A blast from the past and a link to the present

Two posts in one night. I must be going crazy. Tefl geek...


The reason for this is that I have been reading and researching tonight (rock and roll Friday for me - woo!) and came across this amazing 1974 copy of TESOL Quarterly. I was originally looking for the article by Maryruth Bracy Farnsworth (now there's a name!) on using cassette recordings for error correction, which I think is fascinating as historical version of the screencasting feedback that Russell Stannard has written about - watch part 6 of the video here. So there's the link to the present. Doubly interesting for me however, maybe because I'm strange, but in the same edition there is a review by Earl Stevick of Caleb Gattegno's second edition of 'Teaching Foreign Languages in Schools: The Silent Way.' (New York: Educational Solutions, 1972)

The rods!

On my Delta course a couple of years back I did my experimental practice lesson on the Silent Way and found it fascinating to research. And from what I know of the method, I expected Stevick to give it a good mauling, as Gattegno did not come from the 'inside', in terms of ELT scholars and linguists. On the contrary, however, Stevick is extremely positive about what he has experienced in workshops and seminars and also about the book itself.


Amusingly, early in the piece, he states that "I myself found the first chapter of the first edition so annoying that I refused to read further." But then concedes that "I find the second edition exciting and utterly charming from cover to cover".

Miles Davis was down with Gattegno. Possibly.

I found this really interesting and wanted to share, so if there are any others out there intrigued by the Silent Way, or if you want to know a bit more about a long forgotten method (yet still lurking in some more modern techniques), then you could do worse than have a browse at this historical gem.


TESOL Quarterly Volume 8, No. 3, 1974. 


Useful Silent Way links 
www.englishraven.com/method_silent.html
www.onestopenglish.com/section.aspdocid=146498
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvyoevK-dh0

Grammar Lessons

You can't touch this!

Paul Braddock recently wrote an interesting post about grammar lessons for teachers, following an #eltchat on teacher development. I commented that at my first school I had grammar lessons every Friday during the first term. I found this helpful, although it was basically elementary to intermediate level stuff, the basics that we eventually pick up having taught them a few times.


As I reflected on all this I couldn't help realising that here I was, CELTA and DELTA qualified with eight years experience and currently doing an MA, but I have had approximately 12 hours of grammar lessons. Now while grammar is not the be all and end all of language teaching, I can't help thinking that there's something wrong. The ins and outs of the English grammar system should be extremely well understood by all those attempting to teach the language, shouldn't it?

So. A modal auxiliary is...

I worry about the fact that when I get into reading about syntax and morphology, discourse analysis, noun phrases and adjectivals, synonyms and hyponyms I find it confusing and often find myself reaching for the dictionary. I know that a lot of the in depth knowledge is not necessarily going to be passed on to students, but surely the point is that understanding the language helps a teacher explain things as well as understand what is wrong and why. The fact that there are jokes about avoiding students' difficult questions isn't anything to be proud of as a profession, surely? You know - "Just tell them you'll speak to them about it later, or next class. They'll probably forget about it!" I even remember this cropping up in classroom management seminars.


But does this really matter? How much do we really need to know in order to teach English?


Certainly it depends on the levels you are teaching. An elementary class requires different skills to say, a proficiency exam group, but the proficiency group could flummox many teachers with their linguistic knowledge and metalanguage, is that ok? If you've had the opportunity to be involved in teacher development, particularly with observations, you must have seen teachers tying themselves in knots trying to present a grammar point or answer a student's grammatical questions. It's bound to have happened to everyone at some point (it certainly has to me!), but better training would mean that it wouldn't happen, or certainly not as often. 

I is getting me one of this!

I suppose my point is that it's very common for English teachers - mainly NESTs - who simply don't know much about what they are trying to teach, which can't possibly be right. Also, most development is focussed not on the 'what' but the 'how'. I can't help believing that there are many teachers who are adept at teaching a subject they don't really know very much about!


What do you reckon? Have you had any grammar instruction or did you learn 'on the job'? How could we factor in more language learning into development for new teachers? Do we need to?

Post-method - the easy way out?

Post: (prefix), meaning 'coming after in time, often as a rejection of or in reaction to'.

Ok, so are we focused on 'post-' being a simple, temporal shift; or is this a reaction to the methods used before? Surely they're two quite different things, aren't they? Have we simply 'grown out of' methods, viewing them as unhelpful, or are we strongly reacting to them?

Are we anti-methods? If so, why?

There is no doubt that some learners develop a method and it works for them. Some polyglots study a language intensively, using a method largely based on audio-lingualism and grammar-translation; this works for them, very successfully, who are we to dismiss it?

I found an interesting website called 'Omniglot' written and maintained by a ployglot student of languages. This guy is obviously a successful language learner; are there not lessons we can learn from people like this?

I have always felt that there was something strange about the huge contrast between intensive methods promising something like 'learn any language in six-months' and the sometimes rather flimsy, non-method, 'communicative' world of ELT.

Below is a comment that I found on the Omniglot blog:

I’m skeptical about anything from the ESL establishment since as far as I can tell, it’s mostly built around keeping paying students in the system for as long as possible. That is, the student that meets their goals and becomes independent is out of the system and no longer paying. A set of non-goals with undefined methodology fits in well with that.

I’d look instead at systems that have a fixed deadline for preparing students for specific tasks (that are outside the program). There is or used to be a center in Poland charged with taking young adult learners with no Polish and getting them up to speed to follow university classes within one academic year. I really doubt if they had no methodology. It might not have been much fun, but it worked.

A colleague who attended a seminar on multi-lingual people who deal with three or more languages on a daily basis said they all reported the same tactic when confronted with a new language: Get a surface understanding of the whole of the grammar as quickly as possible and then go back and work on different parts of the language.”

This is heavily critical, obviously, but I can hear ring of truth in the distance!

What do you think?

Is post-methodology a product of the commercialisation of the industry? Do we not promise because we're afraid to disappoint? Or afraid of losing 'customers/ clients'?

In my teaching contexts, I have often felt that (to view language schools cynically) kids classes are glorified child-minding and adult classes are a social-club, run by poorly qualified foreigners who like a conversational approach because they don't understand the grammar they're supposed to be teaching.

Tell me I'm wrong!

Dogme for all?

I can appreciate reasons why teaching unplugged is relevant and worth considering as an approach to add to one's teaching repertoire. I have tried it myself and have also read some of the Thornbury and Medding's book. I like it and I tend to be fairly rebellious when it comes to using coursebooks.

However, I would like to suggest that there is an unreality of the recent coursebook v dogme debate with regard to how little relevance it has to most teachers; demonstrated neatly by a recent blog about creating worksheets. Directly relevant to more teachers than dogme, yet surely the antithesis of dogmetic principles.

Worksheets are something I dislike even more than coursebooks, because normally students are being given worksheets as well as the material from the book. It never fails to wind me up when I watch the photocopier churning out another dozen copies of a filler that will never get used and end up in the recycled paper box the following day.

While there's a debate that sometimes feels as if it's about to change face of language teaching as we know it, it's worth considering that in the grand scheme of things, not very many of the target audience (the teachers) are actually paying attention or, for that matter, know that it's happening.

Karenne Sylvester mentioned somewhere that those in the know should get out there and do workshops, spreading the word and enabling other teaching professionals to catch on, learn and try it out for themselves. This, I think, is a very important point. If you want to try dogme, there is very little information out there. Ok, so there's the book now, but the only video of dogme is Scott Thornbury talking about doing it as an experimental lesson on a Delta course. Does anyone realise that there are teachers out there talking about it, without having the faintest idea where to start? Really.

Think about it. 

I loved this passage from Robert Haines on the dogme discussion group:

The best classes, meaning the ones that everyone seemed to enjoy and 
learn from the most, have started with a conversation sparked by a 
person's comments as s/he enters the room. Out of those conversations 
emerge language that we examine, question, and practice.

The description here is of classic dogme. The organic, dialogic learning environment, initiated by a simple comment from one student, like Jorge's wedding, described in Teaching Unplugged. 

Clearly, missing out on these opportunities to generate authentic conversation between students is a mistake, that many teachers miss out out, mainly due to 'lesson-plan anxiety', the need to 'get through the plan'.

What I am concerned about though, is that I have yet to see, despite attending workshops, reading countless blogs and lurking on the yahoo discussion group for ages, an example of what one of these mythical classes actually looks like. What happens?

This is the most exhaustive dogme resource list I can find.

How do you stage a lesson? How do you focus on the emergent language? How do you choose which emergent language to focus on? Do you focus on grammar explicitly? Do you use the whiteboard? Do the students make notes? What sort of notes do the students take? Does everyone participate equally? How do you deal with the students who'd prefer not to speak very much? How do you balance the conversation with focussing on other skills? What about reading texts?

What about lesson to lesson? How does one lesson lead into the next? Is there any evaluation? How do you deal with showing them that you are actually organised and not just 'winging it'? Let's face it dogme is about making it up as you go along, which is NOT a thing generally looked upon favourably in teaching. How does this type of making it up become 'principled' making it up?

Most of all, I'd like to see some videos on youtube or even a few podcasts; that would seem to me the simplest way of demonstrating what goes on behind the door in the secretive world of dogme. 

Perhaps it's just me, but I've tried it and I have felt like a fraud. I've used activities from the book, but they are mostly dogme in 'chunks'. Many of the activities are not so removed from ideas in books like The Standby Book, or Keep Talking. I haven't got a copy of the book with me at the moment and maybe I will stand corrected, but I don't recall getting answers to the questions above when reading it.

Considering some people are talking about this approach as a movement, it would be nice to have a good idea of how it works. We wouldn't want teachers to just go into the classroom and make it all up as they went along, would we?

The Coursebook Debate - a more down-to-earth perspective

An amazing number of words have been written over the past couple of days about the relative merits of using or not using coursebooks. Linked to the unplugged or 'dogme' approach espoused by Messrs Thornbury and Meddings, the 'materials-light' possibilities for teaching are great, yet how sensible or practical is it to throw out the coursebook completely? And in the reality of a regular school, what would this actually mean for the teachers and the students? This blog is written from the perspective of my context and therefore my feelings may contrast with those of others, which I know less about.

In my experience (apart from my first school, which had a filing cabinet full of worksheets), the start of a new year or course meant that a set of books were given to me and that was what I was expected to use with the students. The students were given a copy of a student's book and normally a workbook (or activity book).

This book is expected by the students, it is expected by most teachers and it is expected by the parents. It would take a fairly sizeable paradigm shift to overcome the 'coursebook-bound' feelings of all these stakeholders. Adult students and parents even complain about coursebook prices, yet they still expect coursebooks.

In a couple of the schools where I've taught, the courses themselves were in fact named after the book. So we had, for example, these class names: Inside Out Intermediate (Adults), Sky 1, Find Out 3, English File Elementary (3) and other such things. In this reality, the course WAS the coursebook. If the book wasn't finished, then the course hadn't been completed. In one school, due to being required to reorganise the young learners structure, I managed (following a battle with the school directors) to change the courses to a different name, i.e. Kids 1, Teens 1, or something. The other school still names courses after the book. I just can't stand the connotations of this connection.

I remember one school where I was expected to put time and effort in to create a plan for the teachers, to be filed in their register, that was a structured outline for the timing of course, detailing how many lessons it should take to finish a unit or a section, to finish half the book and to finish the whole book. This was expected, in fact demanded, by the teachers. When I suggested at a management meeting that it was unnecessary and that teachers could work at their own pace and it was spoon-feeding, I was informed otherwise.

Many teachers feel that this 'crutch' is necessary, even if they don't use the book all the time, it is there as a skeleton of the course, a syllabus for them to follow; normally leading students towards an exam at the end of the year, perhaps a formal external exam. Some teachers simply can't imagine teaching a course without a coursebook. I've met them.

There are contexts where teachers are required to teach so many classroom hours, with so little time for breaks, that planning time is minimal and working directly from a coursebook is really the only option available, in order to ensure that a structured syllabus is followed and some sort of course objectives are met. Maybe I'm wrong, but thinking of that context I have no other answer. This is McTeaching, but I have the feeling that it's quite common, much as we'd like to think otherwise.

In terms of practicality then, for an ordinary private language school, the context with which I am most familiar, how could we chuck out the course books and what would replace the necessary structure that they offer? If indeed one agrees that a pre-course structural outline is actually necessary, rather than a mid or post-course reflection on what has been done, as suggested by dogmeists.

An idea I've considered is providing a rough syllabus outline that could be given to teachers at the start of a course outlining skills areas, functions and learning strategies, for example, that were expected to be covered. Then at least the teachers would have the freedom to identify their own materials (if they felt pre-prepared materials were necessary) and in turn this freedom would (ideally) force them to research other possibilities. The less controlled lesson planning process could be scaffolded by peers and more senior staff, perhaps even a mentor, particularly for new or inexperienced teachers. I'm sure this happens, if your school does this, I'd love to here about it.

I think this sounds like a reasonable step forward, breaking bonds with coursebooks, but allowing for enough support.

However, there's still a caveat: most (certainly the European) private language schools structure their courses to prepare students to sit Cambridge Exams. So, related to the coursebook debate is the backwash effect within schools structured entirely towards managing the success of Cambridge Exam candidates. 

It is often considered necessary to include preparation even at a fairly young age, in order to ensure preparedness at the right time. There is at least some breathing space if this starts with FCE, but what if the school offers PET and KET as well? Furthermore, some YLs coursebooks, even those aimed at 'tweens' contain skills work that is clearly influenced by these exams and their particular structures. It would take some experience and no little skill to teach an exam course 'unplugged' and I feel sure that there would be as many who could not as those who would not.

Let's just escape from naming courses after a book and that would be a start.

I think it's implicit throughout this that I'm not in favour of a 'hardcore' dogme approach, though few people are. As a teacher with more experience in teaching younger learners a field rarely addressed by dogmeists, I have seen that some dogme ideas can work and that dogme moments should be grasped with both hands; many teenagers I've encountered can't stand coursebooks and so a freer approach suits them. I do think, however, that the louder dogme voices come from an adult and one-to-one background, that's all very well, but it hardly reflects the majority.

For me, the main issue in relation to coursebooks is the need to provide development opportunities for teachers so they are not so coursebook-bound. This can be done by providing support, mentoring and an environment in which there is enough time to plan creative lessons without, in the worst cases, just having to run into a room and open that damned book.

What a find! A Web 2.0 guru.

Although it is completely overwhelming due to the vast array of possibilities, this wiki is a fantastic resource containing more links for resources and web tools than anyone could ever possibly need. It would take ages to sift through it all, but as an idea of what's out there I haven't come across anything as simple and effective, yet so thorough.

Check it out here 

If anyone knows of any other similar sites, please feel free to add links below.

Cheers