got it right by mistake?

The other day a student came up to me with a question - or more of an observation, really. She told me that when she'd been talking to her husband about how her English was coming along, she'd confessed that when she spoke English she 'cheated'. She didn't refer to a rule of grammar - she relied on her intuition, and this clashed with her ideas about what learning and studying another language involved (she's a retired school-teacher).
A lot of people would probably love to be able to follow their intuition rather than have to halt and re-call rules (and maybe opt to say nothing if their recollection is unsure) but if she felt that this was somehow 'cheating' it might mean that the course she was doing was in a way cheating her.
Here is a section from the Teacher's Notes in the new edition of Unit5 (it accompanies a section on 'articles') which addresses this very point.



The following explanation is very important as it addresses one of the main aspects of SpeakYourMind – that students learn grammar through:

a) A focussed introduction of one defined area
b) Plenty of useful practice through examples and questions spaced over an interval of time
c) A successive introduction that takes the grammar a bit further (this is then followed by plenty of practice before the next bit comes along).

The most important part (and the one that learners may need most ‘educating’ on) is the ‘plenty of useful practice’. The SpeakYourMind course basically provides learners with a 'good language experience’. When we talk about something ‘sounding right’ or ‘sounding bad’ we are relying on our ‘language experience’ – an accumulated store of evidence of language which allows us to decide if a piece of language ‘conforms’ (we have heard it many times) or not.

As native speakers we all have a highly developed ‘language experience’ of our own language, but as learners of a new language what we can rely on?
Grammar books provide ‘concepts’ but little in the way of ‘experience’. At the other end of the spectrum, exposure to unfiltered flows of 'natural' native speech is a highly baffling experience and can turn out to be a very long and unreliable process in terms of ‘learning’.

SpeakYourMind creates, in lessons and over the course as a whole, a ‘language-learning environment’ which exposes learners to (and invites them to use) constantly accessible ‘good language’ – and a constantly expanding environment of ‘good language’.
Of course – learners will make errors as they begin to learn new things, but this is not ‘harmful’ in any way, as long as they are made aware of the mis-match between their trials and the ‘model’ as provided by the teacher, through correction and ‘highlighting’, as well as through reading the course material.
Many learners will ‘want the rules’ – and SpeakYourMind doesn’t deny them explicit explanations of grammar. However, all learners benefit from ‘plenty of useful examples’ which, over time, will build up and blend in to form their ‘good language experience’.

train

It's back to school again. September - at least here- is a long, long month that starts out in sunny summer and slowly pushes you into into the colder and shorter days of autumn. September seems to take ages. For a school it's the time when you know how things are going to be for the coming school year. Will the crisis bite this time round? It's all a bit nerve-racking.
One thing that we do not have to deal with this year is training and integrating new teachers (so far anyway). With a full return from last year and a return to full-time teaching of an ex-teacher of ours we're probably sorted. So - no training session. Actually, yes.
As has become a tradition, Hugo from Tokyo came over with a smal group of his students. Hugo enjoys being involved with training here and his students enjoy a trip to Verona and also very much enjoy being our 'practice students' on training courses for new teachers. This time round they were practice students on a rather different programme.
It was a good opportunity to get all our teachers together for a week of serious 'advanced' training. The newest teachers have eight months experience with SpeakYourMind but the overall average is four to five years.
The interest in taking part and being able to learn and to contribute was there, which made for a very positive mood. I was able to introduce the new books - both updates and upcoming new editions and the implications these changes will have in the classroom.
Working in small groups which changed from day to day, we all taught our Japanese guests students, sometimes together with some of our own students. This made for an interesting contrast of styles - careful, accurate Japanese learners with more spontaneous and erratic Italians - at least in these cases. They got on well and probably benefitted from theirt own observations of this different approach.

At the end of each shared lesson, teacher-groups would comment and analyse any points of interest before re-assembling as a full group to discuss aspects of general interest further. It was all very open - everyone seemed unworried about having their say.
In the course of the five days, everyone got to work with and to observe everyone else and I think we all feel that it has been a very worthwhile experience.

Of course the hard thing is to keep that ball rolling. When schedules get busy, training tends to move out the way for more pressing priorities. It's like going for a run after work - you know it's good for you but you soon end up needing to do other, more urgent, things instead.

Anyway - it's done. I'm pleased with the way things went and the things I've been able to learn about and from our teachers. Hugo seems happy and his students thanked us most kindly when things came to a close. There wasn't the tension that ther can be an an intitial training course for new teachers but nonethless it was pretty demanding in its own way. Ultimately, the greatest satisfaction comes from being able to work with a group of teachers who stay with you, in many cases for many years, and who continue to be responsive, curious and enthusiastic and who express real confidence in what we are doing and how we do it and in how we are moving things forward.

the secret could be in the beans

I've had a couple of talks with interesting people who are interested in TESOL and are good speakers of English, having studied it for much of their lives (including courses in the UK).
On several occasions we talked about English courses in the UK or the US and they immediately and resolutley expressed the view that you can't make any useful observations or assessments on the effectiveness of these courses, as anyone studying in the UK or the US was bound to learn English anyway - what happened inside the classroom was pretty much incidental.

Now - this surprised me, as (as I pointed out to them) they almost certainly knew foreign people living in their own countries whose language skills were poor, even after a considerable period of time (and I'm not talking just about people living in disadvantaged circumstances). They didn't really accept this argument as sound. It occurred to me that this resistance could be due to a form of 'cultural experience' - people who go to study abroad tend to be well-educated and highly motivated and are better placed to achieve the good results that provide the evidence for the view that my companions in conversation held.

As a teacher in London I certainly came across plenty of cases of people who, after months and even years, seemed to have a huge barrier between their minds or brains and the English language that surrounded them. I wonder if these people in any way resisted adapting or submitting to the foreign experience in general. Maybe they saw living in the UK as a kind of exile to an outpost of their own land and saw everything new as an inadequate and somehow undesirable version of the real and right thing.
Did they want to eat baked beans? Did they sunbathe when it was 17°C?

well then?

What we know as “Communicative Language Teaching” does not have exclusive rights over ‘communication’ as an aim, just as ‘communicating’ does not necessarily involve ‘teaching’ or lead to 'learning'.

Anyway - to what extent does what happens in classrooms depend on the tastes and preferences of?
a) the teacher
b) the learners

and ..... how often do (or should) the two sets of tastes and preferences coincide?
plus ..... how often do we know?

I'm not talking about the school system here, I'm referring to adult TESOL courses.

Protect our English!

I have had an interesting encounter with a group of teachers who all come from a similar teaching background. The topic under discussion was 'correction' - no minor issue. They were very much of the view that one of a teacher's prime responsibilities in lessons is to correct mistakes; all mistakes (at least the ones that don't slip by unnoticed).
A lot has been said and written on the effectiveness and the appropriateness of correction and I don't intend to go down that road right now. What struck me in this discussion, however, was the overall view of language and learning that lay below their belief in the importance of correction (and, whenever possible, the use of error-avoidance strategies). As we spoke I had this image: what these teachers were doing was to shield a statue from attack. Language was a complete and perfectly-formed body - the version of language as they presented it to students. Mistakes were like hostile arrows or stones that would chip away at this perfect work - too many mistakes and the statue would become too damaged to be any longer recognisable, something the teacher had to attemot to stop at all cost.
Mistakes cause damage: it is a very 'static' vision - and it sees learning as a purely external rather than personal activity that involves the imitation or reproduction of 'perfection'. Learners' language can only get worse: it can't get better than perfect.

It was an interesting encounter and it didn't finish here. But that is for another time.