I had the pleasure of listening to Robin Walker at IATEFL a couple weeks ago during his excellent talk on pronunciation, during which he addressed the fascinating topic of national and regional accents. He made many well observed points, one of which was that for communicative clarity it isn’t really necessary to adopt or parrot a specific “brand” accent, such as RP or General American.
His talk reminded me of when I started working for CNN in 1994, in London, at the time when it was sometimes still referred to as the “Chicken Noodle Network” because of its perceived provincialism. This was no doubt fueled, in Europe, by the fact that most of the network’s news readers and journalists at that time were still American. Shortly thereafter, CNN International got a new President, Chris Cramer, formerly the head of newsgathering at the BBC. Within days of his appointment, he set about transforming the look and feel of the international channel, bringing in not just British presenters but Australians, Canadians, Indians, Pakistanis as well. The early morning Asian news bulletin was fronted by local journalists based in Hong Kong; our mid-morning European news bulletin was co-presented from London and Berlin by, respectively, Fionnula Sweeny from Ireland and a German journalist with impeccable English, Bettina Luscher; and Charles Hodson, a London-based business journalist and an Englishman, was given more prominence in the evening business bulletin. We of course had Christiane Amanpour, the Anglo-Iranian reporter, filing stories from the world’s hot spots; and we even had a Puerto Rican weatherman and a Portuguese sports journalist.
Of all the “new blood” journalists transforming the image and sound of the channel, the one whose English I found to be the clearest, most neutral and most precise was that of Ralitsa Vassileva, a Bulgarian based in Atlanta of all places. Very soon, our viewing figures (and advertising business) began to rise; cable and satellite operators no longer treated us as a marginal channel; and the quality of guests coming in to the London studio for interviews jumped several notches. It was a wonderful place to work in those days; a perfect example of “world English” not interpreted as some neutered form of “globish” but rather composed of a rich kaleidoscope of English flavored by national accents, both native-speaker and non-native speaker. CNN International’s output is, still today, one of the best examples of clear, precise English unburdened by a consciousness of place or national identity, and is is this form of English which, by good fortune, many of today’s current and future world leaders and decision makers have grown up with. There will always be a place for regional accents, of course, and they are important in different ways (more cultural than linguistic), but to me the fixation of RP vs. GA and debates over which should be taught seem, increasingly, to be an anachronism from another era.
The last few years have witnessed an explosion of interest in how technology – from interactive whiteboards to podcasts to e-learning platforms like Moodle — can be used to enrich the classroom experience for learners of English.
Much less attention, however, has been paid to how technology can be used outside the classroom — where learners spend 98% of their time — to accelerate, enhance or otherwise improve the learning of English. With learners – particularly teen and young adult “digital natives” who have grown up with digital devices and the internet – increasingly using these tools and resources for home assignments in their other school subjects (not to mention for information, entertainment and social interactivity ) we owe it to ourselves, as well as to our learners, to fully investigate how digital platforms can provide a true “second front” in EFL/ESL pedagogy.
In a recent talk I gave at the IATEFL annual conference, I called homework the “Final Frontier” in EFL/ESL because in many ways this subject has become the last virtually unexplored space in English Language Teaching. In the past 40 years we’ve seen huge, tectonic shifts in the theory of how English can more effectively be taught to speakers of other languages, from the rigid, rule-centric Grammar Translation view of the world, passing via the fad-driven transitional phases of the Audio Lingual, Structural / Situational, and Cognitive theories, to arrive at the more pragmatic and learner-centric Communicative and Lexical approaches we have adopted more recently. Similarly, in terms of classroom approaches and resources, we’ve seen a healthy widening out of scope from pure textbook-driven, teacher-centric teaching to task-based learning, group work, learning games, physical movement, roleplay, and similar evolved approaches which respect the learner as a stimulation-hungry, social human being rather than only as a potential repository of received knowledge.
As soon as the learner steps outside the classroom, however, it’s another story: he or she is essentially “on their own.” With notable exceptions, it’s fair to say that many if not most EFL and ESL teachers out there still see homework as a necessary evil, liquidated with end-of-class instructions to complete some pages in a workbook. Some might even casually recognize the importance of greater exposure to the language outside of class by exhorting their learners to “read a magazine article” in Time or Newsweek, or “watch a movie in English,” or some similarly vague and unsupported task, the execution of which tends to be unverified.
Googling “EFL Homework” and permutations of similar terms results in a paltry collection of 12-year old academic papers, a homespun teacher tip or two, and that’s about it. Similarly, an appeal to my Twitter PLN, an article on the English Attack! blog asking for input, and an open question posted on a sprinkling of LinkedIn ELT groups for thoughts and experiences on the subject resulted in no more than a couple dozen comments, all very appreciated and insightful (thank you Henrick Opera, Adam, Marisa Pavan, Cecilia Lemos, Valeria Franca, Alice M, Bete Thes, Sean, and others) but nevertheless thin on the ground. Why the seeming lack of interest?
Before we delve further into the subject, this is a good time to re-examine the fundamental role of homework in general, and to refresh our thoughts on what it might be able to achieve specifically within the context of EFL/ESL. First, let’s see what the academics have to say about the concept of homework itself:
Homework is formally defined as “… tasks assigned to students by schoolteachers that are intended to be carried out during non-school hours” (Cooper, 2001, p. 3). It said to be the instructional strategy influenced by more factors than any other.
Behind a simple definition, one can say, hides one of the most complex educational tools, in the sense that homework goes beyond the school walls and invades the physical and familiar environment of each learner. Teachers, parents and particularly students, are the trilogy in the homework issue, its main vectors and actors (Cooper, 2001; Walberg & Paik, 2000).
To this, Zimmerman, in a paper from 2000, adds the remarkable insight that:
Becoming self-regulated implies students’ metacognitive, motivational and behavioral active participation in their own learning process.
So here we start to see a coming together of homework’s specificity, in terms of time, place and supervision (or the lack thereof); which neatly start to coincide with elements of EFL/ESL pedagogy that are increasingly seen as crucial, i.e.
• Learner Autonomy
• Individualized Learning
• Motivation
It would seem to me that any ESL / EFL educational tactic or tool that helped to tackle this trio would deserve a lot of respect in teacher training seminars and industry conferences. So again: why the deafening silence?
Let’s first look closer at the obstacles: why Homework doesn’t play the role that it really should in EFL. Then we can explore how online technology can mesh wonderfully with a modern pedagogical approach to overcome these obstacles.
A first obstacle, I believe, has been the fact that until now technology has not really been ripe to allow an evolved approach to homework. Clearly, if you have only linear materials to hand, it’s rather difficult to create an out-of-classroom departure from a lesson-type assignment.
Another obstacle has historically been the fundamental pedagogy schism between those who see homework as a “consolidating” tactic for what has been previously learned (or, at least, taught) in class; and those who see homework as “something else,” i.e. complementary to the classroom experience but with its own unique role in the language learning process.
Third, homework is tricky for teachers because it’s unpopular. By its very nature, assigned homework is less motivating that what it is competing with in the home: relaxation time, television, and, especially, for teens and young adults, online entertainment and social networking. And learners know that teachers are on the back foot here: by and large, students enrolled in a language course know that attendance in class and a minimum degree of attention to the teacher in front of them is compulsory; for homework, however, they’re aware that only very rarely does non-compliance have meaningful consequences.
Finally, even for those teachers that recognize that homework can result in opportunities for autonomous, individualized learning, there has until now been a heavy price to pay: the additional workload of designing homework tasks appropriate for individual learners, and the labor-intensive follow-up that it requires in terms of monitoring whether it has been done and providing feedback on the completed work.
So we see that one of the things holding back homework as a popular and researched ELT topic is that it is, on the surface, a more or less losing proposition for teachers, no matter how valuable it can be as a component of the overall learning journey.
So what I’d like to do now is to look at those drawbacks we mentioned, one by one, and show how online technology changes the game to the point where we can revisit homework as a potentially powerful adjunct to classroom teaching.
How does technology help us get over the answers-in-a-workbook model? That’s the easiest one to address: clearly, online, multimedia platforms have the capability of delivering a homework experience much more lively, interactive and involving than any workbook. If the problem until now has been that learners find workbook-based homework assignments tedious and uninspiring, this is clearly a hurdle we can vault over quite easily with what we can do nowadays on the web.
Tacking the second issue, the schism between homework-as-consolidation and homework-as-different experience, is a lot more difficult. Both sides have very valid points. Clearly, the more hours that are dedicated to a task, regardless of where that happens, the more learning will occur. That’s the whole principle of repetition, which is, on the surface paradoxically, one of the main tenets of a TEFL approach that enlists the lessons of cognitive neuroscience. However, as Andy Mallory wrote in comments to a blog post by Paula Swenson on the subject of homework, “if the student is only doing the work because you told them or because you will be angry if they don’t, then the benefit is very limited. Students will cheat, do the minimum and not engage with the task fully, defeating the purpose. Homework that means more work for you than for the students is not a good use of your time.”
And that is, I’m afraid, where the pro-consolidation camp’s arguments run out of steam.
For me, the analogy with learning how to play tennis is not far fetched. Your tennis instructor might spend 45 minutes one day teaching you the (rather convoluted, for a beginner) mechanics of the backhand swing. He would hardly expect you, however, to go over those mechanics on your own the next day, in your own time, breaking down your swing to perfect it in its component parts as pictured in a manual or seen on a videotape. He would hope, rather, that you got in the habit of playing a few hours of tennis with a friend in between weekly lessons, and that from time to time you had occasion to use the newly learned swing, even if imperfectly.
Your tennis instructor would know that, over time, you would become more confident with the swing and use it more often when the ball came to that side of the court rather than running around it to hit it with your forehand. And that, grossly oversimplified, is what autonomy is all about: discovering that instructed behavior can be employed usefully in the “real world,” and done so with increasing frequency until the behavior becomes truly learned. No extra points, then, for guessing that I come down on the side of the homework-as-different-experience. Homework, in my opinion, can be a form of “practice” which does indeed end up consolidating the “instruction” to which the learner is exposed in class. But rather than immediate cause-and-effect, this view of homework sees consolidation happening over time, informally, but in an ultimately more self-reinforcing manner.
What about the unpopularity problem? Students just don’t like homework, let’s face it. OK, fine, let’s deal with that. They certainly don’t like forms of homework that have the same look and feel as class work, but which intrude on their precious home and leisure time.
But what if “homework” could in fact be very similar to what they actually do enjoy doing in their free time? What if, instead of artificial situations and gap-filling exercises, the starting point was popular culture: video clips, online games; and social networking? What if they got the chance to use their creativity, their resourcefulness, or their sense of humor? What if the unpleasant anticipation of teacher marking could be replaced with the satisfaction of sharing the results of your efforts with your friends?
In other words, what if homework can be transformed “from a chore to a learning challenge,” as Daniel Monaghan wrote in an article in the Guardian a few years ago? A challenge that employs the values, rewards and peer dynamics of the learner’s own life, entertainment preferences and social circle rather than those of the classroom? With online platforms, this definitely becomes possible, allowing us to re-label “homework” as “practice” or “self-study,” which gives it greater perceived value and relevance in the eyes of the learner.
Finally, let’s address the workload issue. If we accept the premise that homework can be “something else,” something that is more akin to free-form practice than to consolidation drills, then we can also accept that designing the homework and checking compliance can be vastly simplified: a simple deep-link into a favored creativity or practice website might be sufficient as far as instructions on what to do; or, even better, why not respect to the full the spirit of the new possibilities and, if we have the right resource on the other end, allow learners to gravitate to whatever content or activity motivates them the most? Monitoring for compliance is just as simple: rather than get bogged in the tedium of checking whether specific homework assignments have been completed, the adoption of a game-like scoring system, with scores and achievement badges visible to all, favors a performance “pull” by the learner rather than a compliance “push” by the teacher.
These new possibilities work well enough when we adopt a traditional view of homework as extra work that is to be done after class. But we have the opportunity to stand this model on its head, which makes it more interesting for both learners and teachers. Let’s have homework spill over into classroom work, as opposed to only the other way around. Let’s have learners find content they really like, have them absorb it, and then talk about it in class, perhaps asking clarification as to specific language usages encountered. Again, a show-and-tell strategy reverses the compliance burden from the teacher back to the learner, to the benefit of both.
But we can do even more. We can go beyond seeing the world in bipolar fashion, either inside or outside of the classroom. Online platforms can constitute a “third dimension,” connecting the first, collective one – the classroom – with the second, solitary one – work done at home – in a way that allows classroom dialogue around stimulating, authentic source material and user-generated content to happen on a continuous and place-agnostic basis. Learners can pick up on an item of vocabulary, or usage, seen at home in an authentic-language video clip, and ask questions about it in class, leading to a fruitful group discussion of the item. Collaborative projects, like, say, a 3D storyline created with Xtranormal, can start off on a laptop in the bedroom and be finished in pairs or group work in a language lab. Word trees and mind maps can originate in one place, and branch out, with inputs from classmates, to new areas. Truly, the only limits are the limits of our own imagination.
Online resources that facilitate an evolved approach to EFL/ESL homework include:
- Xtranormal → 3D video making, using avatars
- Voicethread → show & tell using videos, pics, & commentary
- Lino It → brainstorming wall, can also be collaborative
- Glogster → great, popular poster-making tool
- Zimmer Twins → simple cartoon-making tool. Also: ToonDoo.
- Classik TV → make up your own movie subtitles
- MessageHop → add your photos and comment on them
- Bubblr → slideshow tool based on photos from Flickr
- Fotobabble → post a photo and provide audio comment
- Voki → customizable, talking avatars
- English Attack! → EFL through online entertainment, including movie clips, thematic visual dictionaries, games, and social networking.
What constitutes useful, creative and stimulating homework in the context of EFL/ESL? Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Don’t simply replicate what’s being done in class. Stimulating out-of-classroom assignments have to look and feel different to classroom work. Otherwise, learners will tend to consider it as just a burden and an imposition. Remember that as soon as the learners get home, these tasks are competing with the web, television, MP3 players, after-school sports, and any hobbies they might have.
- Evolved EFL/ESL homework needs to be far less linear and structured than classroom lessons. Without choice, there will be no autonomy, and without autonomy, there will be very little motivation. Many “e-learning” platforms make this mistake.
- Important: unlike classroom work, homework has no time constraints and learners should proceed at their own pace. Thus, homework should be relaxing, not stressful. The way in which compliance and performance is monitored can help or hinder homework as a non-stressful learning opportunity.
- When designing EFL/ESL homework, ask yourself: is the homework experience enriching? Does it add another dimension to what is learned in class? Does it allow learners to zero in on something that they can really get passionate about? That they can or would want to share?
- Another question to ask yourself: is there continuity in the homework, or does it just feel like disjointed tasks and exercises without a goal, without building towards an achievement or a completion? Is there an end-goal, a reward? More mature adults naturally see homework as an achievement-related activity, whereas for teens and younger adults, homework may be an activity performed at great cost (the opportunity cost of not doing more fun activities) with no foreseen immediate or long-term benefits.
So, in conclusion:
I. Homework is a neglected but vital and potentially transforming subject. If active learning is central to language acquisition, then setting effective and motivating homework should be a key skill.
II. Homework serves to reinforce precisely those areas that are difficult to strengthen in class:
III. Online technology gives us the tools and platforms to vault Homework directly from the 19th into the 21st Century, casting away the historic reasons for which it was a problem for teachers and making it appealing for learners as well as pragmatic for teachers.
IV. Online platforms used for Homework can furthermore go beyond what we currently would like it to do, constituting a “third place” between the classroom and the home, a social, communicative space. In short, homework can encourage learners to make their own links between the classroom and opportunities for talking outside it.
One last word: given how unpopular the topic has been, I was fearing a low turnout for my talk on the topic at the IATEFL conference last week in Brighton. The room, however, was filled to what seemed like 200% of capacity, which somewhat undermined my point as to what a marginalized subject it was. There is clearly much more teacher and school administrator interest in out-of-classroom learning than I originally thought, so perhaps this is one of those rare areas of technology where a problem has indeed been looking for a solution, rather than the other way around.
Yesterday’s news – that the full-length Oxford English Dictionary will henceforth be available only in digital format – pushed something that has been buzzing around in my mind into tipping-point territory. It joined forces with other recent news – that USA Today is making big cuts in the staffing of its print-based edition in favor of online; that Amazon is now selling more e-books than hardcover ones; that Newsweek, the loss-making magazine company, was sold for a symbolic dollar; and that computer manufacturers are currently rushing out iPad wannabe tablets to surf on the massive sales success of that reader-like device – to lead me to ponder on how long the EFL/ESL paper-based textbook can survive in a rapidly digitizing world.
The ELT industry seems to be in a state of semi-denial, continuing the traditional marketing investment in each year’s new editions and collections while quietly figuring out how long the party is going to last. Some publishers – Pearson with its involvement with social language-learning site LiveMocha; Cambridge with its 50% buyout of the business-oriented English360.com, and McMillan with its efforts around the teacher-centric OneStopEnglish.com, are already moving a few eggs out of the paper-based basket while figuring out how to manage the conundrum of building up a digital presence while continuing to milk the physical cash cows. Others seem to be adopting an ostrich-like stance, making only symbolic efforts at playing the digital game and pretty much hiding their heads in the sand, paralyzed at the prospect of fundamental and permanent change in the “one textbook, one workbook, every learner, every year” formula that has produced such nice revenue streams until now.
As stated by Graham Stanley in a prescient blog post a little over a year ago, the temptation in these situations is always to believe that a little added-value to the existing product will be enough to see off the new-form rivals, much as the music industry did for most of the previous decade.
But the EFL/ESL texbook will be subject, if anything, to even more pressure for change. The need to be very careful about presenting appropriate content by age, culture/religion and proficiency level has become ever-harder to accomplish with a single edition. Young people, in particular, are becoming increasingly allergic to paper-based educational formats lacking interactivity and social networking features (I know this from personal experience with my children aged 10 and 14, for whom exhortations to do assignments in their language workbooks are about as popular as requests that they take out the trash. When given the option, they go for the trash every time). The input material in textbooks seems to age faster than ever, especially when publishers try to make them “current” (Pussycat Dolls? Daddy, that is so 2009). The complaints about the weight of textbooks in backpacks becomes louder by the semester; and sooner or later the “dead trees” ecology argument will find the target as well. Finally, the learning of correct pronunciation is becoming more solidified as a learner demand, and this is one area where textbooks have run out of rabbits to un-hat – the effort with back-of-cover CD-Roms or DVD-Roms having run its natural course.
So Is The Clock Ticking?
Is there a future for ye olde chapter & verse ELT textbook over the next decade or so? In the medium term (five years), almost certainly. The books themselves have gotten a lot better, and this alone will tamp down the students’ carping for a while. The “wiring” of schools, in particular those in the state sector, is proving painfully slow once the relatively easy option of Interactive Whiteboards has been checked off. It will be years until the average 12-year-old will be expected to come to class with his e-tablet, much as he or she is expected to purchase stationery supplies ahead of the start of classes today. And many classrooms in the poorer parts of the developing world still lack electricity, let alone a broadband connection or wi-fi, so paper-based materials (if they’re lucky) and chalkboards will continue to be relevant in these settings for some time to come.
But the writing, longer-term, does indeed seem to be on the wall. I do think, however, that despite the widespread declared enthusiasm for “edtech” and all its related cyber-baubles, teachers still – and will continue to – rely on a quality ELT textbook as the pedagogical “anchor” of their teaching, and schools are also probably more comfortable having such an expert-authored curriculum than being without. I can easily see an emerging norm where textbooks are phased out for learners in favor of online platforms, both in the classroom and outside of it; while the publishers, in addition to investing in those types of platforms, focus their efforts textbook-wise on teachers and the related teacher training that allows them to get the best out of the material. The unit sales volumes for physical books will be nothing like they’ve been to date; but with the right understanding of how to achieve the transition from physical to digital (something, admittedly, easier to describe than to implement) the best of the EFL / ESL publishers should be able to enjoy the fruits of their authors’ experience and brain-power for some time yet.
I’m just back from the Braz-Tesol conference and trade show which this year took place in Sao Paulo, and I want to quickly get things into writing while everything’s still fresh in my mind. It was my first time in Brazil, and my first impressions are of a country on the cusp of a real breakthrough in adopting English as a generalized second language, not least as a side-effect of Brazil’s growing export-oriented economy and in anticipation of the World Cup and Olympic games to be organized here later in the decade.
A few EFL-related observations: first of all, Brazilian teachers of English seem to have zero issues with American vs British English: I heard plenty of both (in the context of generally very high English proficiency) at the conference. The consensus among both delegates and speakers seemed to be that learners should be exposed to all variants of the language and be able to function in “Globish” regardless of the origins of their conversational partners.
Secondly, I was surprised by the presence and clout of the big home-grown language-teaching franchises – CNA, Cultura Inglesa, Alumni, Wink, and Casa Thomas Jefferson, just to mention a few – who don’t seem to have left much breathing room for the global multi-school or franchise players like Berlitz or Wall Street Institute. That said, small and medium-sized language institutes from all over this vast country sent teachers to the event, which probably benefits from the rarity value of being held only every two years. Brazil is clearly a honey-pot for the big publishers and for the British Council as well, with investments in stands, staffing and imported star speakers even more significant than those at IATEFL earlier this year.
In terms of innovation, I was interested to see the efforts being made in the public education sector, in particular the Centro Interscolar de Linguas in Brasilia, which runs a network of state language schools attended by over 30,000 students and was presented by Claudia Arantes Batista during the well-attended EdTech Special Interest Group meeting. Brazil also seems to be a leader in the practice of partnerships between high schools (both state and private) and language institutes, something which might be a valid approach in some Southern European countries where state sector secondary school teaching of English leaves much to be desired.
I was impressed by the number of Brazilian teachers using film clips to illustrate grammar concepts, and attended a particularly impressive workshop on this topic given by Claudio Azevedo of Casa Thomas Jefferson. The subject of Teaching Teens was also addressed by several speakers (the English Attack! presentation is here ) and proved popular with delegates, as did – as is now the norm for these conferences – any talk or workshop incorporating the key words “technology” or “social media” in its title.
On a personal note, I had the immense pleasure of finally meeting several Twitter friends from Brazil face-to-face, including Fernando Guarany, Willy Cardoso, Rafael Medeiros, Deniliso Lima, and the irrepressible “Junior” from Natal, all truly great guys whom I got to know a lot better at the fun MacMillan party on the Wednesday night. I travelled back to Paris with a notebook crammed with scribbled notes, new friendships, about a dozen new ideas for English Attack!, and a much better idea of what a good Caipirinha tastes like (and when I should stop drinking them).
A word about the plenary talks. I was attending the conference in parallel with some business meetings, so attended only about half of these sessions, but most of those I attended were excellent: David Crystal’s hilarious tales of his globe-trotting experiences, for example, but also the more academic presentation given by Donald Freeman of the University of Michigan, who gave an very smart talk on the need for EFL teachers to protect and promote their professional status by developing a profession-specific lexicon and teaching-specific assessment systems comparable to those used, say, by airline pilots or medical doctors. There is a clear pattern emerging for the proper role of plenary session speakers at this type of conference: that of the speaker either as entertainer, or as original thinker with useful pedagogical insights, or, ideally, both. Those speakers who fall neither into one category nor the other – and I did sit through a couple such talks in Sao Paulo – need to “find a new shtick,” as they say in Brooklyn.
In general the conference was extremely well run, with a smooth registration process; sessions starting and ending on time; video projectors working as intended; and a wide range of speakers and topics. There was some carping about the absence of Wi-Fi internet access at the venue, but I’m ambivalent about the inconvenience caused: at times I missed being able to connect with the outside world, but being cut off probably also resulted in delegates more tuned-in to the speakers and less engaged with Tweet Deck. So congratulations to Vinnie Nobre, to Braz-Tesol, and to the numerous volunteer Minders (all teachers of English themselves) for organizing a memorable conference. Something tells me I will be visiting Brazil more often in the coming months and years.
How to end this little post-conference stream of consciousness? In the final plenary talk, Jeremy Harmer gave a typically congenial, charismatic and thought-provoking presentation on the subject of “endings,” one that for me raised the bar on how to choose an appropriate closing for anything, even a humble blog post. I started worrying about this a couple days ago, as the notion of writing about the conference began to form in my mind, and then last night, at 3am while jet lag did its worst on my sleeping patterns, providence came to my assistance while I was hopping from channel to channel on the television in an effort to bore myself back to sleep. I happened to stumble upon a documentary – in English! – on brain plasticity fronted by Dr. Normal Doidge, author of “The Brain That Changes Itself.” It powerfully presented, through a handful of amazing case studies, the emerging science of investigating and manipulating the brain’s ability to learn new functions and competences through stimulation and repetition, and detailed the brain’s amazing ability to find alternate neural pathways when the most obvious ones are dysfunctional, damaged or, in the incredible story of a girl literally born with half a brain, inexistent.
As I had incorporated the subject of brain plasticity into my talk on Wednesday, I stayed awake for the entire film and by the end of it understood more clearly that we are just beginning to understand how profoundly we can influence what and how the brain learns, for any individual, in any condition of health, and at any age. I guess it is this message of discovery and faith in the future that allows me to select, from the many possible styles of ending amusingly illustrated during his talk, Harmer’s “ending of hope” option, and I look forward both to investigating this field further in the context of language learning, and to a continued and mutually beneficial teaching, learning and life dialogue with my new Brazilian friends. To everyone I met there: Obrigado!
Good article by FT columnist Matthew Engel in today’s Daily Mail on the continued colonization of the King’s English by Americanisms of all type and stripe. What seems to have gotten the Engel’s particular goat as of late was the mention on a recent BBC Breakfast Program that something was clear “from the get-go.”
The sentiment of rebellion against reverse-colonization-by-language, for an Englishman, is understandable: here in France, resistance to Americanisms is seen by some politicians as a quasi-patriotic duty. But even Engel pretty much acknowledges that any resistance would be of Canutian futility, and that Americanisms have been permeating British Engish for a couple of centuries now. He does, however, regret that the imported terms tend to establish themselves and eventually replace the home-grown alternatives seamlessly, with no Hong Kong-like handover ceremony or at least an awareness by the island natives that they are trading traditional, time-honored language chunks for imported, Made In USA ones.
The issue of Americanisms has been covered at length (and breadth) in the ELT / EFL literature, and occasionally is corralled into the sub-topic of “idioms” by compilers of guides to such things. By now, most purveyors of Business English publications and courses recognize the importance of American sports-related expressions as essential to survival in multinational corporations (woe betide the young Scottish executive who does not recognize “strike two” as a warning that performance had better improve, sharpish).
In the past couple of decades, California-speak — -both the first wave, Valley-girl slang (totally awesome!) ; and the more recent second wave, geek-speak (fail!) — have added to the sourcing of Americanisms currently spreading across the globe. I am not certain, however, that the various guides / compendiums (compendia??) or “idiom of the day” columns or tweets do much good in helping learners of English achieve a better understanding of, or ability to reproduce these expressions correctly. They really need to be heard and demystified in context; as they are typically very context-sensitive things. Boasting about a “home run” following a successful product launch is not quite the same as using the term to describe a successful romantic encounter, particularly in polite company.
Personally, as an American having left the United States at age nine and having lived in London for 13 years as an adult, I often find myself in the opposite situation, guilty of innocently placing “Britishisms” in conversations with Americans which seem, to them, confusingly at odds with my faint East Coast accent. Most recently, I committed the faux pas of using the word “university” when talking about where I did my studies (Americans say “college” in casual conversation). I also can’t help sprinkling my discourse with references to “prats,” “oiks,” and “jobsworths,” terms that elicit embarassing silences of communicated non-understanding when used with my countrymen.
Just back from the giant IATEFL conference in Harrogate, UK, where I spent five stimulating days meeting Twitter friends, listening to some great speakers, and getting a first-hand feel for how curiosity about adopting educational technology in and out of the classroom is starting to permeate the EFL / ESL world.
Given my interests and profile, you’d think I would have shunned any and all specialist sessions on Grammar as too painful and off-target. Yet I found Dave Wills’ talk “What Do We Mean By Grammar?” to be not only one of the most interesting and useful of the entire conference, but also one of the most relevant to the fine-tuning of our English Attack! online entertainment learning service currently in Private Beta testing.
Dave Willis is one of those profoundly impressive experts who are able to make a subject sound simpler, more accessible and more pragmatic than it originally seems to the uninitiated. He is also someone so honest in his approach to his subject that he doesn’t hesitate to use those three words all too rare in so many academic talks, “I don’t know,” when addressing some aspect of grammar or language learning that is still the subject of debate or hypothesis. Yet he clearly does know a lot, as was obvious to everyone in the room.
A few notes from his talk:
The distinction and contrast between knowing (of the rules) vs. using (flexible adoption of) grammar.
By the age of five, most children are capable of using (see above) most of their L1 grammar – but have absolutely no knowledge of grammar rules or terminology.
Using a language comes first; knowing the grammar comes second. We should never attempt to teach it the other way around.
The key for enhancing learners’ grammatical competence: more exposure to the language. Show them more and more text, and over time the grammar sinks in.
There’s no point in trying to teach language (including grammar) systematically; the only way to engineer progress in this area is through random exposure to language assisted by guidance in helping learners figure it out for themselves.
While English Attack! won’t have a big focus on grammar, to the extent that we touch on it we will conform to his views as outlined in his talk and in some of his published articles. Listening to Dr. Willis was a welcome, refreshing and illuminating experience. His session was packed with common sense and an evident deep understanding of how learners learn, and I would encourage anyone interested in this subject to watch his presentation and read his books. Very, very impressive.
I had envisaged my first “personalized” Entertainment English blog post (I’ve written and posted a few regarding company news) as a pithy and erudite compendium of insightful observations on various aspects of EFL pedagogy and EFL-related education technology, freshly fueled by my presence at the ISTEK EFL Conference just concluded in Istanbul.
Instead, a five-day jackhammer headache that started March 19th resulted in my admission to the Neuro-Vascular unit of the Pitié-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris (Europe’s largest by surface area) for tests to see if I’d blown a head fuse. Six days and multiple tests later, it seems I have the non-threatening but oh-so-bothersome condition of cluster headaches, which I guess I will have to deal with whenever these decide to pay a visit.
My convalescence did however result in a number of thoughts tangentially related to language and technology that I’d like to share here.
Firstly, technology: in the first 36 hours at hospital, I did not have my iPhone with me and no access to a computer either. Needless to say, I felt like a castaway forced to rely on the alignment of the stars for information and counting coconuts for amusement. The evening of my second night in hospital, my co-founder Frederic Tibout was presenting English Attack! at the Tech Crunch conference in Paris, something my temporary status as a “digital excluded” did not even allow me to follow via Twitter. To make matters worse, at that stage I still harbored a hope of being released in time to speak at the ISTEK conference, and I desperately wanted to hone my presentation.
When, the next morning, the doctors told me that I wasn’t going anywhere soon, I began to accept my predicament and started to notice things around me that shed some new light on an old hobby horse of mine, the connection between the human brain and language. In the bed next to me was a stroke victim, about 60 years old, who was being attended to by a therapist. She seemed to be giving him a rather elementary lesson in French, until I understood that she was actually seeing if his post-stroke brain wiring was OK based on his ability to use language. Following some “repeat after me” exercises, she moved on to language categorization drills (list everything you can think of that starts with a “b”; now list every different type of fruit you can think of; etc). It was the first time I had seen the link between brain function and language as used in a medical examination, on a real hospital bed, as opposed to simply reading about it in academic texts.
The second observation that came to me was how the nurses, therapists, and attendants (not so much the very harried doctors) would use banter, jokes, gentle teasing and irony, both among themselves – to lighten the mood – and with patients, to make them more at ease. It led me to ask myself whether, when teaching a second language, we may be entirely underestimating the crucial role of humor and light-heartedness in easing communication and being accepted as an interlocutor among the native-speaking population. Perhaps all the mechanical gearing that we provide learners with – the lexis, the structure, even the set phrases and other chunks which we persuade ourselves constitute “functional” language – are in fact of limited use without the “communications grease” constituted by humor that allows the language to be inserted in a social context. I don’t know what we can do about that – I certainly shudder at the thought of humor being “taught” to earnest L2 learners – but we can certainly expose them to a lot of it, via film clips from authentic sources and so on. As teachers, we need to impart the importance of humor and banter as a vital component of how people not only communicate functionally with each other, but also co-exist with one another in a continuous, self-reinforcing loop designed to ease conversation and relationships along.
When I was at last mercifully was re-connected to my iPhone, I went straight to my TweetDeck application and expressed my regrets, hashtagged #ISTEK, at not being able to be at the Istanbul event as planned. And here I had yet another hospital-induced epiphany. For the first time in my life, dozens of people that I have never physically met, plus others I have only met once or twice in my life, were Tweeting me get-well-soon messages from around the world. It was very uplifting, very heart-warming, and very appreciated – a very novel, for me, demonstration that a “virtual” PLN can also be a very human community and express emotions as well as wisdom. I was also able to follow the main ISTEK events and the comments around them, which lessened — a bit — the frustration at not being there. Technology popped up again as a subject – in an evil way this time – as my TweetDeck app decided to automatically re-broadcast my initial #ISTEK tweet several times over the next couple of days, making me sound either like someone with terrible medium-term memory damage, or someone repeatedly eliciting pity and attention from his hospital bed: neither of them the effect I was striving for. I did however get a few additional “get well soon” messages following the repeat Tweets, no doubt to humor me in case I had indeed blown a brain gasket.
So, to conclude this inaugural post, which has turned out very different to the one I intended : (1) many, many thanks to all of you for your kind words via Twitter; (2) apologies again to Burcu Akyol for the missed speaking slot in Istanbul, and congratulations to her for what I hear was a fantastic event; (3) thanks to Mike Butcher for having us present at Tech Crunch Paris last week; (4) thanks to Kirsten Winkler at Eduqwest for her recent article on English Attack!, and, finally, (5) please feel free to sign up to our Beta Test Program and share your feedback on the site with us. That’s all folks: I guess I’ll be seeing many of you at IATEFL in Harrowgate next week.
Following our recognition as one of the top 20 European tech start-ups and our related appearance at the PLUGG 2010 event last week in Brussels, English Attack! has received the further honor of being selected to present at the Tech Crunch Paris event next Wednesday. The event, organized by Tech Crunch Europe editor Mike Butcher, will be held at the Silicon Sentier venue La Cantine. Unlike PLUGG, where we had two minutes to present our company, at Tech Crunch we have the luxury of a whole three minutes!
Applications to join the Beta Program at English Attack! can now be made via the English Attack! website. Simply click on the “Join Our Beta Programme Today” link in the orange box on the site’s home page; fill in your details, and we will get back to you in a few days via e-mail to confirm your registration and grant you access to the site.
We are over the moon at the news that English Attack! has been named as a Finalist in the 2010 PLUGG competition for European technology start-ups. Many thanks to EdTech guru Kirsten Winkler for mentioning us in her popular and always well-informed blog.
Following our recognition as one of the top 20 European tech start-ups and our related appearance at the 
English Attack! website