Archive for August, 2007

So, my last thread (of five?) on the Rave’s ESL Au Lait Japan forum has been locked and that is that. There was lots of raging passion, some (but much less) civilised debate, a lot of chest beating and territorial pissing, and two or three people who were just there for a fight and ruined it for everyone. Although you have probably realised by now that I would hardly claim to be an academic, there seemed to be a lot of letters after names on the other side and the whole thing reminded me of a classic academic feud, of which you can see a recent example here:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/22/healthscience/21gender.php

Although the main reason people with more certificates than friends tend to get all het up about these things and keep those feelings for life are probably “they are human”, it amuses me to brainstorm some other reasons. And as this is my blog, that is what I will do! But first of all

Warning: If you have lots of letters after your name and are the kind of person to take slightly tongue in cheek generalisations personally, I would suggest reading no further. Unless all of that is true and you have also indulged in an academic feud or two, in which case this is for you:

Reasons why academic feuds happen more often and last longer than people-who-think-Aliens-was-better-than-Alien-or-visa-versa feuds:

• People with more letters after their name than in their name spend far too much time on their computers or at their desks and not enough moving around, so physical feelings of frustration and aggression build up and come out in flame mails
• They actually set too high standards for their personal behaviour in terms of things like not using offensive language  (being PC) etc. and so the pressure builds up until they burst
• As they were not jocks when they were younger, they never learnt the “have a full-on fight and then forget it” school of conflict resolution
• They got bullied at school and enjoy doing the intellectual equivalent to someone else in revenge
• Their self-image is so tied up with their ideas that any attack on their ideas cannot be seperated from a personal attack
• They spend so much time explaining their ideas in words of one syllable to the dumbed down youth in their university lectures that the last thing they want to do is more of the same in their free time, so any “can you explain that more” question is the snapping point (Stephen Krashen, this means you my son!)
• If they took all those qualifications and got a nice university job to get praise from their families, they are hardly likely to take anything but praise from anyone else
• After all that time and expense doing an MAPHDTESOLEFLSLA, they think they should get a bit of extra respect. If not, what was the point of doing that instead of watching tentacle porn?
• They do indeed usually get that extra respect, so they are about as unlikely as a North Korean leader to understand it when someone treats their opinion as equal to a man off the street
• That’s all for now

If you don’t agree, I would be glad to hear from you. However, please remember the comments policy of TEFLtastic, which consists of just four words: Try to be nice.

Following up my breaking news story on the school in the British Midlands that takes a 50 pound “interview fee” just for the pleasure of seeing what a real whiteboard looks like before you are accepted or rejected as a CELTA candidate, the Cambridge ESOL reply (received today) is basically “they can charge what they like”.

So starts my first TEFLtastic campaign. TEFLtastic says: not only is this a rip off that affects people who are new to the industry and so don’t know any better, it also sounds so similar to actual criminal scams that have occured in TEFL that the whole industry suffers from a supposed keeper of standards like Cambridge being connected to it. This has to stop, full stop.

Thanks to Appy Linguist for mentioning the PPP approach while talking about the CELTA because I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while. The question is: should teachers still be trained to teach PPP and it’s offshoot (or bastard offspring, depending on your point of view) TTT? First of all, to recap what they mean:

In PPP (presentation, practice and production), you present a language point, students do some controlled practice of the language and then they are given a freer speaking task to do where they can produce the language you have presented and practiced if they wish. TTT (test, teach, test) is similar, but you test the students on their knowledge and ability to use the language you want to teach first, see where the hole in their language is and then do the stages in PPP. The possible things you can do at each stage are:

Presentation

1. Write an example of a grammatical form up on the board and translate it into the students’ language
2. And/ or write an example of a grammatical form up on the board and explain what the name of the form is, how it is used and what it means (in English or in L1*)
3. Do the same as 1 or 2, but eliciting the translation or explanation from the students
4. Do the reverse of 1 or 2, providing a sentence in L1 for translation or giving the name or meaning of the form and getting students to provide an example sentence
5. Do the same as 4, but eliciting the form with a cue such as a picture, a story, a gapped sentence or a timeline*
6. After a listening, reading or video watching activity, pull examples of the form you want to teach out of the text and do the same as 1 to 5 above
7. Do the same as 6, but providing the explanation, translation etc. as asking students to find examples in the texts
8. Students do any one of 1 to 7 above, but individually or in pairs from their textbooks or a worksheet. Check answers as a whole class.

Once you are sure that all the students understand the meaning and construction of the form you want to teach (this stage usually includes a few concept check questions to make sure that is in fact the case), you are ready to move onto the practice stage

Practice

1. Students are drilled on more sentences similar to the one used in the presentation, making sure their pronunciation is okay 
2. Students translate more sentences with the form in to and/ or from English
3. Students complete multiple choice, gap fill etc. written tasks including the form being taught
4. Students produce examples of the form based on prompts provided by the teacher or textbooks (e.g. book- I like reading books, flower- I like picking flowers etc.)
5. Students produce examples of the form to answer questions by the teacher or in the textbook (When did uyou have breakfast? I had breakfast at 8:15), either their own real answers or based on cues in the textbook
6. Students ask questions with the form being taught to match answers given by the teacher or in the textbook (I was walking down the street- What were you doing when you last met your best friend?- That’s right)
7. Countless other speaking and/ or writing games that involve a limited range of language
8. Any of the production activities below, but with students being told to use the form being taught or even to only use the form being taught

It is possible to use two or more of the practice activities above, often moving from very controlled (e.g. drilling) to freer (e.g. language games).

Now that students are capable of making some correct sentences with the form being taught, they are ready for the next stage. In the practice stage above, even when the tasks are, in the best of cases, genuinely communicative (that is, students learn some real information about each other they didn’t know before) they still use an unrealisitically limited amount of language. Hopefully, the students are now ready to try to use the same structures in a situation where a lot of other different language could also come up.

Production

1. Roleplays
2. Writing longer texts like stories, letters etc.
3. Problem solving and logic puzzles
4. Many many more which don’t spring to mind at the moment

I’m going to deal with the criticisms of PPP in PPP RIP? Part Two, but before I forget a point that has just occured to me, I would like to say that modern so-called PPP classes, textbooks and teacher training courses tend to include just as much emphasis on skills development as on items of language taught through PPP- a point often forgotten by both critics and defenders due the fact that the name is not PPPPS (PPP plus skills) or such like. It’s amazing how much a snappy acronym* can change history

*L1- The students’ first language, e.g. Spanish

*Timeline- A picture of wiggly lines, straight lines and crosses that is supposed to show the time connections of different tenses

* Acronym- Strictly this is not an acronym because it is not pronounced like a word (like NATO), but I don’t know what it really is, so on this blog an acronym it remains

After getting illuminating, intellectually piercing responses to this question on Rave Spelling’s ESL Au Lait Japan forum like “because no one cares” (Only possible response- okay, so why does no one care!) from self-proclaimed well-qualified and experienced “real teachers” before they started throwing around personal insults and got the topic locked, I have no choice but tackle this point on my own. Here are three ideas below:

• Because the managers from most schools haven’t gone through the Cambridge teaching qualifications system themselves, they are unlikely to demand a CELTA of their teachers. For example, if you see your CELTA or DELTA as a proof of your own professionalism you are more likely to demand the same of your teachers or see the value of it on their CV. It is noticeable that chains of schools with overwhelmingly British management are more likely to ask for CELTA, and this seems to me the man reason why.
• In a similar way, because no schools in Japan sell TEFL teacher training courses like the CELTA (because of reasons like the cost of living here making it cheaper for people to do one in Thailand or at home), they don’t need to demand it of their teachers to boost the status of their own training courses.
• In Japanese companies there is a tradition of taking on new graduates without specific qualifications for their job in order to train them into the company’s own way of doing business while they are still young and impressionable, and being trained in someone else’s way of doing things might even be seen as a negative. In government and other Japanese-owned schools it seems possible that that attitude stretches also to the English teachers. In a similar way, you can see from the link below that MBAs are much less popular in Japan than in Europe or the USA.

www.referenceforbusiness.com/encyclopedia/Int-Jun/Japanese-Management-Techniques.html 

More ideas please from my TEFLtastic tribe:

“Although in most Chinatowns, from San Francisco to London, restaurants prepare food for Chinese tastes, in Yokohama everything is adjusted to Japanese taste buds…. (Top chefs recruited from Hong Kong and Taiwan have to be deprogrammed to prepare Chinese food in Japan)” Insight Guides Japan. Another similarity with Italy, that one

Why is on the train eki-ben sushi served in bamboo food holders rather than wood?

The natural chemicals in bamboo and bamboo leaves help preserve food.

Everything else about Japan explained in my imaginatively titled blog, Japanexplained.

“Japanese tend to have a deep-seated dislike, even contempt, for weakness” Boye Lafayette De Mente

$700- The hook up fees for a single domestic phone line in 2002

British TEFL publishers are producing world beating books that keep getting better and better, apparently:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/tefl/story/0,,1993611,00.html

TEFLtastic says- Ha, pull the other one!

Why is Japanese deoderant to ineffective for Westerners?

The classic explanation is that the Japanese do not sweat or smell as much, and the second might be true in some cases. More importantly, the Japanese equivalents of P&G obviously have some kind of monopolisitic hold on the drugstore market because this is one of the few sectors where Japanese companies produce such rubbish products that not even people in other Asian countries will buy them. Shiseido and Shu Uemura are the exceptions, but again you will you not find them getting a lot of shelf space in your neighbourhood drug store.

All other questions about Japan answered on my Japanexplained blog.