This year’s ELT-a-thon in Glasgow was my third IATEFL conference, as well as my third as a speaker, but the first where I really got the feeling that EFL and ESL are fields in serious transition, with the path forward uncertain.

Personally, the conference week started off well (serendipitous meeting with Bethany Cagnol of TESOL France getting on the plane in Paris, sat together, good laughs); then took a turn for the worse when I got to my hotel late in the evening (restaurant closed, no other dining alternatives in vicinity, went to bed hungry like Oliver Twist) and then deteriorated further when I got my pre-conference SIG planning totally wrong, pitching up to the “Young Learners and Teenagers” event (the latter being my interest) only to find – mea culpa for not reading the schedule carefully – that the day’s talks were focused on the tiniest of tots and how to teach them.

Initially, my excessive politeness kicked in and I stayed put, deciding to tough it out despite my error. I felt compelled to make for the exit, however, when egged on to participate, along with the other 50 or so teachers present, in a “clap-hands-and-repeat” sing-along on the theme of “I’m happy / you’re happy; I’m sad / you’re sad” or something along those lines.

I must say that, as much as I admire primary school teachers and their endless quest for new ideas to engage learners of that age group, I fail to see why grown men and women are always exhorted to “join in the fun” at conferences like these.  It seems something particular to the teaching profession and, I suspect, ELT in particular. You seldom see pediatricians affecting whooping cough at seminars on children’s illnesses; or fashion designers dressed up in Petit Bateau outfits at trade shows for children’s apparel, but for some reason when it comes to Young Learners and English, there seems to be this irresistible urge to “get down with the kids.” Baffling. I know I will get stick for this from some of those who were there, but please, it’s no criticism of your teaching approach: it’s just that I’m allergic to this type of forced presentation session “interactivity.”

While I’m in mild rant mode, I just want to point out the continuing absurdity of lumping in teenagers with Young Learners in that particular SIG. It’s a bit like having an “Aviation English and Glaswegian Street Slang” SIG: the two have absolutely nothing in common; the teachers of one group tend not to teach the other; and as a result the “Teens” part of the label always feels like a last-minute add-on with no real pedagogical focus upon it. A good example: the very comprehensive symposium on Teens and Technology on the Thursday afternoon was organized by the Learning Technology SIG, and was the better for it.

On to the Conference proper, which was a very special one for me as I got to see, live on stage, two of the authors I first read when studying TEFL: Jim Scrivener and Michael Swan. Predictably, they spoke to packed audiences, adding to the privileged feeling of having them at the conference.

Jim Scrivener’s talk, in particular, was highly thought provoking. His general message — that we are often guilty of “excessive niceness” in the classroom, preventing us from challenging our students more – was a brave one, and he followed it up with a challenge of his own: that we take time to think about where learning is actually occurring in the classroom, and to focus our time and energy on those valuable trigger points.

Scrivener also spoke about the problem of some teachers blindly following the course book.  To be fair, this is sometimes a symptom of inexperience; and sometimes teachers have book-based lesson plans more or less imposed on them by their Director of Studies, school owner, or state education system. But Jim’s general point is still valid: textbooks are all too often used as a substitute for contextual analysis of learner’s needs and the creation of tailored lesson plans to address them.

As ever, the subject of “Technology” loomed very large across all five days of the Conference. The trickle of how-to sessions I first experienced in Harrogate on this theme has by now turned into a raging river, encompassing new conference agenda favorites like mobile learning and now learning with tablet computers. But to echo Scrivener’s point about asking ourselves where learning actually occurs, what worries me is that very few of these talks start by stating the pedagogical aims of the proposed technology-assisted task. They tend, instead, to just dive into an explanation of how to use the website, app or program in question, followed by samples produced in class and testimonials on how much the (usually young) learners enjoyed the activity.

The activities shown are, mostly, indeed engaging and do promote learning (or at least activity) autonomy and some language use in new and original ways.  But I get the distinct feeling that most of them will end up being bypassed by other, newer types of digital activities, more flavors-of-the-month, in which case: why bother? Learning the sequence of required steps, getting used to the user controls, and getting a handle on the interface logic of any new digital device or online service takes requires a certain amount of trial and error, and takes time and practice. Once you’ve learned it, you can start to use it fluidly and unleash some real creativity. But, just like language learning itself, the key is in the repetition, the building up of confidence and self-assurance, and the pushing of the technology into the background as one’s increasing familiarity with it allows us to focus on the content, on the communicative objective. Compare the trepidation you felt just before publishing your very first post on Facebook, and the timidity of that message, with the nonchalance with which you now add to your profile status on a regular basis.

So it would not be a bad idea if, on the subject of learning with technology, we could encourage teachers to commit to a course-long use of a couple carefully selected tools, to be used both within and outside of the classroom, so that both the teacher and his or her learners can benefit from the flattening out of the technology learning curve over time, In short, let’s not swap the confining nature of the linear textbook with a de-focus created by a rather promiscuous use of too many of the newly available digital teaching and entertainment tools.  They may be great conference subject matter, but – if used haphazardly and in an unstructured, short-term way – these may ultimately distract teachers from their core teaching objective. The danger, paradoxically, is that this might in turn ultimately drive some teachers back to the safe, secure, and comforting “home base” represented by the course book.

There is one last aspect of the IATEFL conference that reminds me about Scrivener’s point referenced above. It puzzles me that the one field directly related to “where learning actually occurs” in the most basic way, cognitive neuroscience, is still very much a side-show at conferences like these. Sure, James Zull’s eye-opening  talk on the subject was positioned as a plenary, but one still gets the impression that talk of neurons, synapses and dendrites sort of sails past everyone’s head, and that the end-of-talk applause is more at the politeness end of the scale than demonstrative of real enthusiasm and agreement in a head-nodding way.

How can this be? Brains are required for learning, so if we want to understand how to teach better, we really need to get at the fundamentals of how learners learn, not just pedagogically but physiologically as well. To reprise my comparisons with other professions earlier in this post, can we imagine graduating engineers without a thorough understanding of physics, thermodynamics or the fundamental properties of metals? Would we award professional qualifications to agronomists who have not studied the chemistry of soil, plant cell structure, and the precise nature of photosynthesis? Yet millions of teachers venture forth from teacher training every year without a solid grounding in brain-based learning.

The more we find out about how the human brain actually works, the more we realize how much it changes over time (with very real implications on how we need to teach to different age brackets, like teens); how specific regions of the brain are primed to deal with communication generally and language specifically; and how pedagogical principles like the value of repetition can find very real support in an understanding of how stimuli move from input to intake to long-term memory. It’s a fascinating, evolving, and vital area of research directly related to teaching as a field of study and as an applied science, and I would love to see it occupy its proper role in the teaching profession, especially in language teaching, and at conferences like these. That said, kudos to IATEFL for bringing Dr. Zull over from Ohio.

In between the plenaries, the talks, and meeting up with existing and potential territory Marketing Partners for English Attack!, I managed to squeeze in about half a dozen chats with textbook publishers as well. It’s a fascinating time to be talking to the latter. Publishers are both interested in – and wary of – pure-play digital upstarts like ourselves. They are starting to finally understand that “going digital” means a lot more than adding an online “complement” to their course books, and that having a truly compelling and pedagogically valid stand-alone online offering is in fact expensive, requires a lot of hard work, and takes years to get right. Our message to them is that it makes a lot of sense to simply partner with the best of what’s out there, rather than try to compete with them when what we do will never be the primary focus of the mother ship. Will we be working with them more in the near future? We shall see: “Talks are ongoing,” as they say in diplomatic circles.

So, in conclusion, IATEFL 2012 was a conference at which the continuing “learning with technology” show-and-tell picked up further pace; it was a conference at which at least one of the ELT gurus present delivered a back-to-basics message unadorned with the usual Dogme trappings; and it was a conference at which the traditional backbone of the event, the publishers, showed signs of realizing that “the jig is up” without, for that, fully being able to say what their businesses will look like five years from now.

We know that ELT is changing, but, at its heart, is it really destined to be a transformative change? Perhaps we are simply and very slowly becoming aware that the fundamentals must remain at the core of what we do – and in fact we need to research these more fully and seriously than ever before, including on the cognitive level – but that the means to then implement teaching techniques based on these fundamentals will be available in more shapes, sizes and patterns that anyone could have previously imagined. Provided that we treat the best of the technology tools as stable, continuously used resources that build towards something, and not quick-to-adopt, quick-to-abandon gewgaws, we may actually be able to have our digital cake and eat it too. Roll on Liverpool!

By Katheryn Rivas

The proper way to support ESL objectives has been a hot topic of discussion in the academic world in several countries for many, many years now. The debate essentially revolves around a budgeting issue. Many people believe that ESL should not be taught in the mainstream native speaker classroom because teaching ESL typically requires additional resources and support to adjust to the different linguistic and learning complications of a new language. Extra resources and support unfortunately equates to extra funding. With public schools already in a difficult financial state, there are many people who are against putting extra funding towards ESL learning rather than other academic purposes. There are many attempted solutions to the issue throughout both the private and the public school systems, but no agreed upon resolution has been found.

ESL in American Public Schools

In 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act required that public schools in the United States help ESL students become proficient in English. While this means that public schools are required by law to address the needs of ESL students, many experts believe that the approach is fundamentally flawed. In a time of recession, ESL programs and other programs serving culturally, linguistically, and economically diverse students will often suffer. Funding, for the most part, is prioritized to serve the more mainstream and conventional student population. To cope with the rising number of non-English-speaking students in the classroom, many public schools have adopted instead the “full inclusion” approach to ESL teaching. With this approach, non-English- speaking students are placed in “native” English classes regardless of their individual ability to read or understand English. The ESL budget is then concentrated on providing English tutoring support rather than to implement an actual ESL curriculum. While this approach is intended as a budget saver, many individuals claim that the best method for language fluency is indeed full immersion and therefore that this approach is also pedagogically sound.

While some experts claim that “full inclusion,” for both these reasons, is the smartest, most reasonable option for the public schooling curriculum, there are many others who argue the opposite. Study after study shows that ESL students in high school and middle school programs are more successful reaching language fluency when engaged in specialized language programs rather than “inclusion” classrooms.

A 2006 study by Roberts, Brunner, and Bills examined ESL programs in both private and public schools in the state of Utah which included a poll to determine which approach was perceived to have the most effective ESL outcomes. The researchers found that most educators believed the public schools in the state to provide the best support. However, these public schools did not take the “full inclusion” approach. Rather, the schools used specialized programs and curricula to support their ESL students. While this study is not conclusive as to what the best approach for ESL education is, it does support the idea that specialized programs should be given emphasis. This runs counter to decisions taken in large states, often influenced by political factors. In 1998, voters in California passed Proposition 227, which stated that all public school instruction must be conducted in English and that extra funding will be put towards “personal English tutoring”. This forces all public schools to have “full inclusion” classrooms. The arguments for and against the proposition are fairly simple to understand, and each has merit. On the one hand, full inclusion forces students and teachers into a relatively untested method of teaching without any flexibility. On the other, in full inclusion classrooms students are treated as equals within the classroom and there is less separation, both linguistic and cultural.

Another argument for specialized ESL curricula is that full inclusion classrooms put both language populations at a disadvantage. While non-English speakers are not obtaining the best materials and support they can get to learn English in the classroom, fluent English students in an inclusion classroom suffer as well. While the curriculum in these classrooms is designed for “average” English speaking students, teachers are forced to slow down for the non-fluent English students and all students, in turn, suffer to some degree.

For the most part, the debate simply continues as to what should be done with ESL teaching in the secondary school classroom and where budgeting should be focused. However, if any real progress is going to be made, it needs to be made soon. As the non-English speaking population of the United States continues to grow, experts predict that in many states 50 percent of the students in an average state school system classroom will soon be from non-English speaking backgrounds. The public school system must respond to the changing population in order to provide the best education possible for every student in the classroom.

This guest post is contributed by Katheryn Rivas, who writes for online universities blog.  She welcomes your comments at katherynrivas87@gmail.com

Our Serbian friends PRODIREKT and their language network Verbalisti recently announced the results of the poll designed to discover how parents in the Balkans feel about the language education of their children.

The visitors of the Verbalisti Facebook page were asked “How important is it for your children to learn a foreign language in the native speaking country?”. The survey was conducted in four countries – Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, during two time intervals – from 21st November to 21st December 2011, and from January 6 to February 6, 2012, and it generated enormous interest among the Verbalisti network fans and other Facebook members alike. The poll reached 247,757 people, while 1,566 participants cast their vote, with 1,226 of them saying that they would send their children to learn a foreign language in a native speaking country, regardless of the family budget constraints.

See the full survey write-up here.

This week’s guest post is by Jan Pierce, currently a 4th-grade teacher who has over 20 years of experience in the classroom. Her interests include educational technology and online learning. She also runs the site Elementary Education Degree, for students interested in earning a degree in elementary education.

When it comes to teaching ESL classes, teens are perhaps the hardest group to motivate. However, with a few innovative techniques, you can get teens excited about learning English while connecting with them on a deeper level. Here are some suggestions for motivating teen English learners.

1. Pop Culture – Most teens will have a strong interest in music, movies, and television, which means they’ll be more willing to discuss Beyonce’s latest hit or the new Twilight movie than the headlines in the news. This is a good way to use descriptive words, express opinions, and use the past tense, and it will help you learn more about your teen students.

2. Competition – Teens are just as competitive (or even more so) than little kids. Harnessing this sense of competition is a great way to motivate them in English classes. You can incorporate games into almost any type of lesson or activity. For example, a game for vocabulary practice could involve having them write down as many words they can think of related to a specific topic in one minute.

3. Talents – Learning about your students’ talents is another great way to connect with them. These talents can become the basis for creative English lessons. If a student plays the guitar, he/she could play a popular song while the rest of the students sing the English lyrics. An artistic student could draw a picture for the class to make up a story about.

4. Pen Pals – It can often be difficult to motivate teen students to write. One way to do this is to give them each a pen pal. This could with an ESL class in another school in your district or on the other side of the globe. You can easily find ways to connect with other ESL classes online, and this also makes the process go a lot faster than sending letters.

5. Appropriate Reading – No teenager wants to read dated stories about Dick and Jane that don’t apply to their lives. Find reading that interests them, such as stories about teens, celebrities, or sports. It’s also important to make sure the reading is at the right level for them – if it’s too easy, they’ll be bored, and if it’s too hard, they won’t want to do it.

6. Music – Teens don’t really want to listen to the audio practices that come with English courses, but they love listening to music. Play songs they like and go over the lyrics together (as long as they don’t have inappropriate words). You could even make worksheets for them to fill in certain words as the song plays.

7. Videos – Like songs, videos are a great teaching tool for teens in an English class. Thanks to YouTube, it’s easy to access everything from movie trailers and music videos to funny home movies. These can be great materials for discussion and comprehension.

8. WebQuest – Teens love to surf on the internet and are very good at finding information on the web. WebQuest is a tool that creates activities or “quests” that have students search for specific information based on links their teachers give them. Then they make a PowerPoint about what they found out. WebQuests can even be designed based on reading level, which makes them easy to adapt to any ESL class.

9. Games – As mentioned above, teens thrive on competition. Games are a great teaching tool as well because it makes students forget that they’re learning when they’re having so much fun. Games that work well in classrooms include quiz games, like Jeopardy, or a guessing game like 20 Questions.

10. Life Connections – Connecting to students’ lives in a tangible way can help them understand why learning English is important for them. You could go on trips to their favorite places like shopping centers or sports arenas and practice giving directions. You could also have them bring some of their favorite objects into class and talk about themselves.

Paris, France, February 7, 2012: English Attack! has been named official pedagogical partner and content supplier to English By Yourself (www.englishbyyourself.fr), the national online portal for English language learning developed by the French Education Ministry and launched today at a press event in Paris by French Education Minister Luc Chatel.

The portal has been created and will be operated by the Centre National d’Enseignement a Distance (Cned), the French Education Ministry’s distance-learning unit. Like English Attack!, the Cned is active in the promotion of informal, lifelong education and autonomous learning for a wide audience.

Every day, English By Yourself will feature feature freshly updated content from English Attack!, specifically:

• The Video Booster of the Day – an interactive language exercise based on a clip from a current movie, TV series episode, or music video and designed to develop listening, comprehension, reading, vocabulary and grammar skills. A new Video Booster will be promoted on the home page of the Ministry’s portal every 24 hours.
• The Verb Dash learning game, developed to help learners to master the various forms of irregular verbs in English. The game will be a permanent feature of the English By Yourself portal
• The Photo Vocab of the Day – a themed visual dictionary on a wide range of topics. Each Photo Vocab contains 15 to 20 lexical items related to the theme, including vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, and cultural references like commonly used acronyms.

English Attack! has been created in consultation with linguists and Teachers of English as a Foreign Language, and implements a novel pedagogical approach to language learning based on cognitive neuroscience. It is accessible to learners of any level, and incorporates the following pedagogical principles:

• Proficiency is driven by regular exposure to current, authentic English. This frequency of exposure is arrived at by motivating learners to use the service often, via enjoyable content units based on topics of widespread general interest – for example a movie currently playing in local cinemas, or a visual dictionary providing vocabulary on a major event in the news.
• Learning effectiveness is enhanced by lessons that are always situated in a specific meaningful context, are of short duration, and illustrated via a video clip or a selection of photos.
• Storage of newly aquired language in long-term memory can only be acheived by sufficient repetition of the learned content at appropriate intervals. English Attack! encourages varied repetition of learned items via its range of five learning games, which are dynamically driven by the site’s video-based and photo-based content.
• Errors are not to be penalized, but rather – as in videogames – they must be seen as a natural consequence of attempting a task, getting something wrong, and trying again integrating the learning arrived at via the error. This principle is reinforced by a supportive reward ecosystem consisting of constant positive feedback, points scored for every activity, and badges awarded for completing specific learning tasks.
• The practice of communicative skills is best encouraged by meaningful interaction with others. In the case of English Attack! this is achieved by learner participation in (and communication within) the site’s international social network of learners of English.

About the Cned:
The Centre National d’Enseignement a Distance (Cned) is a national public sector organization appointed by the French Ministries of Education and Higher Learning, and is tasked with the promotion and enabling of distance learning, in particular via information and communication techologies.

Check out this wonderful cinema-quality advertisement from CCAA, the Brazilian chain of English language schools – the biggest English-teaching organization in South America in fact – with over 400,000 students.

The big-name actors (did you ever in your wildest dreams think you’d see Mike Tyson in a commercial about learning English?), sky-high production values and humor on display go some way towards helping us understand how big a business English is in South America. But what it also does is to afford a refreshing glimpse of how industry players in other parts of the world  sometimes show a far more playful, creative and emotion-driven approach to communicating English proficiency as a goal, as compared with the usual  “prepare for your TOEIC (or other standardized test) so you can get a job” pitch seen all too often in Europe and Asia.

Whatever you think of CCAA itself as a school, from a pure communications point of view we could do with a lot more of this type of marketing from the English-teaching industry. Muito bom!

Chicago, January 9th, 2012: Entertainment Learning, the pioneering education-via-entertainment company, announced its partnership with Kinney & Associates today for the launch, marketing and business development of its flagship language learning service, English Attack!, (www.english-attack.com) in the United States.

English Attack! allows learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) in the United States – an audience some estimate to be as large as 50 million individuals – to improve their English contextually with video clips from blockbuster movies, hit TV series, music videos and television news reports ; online games ; and thematic visual dictionaries. English Attack engages participatants and allows them to  practice their developing English language skills with a global social network of learners of English. Users have a choice between an English-language interface and a version with navigation, help texts, tutorials, a dictionary, and other resources in 19 other languages. These include Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Hindi, Russian, Romanian, Polish and Korean, allowing easier access to the site’s unique pedagogical approach.

Said Paul Maglione, Co-founder of Entertainment Learning : “The US is of course a special market for English language learning, due to the tens of millions of immigrants or first-generation citizens that need to improve their English to maximize their academic, professional and social potential in their country of adoption. We needed to find a partner who had not just an excellent reputation in the national education industry but also one who also shared our vision of a language-learning experience transformed by web 2.0 functionalities. We finally found what we were looking for in Kinney & Associates and are confident that they will help us make this vision a reality here in the United States.

Said David Kinney of Kinney & Associates: “ English Attack offers an engaging and powerful resource for schools, community organizations, companies and colleges. It is unique and fulfills the need to deliver innovative solutions for today’s digital generation. The school platform will allow instructors to easily track usage on data to insure accountability and success. Entertainment Learning has created a program that can have a major impact and create learning communities connecting English language learners around the world.“

About Kinney & Associates:

Kinney & Associates was established in 1994 by David Kinney, a former special education teacher, administrator and test consultant. His background in assessment and technology lead to developing one of the leading consulting and professional development companies utilizing a “data driven” model of school improvement. Kinney and Associates strives to offer the very latest programs and services that are both affordable and effective in helping to increase student achievement.  As distributor for English Attack!, the company will deploy an array of marketing and consulting services, including grant writing, to deliver the product to schools, community organizations and agencies throughout the United States. Go to www.kinneyandassociates.com for more information.

Contact :
David Kinney, principal, Kinney & Associates
david@english-attack.com

“Technology” has been one of the hottest buzzwords in the world of education for a couple of decades now. Teachers, education authorities, multinational companies, entrepreneurs and investors around the world are waking up to the transformative possibilities of digital and online technologies applied to the learning process.

Likewise, the EFL/ESL conference circuit has shown a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for any presentation involving online platforms, podcasts, tweets, blogs, or mobile devices. No TESOL or IATEFL national chapter meeting or global conference these days is complete without a smorgasbord of talks showing how teachers of English can use new sites and services to drag their lessons kicking and screaming into the 21^st century.

So I would suggest it’s time to formally recognize the new opportunities these technologies bring to the domain of English language teaching, and to mark their pedagogical importance, with a collective label. For no other reason than its widespread identification with evolved (i.e. interactive, socially connected, hardware-agnostic) digital networks, I humbly suggest English 2.0.

The term has an immediate weakness, which I am the first to admit: that of implying that the set of teaching advances represented by English 2.0 is solely focused on technology; on the medium. In this case, Marshall McLuhan was only partially right. The medium is indeed part of the message, but not all of it. I will explain why.

It has by now become a cliché to say that technology is just an educational enabler, not the objective of digitally enhanced teaching. Nevertheless, it’s healthy to remind ourselves that sound pedagogy must always be at the heart of the teaching endeavor. Always, always, we must maintain our focus on how technology can help implement those pedagogical principles, not substitute for them. If we can use that as our starting point, and if we think laterally about all the new things we can now do in language teaching instead of vertically about how technology can merely improve what we are already doing in the classroom, we can consider English 2.0 as following on from Grammar Translation, Audio Lingual / Structural Situational, Cognitive Code, and more recently the Communicative and Lexical approaches not as the latest in a series of pedagogical fads, but rather as a further step in our understanding of how additional languages are learned and what we can do to empower and facilitate that process.

Of course, there is always the temptation to over-reach, to ascribe to a new vision foundations that have in fact already been in place for some time. At its heart, even though so much of what it can achieve in scale is unprecedented, English 2.0 is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. As a pedagogical orientation, it builds on the more valid elements of those ELT methodologies that preceded it, in particular the Communicative and Lexical approaches.

This deep nod to Mssrs Chomsky, Nunan, Widdowson, Krashen, and Lewis (and even, in a way, to their distinguished critics, like Michael Swan) is reflected in the fact that English 2.0 is best understood as providing new, unprecedented facilitation and acceleration to the best of the past four decades of pedagogical advances in EFL/ESL; as well as adding new dimensions to them.

Some of these concepts – immediate personalized feedback and continuous positive reinforcement, to take two examples – have been seen and appreciated  in the past, but were hitherto used only in small-class or tutoring contexts and thus unavailable to the majority of learners. Other dimensions  encompassed by English 2.0, on the other hand, are totally new, such as the ability to connect the learner with a quasi-unlimited choice of current authentic input; the extent to which new online and mobile teaching platforms can extend EFL/ESL education to a vast “anywhere/anytime” arena, including transforming the whole notion of homework; and the ease with which these platforms can foster autonomy and intrinsic motivation in the learner. Another new dimension created by English 2.0 is the ability to effectively “gamify” EFL/ESL for learners, thus allowing the educator to replace the learning-unfriendly stress brought on by grades and pass/fail marks with learning-enhancing game-like reward systems and the social sharing of learning achievement.

There is one aspect to English 2.0 that might seem counter-intuitive at first. It is that this vision for language learning can completely and comfortably embrace stripped-down, “unplugged,” high-touch teaching methods like Dogme, which often are positioned in direct opposition to a learning-with-technology approach.

Unplugged ELT: not at all in opposition to English 2.0

This is because English 2.0 fully recognizes that some things are best done by a human being spending time with other human beings in a physical space, such as a classroom. These areas include person-to-person unscripted discussion (i.e. “talking”); gentle pronunciation guidance; or communicated centered on local and present topics relevant to the learner and teacher.

Learners can only spend so much time in a fixed location with a teacher, however, and thus if we want to make the learning process faster and deeper we need to add out-of-classroom learning into the mix. It seems fair to say that this is where the new generation of networked, interactive digital resources and platforms can make a real difference. Compared with the textbooks of old, we can now give learners access to vast collections of authentic language samples (which in turn allows much lexical and grammar work to be contextual); allow them to explore language in a non-linear fashion; and achieve levels of intake frequency and repetition-with-variation that allow them to better lock vocabulary items and language usage principles into long-term memory.

In fact, there is more than mere parallelism to the relationship between online resources and Dogme-style teaching. It is precisely the ability to shift lesson components like Presentation and Drilling away from the classroom that allows more if not all classroom time to be dedicated to the high-touch methods and human-interactions principles on which the Dogme concept is based.

So we see that English 2.0 is not just a collection of technology tools, but rather a way of using assets like time, place and the teacher-learner (and learner-learner) relationship in new, more flexible, more creative and more productive ways.

This is the key thing to understand about English 2.0. It is a combination of the best of past pedagogical breakthroughs in linguistics; of a better understanding of how learners actually learn (including the latest advances in cognitive neuroscience); of a re-valued and enhanced role for the teacher and what his or her core function needs to be; and, yes, of technology to increase and optimize time spent learning. More than yet another “approach,” it is a spirit of openness, of adaptability, of trust in the learner’s capacity to become engaged in the learning process; and of ambition that we can harness the new communications tools and social networks around us to make learning a new language more enjoyable, effective and efficient. It is also a spirit of democratic access to learning, made possible by digital technology. For the first time ever, the ability to learn the global language of opportunity does not depend uniquely on the presence of qualified teachers in one’s school or home town, nor on the ability to afford language courses and expensive textbooks.

There is one additional facet of English 2.0 that is worth emphasizing. The digital revolution of the past 20 years has unfolded in the context of increasing globalization. Soon, if it hasn’t happened already, the number of speakers of English as a foreign or second language will surpass those who speak it as their native tongue. English 2.0 belongs to those born in the midst of this technology revolution. Digital natives tend not to have a marked preference for British English or American English, because all imaginable variants of English are reflected in the terabytes of input material now available to learners and reflected in the reality of everyday digital communication among speakers and learners of English across satellites and the Internet.

Learners today know that they want to be at least capable of understanding all forms and regional variants of English, from formal written business texts to the most informal verbal, regional slang, including idioms, acronyms and cultural references that will tend to pop up as they expand their roster of entertainment references and their circle of English-language conversation partners. Most of these learners will never develop a Texas drawl or even attempt to affect a Cockney’s dropped consonants, but they will benefit from knowing that one seldom actually “takes a bull by the horns” these days, and that being invited over to a London friend’s “Mickey Mouse” does not imply paying a visit to a Disney character. English 2.0 is World English. Not some neutered “globish” version of the language, but an all-inclusive appreciation for the vastness of English that encourages recognition and understanding of all its manifestations, even if we don’t use them ourselves in everyday discourse.

There is one last extraordinarily significant aspect of English 2.0, true to the significance of the “2.0” label, that bears mentioning: the extent to which blogs, Twitter, webinars, Facebook fan pages, and LinkedIn professional groups have allowed teachers everywhere to create Personal Learning Networks that help them become better teaching professionals as well as forming productive friendships with other educators. Whereas once a teacher in a small town might only hear about a new pronunciation approach or classroom management technique months or years after it had first been introduced somewhere, that information now reaches hundreds of thousands of EFL/ESL professionals around the world in seconds. Where once information was power; now it is the sharing of that information that confers status on the person sharing it. We have thus moved into an era where good teaching ideas circulate faster, productive experiments can be brought into practice more quickly, and great educational resources can be made available to both learners and teachers instantly and regardless of physical location.

A facet of English 2.0: Powerful Teacher Training and Sharing via PLN's

So, in conclusion, as we glide into 2012 and the 20^th anniversary of the internet’s reaching “adulthood” via the standardization of the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) in 1982, let’s honor this landmark event in the history of human evolution via lending part of its nomenclature to the way we can finally start teaching English to reach the hundreds of millions of people who thirst for it, keeping all that is great about the best in EFL/ESL pedagogy; communicating it and sharing it among ourselves collaboratively;  and amplifying it through the power of personalization, context, creativity, emotion, choice, speed, interactivity, motivation, and community. Think “twice as good.” Think 2.0!

As is my wont, I have once again preferred to let my thoughts settle a bit after a TESOL conference, rather than post immediate re-caps and impressions right after the sessions have ended. I like to let the old synapses do some sifting and filtering before putting cursor to WordPress, as it were, to see what remains as having had a particular impact on me. It’s rather like a process of gentle, simmering reduction – like a good French sauce – from a large casserole full of quality ingredients (two and a half days of great events, talks and conversations).

France TESOL has a special place in my heart, of course, as the very first EFL event at which I ever gave a talk. This was in distant 2009, as we were just beginning the coding of the prototype English Attack! website. So I guess it was fitting that, three years later, we would unveil our Teacher and Schools platform at the same event, in our home town of Paris, on the occasion of TESOL France’s 30^th anniversary annual Colloquium.

The first talk that motivated me to take notes (a major caveat: I was unable to attend many talks that I would have liked to, so this list is hardly exhaustive nor representative of the fascinating topics and brilliant speakers in Paris) was Stephen Brewer’s keynote on Friday evening, during which he introduced the notion of learner “habits” they need to acquire in order to maximize their learning potential. It’s a notion I had not come across before, for all the talk of autonomy and intrinsic motivation, for habits are something slightly different: actions you perhaps force yourself into at first, or have forced on you, but which are then done routinely and automatically, without coercion or even self-coercion, simply because we know it’s good for us and we function better that way. The notion also feeds into my interest in frequency,  out-of-classroom learning and in using web 2.0 principles to foster more involvement by the learner in the learning process. How can we, as teachers, suggest techniques, resources, approaches and exercises that will survive the “coercion” phase, imposed by us in a regulated environment, to eventually become ingrained, useful, and totally voluntary habits? Can imposed reading become reading for pleasure, as so often happens in a learner’s L1 early in life? Can increased exposure to authentic English, through online video assigned as homework for example, result into habitual browsing of YouTube clips in English for the pure pleasure of it? It’s a fascinating subject, and one that merits further consideration and sharing of ideas.

The second talk that made an impact on me was David A. Hill’s presentation “Whose Culture Is It, Anyway?” on how the same topics can look very different according to your national perspective. Towards the end of his talk, he handed out sheets with the lyrics of the Pink Floyd song “Time,” and played the song from his laptop. I’ve always been a Pink Floyd fan, and have heard this particular song and even sung along to it (badly!) dozens of times, but David’s highlighting of the significance of the lyrics was the first time I had ever truly understood them, and it was a wonderful demonstration of how song lyrics can illustrate and expand upon a rather amorphous concept like “time,” not just in terms of its measurement in seconds, minutes and hours, but also its deeper related consequences, such as opportunity, regret, wasting time, trying to catch up with its passing, and so on. A brilliant exposé by someone who has such an easygoing yet thorough mastery of all things EFL that he should be required listening for all pre-service teachers in training.

My talk on Saturday, The Challenges (and Rewards) of Motivating Teens in EFL, involved a great discussion with the delegates present on what we loved most, and hated most, about being that age. It’s not my usual style to start off a talk by involving the audience in defining and fleshing out the topic, but it’s something that I enjoyed and shall be doing more of in the future.

Finally, my TESOL France 30^th Annual Colloquium concluded with our introduction and demo of English Attack! for Teachers and Schools, for which all conference delegates received a voucher entitling them, together with 30 learners, to three months’ free use of the platform. The presentation resulted in several France-based teachers now already using the platform, including the various teacher and class management tools, with their learners across a range of high schools, language institutes and businesses in various cities across the country. For anyone reading this having questions on how to use the voucher, or on our Teachers and Schools platform generally, just contact me at paul.maglione@english-attack.com.

So, in conclusion, hats off to Bethany Cagnol and the entire TESOL France staff and volunteers for yet another great annual event, this one more international than ever with visitors and presenters from as far afield as Brazil, Taiwan, Japan, the United States and Turkey. Would I like to attend and speak at the event next year? You bet. It would be an honor.

For the second year in a row, English Attack! has been named a Finalist in the Education category of the prestigious Tech Crunch Europas awards competition.

The annual competition gathers the best startup companies across Europe in various product and service categories, as determined by a panel of journalists, tech entrepreneurs and venture capital executives. Winning the Europas is then determined by popular vote. You can help us win by voting for us via the link below (just scroll down to the Education category, and you’ll find us). Thanks everyone!

http://theeuropas.com/vote/