A reply to a discussion on Translation in class

Thanks for your interest, Stephen. The age-old debate - personally I tend to steer clear of 'nevers' and 'always' when it comes to what is best in teaching situations - these can vary in many ways and dogma can be a real obstacle. Nonetheless, you need to be guided by ideas about what is most beneficial and effective - that's the point of having teachers.

My own guide (we're talking mono-lingual teaching situations here) is that relying on L1 in the classroom is doing learners a disservice, although it's what a fair number of them ask you to do. It can be a lazy short-cut - I think it probably often is - but there are several good reasons not to translate for convenience. 

One very practical reason (in the case of English mother-tongue teachers) is that it gives an unfair 'advantage' to teachers who know their students' language well, over their colleagues who don't - and some students might think teachers 'better' or 'worse' as a result. I've observed teachers mis-translate words in class - another good reason for the practice to be discouraged. It's also true that while some students want translation, many others dislike it - they find it de-motivating and a waste of valuable time.

From a learning point of view, regular use of translation doesn't do learners a favour - it teaches them a 'shallow' relationship with the new language, and although lessons will seem 'easier' it will make out-of-classroom interaction in the the new language more 'laborious' and stressful. There's also the fact that some things simply don't translate - this applies both for lexis and grammar.

However ........  translating new words can be a lazy shortcut, but refusing to do so can become a very long and circuitous diversion - like eating a kilo of celery to gain just a handful oif calories (I like celery but it's not a good source of energy). Lesson time is limited - a talented and perceptive teacher can often get meaning across economically and effectively - but in many 'no-translation at any cost' classrooms there's a lot of time and frustration before mission is accomplished (often by classmates whispering the translation anyway).

Do I translate? Yes - sometimes. At beginner level with new classes I will use some Italian (when I'm teaching Italian students - or Italian-speaking students, as is the case here), although not to teach the language content but to give little interludes of advice and information about what we are learning. I like to give a brief outline of the course and about what lessons will involve, and maybe to remind students about how things are going from time to time. 

I often point things out about English - unlike some languages it has no genders: "wow, that's easy!" - and what sort of things are difficult and take everyone time to begin to grasp. So, I translate for 'welfare' reasons rather than as a teaching tool. Sometimes students check with you that they have understood something - I acknowledge these 'translation for confirmation' requests, rather than pretend not to understand. 

One other thing  (this is much longer than I'd expected). Translation is a useful skill and I try to do short spontaneous translation activities - with elementary and first-intermediate levels. When we read short dialogues (phone-calls are good), I might also ask for an off-the cuff translation - not word-by-word but just what was said. 

This is a real-life need - it's not unusual to have to report and translate a phone-call or e-mail, or translate for a friend in a social setting. This is a useful and enjoyable translation activity to sprinkle in to lessons. It has to be quick, so accessible content is required.

Day 1

A good day today -- unless I'm wrong.


This was day one of a teacher-training programme in a new school. When I say a new school, I mean it's going to be a fresh start for them with SpeakYourMind.

The school has been up and successfully running for 20 years and has a good stable stream of clients and a strong local reputation. Why rock the boat? The owner thought that after 20 years he could simply be looking towards another 20 years of the same and then retirement. Was that doing justice to himself and his own potential? Was it doing justice to the business that he might want to pass on? And was it doing justice to his staff who have been very loyal and hard-working over the last few years? He evidently had asked himself these questions and decided that no -- he wasn't ready to settle into a comfortable rut.

A lucky coincidence brought his attention to SpeakYourMind: a new student at his school told him that he had done a really good course in another town where he had spent the last few years – the method had really worked for him and he had made a lot of progress: didn't this school have anything similar to offer? The course was SpeakYourMind and the owner contacted us. After a few exchanges he came over to visit our central office in Verona with a friend from his town who would be able to get a student’s-eye view of things. They both liked it and were impressed and the decision was to go ahead with SpeakYourMind being at the centre of his revitalised school’s new era.



So today saw the school staff’s first real encounter with SpeakYourMind: the owner had prepared them for this in advance so it wasn't totally out of the blue and because they had a good relationship with him they were naturally inclined to trust his intuition on this important decision - or at the least, to approach this change with open minds. So -- how did it go?

Sitting here in my hotel room reflecting on the day, I'd say that things got off to a good start: the teachers had a busy schedule after our training, so feedback has to wait until tomorrow. I think things were far more different than they had anticipated but I think they are impressed by the way things are thought out and the reasoning that has gone into what we propose as an English course -- they like the whole approach that really looks at things from a student’s point of view.

And talking of students – well, they always seem to be our best allies. The students we had today as volunteers did the SpeakYourMind placement test in the morning, which in itself seemed to gain positive response from them -- and then they came back for their first lesson in the afternoon with all the staff observing. Students tend to instinctively get the point of the whole lesson format and quickly see how easy it is to get a lot out of the lesson, and for the teachers to see that positive response goes a long way towards persuading them that there really is something of value inside the course - things that might not be evident on first or even second sight. Thank goodness for the students!

Desirable Difficulties ... interesting stuff!

New information in small nibbles rather than full mouthfuls, variety (interleaving) rather than topic-based lessons, spacing, retrieval, ‘low-stake quizzing’ …


It's interesting to see how the work of Prof Robert Bjork at the learning and forgetting lab at UCLA throws into question traditional paradigms -- and the findings seem to sit neatly with what we've been doing in the development of SpeakYourMind. Interesting food for thought - and more for the drawing board.

http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/research.html

more on motivation (final part)

So where does a teacher not have control? There are the unpredictable personal factors: you can't control what kind of mood a student walks into the classroom with -- it wasn't your fault he just had an argument at work. Of course you have influence once they are in the classroom and you make decisions as to how to deal with that situation.
On a more permanent level, where the teacher usually has no control is more to do with organisational aspects of courses and it is these that can make a teacher's life so difficult in how they limit the potential of the teacher’s skills, experience and talent, and can ultimately erode the teacher's motivation and sense of self efficacy. I’m talking primarily of class-size and class streaming.

Earlier we looked at modality -- if the modality of learning is to respond to most learners’ needs and preferences, by which we mean a primarily speaking-based lesson format, large groups are pretty much destined to impair the potential of lessons in providing interest and motivation. When groups go beyond a certain number, say more than 12-15, teachers have to bend over backwards and resort to a variety of strategies to keep people talking and communicating.

Under CLT, pair-work has become a stalwart of lesson procedure and this can work well - or it can become tedious, dispiriting and of little use. Many students don’t like spending more than a limited time with a peer when they have a real teacher in the classroom. Nonetheless, pair-work has become orthodox practice -- it's bad if you don't do it – but it is more useful and valid as a class management strategy than as a teaching strategy.
Working on projects or tasks in groups is another common form of activity that has been imported from other teaching situations and where it in line with the idea of developing teamwork skills and learner autonomy. But whether this is within the remit of an English course for adult learners is open to question, especially where developing speaking skills is the declared priority and where lesson-time is very limited.


So where the teacher has limited influence over motivation is in creating workable conditions for successful and relevant learning – this is where the school has the key role. With large classes, teachers and students are left pretty much to make the best they can of things, but whatever happens there will be little room for useful speaking for the majority of students.

Well prepared, well organised and enthusiastic teachers will be able to offer interesting enough lessons for all - and very challenging and productive lessons for a few. Poorly prepared and unenthusiastic teachers will sit back and watch as their students proceed with the tasks that have been issued them. The ‘good’ students will do as much as they can in their own time and they will be able to bring that useful learning into their lessons with them. Those who have no time or no inclination will just float along with the current that isn't moving very fast if anywhere at all.
In many situations (public education), large class-size is a simple fact of life, so speaking will always have little space and students will have little real benefit in terms of improving communication skills. However, for private schools class size is a decision they can make. Clearly there are financial implications. In situations where there is little competition, schools are free to fill classes with paying students and make a hefty earning -- on the other hand they might decide, responsibly, to limit class size for students’ (and teachers’) benefit and be willing to accept lower margins on earning.

So it is very likely that students will be happier and therefore more motivated in a small group. But it's not just down to numbers. A large group of students all at similar levels and with similar aptitudes is more likely to be a useful context for learning than a small group of students who are very poorly matched -- this is basically setting up a class for failure and frustration. Again for very many teachers, having to deal with mixed ability or mixed level classes is a fact of life but it needn't be like that. Schools too often tend to pass the buck and present teachers with largely unworkable conditions, the idea being that if they are trained teachers it's their job to sort things out. Forming well-graded and well-streamed groups of students involves far more hard work for a school than bunging people together out of convenience. The thing is that most people are used to mixed ability groups, because that's what happens at primary school and secondary school, so even students tend to accept this as simply being ‘normal’ and tend not to complain too much. Again the result here is that much of the teacher's time and effort is spent simply managing lessons rather than getting on with good focused teaching -- often teachers become events organisers or entertainers more than anything else.
Very often placement testing is a perfunctory ritual: standardised multiple-choice tests, often online for convenience again, and, maybe, a brief and superficial oral test. More often than not the outcome of this test is pretty predictable with students ending up in one of the catch-all nets: elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate or advanced. I don't know how many people I've met who have been stuck in a constant loop of intermediate courses.

The school then has the primary role in establishing the right conditions for good learning and the right conditions for student motivation to remain intact. So here could be the list of key components which can allow motivation the highest likelihood of survival:

• Workability of conditions
• Skill and intuition of teacher
• Appropriateness of method
• Relevance of content

More on motivation

(cont).......... So, methodology has a role: a classroom method that seems appropriate, relevant and respectful to intelligent individuals is likely to enable the right conditions for ‘fertile learning’.
Language has to be presented in the right modality; for example, learners who identify speaking as their priority are more likely to respond positively to a spoken modality rather than work primarily from books or become passive members of an audience in a lecture style format.


Relevance of content is important of course -- language has to be related to what learners perceive as being useful in practical language-using situations. The course also needs to be accessible and learning has to be manageable.
Approaches diverge on this point, but I believe that structure is something that many learners approve of - the randomness, eccentricities and originality of language are not aspects that should be emphasised in the language classroom, certainly not at most levels (I want to differentiate between ‘language’ course and ‘cultural’ courses which deal with literature or creative writing etc. – combining the two things has caused more harm than good for generations of school students worldwide).
I'm not suggesting that the life be squeezed out of the language, but if the course is well-thought out enough to allow students to be aware that things do connect up and that simple things do lead on to other things (which, in turn, will be more straightforward to learn having grasped the preceding simple things) students will feel empowered - they will feel that they are just about in control of the language that they have so far learnt : it's not some slippery mystery that is constantly beyond their reach.

In this respect the structure of the course should allow constant mini goals -- the chance for students to see success throughout the lesson - as well as setting longer scale milestones which enable students to mark their progress over the months.
Most people need regular reward in order to keep the minute-to-minute motivation that sees them through lessons, but this needs to be balanced with a sense of challenge -- lessons mustn't be dumbed down. The recognition of achieving even small tasks which were unachievable in previous lessons is important – as is acknowledgement of this from the teacher. Constant patting on the back can backfire but giving credit where credit is due will consolidate a sense of self-efficacy when it comes from a respected source.

to be continued ..........

Motivation, motivation, motivation, moti......

Motivation -- often we seem to talk about it like a magic spell conjured up for us by an invisible wizard. Motivation is not just a happy coincidence -- there are many contributory elements, some of which the teacher has direct influence over and others which are beyond the teacher's direct control.


Nothing is simple of course – and even if it was, certain types of academics or other authorities would need to intervene to make sure it became complex enough for ‘serious’ discussion. It turns out that, like ‘intelligence’, ‘motivation’ doesn’t really mean what everyone thought it did. It has been dissected up into bits (a quick Google search revealed 8 different motivations to me: "Are you motivated?" - "What type of motivation did you have in mind when you asked?") but like our laboratory frogs in school biology lessons – once dissected, a frog is no longer a frog and the separate bits are only relevant if we understand them as parts of a single whole amphibian. We all know that people can be motivated in different ways and by different incentives but we need to reassemble ‘motivation’ to get back to an idea that we can all usefully understand and address. The rant bit is over now.

When talking about learning English, one of the most common observations is that students arrive with their own baggage of motivation -- they know that English is relevant and useful and is therefore a good thing to learn. Fair enough, all of us teaching in private language schools probably meet motivated adults at the beginning of every course. The trick is to maintain motivation lesson after lesson through months or possibly years -- something which becomes harder in situations where students have little or no exposure to English in real situations, and without opportunities to practise what they have achieved in the classroom they have no tangible evidence of the results.


There are different attitudes both from teachers and from students about how much people should need to enjoy the process of learning. There is a persistent ‘nasty medicine’ brigade -- the approach being, “this tastes horrible but it's good for you”. And there are indeed students who have the kind of mental discipline and single-mindedness to get on with the job regardless of how gruelling it may be. I'm not saying that learning has to be laugh, laugh, laugh all the way along the line, but I do think that the nasty medicine approach will only be successful with a small minority. I think it's certainly true that someone who has enjoyed a lesson is more likely to look forward to the next one, and the experience itself will be satisfying enough to ease the load of effort and concentration.

to be continued ......

INNOCENT VICTIMS OF LEARNING STYLES?

Innocent victims of learning styles?


Diversity is so much more appealing than uniformity, and uniqueness is so more intuitively attractive than sameness. The monolithic methods that taught on the assumption that ‘languages were languages’ and that ‘brains were brains’, so that success in learning was primarily a question of how much effort you put into it, have largely been long left behind us. The mood of the times changed a generation ago and the individual became the centre of attention. In teaching, the recognition that brains were far more complex and idiosyncratic than the blank slates that we used to have in the old days has brought lots of benefits, many of which we have been able to take advantage of ourselves as students in enlightened school classrooms or universities.
Multiple intelligences, learning styles -- with all this variety, we're bound to find a category we can be slotted into, rather than simply being lumped together with everyone else. But how beneficial is it to be categorised and divided up? To what extent has the focus on these diversities been a distraction from a more essential and panoramic way of viewing learning and learners?


Intelligence lost in meaning
In terms of multiple intelligences, we can keep on adding to the list to suit whatever purpose suits us. A recent article in IATEFL’s Voice’s publication describes how to develop ‘eco-intelligence’, an individual’s awareness of the environment and the threats it faces. Does this mean that a person who is unconvinced by scientific arguments supporting the role of emissions and global warming is ‘eco-unintelligent’ rather than just ‘sceptical’ or ‘stubborn’? The idea of multiple intelligences is valid enough in the way that it can break down artificially narrow barriers and prejudices but I'm not sure if it tells us something that most people didn't already instinctively know. The thing is, of course, that when the word ‘intelligent’ becomes applicable to so many different areas of human activity, it stops meaning anything at all -- the comment that “she is a very intelligent girl” in theory becomes meaningless, except for the fact that most of us will actually know what was meant – ‘intelligent’ in the sense of the pre-multiple intelligence days.


Learning style - the goods or the labels?
Learning styles is an idea that has been so enthusiastically embraced by many teachers that it's become hard to disembrace, to stand back and look at it from a fair distance. When some of the people reading this went to school, we didn't actually have learning styles but we still had ‘good teachers’ and ‘bad teachers’, and I think those good teachers would still be ‘good’ today and, on the whole, the bad teachers would still be ‘bad’. One of the reasons the good teachers were good is probably because they were aware of learning styles: they simply had different ways of describing the attributes, personalities and receptiveness of the students that they taught. What they didn't do was to separate their classes into distinct groups -- they were able to respond deftly enough to different individuals and to accommodate them while being guided by the needs of the group as a whole - and the needs of the curriculum they had to follow.

The fact is that the classroom is one aspect of the real world which involves constant contacts, negotiations, concessions and compromises. As individuals we have to be responsive to our circumstances, aware of our priorities, aware of our strengths and weaknesses in any given situation and to be adaptable. This is true in ‘real life’ as it is in the real classroom - people who are unresponsive, unaware of their circumstances and unadaptable tend to have what we could call unsuccessful lives, and in the classroom they tend to be unsuccessful learners or teachers.
The good teachers throughout history didn't know about learning styles but they did know about people, and could base all their decisions on a more dynamic moment-to-moment and person-to-person flow of information and impressions, rather than on a set of descriptors which would label their students as being in one or another category.


One-sided or well-rounded?
Adaptability is the key, I think. Most human beings, by the time they are young teenagers, have learnt to be adaptable enough and resourceful enough to cope in a range of learning situations, including those which are not presented in their most preferred style. To design a course in order to match the specific preferences of a learner or a category of learners underestimates the mental potential of those learners and can, in reality, be unhelpful. Learning works best when different forms of perception combine and work together rather than in isolation. There is evidence to suggest that people learn better when they are required to make a little more effort and not allowed to operate in their sphere of comfort.
Most language examinations test learners’ abilities, naturally enough, in the different so-called skills. What is the normal or most appropriate thing to do when the student is weaker in one of these skills, say, listening? Do we simply say that because the student is not an aural learner it is unfair that he or she should have to face such an unfair test, or do we work hardest on improving that skill in order to bring it up to level?


Don’t talk to me like that to me– I’m a visual learner
For the vast majority of people learning a language, language will be encountered both in its spoken and written forms and it makes sense that the modality of teaching should ultimately be decided by what needs to be taught, rather than by who it has to be taught to. In other words, if understanding spoken language is important, it is important full stop.
The reason that so many people on foreign language courses regard themselves as being visual learners is that most of their personal experience with that language has been in the written form: it’s simply the most familiar form of language and, naturally enough, the form they feel most comfortable with. There are many people like this on English courses, people who have become ‘visual learners’ for convenience's (and tradition’s) sake. In reality there is more to being a visual learner than needing to see a word written on a blackboard or on a page, but this fits into a conventional understanding of it.

To get back to the point of the primary modality of teaching, SpeakYourMind is a method that favours spoken presentation and practice of language simply because that, for most people, is likely to be their declared priority: “I need to speak but I'm not very good at it”. It makes sense for everyone to address this in a responsible manner and one of the prime objectives of our course is to enable people to learn to trust their own abilities to operate in a modality which they find, or had always found, to be their weakest. If people can’t learn to trust their own abilities to understand and to speak when they are in the classroom, the chances of them succeeding to do so outside the classroom will inevitably be reduced, and the course in which they invested time, effort and money will end up a disappointment.

I am not opposed to learning styles -- I am opposed to creating unnecessarily divided classrooms, to the constant narrowing down of how we teach, and I prefer to look at how we can broaden course design and teaching procedures and teacher awareness in order to accommodate as many individuals as possible, in the attempt to meet their priorities as closely, and as pleasantly, as possible.

'So, it's good for new teachers'

Yesterday I took part in an online tutorial as part of the conversations series on WizIQ. They host people from various fields of teaching and it is hosted very capably and courteously by Dr Nellie Deutsch.

There were a few technical hitches at my end, despite all the effort I had been making beforehand to make sure everything would work smoothly. I had to change microphone after 5 or 10 min of faffing around with plugs and dials and buttons and things, and my video connection never worked at all as I discovered later. I felt like I was in an isolation chamber.

Never mind, the people taking part could see Nellie and the live chat board seemed to be pretty active with people joining the class and asking me and each other questions and making comments. It's a very good format for this kind of discussion–next time I'll make sure I can keep track of the comments as they happen, but Nellie was very good at summing up the most relevant questions and posing them to me.

At one point Nelly invited Jesse davis - a teacher who had worked with SpeakYourMind in Japan - to recount his experiences and one of the things he pointed out was how that after having taught in Japanese English schools where he'd been pre-much dropped in a room left to get on with it and pretty much just amuse the students, he had learned with SpeakYourMind a great deal about basic classroom skills and classroom rapport and was given for the first time a set of criteria by which he could assess how learning was proceeding.

In the chat-box a comment soon appeared, “so it's good for beginner teachers". I couldn't tell from the context whether or not the implication was “it is only good for beginner teachers ", but that is a comment that I have heard in the past.

First of all, if it is a good method for new teachers, that's great! It's designed to be teachable - to be intuitive and straightforward enough for people who have the right teaching qualities, but not the experience, to be able to do a decent job right from the start.

Being good for new teachers is a far better thing than not being good for new teachers. I don't know exactly what percentage of teachers currently working in schools around the world are in their first year, but I imagine it's a significant amount. It's also very common for a teacher's first year to be almost their last year: in fact, the figures claim that on average TEFL teachers have an average career span of 18 months. So in this kind of context, being able to provide a method that helps new teachers work well becomes a very important asset.
Good teachers are, however, a school’s greatest asset of all.
In our own experience we have been lucky enough to have very high retention rates of staff over the years–fairly seldom over the last 10 or so years have we had teachers who have only done one academic year with us. The same applies to most other schools using SpeakYourMind in other countries. It may be the case that teachers stay simply because it's an easy option–they enjoy their place of work, so what reason do they have to leave? But I'm pretty sure that teachers stay largely because they very much enjoy the teaching and I'm sure that if you ask them they would certainly say they have grown as teachers because they have been able to see potentials within the teaching method and the material which simply were not accessible to them as new or relatively new teachers.

Teachers don't have the challenges that they would have working in more conventional environments, such as being able to improvise activities or having to prepare materials and presentations, even though this can be a burden more than a challenge. But teachers do face a challenge every time they open the door and walk into a classroom. The material is there for them -- the same material they've used hundreds of times – but because it's a very direct, personal, individual-to-individual lesson format, the lesson itself will be unique. The challenge comes in the dynamic nature of the lesson, the moment-to-moment assessments and decisions, the responsiveness to needs and moods, and the ability to emotionally and intellectually engage students.

I'm certainly not naive enough to believe that every teacher will be happy working with what is, after all, 'a method' There are teachers who need to have free rein and there are teaching situations where that is appropriate -- but the idea of SpeakYourMind is to be able to give students as complete a lesson as possible when the time for learning is limited. And apart from the classroom teaching itself, I think one of the things that keeps experienced teachers interested and fresh is the sense of reward they get from seeing real results from students over time. So, if the people you teach are satisfied, that will be important to any teacher – new or not.

Structured Interaction

Structured Interaction Method
SpeakYourMind needs to stand as a real alternative - so often I hear or read it judged according to sets of standards or principles that simply don't apply.

So often students get caught between the hard work of 'arid drills and study’ (grammar-based book-and board methods and audiolingual methods (often confusingly called ‘direct methods’)), and the attractive vagaries of theme-orientated CLT.

Finding a middle way – a balance that can harness a principled approach towards lexis and recycling and yet creates contexts and trigger meaningful interaction - is what we have been working on for the best part of twenty years and it continues to be a fascinating journey.

Extended recycling of lexis and grammar is essential, especially in situations where learners are getting only two or three hours a week and little or no exposure to English outside their classrooms. It is essential both in terms of making learning efficient and in terms of maintaining motivation – learners can see how what they have learnt before was worth learning and thus gain a sense of achievement. The design of the SyM teaching material ensures that recycling occurs regularly, long-term: learning is seen as a part of an continuous process rather than presenting 'the language to be learnt' in a succession of one-off episodes.

There seems to be no doubt that frequency-of-use is a primary factor in how memory stores vocabulary, but it doesn't come down to mathematics. Quantity is important - if a word is given exposure ten times it is more likely to be remembered than if it is heard or read five times -but ‘quality’ will have a significant impact too. If the encounter with a new word is able to summon up significant associations of some kind, the impression is more likely to be lasting. An association can be significant in different ways – in terms of personal or emotional context, or in its ‘language-learning’ context - how useful or interesting it is in the mind of the learner.
Words need to trigger learning-awareness, which repeated encounters will recall, re-elaborate and deepen.

to be continued

TESOL conference Rome: Mr Perez, pens and Tunbridge Wells

TESOL conference Rome: Mr Perez, pens and Tunbridge Wells

Last week I went to the TESOL conference in Rome: probably the major teaching event in the annual calendar. Attended primarily by English teachers at high school and middle school, there are nonetheless a fair number of representatives from private schools (PLS’s to use publisher’s jargon as I learnt). Over the two days there is a wide and varied programme of presentations and workshops -- around 60 in all.
We were present with a stand in the exhibition area, along with the big-boy publishers and examination boards. It was our first public outing and although attendance at this conference was worryingly down on previous years, it proved to be a useful experience.

On the whole it was very encouraging to see so many teachers’ curiosity and interest in something different. There was fairly general acknowledgement among teachers that, for several all too well known reasons, getting a good job done in prevailing circumstances proves arduous and elusive far too often. We had to point out that SpeakYourMind is currently available only through associate private schools: not because teachers at private schools are ‘better’ than those with in the education system, but simply because, in theory at least, private schools are able to establish better conditions for successful learning - primarily in terms of class size and in terms of streaming classes for level and, ideally, ability.
Talking there to teachers I did perceive a sense of predictability: the publisher's new products tended to be not much more than new marketing. New ideas were only new to the people who hadn't encountered them yet: certainly in the few presentations I was able to attend there was nothing particularly original. Corpus linguistics is extremely revealing and helpful but it’s also a popular and spacious bandwagon: some of the conclusions I heard drawn from corpus ‘evidence’ were open to different interpretations, and I think that reliance on these sources can be distracting to teachers in the front line. ‘Authenticity’ and ‘motivation’ were other popular themes, although it’s disappointing when speakers and writers cook up the evidence to suit their own menus – such as presenting examples from out-of-date Peruvian course-books to highlight the demotivating effects of ‘artificial’ language (“I am Mr Perez – are you Mrs Perez?”) and therefore the advantages of using ‘authentic’ language (“… and she’s like, ‘why did you do that?”).

Back to the exhibition area and our encounters with teachers: among the interest and curiosity there was naturally enough a more critical voice. I had been expecting this but was surprised by the vehemence when it happened. I can't help thinking of this teacher as ‘disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ – she did rather fit the stereotype. As we spoke (spoken preliminaries, rather than ‘discussion’) and I was looking for a student book to illustrate how the course was organised and the content presented, I could see her eyes guiding her towards the beginner’s course-book - and instinct guided me towards deflecting this move: I had a premonition of the ensuing confrontation. “This looks like a Berlitz book from the 50s,”' she scoffed. She had me at an unfair advantage here, not having taught then myself. I began to explain that the course incorporated ideas and procedures from different traditions and approaches and reworked them in the light of newer thinking, but she would have none of it.
Flicking to the opening pages she found the food required to fill her outrage: “Pen, clock, table! Haven't you people heard of communicative teaching?”. “Yes of course - and we have moved on from there.”
“Have you indeed! How can you teach ‘pen’ and ‘book’?” “It depends what you have in mind - in a classroom teaching situation it can be a useful way to get things started.” I tried to engage her in an exchange of views but her raised hackles got in the way. “I'm not interested, I'm not interested”, and off she marched, her sensibilities thoroughly offended.
Well, being addressed as ' you people ' hardly creates the rapport that allows the kind of communication that this teacher was such a stern proponent of in the classroom. Also the suggestion that ‘we people’ had been living in some sort of cave for the last thirty years was a bit objectionable too.
However, I knew where she was coming from. I am not a diehard fan of pens, pencils, clocks, phones, doors and windows; but at the same time this long-standing Situationalist approach to teaching beginners is not as harmful as some teachers believe. They formed the basis of drills used to ‘imprint’ structures in the 50’s - because structures were the key to language, so the thinking went. Of course, now we know that mastery of structures does not automatically lead to communicative autonomy, but that, in turn, does not mean that structures or sentence patterns have no place in language learning.
In the SpeakYourMind course we are very clear about recognising the limitations as well as the uses of starting in this way. There are advantages of teaching the words for the things that occur in your physical surroundings, learners can see them and touch them - it's very direct and immediate. In the initial set of objects and words that our beginner learners encounter they come across almost the complete range of phonemes, as well as beginning to learn about stress patterns - so important in English – so it’s not just ‘structures’.
Teachers and students are aware that starting in the classroom with classroom objects is purely a convenient way to get going – it kick-starts the language learning. As language quickly grows, the confines of the physical classroom dissolve, and more likely and plausible interaction can emerge. Even the very early lessons involving pens, watches, phones, switches, tables and so on can, in reality, become challenging and fun in the hands of a talented and informed teacher - it's not a question of some brutal taskmaster squeezing the life out of language and chipping away at the poor learners’ brains to engrave words and structures indelibly and inalterably.

But I think the most important point to dispel is the idea - common among many teachers - that when we are teaching language we are in some way reliving the learning experience that occurs in growing individuals as they learn a language.
Of course, no one would set about teaching their toddler in such a formal restrictive and disciplined way. Children ‘discover’ language in all its complexities and subtleties, and learn over the course of years and through hundreds of thousands of different types of experiences and encounters.
We cannot try to replicate this experience - and we certainly don't have the time to do so - in the classroom. When adult or teenage learners come to a classroom, they come with the benefit of many learning experiences with different degrees of formality and modality, and are well equipped to cope with learning strategies that do not correspond exactly to what might be described as ‘natural’ or ‘real’. But of course, a classroom is a classroom and not the ‘natural world’ or the ‘real world’ (but ‘real worlds’ have classrooms too).
To assume that an approach which is evidently contrived and artificial will somehow necessarily impair learners’ receptiveness, or ‘damage’ them in some way, is to do little justice to their intelligence.
Of course if a teaching programme continues to present a language in a lifeless and implausible way, learners will lose interest and motivation, and as experience has shown, will not provide learners with the skills required to become confident and effective language users.

Yes, we have heard of the communicative approach and we well appreciate and approve of its aims, and we recognise the advances and benefits that it has brought. Communication is at the heart of what we teach, although we would make a distinction between communication as the exclusive ‘means’ and as the ‘end’. Communication is a consequence of what happens in the classroom more than being the starting point of what happens at all costs.
This is what I meant when I said to disgusted of Tunbridge Wells that we can move beyond CLT, which so often seems to end up becoming trapped in a hall of mirrors. So I am genuinely sorry that pens and books figure in our first lessons, but we do not live in caves and we do not use the pens to club our students into submission.

Are you this kind of person?

Why I like my coach

"Back to my tennis........
I’ve started lessons with a new coach and I’m pretty pleased. I’ve been watching and noticing how he manages things and he’s got qualities that apply to most teaching situations.

First of all, he knows just what I’m capable of and he seems to keep me working just at the edge of my limits. He also sees when I’m beginning to get frustrated and when I’m simply beginning to tire. The pace suits me. I’m breaking sweat pretty much straight away – he’s hitting the ball hard enough and just far way enough to keep me stretched but without leaving me doubled up on the ground panting for breath – something he could easily do if he wanted to (he could also bore me stiff like a previous coach who didn’t seem to be interested enough in me to notice how good I could be and just did everything on ‘auto-instructor’ mode).

We start with a warm-up. He gets me to practice strokes that I can already handle pretty well but he ups the pace from session to session to make sure that it’s challenging - I certainly couldn’t have coped a couple of weeks ago with the pace we’re working at now. I’m improving my basics and feeling more confident and becoming more adventurous.

He makes sure there’s variety. He’ll introduce a new exercise each session to work on a new stroke but he doesn’t spend too long on this. I get more wrong than right at the beginning and he doesn’t let me reach the stage where I lose heart. He stops when he reckons I’ve had enough, not because I’ve finished learning the new stroke – we’ve just completed the first step. We’ll go back to it again next time and the following time and sooner or later he’ll incorporate it into the repertoire of our warm-up.

I certainly get more upset about my mistakes than he does and he makes sure he gives me plenty of encouragement by praising shots that really deserve it and not commenting on every single bad shot, limiting himself to identifying the cause of a problem when I make the same kind of mistake several times. The thing is I know that he sees everything and that he sees everything in a broad context – where I started from and where we’d like to get to.

We’re “playing tennis”, which makes me feel great. But I know that really he’s “playing” – not “playing a match”. He’s working on improving me. That’s why I’m here."


It's probably true that all of us transfer our own preferences, tastes and styles (How can you not like pasta? Don't you realise it's fantastic?!) into our students and as teachers "do to others as we would like others to do to us" Teachers who like grammar teach lots of it.
Teachers who like poetry incorporte poetry into their lessons.
Teachers who don't like organisation like to improvise (wing it).
Teachers who like the sound of their own voices assume everyone else does too.
Teachers who feel uncomfortable about 'correcting people' don't like to 'correct mistakes'.
Teachers who are laid back don't expect too much effort from students.

Please add others at will:

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’.