Your target language includes the words, phrases, idioms, grammars, and issues used by those in your chosen field and expected of those, you, who would join them. While you may not know this language right now, within weeks of starting an internship or job you will be swimming in it. These exercises are designed to give you a head start.
Where do we find our “target language”? (in conversations)
We start by looking for conversations, because among the first things that we do in business when confronted with something new, difficult, and challenging is talk about it. In the workplace, we find these conversations in working groups, but also, in the corridor, kitchen, elevator, out on the street, in conferences, bars, on the telephone … and on the web nowadays on blogs.
Why not stick with the textbook? (we want to add to it)
We go to the textbook if we want to find the solution to last year’s problems and to the important different principles and practices derived from them, but it often takes months or years for today’s problems to find their way into the textbooks, and by the time today’s problems get into many textbooks they have been cleaned up, stripped of much real-world complexity and uncertainty and confusion.
It may also be that for all practical purposes our “learning the fundamentals” is conceptually flawed: our fields are changing so rapidly, competence in our field is about learning how to adapt to change, and so “learning the fundamentals”, rightly understood, might best be thought of as “learning the fundamentals in a context of change”.
It may also be that if we wait until things appear in the textbooks some vital things are lost, too, such as the ability to view problems as puzzles, to see them unfolding through time, and to learn the skills that one needs to learn to discover emerging opportunities in time to do something about them — as competitive business environments often demand. The skills of reading textbooks (and taking quizzes and tests) are likely far different from those needed to apprehend emerging problems and opportunity, relate them to established principles and practice, and imagine innovative solutions.
We read the newspapers, so why not blogs?
If we want to find today’s problems in the making we go to the blogosphere much as we go to the newspapers. And just like reading the news, we read the blogosphere critically, taking the author and his or her perspective into account, comparing what we hear to what we know, presenting what we hear carefully, provisionally, using report structures (and not as “the facts”), and if we are interested we run around to check other sources …
For example, BP
For example, on the topic of “corporate social responsibility”, it is very important that one learns the normative assumptions (concepts, methods, practices, etc.), which is what one gets when one types “corporate social responsibility” into Google, but when one uses Google Blog Search, adds “bp”, and limits the results to the past month (May 2010), one finds these assumptions tested: one finds wide-ranging discussions from all over the world, because with the current disaster just about everything — government regulation, environmental issues, cost/benefit analyses, etc. — has been thrown into question.
Here is where I love to quote Colin Powell, the former U.S. Secretary of State (and before that, general in the U.S. Army), who said something like: “no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy”: that all these wonderful plans are very nice in peacetime, but the true test is in contact with reality.
Plus, more generally, many of us think that what you want to prepare for are the challenges of the future, which likely do not yet exist. In business in professional life, the chances are very good that the ability to research current issues so you might help solve emerging problems will earn you a high premium.
How Do We Find Current Conversations on the Web?
If you’ve not yet found these conversations, your first tool is most certainly Google Blog Search, but you’ll need a sophisticated method as well: one that begins with any number of field-specific terms but includes whatever peculiar idioms speakers in your target language use when writing on the web.
Simple searches produce simple results
For example, if you look up “corporate social responsibility” using google.com, the first site you will be served is a wikipedia entry, and most of the sites that follow offer definitions and official corporate policies, which of course you’ll want to read and get to know.
How to narrow your search to find relevant conversations
But if you want to know about current problems, you will likely have to choose terms that shift your results considerably to the present and problematic, which you do by adding words associated with current topics, like “bp” for British Petroleum, or when you are shooting in the dark, the languages of informal conversation, such as “joke”.
There are other things you can do.
Start with your textbook, look for its sources.
One of the first things you might do is establish your baseline understanding of your topic by reading the most relevant passages on your topic in the assigned text and finding the cited articles, if any, offered in the footnotes, because the author has done a lot of homework for you. But what he has also likely done is generalize upon the topic, and what you are looking for is what he, and his sources, are working on now: you want to build on the basics and find the current debate.
To find the author’s sources, go to his footnotes, pasting the article title in quotation (so Google will look for exactly those words in that order), and if you are lucky you will find the original source.
You might want to limit the search to .pdf or even .flv files, learn how:
You might also learn how to limit the search to specific file types as you will find explained here:
If you can’t find the original article, try looking for other articles by the same author by searching for the author name (pasted into Google in quotes, so you will be served that proper name).
Keep track of your target language, take detailed notes
As you read the textbook and examine the author’s sources, keep a list of key words and list as well various ways ways of examining the topic to the end of identifying both you and others think is important. You want to follow your nose and interests, but you need the cooperation of others, and specifically, you need to find those who have identified relevant issues and explored them so you can learn from them and maybe eventually contribute to the conversation.
Next, look for the current debate
The next step is to find CURRENT issues, discussions over the past six months, because your goal is to prepare for the future, and that means finding emerging issues which, by definition, are those being discussed now and recently.
When you navigate to Google Blog Search, click the Advanced Blog Search link and narrow the search in time by clicking the radio button for “… posts written between …” and choosing a reasonable time frame, such as the last 3-6 months.
And even better, compare your work to other case studies.
Something else you might do is begin with existing case studies and build your own after having reviewed, even if briefly, the others. In Google, type “companyname case study”, report on what you find, and conclude by evaluating one or two of the relevant advantages of the others, what you have learned from them, and finally, how you might see things differently. Observe how they have expressed themselves, including what issues and terms and analytical frameworks they have used and learn how to converse with them and see yourself in a conversation with what has come before you. Your readers will appreciate the overview, understand from it where you are starting from, and so be prepared to appreciate your unique insight. This is, ultimately, what we mean by learning your “target language”: that you are part of a larger professional conversation.
Learning Current Language More Generally
For learning current language use more generally, you will do well to learn how to use a Learner’s Dictionary, which is probably completely different from the dictionaries you have been using until now, which are often based not on current use, but ideas going back over a long time.
My favorite illustration of this difference is to note how, when you say “I do” in a cafe, someone will add sugar to your coffee, but when you say “I do” when standing in the front of a church with your girlfriend beside you, you will end up getting married! When viewed and used in this way, language is not just ideas, but action as well.
For example, compare the definition of the word “revision” in LEO and in the the Collins Cobuild English Learner’s Dictionary. You will see that while Leo is very good at preserving the the idea of a word, such ideas are not ordered carefully and appear completely out of context, so you don’t learn where, when, and how you might actually use a term. In contrast, the Collins Cobuild explains the meaning in a systematic way and based on the most common, current uses for its audience of learners.
Let’s look at this more closely. The definition of “revision” in the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary starts off with a very general idea of change and only in the third definition does it refer to concrete, real-world examples. But in the Collins Cobuild definition above you are invited to act in the real world and do so boldly from the very start: “to make changes in order to improve it or make it more modern … read things again and make notes …”
Learning Vocabulary in Context
I’ve also observed that students spending a lot of time drawing up lists often have a hard time remembering what they’ve learned: those with good memorizations skills appear to be wizards, but not everyone has such skills. In one class, we tried to draw up lists of the vocabulary we learned in the previous week and came up with very little.
We found this difficult to do, because trying to remember vocabulary taken out of context is like fishing in the dark: it can be done, but without being able to see the landscape we don’t really know where we are and what is going on.
But when these students went back to the blog posts they had written, they were quickly reminded of what they had learned, because they returned to a meaningful context, their own writing, and from there they could remember one phrase after another.
In this class, we discussed how there is a special word for understanding how a term relates to others in a meaningful way: “collocation”. Perhaps more interesting for us, was our coming up with three theories on why it is easier to remember things we have written, including:
— The Body Theory. When we write, our thoughts go through our eyes, brains, back, arms, hand, and pen, paper, and back into the eyes, we think, and so we remember what we’ve done.
— The Context Theory. When we use a word in context, all we need is to start thinking of the context, and then we remember other pieces of the puzzle — other words, phrases, ideas — and a whole family of meanings begins to pour out.
— The Use Theory. When we do not put things off until later, but use the words now, we learn (now). Very simple, very powerful realization this one.
Learning by Listening
So then we listened to the IBM marketing film, “Blogging Means Business”, and we found all sorts of memorable phrases, like “blogging means business,” “collaborate on problem-solving,” and “blogging to build stronger relationships”. These are memorable because they are carefully chosen, they sound like marketing language because they are, but we also found them to be useful.
We compared these power words with the often far less clear phrases that the speakers often used. For example, one VP said thing like he was “engaged in a blogging initiative,” which was difficult to understand, and we discussed how he suddenly became much clearer when he said, “I lead a team.” We discussed how, when speaking, we often use such unclear terms until we sharpen our thoughts and that the thing to do is skim along until things become clearer, for example, when people describe not abstractions, but things they actually do, like “I lead a team”: short, clear, and to the point.
Similarly, in the video, we noticed how the second VB also talked abstract and so not very clearly until she described what she actually does, “I’m also responsible for managing IBM‘s blogging system,” which also sounded much better because it described real actions that she probably really does and in a very realistic, direct, straight-forward way.
Learning by Analyzing Texts
We then went back to finding interesting blog posts and reporting on them. This time I suggested that we get to know Alltop as it presents hundreds of interesting blogs organized by topic and find blog posts of personal interest, which we did.
As everyone has laptops and enjoys working with them, we then developed a workflow whereby we copied our chosen blog post into Word, broke it apart into sections with line spaces in between, and outlined and summarized passages in red.
Learning by Rephrasing Things in our Own Terms
Then we briefly discussed what we found, and the interesting thing was that, when left to our own devices, some of us would explain what we were doing by listing the main points … back we were again to the making of difficult-to-understand lists.
But when I asked, “why is this important?” students lifted their eyes off of their note — a VERY important thing to do! — and put what they had read in their own terms, which we found to be much, much clearer.
Try this yourselves: I think you will find here a VERY important lesson. I think many of you will find that you have gotten good at making lists, but for some reason have not had that much practice, at least in the classroom, putting your learning into your own — more clear, more memorable — terms. Is this really true?
There is a profound difference between working from the text and discussing things with others. When we work from the text, we tend to follow the text’s ideas. But when we discussing what we are doing with others, I argued, we enter into a conversation and where the frame of reference is larger, more interactive, and easier to understand.
This was something of a revelation, and I explained it by talking about the difference between working from the text and discussing things with others. When we work from the text, we tend to follow the text’s ideas. But when we discussing what we are doing with others, I argued, we enter into a conversation and where the frame of reference is larger, more interactive, and easier to understand. What is going on here? Well, I think it has to do with the humanizing dimensions of having a living, breathing, interactive audience.
We noticed this in the speaking of the VP’s from IBM, too: how, when they first described what they do, they spoke in abstractions that were difficult to understanding, something about “furthering leading innovative leading edge companies”, but once they got going, the talked about managing projects and people in very concrete terms.
Thus, we came up with a very powerful, transformative method: by sitting down and explaining things in plain English to someone else before you sit down to write, you set up a conversation: the trick is, to then write up what you said: to leave your notes behind for a moment, which you translate things into everyday language and in your own “voice”.
So, that’s it: when we blog, we write like we talk. To do that, talk before you write: explain what you are doing to somebody — anybody — letting them help you by asking questions, helping you break out of abstract mode and enter into conversational mode. Then write up what you discussed, person to person, in terms that anyone can understand.
Searching, Target Language, and Professional Community
Your target language includes the words, phrases, idioms, grammars, and issues used by those in your chosen field and expected of those, you, who would join them. While you may not know this language right now, within weeks of starting an internship or job you will be swimming in it. These exercises are designed to give you a head start.
Where do we find our “target language”? (in conversations)
We start by looking for conversations, because among the first things that we do in business when confronted with something new, difficult, and challenging is talk about it. In the workplace, we find these conversations in working groups, but also, in the corridor, kitchen, elevator, out on the street, in conferences, bars, on the telephone … and on the web nowadays on blogs.
Why not stick with the textbook? (we want to add to it)
We go to the textbook if we want to find the solution to last year’s problems and to the important different principles and practices derived from them, but it often takes months or years for today’s problems to find their way into the textbooks, and by the time today’s problems get into many textbooks they have been cleaned up, stripped of much real-world complexity and uncertainty and confusion.
It may also be that for all practical purposes our “learning the fundamentals” is conceptually flawed: our fields are changing so rapidly, competence in our field is about learning how to adapt to change, and so “learning the fundamentals”, rightly understood, might best be thought of as “learning the fundamentals in a context of change”.
It may also be that if we wait until things appear in the textbooks some vital things are lost, too, such as the ability to view problems as puzzles, to see them unfolding through time, and to learn the skills that one needs to learn to discover emerging opportunities in time to do something about them — as competitive business environments often demand. The skills of reading textbooks (and taking quizzes and tests) are likely far different from those needed to apprehend emerging problems and opportunity, relate them to established principles and practice, and imagine innovative solutions.
We read the newspapers, so why not blogs?
If we want to find today’s problems in the making we go to the blogosphere much as we go to the newspapers. And just like reading the news, we read the blogosphere critically, taking the author and his or her perspective into account, comparing what we hear to what we know, presenting what we hear carefully, provisionally, using report structures (and not as “the facts”), and if we are interested we run around to check other sources …
For example, BP
For example, on the topic of “corporate social responsibility”, it is very important that one learns the normative assumptions (concepts, methods, practices, etc.), which is what one gets when one types “corporate social responsibility” into Google, but when one uses Google Blog Search, adds “bp”, and limits the results to the past month (May 2010), one finds these assumptions tested: one finds wide-ranging discussions from all over the world, because with the current disaster just about everything — government regulation, environmental issues, cost/benefit analyses, etc. — has been thrown into question.
Here is where I love to quote Colin Powell, the former U.S. Secretary of State (and before that, general in the U.S. Army), who said something like: “no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy”: that all these wonderful plans are very nice in peacetime, but the true test is in contact with reality.
Plus, more generally, many of us think that what you want to prepare for are the challenges of the future, which likely do not yet exist. In business in professional life, the chances are very good that the ability to research current issues so you might help solve emerging problems will earn you a high premium.
How Do We Find Current Conversations on the Web?
If you’ve not yet found these conversations, your first tool is most certainly Google Blog Search, but you’ll need a sophisticated method as well: one that begins with any number of field-specific terms but includes whatever peculiar idioms speakers in your target language use when writing on the web.
Simple searches produce simple results
For example, if you look up “corporate social responsibility” using google.com, the first site you will be served is a wikipedia entry, and most of the sites that follow offer definitions and official corporate policies, which of course you’ll want to read and get to know.
How to narrow your search to find relevant conversations
But if you want to know about current problems, you will likely have to choose terms that shift your results considerably to the present and problematic, which you do by adding words associated with current topics, like “bp” for British Petroleum, or when you are shooting in the dark, the languages of informal conversation, such as “joke”.
There are other things you can do.
Start with your textbook, look for its sources.
One of the first things you might do is establish your baseline understanding of your topic by reading the most relevant passages on your topic in the assigned text and finding the cited articles, if any, offered in the footnotes, because the author has done a lot of homework for you. But what he has also likely done is generalize upon the topic, and what you are looking for is what he, and his sources, are working on now: you want to build on the basics and find the current debate.
To find the author’s sources, go to his footnotes, pasting the article title in quotation (so Google will look for exactly those words in that order), and if you are lucky you will find the original source.
You might want to limit the search to .pdf or even .flv files, learn how:
You might also learn how to limit the search to specific file types as you will find explained here:
If you can’t find the original article, try looking for other articles by the same author by searching for the author name (pasted into Google in quotes, so you will be served that proper name).
Keep track of your target language, take detailed notes
As you read the textbook and examine the author’s sources, keep a list of key words and list as well various ways ways of examining the topic to the end of identifying both you and others think is important. You want to follow your nose and interests, but you need the cooperation of others, and specifically, you need to find those who have identified relevant issues and explored them so you can learn from them and maybe eventually contribute to the conversation.
Next, look for the current debate
The next step is to find CURRENT issues, discussions over the past six months, because your goal is to prepare for the future, and that means finding emerging issues which, by definition, are those being discussed now and recently.
When you navigate to Google Blog Search, click the Advanced Blog Search link and narrow the search in time by clicking the radio button for “… posts written between …” and choosing a reasonable time frame, such as the last 3-6 months.
And even better, compare your work to other case studies.
Something else you might do is begin with existing case studies and build your own after having reviewed, even if briefly, the others. In Google, type “companyname case study”, report on what you find, and conclude by evaluating one or two of the relevant advantages of the others, what you have learned from them, and finally, how you might see things differently. Observe how they have expressed themselves, including what issues and terms and analytical frameworks they have used and learn how to converse with them and see yourself in a conversation with what has come before you. Your readers will appreciate the overview, understand from it where you are starting from, and so be prepared to appreciate your unique insight. This is, ultimately, what we mean by learning your “target language”: that you are part of a larger professional conversation.
Learning Current Language More Generally
For learning current language use more generally, you will do well to learn how to use a Learner’s Dictionary, which is probably completely different from the dictionaries you have been using until now, which are often based not on current use, but ideas going back over a long time.
My favorite illustration of this difference is to note how, when you say “I do” in a cafe, someone will add sugar to your coffee, but when you say “I do” when standing in the front of a church with your girlfriend beside you, you will end up getting married! When viewed and used in this way, language is not just ideas, but action as well.
For example, compare the definition of the word “revision” in LEO and in the the Collins Cobuild English Learner’s Dictionary. You will see that while Leo is very good at preserving the the idea of a word, such ideas are not ordered carefully and appear completely out of context, so you don’t learn where, when, and how you might actually use a term. In contrast, the Collins Cobuild explains the meaning in a systematic way and based on the most common, current uses for its audience of learners.
Let’s look at this more closely. The definition of “revision” in the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary starts off with a very general idea of change and only in the third definition does it refer to concrete, real-world examples. But in the Collins Cobuild definition above you are invited to act in the real world and do so boldly from the very start: “to make changes in order to improve it or make it more modern … read things again and make notes …”
Learning Vocabulary in Context
I’ve also observed that students spending a lot of time drawing up lists often have a hard time remembering what they’ve learned: those with good memorizations skills appear to be wizards, but not everyone has such skills. In one class, we tried to draw up lists of the vocabulary we learned in the previous week and came up with very little.
We found this difficult to do, because trying to remember vocabulary taken out of context is like fishing in the dark: it can be done, but without being able to see the landscape we don’t really know where we are and what is going on.
But when these students went back to the blog posts they had written, they were quickly reminded of what they had learned, because they returned to a meaningful context, their own writing, and from there they could remember one phrase after another.
In this class, we discussed how there is a special word for understanding how a term relates to others in a meaningful way: “collocation”. Perhaps more interesting for us, was our coming up with three theories on why it is easier to remember things we have written, including:
— The Body Theory. When we write, our thoughts go through our eyes, brains, back, arms, hand, and pen, paper, and back into the eyes, we think, and so we remember what we’ve done.
— The Context Theory. When we use a word in context, all we need is to start thinking of the context, and then we remember other pieces of the puzzle — other words, phrases, ideas — and a whole family of meanings begins to pour out.
— The Use Theory. When we do not put things off until later, but use the words now, we learn (now). Very simple, very powerful realization this one.
Learning by Listening
So then we listened to the IBM marketing film, “Blogging Means Business”, and we found all sorts of memorable phrases, like “blogging means business,” “collaborate on problem-solving,” and “blogging to build stronger relationships”. These are memorable because they are carefully chosen, they sound like marketing language because they are, but we also found them to be useful.
We compared these power words with the often far less clear phrases that the speakers often used. For example, one VP said thing like he was “engaged in a blogging initiative,” which was difficult to understand, and we discussed how he suddenly became much clearer when he said, “I lead a team.” We discussed how, when speaking, we often use such unclear terms until we sharpen our thoughts and that the thing to do is skim along until things become clearer, for example, when people describe not abstractions, but things they actually do, like “I lead a team”: short, clear, and to the point.
Similarly, in the video, we noticed how the second VB also talked abstract and so not very clearly until she described what she actually does, “I’m also responsible for managing IBM‘s blogging system,” which also sounded much better because it described real actions that she probably really does and in a very realistic, direct, straight-forward way.
Learning by Analyzing Texts
We then went back to finding interesting blog posts and reporting on them. This time I suggested that we get to know Alltop as it presents hundreds of interesting blogs organized by topic and find blog posts of personal interest, which we did.
As everyone has laptops and enjoys working with them, we then developed a workflow whereby we copied our chosen blog post into Word, broke it apart into sections with line spaces in between, and outlined and summarized passages in red.
Learning by Rephrasing Things in our Own Terms
Then we briefly discussed what we found, and the interesting thing was that, when left to our own devices, some of us would explain what we were doing by listing the main points … back we were again to the making of difficult-to-understand lists.
But when I asked, “why is this important?” students lifted their eyes off of their note — a VERY important thing to do! — and put what they had read in their own terms, which we found to be much, much clearer.
Try this yourselves: I think you will find here a VERY important lesson. I think many of you will find that you have gotten good at making lists, but for some reason have not had that much practice, at least in the classroom, putting your learning into your own — more clear, more memorable — terms. Is this really true?
There is a profound difference between working from the text and discussing things with others. When we work from the text, we tend to follow the text’s ideas. But when we discussing what we are doing with others, I argued, we enter into a conversation and where the frame of reference is larger, more interactive, and easier to understand.
This was something of a revelation, and I explained it by talking about the difference between working from the text and discussing things with others. When we work from the text, we tend to follow the text’s ideas. But when we discussing what we are doing with others, I argued, we enter into a conversation and where the frame of reference is larger, more interactive, and easier to understand. What is going on here? Well, I think it has to do with the humanizing dimensions of having a living, breathing, interactive audience.
We noticed this in the speaking of the VP’s from IBM, too: how, when they first described what they do, they spoke in abstractions that were difficult to understanding, something about “furthering leading innovative leading edge companies”, but once they got going, the talked about managing projects and people in very concrete terms.
Thus, we came up with a very powerful, transformative method: by sitting down and explaining things in plain English to someone else before you sit down to write, you set up a conversation: the trick is, to then write up what you said: to leave your notes behind for a moment, which you translate things into everyday language and in your own “voice”.
So, that’s it: when we blog, we write like we talk. To do that, talk before you write: explain what you are doing to somebody — anybody — letting them help you by asking questions, helping you break out of abstract mode and enter into conversational mode. Then write up what you discussed, person to person, in terms that anyone can understand.