Archive for August, 2007

As much as I hate to say anything positive about the British Upper classes, I think we could borrow something from them to make online debate about teaching a bit more civilised. When I am TEFL President, people will only be able to start or contribute to threads in the language of an RAF pilot in a British WWII film. You’ll know when things are getting really heated when people start to write “Steady on old chap!”, “I say!” or “I really dont think that is cricket!”

The IHT write it, I pass on their wisdom on… Someday I will reach TEFL enlightenment and all that will be in reverse!

First of all, the rather odd and sometimes insulting nicknames that Thais give their kids to keep them away from the attention of jealous demons:

 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/23/america/name.php

The subtext here is the hatred of foreigners and all things foreign that can sometimes lie behind the Land of Smile. It can be healthy sometimes, like the way the Thais seem to be reclaiming Kao San road in Bangkok from the unwashed backpacker types and are starting to pay more attention to their traditions, but the sudden awareness of this feeling is perhaps the biggest “wait a minute, everything is the opposite of how it seems” shock moment long term residents in Thailand are likely to go through.

Continuing the culture shock theme, even New Yorkers who like the idea of wildlife reclaiming the shores seem less than enamoured of the cormorant’s tendency to vomit at the slightest opportunity:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/23/europe/bird.php

It’s another case of how understanding another culture (human or animal) can only go so far to making you accept it. Sometimes, though, there comes a moment when you realise that something that happens in the country where you are a guest is your business. The Japanese love of cutting down the forest of South East Asia to make disposable chopsticks is one. And for the English, of course, the thing we can’t stand most of all is how people treat their animals. In Japan, that’s whales. And in Spain that’s bulls:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/23/news/spain.php

As I’m not one of those Englishmen who put animals before people (famously the national association for the protection of animals was founded years before the one for children in the UK), I will finish with something a bit more serious. The Turkish government continues to deny any existence of the massacre of Armenians, even though it was carried out under the Ottomans rather than the modern Turkish state:

 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/23/opinion/edjacoby.php

Not sure why I’m doing a world tour of countries that can’t deal with history like normal adults (Turkey, Spain, Japan), but it does seem to be turning out that way. Should any politicians from those countries be reading, denying massacres is another thing I can’t be bothered talking about (see below).

I must say, I really think I am onto something here. Since I decided that one particular person’s comments here and elsewhere were about as worth reading as Reader’s Digest and decided to not even glance at them anymore, I reckon I have improved my efficiency by 1.23% and my lack of irritation index by almost exactly the same amount. It is an extreme measure that I would imagine I will never have to use with anyone else in the rest of my life, but it sure does work!

Anyone who wants to borrow this method, including those for whom* I am the one they want to ignore, should do so quickly before I patent it! It could mean the end of academic feuds within our lifetimes, of which more here:

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/archives/241

*If I have misused “whom” here, it was not a deliberate attempt to annoy any ESL Au Lait pendants** who might be reading. That would just be a nice bonus…

**The mispelling of pedants was intentional though. Sorry…

Regular reader(s) might have noticed that recently there have been a certain amount of negative comments from one person, a certain amount of negative comments on such negative comments back from me, and then deletions of the comments of the comments and my comments on the comments. One of these claimed that by deleting I was indulging in “censorship”.

Although I might have shown my irritation a couple of times (excuse- I am human), I managed not to return any of the personal comments, not to indulge in a pointless point-by-point debunking of the debunking, and did not go trawling through other posts said person (under another name) had made on other sites looking for more ammunition, and generally turned the other cheek until all four had been used.

I include the “delete” button in turning the other cheek because I don’t see that as censorship (to start with, surely the definition of censorship is making cuts etc. to other people’s media, e.g. a government to a private newspaper, rather than your own), but rather as showing a rude guest to the door. As I haven’t really got into My Space, this blog is my (semi-public) space where I want to spend some of my free time with more or less like minded people. Maybe it would improve the roundness of my outlook of life phoning in to right wing radio shows instead, but my natural optimism does not spread far enough to think talking with said people would be anything but a waste of time for both of us. And that is why from now on I will be deleting all comments from just that one person (out of 20 or so who have commented here) without wasting my time reading them, and will skip reading anything I see on other forums with that person’s aliases on them. To give a couple more metaphors:

Let’s say you are the landlord of a pub and one of your customers comes in and argues with every little thing you say night after night after night after night (inevitably using the phrases “I have as much right as anyone…” and/ or “It’s a free country”). The landlord gets tired of it, the other customers get tired of it, and sooner or later the argumentative person gets barred. Hopefully they learn that trying to get along with people is sometimes more important than being right, but probably they just choose a different bar and start the whole process all over again…
And one more:

When the JWs come knocking at my door there is some chance that what they have to say about God is correct and could make my life better. I have already decided, however, that talking about God anymore is about as likely to be as useful to my life as learning how to crochet (boy, did we do that subject of god to death during all night stoned conversations at uni!). Therefore, I feel justified in closing the door and ignoring them. And if I have made myself quite clear but they insist on forcing themselves into my house then I might stop being even that polite.

Finally:

Does a newspaper have a moral obligation to print every single reader’s letter?

When I said it was a quiet news day yesterday, of course I was forgetting the daily litany of stories about the Japanese ruling classes ripping off the general public for all they can while telling the average Jo Tanaka in the street to tighten their belts and do their best for their country. There’s one story about yet another embezzlement scandal in Shinzo Abe’s cabinet and one about bones of Japanese troops still lying on beaches in SE Asia while Japanese politicians score cheap political points by turning up as Yasukuni Jinja shrine to “honour our boys”.

The fact that the Japanese ruling classes are such an unmitigated bunch of scum suckers has helped me come up with one theory of how to cope with a symptom of culture shock. If you are not careful, there will be times when little frustrations in a country will make the words “bloody (Spanish), why can’t they just (do their jobs properly)?” or such like pop up in your head or even out of your mouth. It might be because you are having a bad day, it might be because you are just in the wrong country, but it is very unlikely that you have come out with a comment which is true for 100% of the people in said country. As people do seem to need to focus their frustration on someone, though, and taking it out on your partner or your boss is probably even less helpful, it is a natural reaction- all it needs is tweaking a little. Instead of blaming your whole life on (Catalans), choose as small and specific a group as you can to shoot imaginary flames from your eyes at.

For example, if you are a driver Turkey is probably not the best place to be unless you want to develop fatalism, but focusing your attention on one or more groups of dolmus (shared taxi) drivers, lorry drivers and bus drivers will save you bursting a blood vessel everytime you turn the ignition key. In Thailand we decided all our problems came down to men wearing grey shirts. It no doubt wasn’t true, but as it stopped all negative feelings towards people in any other coloured clothes it certainly served a purpose and got me through the year. A blunt tool, but it can work. The better option, of course, is to become a saint who has no negative thoughts about anyone. Tips on this planned for 2025.

This need blog needs pictures. I don’t have a camera. I don’t even seem to be able to steal pictures off the internet like everyone else does. So here is a link to a photo of a triangular watermelon:

http://megaijin.squarespace.com/journal/2007/7/14/triangular-watermelon.html

According the the IHT, font of all wisdom, the Chinese are asking people to dob each other in for making mistakes in English:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/22/opinion/edterril.php

I’ve always been a bit of a classroom discipline fascist, but even I think that is going a bit too far…

In other Japan or teaching related news, the British are soon going to be taking on the salaryman habit of reading rape manga on the train, apparently:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/21/arts/gnovel.php

Japanese Railways show that Anglo-American short termism hasn’t reached some parts of the economy yet, with a plan to introduce a new train by 2025 (by which year Virgin Trains in England are also planning to get today’s departure from London Euston to its destination in Glasgow):

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200708230070.html

Either that, or it was yet another quiet news day in Japan…

Meanwhile, in Malaysia Gwen Stefani does cover her body (but not her mouth, unfortunately) and her concert goes off without scandal:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/22/arts/peepthu.php

 The article doesn’t say, however, if she kept to the rules saying female performers may not “…jump, shout,…or throw things are the audience”. Made me wonder how ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers) in Primary schools would cope under the same restrictions, but lack of time means I will have to keep that repressive fantasy to myself for the time being…

Just could not think of an interesting title to this post, and as the limitations of this method of teacher training is obvious to most people not financially tied up in the teacher training busines, neither do I think I have anything particularly original or shocking to say on this often discussed point:

Unless it is a qualification to be an online teacher, it is always better to have face to face observed teaching practice as part of your course. This is not possible with a 100% online course; therefore it cannot be as good as, for example, the CELTA- end of story. Whether an online course could offer better value for money, be more convenient or even be the only available option for some people are the only debatable points.

Can anyone argue with that?

“(Rod Ellis) recommends holding off teaching grammar to beginning students because the early stages of acquisition are primarily lexically rather than grammatically based and because of the evidence from immersion programs that learners are able to acquire word order and ’salient inflection’ without direct instruction” Nick C. Ellis in Form-focused Instruction and Teacher Education- Studies in honour of Rod Ellis
Makes a lot of sense to me. This might be a good place also to make a mention of New Inside Out Beginner (Macmillan), which I had a thorough look at yesterday and was mighty impressed by. It manages to fit in easy bits that are often missed out even at this low level (e.g. colours) and useful language that doesn’t usually get covered properly at any level (e.g. What is your favourite…?/ What is your dream job?) without having the usual bittiness of books that try to fit too many points in (e.g. Natural English).

Carrying on looking at whether teachers should still teach PPP and therefore whether teacher training courses like the CELTA should still cover it, lets look at some criticisms people could level and/ or have levelled at this approach:

There is little or no experimental evidence to suggest that PPP works

Having not read all the literature since PPP was first conceived I have no idea if this is true or not, but there certainly aren’t a lot of papers around at the moment sticking up for it, that is for sure. A lack of papers on the topic could mean that everyone thinks it is already proved worthless, but anyone who thinks pure scientific results always decide where the funding and interest of researchers go is rather naive and hasn’t read the story of (amongst others) how Stalin’s “scientific” theories set up a mini industry in researchers backing him up. Here are some other possible reasons why there are no professors of Applied Linguistics staking their career on sticking up for a theory well past its heyday:

• It’s unfashionable
• They know the academic rage that will fall down upon them for going against the academic flow
• There’s no funding for it
• No one would publish it
• A PhD student who wanted to tackle it would never be allowed to by their prof

Grammar instruction of any kind is not needed as students can best pick up the language just by using it, listening to it and reading it, so PPP is useless

According to the book I am 3/4 of the way through (Studies in Honour of Rod Ellis- OUP, 2007), most researchers now agree that some kind of form focused instruction (e.g. grammar presentations) improve language learning in both the short and the long term. More quotes and posts on this coming once I finish it.

Students rarely if ever produce the form being taught in the lesson at the production stage at the end of a PPP lesson, let alone accurately.

In my experience, this is true. However, such use can be instantly improved by not having the free production stage at the end of the same lesson as when you present the language for the first time but next week after they have had time to absorb the language a little and do their homework. On a CELTA training course it is not often possible to do this, but once the trainees know how to do all the stages they can easily experiment when they start teaching with seperating them into different lessons- all that needs to be done on the course is point out the fact that they can do so.

Researchers have moved onto the Task-Based Approach, so it’s about time teacher training caught up

Again, what researchers focus their attention on can often be taken with a pinch of salt. “After all, currently discredited methodologies such as audiolingualism or the cognitive code approach once had widespread support from researchers and theoreticians” (Jack C. Richards, ibid). Tasks happen to be something that are tailor-made for classroom-based research. Whether they are also tailor-made for classroom-based teaching is still yet to be proved, I believe. Also, in this case even pro-TBA researchers have even yet to agree on what a good task, good task-based classroom approach and good task-based syllabus might be.

While all these questions remain up in the air, I don’t see how someone can be taught TBA in a four-week training course. When I was a teacher trainer on a TEFL course I was quite happy to admit the unfashionability of PPP, show Cutting Edge and tell how it is (was?) the latest thing and how it was supposed to work. I was not prepared to let them have a go at it in the classroom instead of PPP, and I should point out that even people who had read their Harmer and knew the holes in the PPP theory did not exactly ask to try out a method they knew was more complicated for the teacher. Anyway, if you know how to do TTT in all its variations it really isn’t that far off from TBA.

If they get trained in PPP, it is so rigid that they will never be able to break free from it and try other approaches

This might be true for some people, but most of the people using approaches like TBA now were trained in PPP.

Conclusion

On an initial teacher training course teachers need to learn how to teach grammar (as well as skills, functional language, pron etc.), and the quickest, easiest and most practical method for them to pick up first is PPP (and its variation TTT). However, they should be told about the theoretical and practical problems with the method and about the available variations (e.g. spreading the 3 stages over weeks not over 1 lesson) and options (e.g. TBA). Exceptional trainees who have PPP down the pat over the first couple of weeks (very few!) should be allowed to experiment with other methods.