in the diagrams below 
will be easier to view on a desktop than on a small screen…)

  • The Rods – these are a set of Cuisenaire rods,
    initially designed for teaching Maths,
    which Gattegno adapted as tool to represent words, phrases, ideas,
    and elements of grammar, syntax or pronunciation.

screenshot-rods-2017-03-01-11-30-29

A series of colour charts:  Continue reading →

Politeness Cultures – PowerPoint

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Here is the PowerPoint presentation I refer to in my article
“Becoming Aware of Cultural Differences”. 
It was designed for Teacher-Training purposes.

As I explain in the introduction to that article, in this context the terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ are not in any sense intended to convey approval or disapproval.  They simply refer to opposing ends of a continuum of accepted behaviour in a particular cultural context.

‘Positive’ could loosely be equated with directness, and ‘negative’ with indirectness.  In fact, I wish such terms had been the ones linguists had coined for discussion of these culturally sensitive matters!

(For anyone not familiar with PowerPoint, if you are using a PC, once the presentation has opened, click once each time you want the next element or slide to appear.  To return to the previous slide, simply press ‘P’, or use the back arrow.
On a mobile device, the presentation may simply appear as a series of individual slides, and you can scroll down from one to the next…)

When giving the presentation to a live audience, I would stop at intervals to invite the participants to discuss the content in pairs or small groups, and elicit their responses before moving on.

politeness-cultures-by-rosie-mcandrew

Becoming Aware of Cultural Differences

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I was giving a PowerPoint presentation on ‘Positive and Negative Politeness Cultures ‘
at a conference where Mario Rinvolucri was one of the participants.   
Following on from the seminar, he asked me to contribute
an article for ‘Humanising Language Teaching’
on how I became interested in cultural differences, and here it is…

becoming-aware-of-cultural-differences

By the way, in this context the terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ are not in any sense intended to convey approval or disapproval.  They simply refer to opposing ends of a continuum of accepted behaviour in a particular cultural context.

‘Positive’ could loosely be equated with directness, and ‘negative’ with indirectness.  In fact, I wish such terms had been the ones linguists had coined for discussion of these culturally sensitive matters!