Talk Time

This manual is based on the concept that group based conversational opportunity for newly arrived refugees using volunteer facilitators could be replicated. Talk Time programs flourish in different settings. Most commonly, a volunteer ESL tutor program decides to add a Talk Time component to its existing services. However, sometimes the need to start a Talk Time program emerges from another type of organization or the community. For example, some classroom based adult education programs have decided to begin a Talk Time with volunteers on campus as a supplement for the ESL classes.

"Each lesson begins with pattern practice, and culminates in free speaking practice, The grammar-based syllabus and thematically related vocabulary are recycled throughout to build confidence, Vocabulary organized around related lexical areas helps language acquisition, Listening and grammar presented in manageable chunks allows for plenty of speaking time - about 80% of the activities involve speaking, Conversations combine the vocabulary and grammar point of the lesson, allowing students to use language in a natural context, Check your English, a review page for each unit, lets students check their progress." -- product description.

Preface In the past three decades, businesses have made staggering investments in technology to increase their productivity and efficiency. The technological infrastructure of these companies has become increasingly sophisticated and complex. Most companies today are extremely dependent on their technological infrastructure. Operating without it is like trying to run a business without a telephone or electricity. Businesses depend on their technology at least as much as, perhaps more than, any other utility. However, unlike the telephone and electric industries, technology has not had the benefit of 100 + years to mature under the control of a handful of companies. Thousands of companies contribute to technology, each doing whatever they think will sell the best. Extreme and rapid innovation is the rule, not the exception. Change is the rule, not the exception. The resulting complexity has posed a new challenge for companies: how to realize the potential and anticipated benefits of the investments in an environment of constant change. Businesses are so reliant on technology that they need it to operate as reliably, consistently, and universally as the telephone and electricity. We are a long way from achieving that level of service. Businesses face rising costs because of constant failures that result in lost productivity. It is very difficult and expensive to find the resources with the expertise to manage and repair their infrastructures. It is extremely difficult and expensive to keep those resources trained to manage a constantly evolving environment. But guess what. There is no choice but to invest in technology, because it has to be done. Business cannot stop investing in technology or they will be crushed by the competition. So what have they done? They have standardized to limit the diversity, the expertise required, and the problems associated with diversity. They have striven to make the infrastructure as reliable as the telephone and to keep employees productive. And they have created a team that has the skills, the facilities, and the charter to fix existing problems and reduce future problems. That team is the service center, and this book shares how the best of those teams are doing just that. Technology impacts more than just a business's internal operations. What about the company's customers? They often need support, as well. More companies are realizing the value of providing quality service to its customers. Some studies have indicated that keeping a customer costs one-tenth the price of getting a new one, while the return business from satisfied customers count for substantially more than one-tenth of a company's revenue. It makes good economic sense to spend money on keeping existing clients satisfied. For many companies, that means providing customers with quality support for the products and services they purchase. So who in the company provides that service? You guessed it—the service center. What is a service center? It is an organization whose charter and mission are to provide support services to internal or external customers, or to both. It is a concentration of expertise, processes, and tools dedicated to taking customers' requests and fulfilling them in a timely and cost-effective manner, leaving the customer delighted with the experience. A service center has a defined range of service offerings, from fixing problems to providing value-added services, and everything in between. This book is intended to help a company set up that service center and deliver those services cost effectively. The book focuses on structuring the organization and building the processes to move service requests efficiently and effectively through the organization to deliver quality service to the customer. It discusses the pitfalls that afflict many service centers and offers techniques and solutions to avoid those pitfalls. The book discusses the tools available to help a service center manage its business and deliver high quality cost-effective services to customers. The traditional help desk is still around, but many have evolved into service centers. As more businesses are faced with increasing technology costsand increasing pressure to be productive and efficient internally—while delighting external customers—many more help desks will be forced to evolve. For a well-run help desk, the evolutionis natural and not overly difficult. Most help desks were originally designed to provide one type of service, technical support. Help desks traditionally helped customers by fixing their problems and answering their questions. The help desk concentrated technical expertise, problem management processes, and tools to track and resolve customer problems, answer customer questions, and deliver that support as cost effectively as possible. Many help desks have done this quite successfully, and many have not. As their companies reengineer and look to streamline operations, many company executives have asked the simple question, "Today, you provide one type of service—technical support. How hard would it be to add additional services?" It's a fair question, because the help desk already takes service requests, tracks them, makes delivery commitments to customers, delivers the services, and charges the customers. The organization, the processes, the tools are in place. The evolution usually starts small, with simple, technology-related, value-added services, such as ordering PCs. You need a PC, contact the help desk. They'll figure out what you need, order it, track the order, install it when it arrives, and then support you if you have any questions. Voila, the help desk is now providing value-added services. Since you are ordering the equipment and maintaining and fixing it all the time, how about keeping track of it? No one else does. Again, voila, you're providing a value-added asset management service. Since you have all of that valuable information, can you report on it quarterly to the insurance and risk anagement department and the finance and accounting group? Yep, another—value added service. Hey, you guys are pretty good at this stuff. We need computer training. Can you make arrangements for that and then handle the scheduling? Its happened. You are no longer just a help desk—you are a service center, offering both traditional help desk support and value-added services to your customers. This goes along for a while, and you tweak the processes and improve your delivery capability. Then, someone in the company gets the idea that a single point of contact for many internal services would be handy, and since you're already capable of handling value-added servicesand you do it so well, you should consider handling many more. That certainly sounds reasonable. For example, how about a service for new employees. Instead of the HR department contacting the telecom department, the help desk, and the facilities department every time a new employee is hired, why don't they just contact the service center and let them coordinate the rest. Like magic, you've added a service called New Employee Setup, or maybe even better, Amaze the New Employee. You gather the vital information—her name, who she works for, when she starts, what budget to charge, where she'll be sitting. You order her PC, you contact telecom to set up her phone and voice mailbox, and you contact facilities to set up her workspace. Then, you notify security and set up her appointment to get a badge, you schedule her into the next orientation class, and you schedule her in the next "PC and Networking in Our Company" class. Finally, you generate the standard welcome-on-board letter that tells her the classes she is scheduled for and where they are located. You have standard attachments that explain how to use the phone and how to log on to the PC, and most importantly, how to reach the service center. You email the package to HR, who is merely awaiting her arrival, secure in the knowledge that all is well, everything is ready, and that the new employee will be duly impressed with her new company. Just as you do with the problems you handle, you follow up on this service to make sure the work is done on time. Now your follow-up includes telecom and facilities, who essentially act like any other tier 2 group. Instead of generating a trouble ticket, you generate a tracking ticket, which is associated with another new type of ticket, a work order. One work order is sent to telecom and another to facilities. The new tracking ticket looks amazingly similar to a trouble ticket. It has the same contact information—the customer name and location, the desired delivery date, the name of the agent who took the order, when the order was placed, the current status, and who else is involved. Work order tickets really aren't much different than a traditional trouble ticket to dispatch, for example, a hardware support technician that includes information on where to go, what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, who is handling it, its current status and priority, and so on. The work order ticket even goes into a queue, just like a problem ticket dispatched to any tier 2 support group. And just as with trouble tickets, you have processes and tools in place to escalate the tracking and work order tickets, and to send notifications if there is a problem or if more work to be done. The entire process is, logically, very similar to managing problems. The information must be tracked, people are assigned to do the work, the work is prioritized, time commitments are in place, processes are in place to handle work that can't be done in the agreed upon time frame, additional levels of expertise are available to handle difficulties. Perhaps most importantly, it is all initiated, tracked, and closed centrally. Many help desks resist this evolution. If their house is not in order and they are struggling to handle technical support, they should resist. Get the technical support in order first. Work on your problem management processes and take advantage of your existing tools. When your problem management processes are working, they'll work just as well for other value-added services. That is the secret. If you can make and meet time commitmentsfor technical support to customers, you can easily add new value-added services to your repertoire. Value-added services are like the simplest, most common, recurring problems your customers call about. They're easy because the request is common, so everyone is familiar with it. The solution is known; its predefined. Processes to deliver the solution are already in place. Processes to deal with unexpected complications are already defined and in use. Simple. You have the tools, the people, the processes, the organization, and the experience. Overview This book was written because problem management is one of the most important processes for any IT organization. Yet, of the hundreds of companies we have worked with, it is most often not done well. It seems that many companies consider problem management only as an afterthought, a necessary evil, overhead, or worse, all of the above. So what is problem management? Problem management is a formal set of processes designed and implemented to quickly and efficiently resolve problems and questions. Those problems and questions come from customers, both internal and external. Why is problem management important? Because how well you do at resolving those problems and questions determines how your customers perceive you. Further, how you provide those services can make an enormous difference in your overall costs—not only your costs, but also the costs your customers incur. Do a poor job on your problem management processes and your customers will think ill of you. Internal customers can be the most vicious, because they know who to complain to. They also complain to each other, and before you know it, the entire company believes you to be incompetent, at least as far as problem management goes. Worse, that attitude can easily fail over to the entire IT department. Let's face it—most of the IT department's exposure is through the problem management function (the help desk) and that is where your reputation will be made or broken. It isn't hard to justify spending to improve problem management when you calculate the number of hours of internal downtime and the average cost per hour the company absorbs for that downtime. Run the numbers and see for yourself. External customers can be less vicious on a personal level, but from the business perspective, their impression is even more important. If they don't like the way you handle problems, they may complain, but worse, they will most certainly vote with their dollar by taking it elsewhere—and will probably tell everyone they know to do the same. Your company worked hard and spent significant dollars to win that customer. To lose them because you provided poor service is an enormous waste. What will it cost you to win them back? Can you win them back? Can you ever win their friends and associates? Many studies have found that it is much cheaper to keep a customer than to win a new one. If your company hasn't seen this light yet, you need to convince them. This book was written to tell you what you can and should consider doing to improve your problem management processes. It is based on experience gained at many different sites and focuses on improving service delivery and efficiency. It's true—you can do it better and cheaper. You may have to spend some capital up front, but a standard project cost/benefit analysis will show that you can recoup those costs quickly, and in some cases, can generate significant dollars. This book was written for CIOs, vice presidents, help desk and service center managers, and the senior-level internal customers of the problem management department—anyone who can influence the problem management function and wants to understand more about what can and should be done to improve performance. I appreciate any feedback you wish to provide. You can reach me at [email protected]@hotmail.com. Best of luck to you, Gary Walker

Conversations about controversial topics can be difficult, painful, and emotionally charged. This user-friendly guide will help you engage in effective, compassionate discussions with family, friends, colleagues, and even strangers about race, immigration, gender, marriage equality, sexism, marginalization, and more. We talk every day—and we often do it without thinking. But, as you well know, there are some things that are harder to talk about—especially issues pertaining to politics, culture, lifestyle, and diversity. If you’ve ever struggled in a conversation about a “controversial” topic with a loved one, work colleague, or even a stranger, you know exactly how uncomfortable and heated the discussion can become. And even if you are one of the lucky few that expresses themselves eloquently, how do you move beyond mere “lip service” and turn words into actionable change? This groundbreaking book will show you how to get to that important next level in difficult conversations, to talk in an authentic and straightforward way about culture and diversity, and to speak from the heart with tools from the head. Using a simple eight-step approach, you’ll learn communication strategies that are supported by research and have been practiced in classrooms, work meetings, therapy sessions, and more. We constantly hear about friends and colleagues whose family members are not speaking to each other because of different political opinions, who’ve exchanged words that have mutually offended one another. If silence is one end of the continuum and verbal conflict anchors the other, how do we reach a middle ground? How do we take part in the “in between” spaces where both parties can speak and listen? With this book as your guide, you’ll learn to navigate these difficult conversations, and take what you’ve learned beyond the conversation and out into the world—whether it’s through politics, social justice movements, or simply expanding the minds of those around you.

School can be a frustrating and confusing experience for children who have not developed their communication skills. not only will access to the curriculum be difficult, so will developing co-operative skills and friendships. This book has been developed to teach and develop oral language and social interaction skills to children aged 4-6. Containing 40 sessions, designed to take place two to three times a week, the book aims to help teachers to develop the rules of interaction with the help of the character Ginger the Bear, who features in all the activities.

As with the actual practices of speech-language pathologists and audiologists, clinical education and supervision practices work best when they are grounded not only in concept and theory but also in research. Designed to act as a complete guide to both the theory and the research, The Clinical Education and Supervisory Process in Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology provides the most up-to-date information on these crucial topics. Following in the footsteps of their mentor, Jean Anderson, Drs. Elizabeth McCrea and Judith Brasseur have taken on the task of assembling important current research and best practices in clinical education and supervision into one comprehensive resource. With their prestigious team of contributing authors, this text represents the culmination of decades of study and real-world best practices. The Clinical Education and Supervisory Process in Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology covers clinical education and supervision across five unique constituent groups: clinical educators of graduate students, preceptors of audiology externs, mentors of clinical fellows, supervisors of support personnel, and supervisors of professionals transitioning between work settings. It also includes the latest information on certification and accreditation requirements for preparation in supervision. Topics include Foundations: Anderson’s Continuum of Supervision Components of the Process Expectations for Supervision Practical Research in Supervision Literature from other Disciplines Obtaining Feedback About the Supervisory Process The Ethics of Clinical Education and Supervision Supervisor Self-Study and Accountability Interprofessional Education and Practice in Clinical Education and Supervision Chapter appendices add numerous ancillary materials, allowing readers to easily adopt the most successful processes and strategies the research has revealed. Sample scripts of supervisory conferences, self-assessment tools, action plan tools, and analysis systems can all be found inside. The Clinical Education and Supervisory Process in Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology is intended as a primary resource for anyone in those professions in any setting who is engaged in the process of clinical education and supervision. With this text as their guide, clinical educators and supervisors will be able to ground their practices in the vast compiled research and study contained within.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint post-workshop proceedings of two co-located events: the Second International Workshop on Classification of Events, Activities and Relationships, CLEAR 2007, and the 5th Rich Transcription 2007 Meeting Recognition evaluation, RT 2007, held in succession in Baltimore, MD, USA, in May 2007. The workshops had complementary evaluation efforts; CLEAR for the evaluation of human activities, events, and relationships in multiple multimodal data domains; and RT for the evaluation of speech transcription-related technologies from meeting room audio collections. The 35 revised full papers presented from CLEAR 2007 cover 3D person tracking, 2D face detection and tracking, person and vehicle tracking on surveillance data, vehicle and person tracking aerial videos, person identification, head pose estimation, and acoustic event detection. The 15 revised full papers presented from RT 2007 are organized in topical sections on speech-to-text, and speaker diarization.