Rules, patterns, words and conclusions
At last, an ending to the series of posts that started here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here* several blogging decades ago on the book by Dave Willis.
My chief objections to the approach suggested in the book:
- It is based too much on a native speaker model
- There is no evidence given for most of the points, e.g. that students will be more interested and retain language better because it comes from a text they used for comprehension a couple of weeks before. If it was me, this would quickly become tiresome and seeing how much of it I had forgotten in the intervening two weeks would be a distraction and a downer
- Many of the activities are dull
- Most of them entail changing the syllabus and/ or finding new sources of authentic English to use in class, which are the two things that ordinary teachers are likely to find most difficult
My other fairly large objections to the book:
- Given what he says about the lack of an obvious connection between what teachers teach (or more general, choose to do in the classroom) and what students learn, you’d think that the book would be a journey together with us on an attempt to cope with that in any way we can and to try to make some generalisations about whatever conclusions we come to. Perhaps with the aim of increased clarity and readability, the book is exactly the opposite. It advocates one system of teaching (if one that tries to bring together many strands of recently thinking- but without saying so), and often with little or no justification of the choice of those methods.
- Other controversial points are taken entirely for granted, e.g. it is assumed that teachers will accept that the best approach is Task Based Learning, with not even an attempt at a logical connection between that and the other points in the book
- It seems that all his points have been already included in the Collins COBUILD textbooks he wrote in the late 80s and early 90s. Seeing as these hardly changed the world in the intervening 15 years, why should we believe that these ideas are about to change TEFL now?
- In my opinion and experience, the main thing PPP needs is another P, standing for “pause”. He mentions this in a throwaway comment towards the end of the book, while surely recycling and giving students time to digest language before they are expected to produce it is the most important thing, much more so than the variations in approach and things on the syllabus that he mentions.
- Why do we even need one theory of language description and pedagogy that covers both collocation and tenses? There is still no unified theory of quantum mechanics and relativity, and scientists and students not only get along quite nicely without it but can often happily revert back to Newtonian mechanics. If the best way of teaching collocation and the best way of teaching tenses are proven by classroom experience and/ or research to be totally different from each other, should we reject or adapt one or the other to fit in with a more unified theory? I think not
The conclusion of the conclusion
Having said all that, seeing how much I’ve written about this book I guess we must come to the conclusion that it was a stimulating read. I might recommend it for someone who has been experimenting with things that aren’t on the CELTA and wants to see whether it is possible to be more systematic about that (it isn’t, but it’s worth a try) or is starting to doubt their CELTA teaching methods and wants a very easy introduction to some ways of stretching themselves. It has also caused me to change my approach a little, although the result at the moment is less interesting classes and far too many collocations for them ever to be able to remember (see some worksheets posted over the last 4 months or so for evidence of this)!
*This is a new kind of link I have just invented, where readers can end up where they want to be by the simple expedient of scrolling down the page or using a search engine
