I think there’s even time to teach the trainees something about language, too, which many TEFLers are embarrassingly clueless about.

And there’s time to help the trainees learn about the real importance of affect and motivation, which in my understanding - unless there’s been a significant change to CELTA etc - is otherwise totally ignored.

Of course, all this means not spending time on PPP/TTT. But those are just ‘methods’, just like audiolingualism, grammar-translation, and so on. I’m referring to a course that deals with ‘methodology’, which I define as how we can use what we know about SLA and different approaches to language teaching in order to inform the teaching process.

Sure, four weeks isn’t the same as a year spent on an MA, for instance. But a little bit of something that has a body of research behind it makes more sense than a little bit of something that doesn’t. To clarify that: basically all modern research into SLA indicates that PPP/TTT does not reflect how learners learn, and so to continue training people to teach in that way because ‘that’s how things are done’ is somewhat strange.

I’ll see if I can write a decent and clear post on the topic within the next month, and then I’ll blog it and let you know.

I couldnt really work out from your comments what kind of methodolgy your would introduce on a 4 week course and how you would do it, but if you would like to expand on this theme as a guest writer Im always looking for new ideas.

1) There can be influence from the L1 - but not all learners make the same mistakes.
2) There can be influence from other L2s - also varied.
3) There seems to be some sort of ‘interlanguage’, by which learners of quite different backgrounds appear to learn the language in a similar pattern to the general structure used with L1 acquisition - grammatical morphemes tend to follow a certain order, for instance. Yet this can also vary due to points (1) and (2).

PPP/TTT are more about what makes the teacher feel good. They’re about product-teaching - as if language is ‘out there’ and it’s more teachable than learnable. Most methods over the years - including most mainstream EFL today - have been mainly product-teaching. But it does not gel with how learners learn.

A more process-teaching approach, with the idea that language is more learnable than teachable, and that language happens in your head (along with between people… so on the innatist/constructivist interface), would reflect how learners learn/acquire an L2.

So is there any real reason to continue training people on a 4-week course in such a product-teaching approach as PPP/TTT? Me, I don’t think so. It makes the teacher feel like they’re in control, but the aim should be primarily to train teachers who will help their students learn, in my view.

Admittedly, a 4-week course will never be sufficient for training proper professionals. But it seems to think that it is. I remember on my CELTA course back in the ’90s two of the other trainees failed, seemingly because they didn’t understand that they had to follow the rigid TTT method. They wasted their money and probably never set foot in an ELT classroom again. And that’s a pity, as they could have been great teachers - both seemed to be motivated to teach and they were interested in their students. But the RSA/UCLES ’system’ - for that’s what it is - determined their fate. What a joke!

Men drilling himself outside pub “I’ll have a Guinness. I’ll have a Guinness. I’ll have a Guinness”. Walks into pub and blurts out: “A pint of lager please”

There! I said it……