the lives of teachers

A guest post by the mysterious Sputnik of The Tesla Coil, on A Book You Should Read.  Number two is the series, then, is a little book about chunks…..

‘Most people would succeed in small things,’ observed Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘ if they were not troubled with great ambitions.’  This may certainly prove to be the ultimate fate of Michael Lewis’s classic 1993 work The Lexical Approach.  It was certainly not untroubled by great ambitions, as it proclaimed in its subtitle: The State of ELT and a Way Forward.  Such hubris, of course, grated with a few of the initial reviewers, for whom the subtitle announced an implicit condescension towards the existing ELT status quo, as if it really said, Everything is Wrong and I’ll Show You How to Make It Right.  Anca M. Nemoianu, for example, writing in TESL-EJ, complained of ‘the signs of distrust, and sometimes even disregard, for language teachers attitudes, knowledge, and classroom practices’ (August 1994, 1:2).  For me, however, the appeal of the book lies precisely in its vaunting ambition, its avowed purpose to lead us from the valley of professional darkness and into an enlightened state where we know what we are supposed to do, how we are supposed to do it, and why.

The first part of the book is nothing short of a relentless series of prompts.  Penned in the fiercest interrogative mode ever seen in the genteel and generally windless world of ELT field manuals, it is a quasi-cavilling, probing, harassing sort of questioning which compels the reader to undertake an anxious self-examination.  If Descartes famously holed himself up in the snug confines of a giant oven in order to arrive at the founding principles of Western philosophy in Discours de la Methode, it is not difficult to imagine Lewis composing his masterpiece in the more rebarbative circumstances of an infantry trench or a North Sea trawler.  It is deeply uncomfortable.  Assuming the guise of an Old Testament God, Lewis heaps scorn on the unprincipled teacher (yes, imagine – an unprincipled teacher), chastises the unthinking, and laments the fortunes of those whose classroom practice does not mirror ‘the values they claim to espouse’ (p.32).

Should the reader wish to become principled, he has to submit to a kind of coruscating doubt not dissimilar to the process adopted by Descartes.  With the combined admonitory talents of a  worried parent and a sergeant-major, Lewis asks us to reconsider some of the most cherished assumptions in ELT.  Don’t we, he urges, over-value explanations, structure, product and speaking?  Do we know why?  Shouldn’t we, perhaps, stress the importance of exploration, lexis, process, and listening just a little more instead?  In fact, shouldn’t we ask more questions, and stop rehearsing answers for which we can provide little or no philosophical or empirical underpinning?  Eh?

This, then, is the crux of the book.  It espouses a willingness, like all great dialectical thought, to attend to details and, by so doing, see in them the bigger picture itself.  This bigger picture is the approach of the title.  An approach , he remarks, ‘is an integrated set of theoretical and practical beliefs, embodying both syllabus and method.  More than either, it involves principles which in the case of language teaching, reflect the nature of language itself and the nature of learning’ (p.2).  It is not, in other words, a set of recipes for the classroom; rather, it is an elaboration of the precepts by which you might make them and the syllabuses in which they are contained.  The depth of this approach can be measured by its attention to the very tropes we utilise to describe language.  Lewis rails against the ubiquitous atomistic metaphor of the machine which governs our understanding of linguistic phenomena, and implores us to adopt an holistic one of the organism in its stead.

But, again, this book is so much more.  It is a wholly intemperate and inabstinent beast, immoderately invoking and provoking so many ideas it exceeds the summarising brief on the first few pages.  Lewis makes the case for this ideational largesse very explicitly, but was it too much for a profession which countenanced a four-week course as its entry qualification?    How did he hope to persuade the entire teaching nation with such a principled stance?  Nearly two decades after its publication, many of Lewis’s ideas have entered the mainstream – chunking, collocation, and a focus on sub- and supra-sentential grammar have all, to some extent, been adopted for use in textbooks and classrooms.  However, many more have not.  For example, how many of us have disregarded his reproof that teaching the conditionals, will as the future, reported speech, and the passive is ‘neither more nor less than nonsense’ (p.146)?  Of greater primacy is the failure of the lexical approach itself to change the manner in which we think about and teach language.  It has undone none of the suasiveness of the grammar-based syllabuses which still predominate in class and text.  Nor has it retarded the exam juggernaut.  And how many NESTs would retain their positions if they abandoned speaking as the central feature of their classes?

This raises the question of the role of thinkers like Michael Lewis in ELT.  Forming a nexus between teachers, textbook writers and more abstract university researchers in linguistics and education, such free-wheeling intellectuals or ELTerati are a rare but precious breed.  They have not only to amass an empire of research but also to find a practical expression for it and then persuade the teaching masses to use it.  Persuasiveness in teaching often has more to do with instinct and practicality than ideas.   Perhaps Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach, published in 2000, was a recognition of this problem and an attempt to address it so as to make it more likely that the lexical approach would achieve a kind of teaching critical mass.  It is certainly a more amiable read, and more practical than its elder sibling.  However, for a bracing encounter with a blazing mind working at its most acute, The Lexical Approach  is hard to beat.

Thanks Sputnik… and over to the mob to answer your question. Whither the thinker in ELT?

And I’ll throw in another for luck. Where is the line between grammar and vocabulary these days? Cheers!

A serious question on twitter this week, which I couldn’t answer in 140 characters. So, here is the full answer.

Don’t you just love being pigeon-holed? I’m a gen Xer, who grew up on three kinds of video – game, nasty and pop. Before me, the baby boomers. And after? Generation Y – the millennials. Students in university now, and young teachers in training, are the so-called ‘digital natives’. For them, traditional teaching methods are boring and inaccessible. We need to reach them differently, through the technology they are used to. Otherwise, we are doing them a disservice.

Or are we?

Don’t get me wrong. I love a good gadget. I’ll happily tinker with internet tools for hours on end. I am not afraid of technology. I agree that, in general,  ”the youth” are more techno-literate than the old. But not all of them. And more importantly, not necessarily in the ways that we understand.

The myth of the generation gap

I know, I know… you can prove anything with statistics. And who knows how reliable these are? But it does seem that a lot of online social networking is being driven by those who should be old enough to know better. A third of tweeters are over 45 years old. The largest single group of facebookers are in the 45 – 54 age group. And yes, we can see that the very young are becoming more involved… but the so called digital natives who are supposed to be permanently plugged in? Not so much….

Where are you?

Of course, it could be that we digital immigrants are looking in the wrong places. We are getting all worked up about our brand-new web 2.0 when the kids are already on 4. The statistics which are most easily accessible are for North American teens in mainstream education contexts. But that is not who I am teaching – and if you are reading this, probably not who you are teaching either. Facebook means very little to my students. Twitter, even less. That is not to say that they are not using technology, but they are unlikely to be using the same technology as English speaking teens, or old people like you. In Japan, the most popular social software is mixi, and there is probably something similar in your local context. However, that in itself is a very limiting view of “digital nativism”

What does it even mean to be comfortable or proficient with technology?

Being comfortable with technology and willing to use it spreads far beyond internet tools, and the boundaries are blurring all the time. As online applications become more difficult to categorise (what is a ning?), so does the hardware which supports it. If you can watch movies on your computer, listen to music through a usb in your dvd player, and send emails from your mobile phone, what kind of crazy mixed up world are you living in?! But the mistake we make is to assume that all young students will be equally capable across the gamut of technology. This is simply not the case, either on a global to local scale, or within a classroom.

On a global to local scale, Japanese students do not react to technology in the same way as (for example) British students. I have never seen an interactive whiteboard (in use) in Japan. Wireless access is still quite uncommon. The mobile phone is quite a different animal, and the true technological and communications hub for the average Japanese person.

Critics of the technophiles often point out the unfair disadvantage that poorer nations have in educational technology, but Elwood and MacLean’s (2009) comparative study of Cambodian and Japanese students and their attitudes towards technology demonstrates that the relative strength of the economy does not necessarily correlate to techno-proficiency. Although availability and opportunity and age are factors, they are not the only factors.

Within the classroom differences are equally marked. In the academic year just gone, I had students who routinely recorded class discussions on their mobile phones for review, and used their phones to post to the class blog. I had students who put together very impressive powerpoint presentations without my input, and some who independently uploaded documents to the internet for classmates to check between classes. We made videos and animations together, and wrote online book reviews. On the other hand, I had students who could not format a word document correctly, who couldn’t send an email online without help, who couldn’t download pictures or comment on blogs. I thought the young people were supposed to be fluent… aren’t I supposed to be the one speaking with an accent?

A quick look on google scholar will toss up a number of interesting articles about “digital natives”, and the uncritical acceptance of the idea that “all kids are good with computers, so we should cater to them”. To be fair to Marc Prensky, who coined the concept in the first place, he himself has more recently talked of a cross-generational “digital wisdom”. Perhaps the best of the rebuttals is Bennett, Maton and Kervin (2008), who talk of the ‘moral panic’ of this generation gap. Teachers who don’t join in are lazy, out of touch or scared. True? Some of them, yes. But not all of them

So why use technology at all?

It is fair to say that not all young people are comfortable with all technologies. We might assume that they will become so after time, and as teachers we need to keep up. However, the rate of technological change and the demographics of uptake suggest that, now and in the future, most teachers and students will adopt new technologies at about the same time – when they make the mainstream TV news. People who are more adept at new technologies, and absorb them into their lives, may have an edge…. but why is it my responsibility to introduce such tools? I am an English teacher. Just an English teacher.

In a tweet? My answer is this.

It is wrong to assume that my students can only respond to technology, just because they were born in 1990 in an economic powerhouse.

Bennett, S., Maton, K. and Kervin, L. (2008),  ‘The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence.’ British journal of educational technology Doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.200700793.x

the lives of teachers

This is an audio version of the video interview I did with Paul Nation last November. Please head over to iTunes and subscribe to catch future podcasts.

Download Here

“Oh, it must be wonderful to be educated. What does it feel like?”

“It’s like having an operation,”  said Treece. “You don’t know you’ve had it until long after it’s over”

(Eating People is Wrong – Malcom Bradbury)

Isn’t that true? Aren’t the best learning experiences the ones which you have time to absorb, reflect upon, digest? Perhaps the ones which click into place a year later, ten years later? What worries me is that we no longer have time to reflect. If an afternoon with a good book is a long look in a full-length mirror, is the internet a glimpse caught in a shop window on a pell-mell dash through a shopping mall? Maybe I strangled that metaphor…..

But it seems to be something of a ‘meme’ in the twitterverse / blogosphere at the moment. I’ve been thinking about this post for a while, but noticed others pop up with the same message over the last week or two. Maybe a lot of people are reaching the same point at the same time. There’s a very nice little graphic (and post) from Jeff Utecht which shows the stages of Personal Learning Network adoption.

Cresting that wave now, I think.

Alex Case asked me a couple of questions in his recent interview which I think are pertinent. The first was (a tongue in cheek) query as to whether I wanted to become the next Scott Thornbury. Well, the reason someone like Scott Thornbury becomes an ELT superstar (stop sniggering at the back) is through quality work over many years. His online presence is another outlet for that. Alex then asked “Do you think it is still worth getting published on paper?” The phrasing itself gives away his feeling, perhaps. But I absolutely think it is… and I worry that the amount of time I spend online is detracting from “real” research, “real” reading and “real” writing.

Bear in mind that I am blogging this, and I will tweet my new blog post, and I understand the irony in that. I have commented on several other blogs today, and got a great deal out of reading them. But I’ll just finish with this second quote from a book I am reading and enjoying at the moment…

“Well, that’s the lot of people like us. We abstract ourselves from the sphere of national effectiveness. We’re too busy taking notes to do anything… and the fault lies precisely in the things we value most”

So, are we all wasting our time? Deposit kickings in the comments box below and regular, classroom based discussion will resume soon.

I wrote this for my first year university students, who are taking their final classes with me this week. But it struck me that it fits very well with the reflective / anticipatory turn-of-the-decade feeling in the ELT blogosphere at the moment, so I thought I’d post it. There are some exercises at the end, and if you would like to answer the questions for us, or share your message to your future self, I might do the same….

1. Spring, 2. Summer, 3. Autumn, 4. Winter

What happens in one year?

In one year, the earth will make one revolution of the sun. It is long enough to create and gestate a human being. There are three hundred and sixty five days in a year, in which time you will blink about eight million times. They say that you eat eight spiders in your sleep in the course of a year, but I think that’s just an urban myth. However, I also heard that about 230,000 tons of natto are eaten in Japan in one year, and I do believe that.

The average Japanese employee will work one thousand eight hundred and twenty eight hours between now and next January. Shockingly, nearly one million people in this country are killed or injured in road accidents every year – something to think about if your cellphone rings while you are driving or riding a bike.

Of course Japan, like many other countries, will go through four seasons. The icy chill of winter, the life-giving spring rains, the sweltering heat of the summer and the crunch of dry leaves in autumn. Depending on where you are, you will receive between one and two thousand millimetres of rainfall in a year. You will also experience about one and a half thousand earthquakes, although you won’t notice most of them.

What I am trying to express is that a lot of things happen in a year. When you were a child,  a year was an unimaginable period of time. Some years may be uneventful, some may be thrilling, some tragic. But they will all, in real terms, be about the same length. You are just finishing your first year at university. What kind of year has it been?

What were the best and worst years in your life so far? Which was the most eventful year?

Which day in the last year stands out for you?

How did you feel in January last year? What were you doing?

What are your predictions, hopes  and goals for the coming year?

Write an email to your future self. Maybe you want to explain your feelings now, offer some encouragement, scold yourself, or just say ‘Hi!’. Then go to this website  and send the email,  to be delivered one year from today.

Some eye-openers….

In 2003 an estimated 1500 Master’s programmes were offered in English in countries where English is not the first language.

In 2005 about 20,000 American schoolchildren were receiving e-tutoring support from India.

More than 60% of transnational companies see China as the most attractive location for R＆D

A study in 2000 found that over 300 languages were being spoken in the schools of London.

74% of interactions in English do not involve a native speaker of English.

More of a report than a book, Graddol manages to cover an incredible breadth and scope of  research and uses it to provide pithy and well-considered analysis. If only more academics could be so concise….

The mobility of people, money and information has been increasing since the nineteenth century. Are we reaching a point at which English becomes ubiquitous, and it’s teaching unnecessary?

Several basic assumptions are challenged as Graddol tries to make sense of the state of the world now and in the past, in order to posit his predictions. One is the accepted history of English as a hero, battling the French and coming out triumphant (history filtered through the lens of the nineteenth century empire builders). Another is the modernist idea of history as constant change – he suggests that we are in a transitional period, a shift, which started with the industrial revolution and is still underway. These ways of looking at globalisation, as both a cause and effect of international English, help us to see where we are going. This is a debate which needs the heat slapped out of it with the cold hand of reason.

In the next section, Graddol focuses on the past and present of English teaching. The EFL tradition, he informs us, is designed to produce failure; pedagogically in it’s unrealistic aims of native-like pronunciation and grammatical accuracy, and socially and politically as a gate-keeping device to keep people ‘outside’. ESL, ESOL, CLIL, and especially ELF, all get more favourable feedback in the acronym soup race.

For teachers, Graddol’s policy implications are sobering, terrifying, exciting and / or liberating. But they are perfectly believable. Native speakers are a hindrance to the growth of English. By 2050 there may be very few English learners at all, besides the very young or those with special needs. Bilinguals will not be at an advantage; Rather, monolinguals of ANY language will pay the penalty.

The conclusion is this – this is a time of great opportunity, which could just as easily be buggered up by those shaping decisions. The time is certainly done for old fashioned quibbles about which variety of English we should be teaching. That ship has sailed, mate!

Don’t take my word for it. Two great things this book has going for it before you crack it’s metaphorical spine. First off, it’s short. But better than that, it’s free to download. Go and read it now and come back and comment when you are done.

we wish you a merry christmas from darren elliott on Vimeo.

Wife and children abed, the teacher was scratching his way through a stack of conversation transcriptions that his students had handed in earlier that day. “Hi, how are you” began one. “So-so” was the reply. The teacher lifted his pen to strike through the unnatural phrase in blood red ink – after all, don’t we native speakers usually say “not bad” or “okay” – but then paused. The pen hovered above the page, as the steady tick of the kitchen clock marked time.

“so-so”

He understood the meaning.

It made sense.

It wasn’t technically wrong, was it?

“so-so”

It’s a very Japanese response, but one I have rarely used / heard in the UK. The temptation is, then, to strike it out as incorrect. There are many more such examples, and I’m sure you have your own from the contexts in which you work. Aleks Kase has a great list of ‘Konglish’ expressions over on his site which is worth looking at.

There are two debates which draw particularly impassioned discussion across the ELT blogosphere. The first is the use of technology in education, and the second is the ELF / International English / ’standard’ English bunfight. But I wonder if the question of whether the teacher accepts an expression, a usage or a pronunciation feature as ‘natural’ is of any importance whatsoever.

I suggest that there are two people who have an interest in the learner’s English, and neither is the teacher.

1. The first person is the learner themselves. Many learners are not aiming at a ‘native-like’ English. Perhaps they accept that such a goal is often unrealistic. Maybe they want to retain certain linguistic features as a part of their own cultural identity (they wish to use English, but not be changed or defined by it). For many, a certain functional level of attainment is sufficient for their purposes – for tourism, for reading documents or for online interaction.
2. The second is whoever the learner will be using their English with outside the classroom, in authentic communication. The non-native speaker should be concerned with two aspects of their English, in this regard. To start with, they must be intelligible – certain features of non-native Englishes may be more or less intelligible to those they interact with. The other issue is the image that the speaker creates with his or her language. If the non-native speaker is percieved negatively due to their English, they may have a problem. Of course, people can (do) have pre-concieved notions of others before they even open their mouths, based on racial or cultural prejudices. This is something over which the speaker has little influence. But learners need to be aware, perhaps, which turns of phrase or phonological features are likely present a negative professional or social impression.

In all likelyhood, your learners will either be learning English to interact in fairly narrow and specific contexts, or they will be learning general English because they have to. In the first case, the teacher and the learner will be able to negotiate, at the learner’s lead, based on the learner’s potential audience. If a learner is planning to attend a British university, then native-speaker academic norms are obviously worth focusing on. If the learner is doing business with her collegues in the Bangkok office, perhaps not.

Realistically, the vast majority of learners in state education are learning without a particular audience in mind. However, most of them are likely to be at the beginner to pre-intermediate level and the variety of English they learn is somewhat moot – the struggle with basic grammar and vocabulary is enough to contend with.

The student needs to know what kind of English world they are stepping into, what they can expect to achieve from their starting point, and how they are likely to be recieved by their potential audience. What the teacher thinks about English norms means nothing.

Or “cultural diversity is a wonderful thing (within the framework of western liberal democracy)”

Sara Hannam has just contributed yet another excellent post to the blogosphere, prompted by a horrific bit of teaching in the movie ‘Donnie Darko’. In this case, the teacher stifles the expression of a bright young man by sticking to her lesson plan… which also supports a hidden  dubious agenda.

But what do we do when the teacher is ‘right’ and the student is ‘wrong’?

This morning, the listening in our regular textbook was a discussion between a school principal and a concerned mother, about a teacher who was scaring the children with his enthusiastic lectures on environmental catastrophe. Rather than pursuing the ‘green’ angle that the textbook then took, I thought we might get some value out of educational policy issues. I played about with intelligent design, Darwinism and creationism, but then decided to have a look a something else.

Take a look at this clip (don’t feel obliged to watch all of it, I think you’ll get the point soon enough)

This is a typical representation of homosexuality in the Japanese media. Probably not so different from when I was growing up in England in the seventies and eighties – gay people were objects of derision and ridicule, or dangerous perverts to be feared (perhaps they still are). A prime topic, then, for a challenging Tuesday morning class about ‘What teachers should teach’. And this is the worksheet I put together.

So here is the problem. What do you do when the students express ideas or beliefs that could be considered homophobic… that is, when students are ‘wrong’? Or, more broadly speaking, what do you say to students who say something sexist or racist? How do you respond to students who put forward opinions you feel uncomfortable with? At a party, you might challenge the speaker, or avoid them? Doesn’t really work in a lesson though, does it?

The teacher has a distinct power advantage which makes a direct challenge extremely unfair. The first advantage is linguistic – the teacher is more skilled in the use of the target language than the student. The teacher is also in a position of (perceived) authority, and although they may not intend to abuse their power the students may fear for their grades. In some contexts, the learners are considerably younger than the teacher. This may also put them at a disadvantage in a disagreement, either culturally (with respect shown to elders), intellectually or experientially. Students will often back down if challenged, for these reasons. But they will resent being put in that position and grasp their beliefs yet more firmly.

If the student is in alignment with his or her cultural norms, where do we draw the line and openly state “I believe your society is wrong in this case”?

Please express yourself freely in this class, as long as you are ‘right’.

The most important learning takes place outside the classroom. I don’t generally teach children, but my two most important students are still very small.

When I first came to Japan ten years ago, I didn’t think this would happen. To your right, you will see my wife and two boys, all Japanese passport holders. If all of us were bilingual, what a marvellous thing that would be! I’ve already recounted my linguistic shame on this blog; far better to start from scratch with these fresh malleable brains….

There is an immense body of literature on bilingualism but, due to the unique nature of every family context, it is very hard to find clear direction on the best way forward. I’ll explain our particular context, the choices we have made and why, and how it’s going so far….

Some families operate a “one parent, one language” policy, but we have decided to use only the minority language (English) at home. Our rationale is that, once the children start kindergarten, they will receive ample exposure to Japanese so we ought to give them a head start in English. Of course, this relies on both parents being confident and comfortable speaking in the minority language. Even if one is extremely proficient in a second language, it may still feel strange to use it exclusively in communication with one’s own children.

We haven’t been especially strict about it. I know of some families who will not allow the children to watch Japanese television in the house, but what would we do without anpanman?! If we have Non-English speaking guests it seems polite to use Japanese, although I usually gloss in English for the kids. Outside the home, too, we both use Japanese if it feels appropriate (if there are non-English speaking children around, for example).

So far, it seems to be working well. The little one is just a ball of noise at the moment, but his older brother is very talkative. English, currently, seems to be dominant. My wife phoned me at work in a state of excitement last week to tell me that he was using reported speech structures (English teachers as parents…). It’s fascinating to see him fix things as he goes along. Switching vocabulary is easier than sentence structure, it seems. Pronunciation seems to be settling into place. But he’s only two and a half, so who knows!

There are ‘international’ schools around but we probably won’t be sending the children to one. From a purely practical perspective, they are expensive. Beyond that, literacy in Japanese requires plenty of work and, if we are planning to stay in Japan for the long term that has to take priority. But further still, school is socialisation and (for better or worse) we would prefer not to separate the children from the majority culture.

Parents expectations for their own children are very complex. In the case of ‘mixed’ children even more so. I imagine everyone would like their children to be bilingual, but complete mastery of both languages is extremely unlikely. What sacrifices are you willing to make? What level of attainment in the less dominant language would you be satisfied with? Linguistic competency does not automatically equate with cultural competency, either. Can one feel culturally estranged from one’s own children?

Parenting, I suppose, is always a research study… and one which often goes on a lifetime. From a language teacher’s perspective many issues start to become less abstract and intellectual, I suspect….

So what would you do, are you doing, or did you do with your children?

(These three books are worth reading, as a starting point)