English Effort Points

What do you all think of the English Effort Points? I was trying to come up with a way to get you discussing our application exercises in English. I know you are all quite capable of discussing in English!! I have faith in you, so have a little faith in yourselves! I am not looking for perfect English, I am looking for good communication. Native speakers do it all the time without worrying about how many grammatical errors they make--and I will assure you that native speakers make grammatical mistakes too (just ask every American president from the beginning of time!)

Giving your team members a few points for the effort they made to use English was my idea. But at 10 points to disperse among the other team members, most of you were just blindly giving everyone 2 points each. So, last week I asked you to disperse 11 points. It seemed to help you start thinking a little more seriously about who made more effort. Remember, effort does not necessarily mean the person who speaks the best English-- even the worst speaker can be rewarded the most points. In fact, I hope that those who are less proficient will put in more effort and earn a lot of points!

I'm off to the copy machine to print out tomorrow's English Effort Point forms.

See you tomorrow!

Latest challenge: to produce handouts without any typographical errors in them! (you guys are just too sharp! You keep catching all of my mistakes!)