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.

“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.

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:

- Learner Autonomy
- Individualized Learning
- Motivation

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.

The hypothetical demise of the ELT textbook, still much discussed and debated a decade after it was first envisaged, seems to have accelerated the spawning, in the meantime, of would-be substitutive “e-Learning” platforms promising modernity, efficiency, interactivity and modularity in language learning, all wrapped up in a single proprietary package and yours, Mr. School / Language Institute / University / Multinational Company, for a modest $178 per student per year, plus set-up costs.

Ever since “Computer-based Training” became a buzzword of the 1980’s educational scene (finessed, as ever, by the language software boys into CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning), e-learning has been the Great White Hope of the educational software industry. What is mind-boggling, however, is not how many competing e-learning platforms there are out there, each promising technology and pedagogical advances over its competitors. Rather, what astonishes is how little users actually seem to use them, and how inaudible the talk about e-learning seems to be at the various ELT conferences where one would expect to hear a steady stream of triumphal announcements of the latest proof of e-learning’s steady advance over traditional teaching.

Time and time again, when I quiz the purchasing managers or Learning Resources Directors at universities and companies about their degree of satisfaction with their resident e-Learning set-up, they express frustration with the annual costs (not to mention the installation timeframes, admin learning curve, and technical integration issues) vs. the low actual usage of the systems. No doubt there are many exceptions where the systems provide good value, especially in highly specific English for Special Purposes areas like aviation and medicine, but in terms of the plain vanilla and even Business English e-Learning products and services, there seems to be a gap between original expectations and actual take-up.

Why the damp squib? A recent forum thread in the E-Learning 2.0 group on LinkedIn provided some statistics: a 2009 UK E-Learning Report indicated that only 50% of company employees signed up to e-learning training actually used the systems; and one commenter lamented that the system proposed to all employees by his company had a achieved a take-up rate of less than 25%. One of the most enlightened comments in the thread encouraged e-learning systems to adopt a more videogame-like interfaces and reward systems.

Beyond graphic styles and a lack of fun-factor, it seems to me that the fundamental disadvantage of most language-teaching e-learning systems is that they fly in the face of the best EFL/ESL thinking out there today, which increasingly recommends a fluid approach to communicative competence; a flexible, forgiving, and very “human” dialogue between teacher and learner; a focus on lexis and chunks over grammar and structure; and, where technology is concerned, a highly personalized blended learning approach that mixes and matches tools and resources from the plethora of new sites and applications now available – mostly for free – on the internet.

Compared with the brilliance, pragmatism, and humor of the best EFL/ESL progressive thinkers and conference stars – let’s call them the Twitter set — purveyors of most “industrial” e-learning systems appear to still be living in an IBM Mainframe world. By and large, their “solutions” are proprietary, expensive (hence the “e” in e-Learning?), highly structured, provide a rather solitary learning experience, require long session times, are visually unappealing, distinctly lack in humor, become out of date – from a content point of view – by the time they are fully installed; and end up feeling rather menacing in their promise of instant measurement and communication of the learner’s achievements (or lack thereof) to the relevant authorities. Above all, their fatal flaw is to attempt to create a mechanized substitute for human teaching. Mass market adoption of these systems, like that of domestic robot maids and butlers, seems as far off as it ever did – rather like a 1960’s futuristic solution still looking for a problem.

That is why, from the earliest concept documents for English Attack!, we designed the service to be purely web based and limited in scope, focused purely on increasing and enhancing exposure and motivation among teen and young adult learners of English through online entertainment. We feel that it can and should be used in combination with other methods of learning English, above all classroom or tutor instruction. Because only a blended learning approach – with its inevitable imperfections, bolt-ons and spontaneity — reflects the way learners will actually continue to improve and use their developing English language skills over their lifetimes. By contrast, any single-source proprietary e-learning “system” misses out on the marvelous richness, diversity and ever-evolving originality and innovation to be found on the web. Our ambition: to be – if a automaton analogy is required – more 3-CPO than HAL2000. May the force be with us!

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.

Michael Coghlan Talks Networking at Braz-Tesol

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!

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.