In this day and age, it should hardly need stating that traditional notions about the relative merits of so-called ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ teachers are ridiculously outdated. It is impossible to tell from the language used by many of the most regular contributors whether English is their mother tongue or not. It’s also, of course, irrelevant.
I agree with the first sentence. The second sentence is nonsense. It carefully refers only to “many of the most regular contributors”, thus ignoring the fact that in other cases it is very easy to tell from the language used by contributors whether English is their mother tongue or not.
And this fact is not, of course, “irrelevant”. While there are tens of thousands of NNESTs whose command of English is demonstrably excellent, these teachers are not representative. More than 90% of those currently teaching English as a foreign language are non-native English speakers (British Council, 2015). Most of these NNESTs teach in their own countries, and the evidence suggests that a majority of these teachers today don’t have the command of English required to teach the English courses set out in the national curricula, which increasingly focus on communicative language teaching (CLT). To take the example of China, studies by Zhang (2012), Chen and Goh (2011), and Yan (2012) highlight the teachers’ lack of proficiency in oral communication in English as one of the key factors impeding the successful implemenation of a CLT curriculum.
Similar results have been found in studies carried out in other countries. A 1994 study by Reves & Medgyes (cited in Braine, 2005) asked 216 native speaker and non-native speaker English teachers from 10 countries (Brazil, former Czechoslovalua, Hungary, Israel, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, Sweden, former Yugoslavia, and Zimbabwe) about their experiences as teachers. The overwhelming majority of the participants were non-native speakers of English, and in their responses, 84% of the non-native speaker subjects said that they had various difficulties using English and that their teaching was adversely affected by these difficulties. Difficulties with vocabulary and fluency were most frequently mentioned, followed by speaking, pronunciation, and listening comprehension.
No good comes from ignoring these facts. Dellar skates carelessly over the evidence because he wants to make a political point, but he harms more than he helps the cause of NNESTs , and he clouds more than he clarifies the complicated arguments involved in moving towards a better, more pluralistic view of the English language and of what should, and, should not, be taught in ELT.
References
Braine, G. (2005) A History of Research on Non-Native Speaker English Teachers. In: Llurda E. (eds) Non-Native Language Teachers. Educational Linguistics, vol 5. Springer, Boston, MA.
Chen, Z. and Goh, C. (2011) Teaching oral English in higher education: Challenges to EFL teachers Teaching in Higher Education, 16(3), 333 – 345.
Yan, C. (2012) ‘We can only change in a small way’: A study of secondary English teachers’ implementation of curriculum reform in China. Journal of Educational Change, 13, 431 – 447.
Zhang, D. (2012). Chinese Primary School English Curriculum Reform. In Ruan, J. and Leung, C. Perspectives on Teaching and Learning English Literacy in China. NY Springer
Given the continued complaints being made by followers of radical sociolinguistic scholars, this is an edited version of two posts I wrote in 2017. The first was a reply to Adrian Holliday’s suggestion that the terms native speaker and non-native speaker are neo-racist, and the second a reply to Marek Kiczkowiak who questioned the existence of two such groups of people.
Preamble
1 In the domain of English language teaching, there is just about universal agreement that discrimination against non-native English speaker teachers (NNETs) must stop. Those who fight to end such discrimination have my full support.
2 In the domain of SLA research, native speakers (NSs) of language X are people for whom language X is the language they learnt through primary socialization in early childhood, as a first language.
3 To paraphrase Long (2007, 2015), the psychological reality of native speakerness is easily demonstrated by the fact that we know one, and who isn’t one, when we meet them, often on the basis of just a few utterances. When monolingual English speakers are presented with recorded stretches of speech by a large pool of NSs and NNSs and asked to say which are which, they distinguish between them with reliability typically well above .9. How do they do this, and why is there so much agreement if there is no such thing as a NS?
4 For the last 60 years, the term “native speaker” has been used in the literature concerning studies of language learning, and one of the most studied phenomenon of all is the failure of the vast majority of post adolescent L2 learners to achieve what Birdsong (2009) refers to as “native like attainment”.
On the prevailing view of ultimate attainment in second language acquisition, with few exceptions, native competence cannot be achieved by post pubertal learners. (Birdsong 1992).
5 Claims concerning the relative abilities of native speakers and learners of the target language are not disconfirmed by individual cases. The claims all accept the psychological reality of native speakerness.
6 The specific claim that very few post adolescent L2 learners attain native like proficiency is supported by a great deal of empirical evidence (see, e.g., reviews by Long 2007, Harley and Wang 1995; Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson 2003).
7 When trying to explain why most L2 learners don’t attain native competence, scholars have investigated various “sensitive periods”. It’s widely accepted that there are multiple sensitive periods for different domains of second language learning – pronunciation, morphology and syntax, lexis and collocation (see Long, 2007, Problems in SLA, Chapter 3 for a review of sensitive periods).
To the issue then
Adrian Holliday, Professor of Applied Linguistics & Intercultural Education at Canterbury Christ Church University, has just published a post on his blog: “Why we should stop using native-non-native speaker labels” in response to queries about his claim that the terms native speaker and non-native speaker are neo-racist. He addresses the questions: “What does ‘neo-racist’ mean?” and “Are there no occasion (sic) when these labels can be used?”.
He starts with his own subjective impressions of what ‘native speaker’ means to him and then says
In academia the established use of ‘native speaker’ as a sociolinguistic category comes from particular paradigmatic discourses of science and is not fixed beyond critical scrutiny.
I’ve no idea what the phrase “particular paradigmatic discourses of science” refers to, but I’m sure we can all agree that the use of ‘native speaker’ as a sociological category is not fixed beyond critical scrutiny. Holliday seems to be saying that quantitative research based on testing hypotheses with empirical evidence, as carried out by many scholars trying to understand the psychological process of SLA is part of a “mistaken paradigm”. Since in SLA research there isn’t, and never has been, any general theory of SLA with paradigm status, and since I’m sure that in the field of sociolinguistics and cultural education they’re even further away from any such theory, talk of paradigms, like talk of “imagined objective ‘science’”, and problems that reside in differences being evoked “regardless of the words that are being used”, and labels referring to things that “do not actually exist at all”, belongs to the giddy world of post modern sociology where words mean what their authors choose them to mean “neither more nor less”, as Humpty Dumpty triumphantly concludes.
Whatever the term ‘native speaker’ might be used for in sociolinguistics, in psycholinguistics ‘native speaker’ refers to real people, as I’ve explained above, and nothing that Holliday says challenges this fact. Nevertheless, Holliday insists that when we refer to people as ‘non-native speakers’, we imply that they are “culturally deficient”, and that this amounts to “deep and unrecognised racism”. According to Holliday, referring to people as non-native speakers “defines, confines and reduces” them by referring to their culture in a way that evokes
images of deficiency or superiority – divisive associations with competence, knowledge and race – who can, who can’t, and what sort of people they are”.
In my opinion this is so badly written as to be almost incoherent, but perhaps it expresses exactly what Holliday means to say. Whatever it means, it’s difficult to counter “neo-racism” if it’s “unrecognised”, and if any attempt we make to use other terms just pushes the labelling “even further into a normalised, reified discourse, where we are even less likely to reflect on their meaning, and where a technicalisation of the labels somehow makes them more legitimate”. Still, since Holliday confidently asserts that “the native-non-native speaker labels” refer to something “that does not actually exist”, it should be easy enough for sociolinguists (and those involved in intercultural education too, I suppose) to stop using them. Meanwhile, back in the real world, it’s a different story.
Long (2007) argues that the issue of age differences is fundamental for SLA theory construction. If the evidence from sensitive periods shows that adults are inferior learners because they are qualitatively different from children, then this could provide an explanation for the failure of the vast majority of post adolescent L2 learners to achieve Birdsong’s “native like attainment”. If we want to propose the same theory for child and adult language acquisition, then we’ll have to account for the differences in outcome some other way; for example, by claiming that the same knowledge and abilities produce inferior results due to different initial states in L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition. Either way, the importance of the existence (or not) of sensitive periods for those scholars trying to explain the psychological process of SLA indicates that native speakerness will continue to be used as a measure of the proficiency of adult L2 learners.
References
Harley, B. & Wang, W. (1997). “The critical period hypothesis: Where are we now?”. In A. M. B. de Groot & J. F. Kroll (Eds.), Tutorials in Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic perspectives (pp. 19–51). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Hyltenstam, K. & Abrahamsson, N. (2003). “Maturational constraints in SLA”. In C.J. Doughty & M.H. Long (Eds.), Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Long, M. (2007) Problems in SLA. London, Erlbaum.
Long, M. (2015) SLA and Task-based Language Teaching. Oxford, Wiley.
PART 2
In tweets and posts on his own blog, Marek Kiczkowiak questions the distinction made in academic literature between native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs). Let me add a bit to what I’ve already said above.
Native speakers of language X are those for whom language X is the language they learnt through primary socialization in early childhood, as a first language. There is no fixed set of liguistic features or abilities that define all NSs or NNSs because people vary, but there are clear, easily recognized, departures from the norms that speakers of any particular repertoire adhere to. For the last 60 years, the term “native speaker” has been used in the literature concerning studies of language learning, and one of the most studied phenomenon of all is the failure of the vast majority of postadolescent L2 learners to achieve what Birdsong (2009) refers to as “nativelike attainment”.
On the prevailing view of ultimate attainment in second language acquisition, native competence cannot be achieved by postpubertal learners. There are few exceptions to this generalization (Birdsong 1992).
Note that claims concerning the relative abilities of these two groups are of general patterns, thus not disconfirmed by individual cases. The claims, nevertheless, all accept the distinction between NSs and NNSs, and the psychological reality of native speakerness. The specific claim that very few postadolescent L2 learners attain nativelike proficiency is supported by a great deal of empirical evidence (see, e.g., reviews by Long 2007, Harley and Wang 1995; Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson 2003; Patkowski 1994).
When trying to explain why most L2 learners don’t attain native competence, scholars have investigated various “sensitive periods”. It’s widely accepted that there is a period of peak sensitivity which lasts from from birth until approx. age six (see, e.g., Hyltenstam, 1992; Meisel, 2009; Morford and Mayberry, 2000).
There follows an offset, perhaps lasting five or six more years where the acquisition of native-like phonology, lexis and collocations is concerned, and until the mid-teens for grammar, during which progressively fewer learners will achieve native-like abilities. After closure of the Sensitive Periods, a small minority of learners may achieve near-native abilities, and a tiny group may be able to pass for native on a few areas and/or tightly constrained tasks (e.g. Donaldson, 2011; Marinova-Todd, 2003; van Boxtel, 2005), but no-one will be able to achieve native-like abilities across the board. …….
Native-like pronunciation of an L2 or dialect is most likely (not guaranteed) for those with an age of onset (AO) between 0 and 6 years; still possible, but decreasingly likely, with an AO occurring during the offset period from 6 to 12; and impossible for anyone with an AO later than 12. ….
Native-like morphology and syntax are most likely (not guaranteed) for those with an AO between 0 and 6 years; still possible, but decreasingly likely, with an AO during the slightly longer offset period from 6 to the mid-teens (15, plus or minus two); and impossible for anyone with an AO later than that. Beyond age 16 or 17, the degree of grammatical accentedness will, again, depend on such factors as L1 and L2 exposure and use, language aptitude, motivation, and metalinguistic knowledge, and so will only be indirectly and weakly related to AO.
The position for lexis and collocational abilities is less clear, chiefly due to the scarcity of studies to date. However, such research findings as there are suggest that acquisition in this domain, too, is subject to maturational constraints. (Granena & Long, 2013).
When I refer to the difference between NSs and NNSs, I refer to it in the context of this area of research, where the difference is clear, operational, and the focus of an enormous amount of empirical research. Attempts to explain the phenomenon of non-nativelike attainment by most L2 learners are ongoing and there are still lively debates about putative sensitive periods, but the phenomenon itself is, pace Kiczkowiak, surely worthy of more research.
Which brings me to Kiczkowiak’ criticisms.
Argument 1
Kiczkowiak refers to “studies which shed serious doubts on Sorace’s findings” (about grammaticality judgements ).
For example, Birdsong (1992, 2004), Bialystok (1997) and Davies (2001) also studied judgments of grammaticality and all concluded that statistically there was no significant difference in the judgments made by ‘native’ and proficient ‘non-native speakers’. In other words, both groups have very similar intuitions about the language. And it is important to add that they all focused on adult learners who were well past the critical or sensitive period.
Three points:
The three sources Kiczkowiak cites all accept the distinction between NSs and NNSs.
As noted above, Birdsong states that, with few exceptions, native competence cannot be achieved by postpubertal learners, an assertion that Bialystock agrees with.
The different findings on grammaticality judgements say nothing about findings regarding pronunciation, morphology or lexis and collocation. They don’t, that is, seriously challenge the claim that few, if any NNSs achieve native-like abilities across the board. Nor does it argue against the distinction between the two groups.
Argument 2
Next, Kiczkowiak tackles the question of critical/sensitive period. He refers again to the studies on grammaticality and says
they show that ultimate attainment is possible even for adult learners.
What they actually show is that a few NNSs perform as well as NSs on such tests. This doesn’t refute the claims I refer to above, nor, again, is it an argument against the distinction between the two groups.
Argument 3
Kiczkowiak says
there all those ‘non-native speakers’ out there who are virtually indistinguishable from a ‘native speaker’.
True, there are some NNSs who are “virtually indistinguishable” from NSs, but, once again, it doesn’t support the argument that the distinction between the two groups is “imaginary”.
And just by the way, Kiczkowiak’s example of the wonderful writer Conrad ignores the fact that Conrad had a noteable NNS accent when speaking English.
Argument 4
Kiczkowiak then quotes Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson (2003, p.580)
the highly successful L2 speakers that we have characterised as having reached ‘only’ near-native proficiency are, in fact, native-like in all contexts except perhaps in the laboratory of the linguist with specific interest in second language learning mechanisms.
That some L2 speakers achieve such high levels of proficiency is a caveat which doesn’t alter the conclusion that
nativelike ultimate attainment of a second language is, in principle, never attained by adult learners
and, anyway, yet again, it’s not an argument that the distinction between NSs and NNSs doesn’t exist.
Kiczkowiak concludes:
So linguistically speaking, is there a difference between the two groups? There might well be. And the word MIGHT is important here.
He’s quite simply wrong: there IS a well-established difference; no “might” about it.
Still, Kiczkowiak’s main argument is this:
…we need to look beyond language proficiency as the defining characteristic of a ‘native speaker’. In fact, it is quite ironic that in the opening sentence of his blog post Geoff calls Russ Mayne a “cheery cherry-picker of evidence”, when he himself has cheerfully cherry-picked the evidence limiting the discussion to SLA research, completely ignoring wider sociocultural issues that are also at play…. So I’m not saying the evidence Geoff presented is wrong. However, it is very limited. And thus questionable.
I didn’t cherry pick evidence. I limited the domain of the discussion to psycholinguistic SLA research that adopts a rationalist methodology based on the twin principles of logical argument and empirical evidence, because that’s where, in my opinion, the best work is being done to understand second language learning. In this necessarily limited domain, the distinction between NSs and NNSs is a real one, which is all I’ve ever claimed in this debate.
But Kiczkowiak wants to question this limited approach. He says:
As Block (2003, p.4) says, SLA has for a long time dealt with “essentialized interlocutors, with essentialized identities, who speak essentialized language”. Who the ‘native’ or the ‘non-native speaker’ under study really is has very rarely been problematised in SLA. However, Block’s (and others’) calls for a more socioculturally oriented SLA have largely fallen on deaf ears.
The possible reason for this is exemplified really well by one of Geoff’s Tweets where he referred to what I’m planning to engage in the rest of the post as “sociolinguistic twaddle that obfuscates a simple psychological reality”. But wouldn’t the reverse hold true as well? Namely, that the psycholinguistic twaddle obfuscates a rather complicated, but also incredibly fascinating sociolinguistic reality?
Well, no, it wouldn’t. While psycholinguistic research has led to a better understanding of the well-defined phenomena investigated, sociolinguistic research has had less success. What is this “rather complicated, but also incredibly fascinating sociolinguistic reality” that Kiczkowiak refers to? The only source he cites is Block. What “reality” does Block describe? How does it help us to understand language learning? What does Block’s description of SLA research mean? What are “essentialized interlocutors, with essentialized identities, who speak essentialized language”? I suggest that Block’s description of SLA research, and indeed the whole of his published work on second language learning, does little to persuade anybody that a more socioculturally oriented SLA is needed. There are, of course, better advocates for a sociolinguistic approach to language learning than Block, but even if Kiczkowiak had given a better account of such an approach, it would do nothing to rescue his denial of a clear difference between NSs and NNSs.
The clearly-defined difference between NSs and NNSs is useful when studying SLA. This has absolutely no implications for the fitness of NNSs as teachers, and I support those who argue reasonably for an end to the absurd demand that teachers in ELT be native speakers. The fight against discrimination against NNSs isn’t helped by Kiczkowiak’s unnecessary denial of a difference between NSs and NNSs.
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She woke up with a hangover in a bed so big that it needed a journey to get out of it. Throwing off the Egyptian cotton duvet, she tripped over the umpteen bottles of booze from the fridge she’d plundered hours ago and staggered to the bathroom where she fumbled with a bewildering number of taps and dispensers optimistically aimed at giving her the ultimate good morning showering experience. She went down to the restaurant and helped herself to a wider range of unhealthy food than she’d usually eat in a week. She walked a few hundred yards to the conference and went to the OUP stall to see how sales were going. Why were her books on the second shelf? She had fifty meaningless exchanges with fellow presenters before giving her own meaningless presentation. She went to lunch at Grafts with her editor and went back to her room for a nap. She returned to the conference and went to a talk by her chum Ciancia. In the evening, she went to a party organised by Pearson, on to dinner at Iomas, and took a taxi back to the hotel where Jaz, Pugh, Bula, Nool and lots of others were waiting for her in the bar. Much later, she was helped into the lift by Jaz – who else!
Jill
She woke up with a hangover in a bed that was too narrow to contain her. Throwing off the slippery nylon sheet, she stumbled down the hall to the bathroom and had a cold shower. Once dressed and down the creaky wooden stairs, she stood in the rain, waiting for a bus to take her to the conference, wishing she’d worn her Doc Martins. She got to the conference, grabbed a free coffee and stale cheese butty, and rushed off to get a good seat at the first plenary. After that, she went to two more talks, met a couple of friends she hadn’t seen for ages, and they all went for lunch in a pub, where she met lots of other conference goers. A very good time was had by all. She returned a bit squiffy to the conference and went to three more talks, none of them much good. In the evening, she went to a party organised by Pearson where a weirdo whose face was somehow familiar asked her if she liked folk music. After that, she went with a few of the people she’d met at lunchtime to a Greek restaurant where they whooped it up. In between glasses of retsina and the random smashing of plates, they talked about the zero chances of promotion, corrective feedback, the problems of mixed level classes, whether gluing youself to a motorway was a good idea, and who the hell that weirdo at the Pearson party was. A bloke called Bob, from Sheffield, shared a taxi with her back to the B&B.
First, congratulations to Sandy Millin, who’s doing a really stellar job of reporting sessions at the 2023 IATEFL conference – she adds yet another well-tuned, high-definition string to her already impressive bow! Her summary of Frendo’s plenary is simply excellent.
Next, a grovelling admission that I got it completely wrong when I guessed in my previous post that Evan Frendo’s plenary would be one more commercial plug for “Business English”.
And now, you really must watch this video of the plenary. Start at min. 14.
Discussion
Frendo’s wonderfully subversive talk surgically dissects the unhealthy, bloated body of self-satisfied mainstream ELT practice. I imagine Frendo assembling his splendidly-crafted Trojan Horse at home, and then, once innocently welcomed by the President onto the stage, delivering his bombshell with all the lethal good humour of Luigi Galleani. Had Frendo’s talk been broadcast to the Exhibition Hall, the more sensitive among the sales staff would surely have immediately started dismounting their stalls, and anybody attuned to his message in the audience must surely have heard the death knolls of coursebook-driven ELT ringing like tinnitus in their heads.
Let me highlight key points:
1) Doing English. In Frendo’s world of “English for the Workplace”, they focus on “doing things in English”. Getting high marks in tests like IELTS has no place here, and neither do coursebooks.
2) Standard English is replaced in practice by BELF: English as a business language Franca.
‘Conformity with standard English is seen as a fairly irrelevant concept’
‘I don’t actually care whether something is correct or incorrect. As long as the meaning is not distorted’
‘BELF is perceived as an enabling resource to get the work done. Since it is highly context-bound and situation-specific, it is a moving target defying detailed linguistic description’ (p129, Kankaanranta, A., Louhiala-Salminen, L. And Karhunen, P.)
3) The current CEFR idea of proficiency is challenged.
As Sandy says: “Big standardised tests … don’t tell us whether they have the English they need to do that specific job. As teachers, we might be able to judge somebody’s English, but we might not be able to judge whether somebody can do their job in English”.
In VTS communication, assessment is carried out by a team consisting of:
English teacher
Experienced VTS operator – say whether they’ve done the right thing
Legal expert- all conversations are recorded, but they can have legal implications
The test criterion is: Can the worker do the job? This chimes perfectly with what we, the advocates of TBLT, suggest.
4) Informal English In BELF research, Ehrenreich (2010) says ‘Learning…seems to happen most effectively in business ‘communities of practice’ rather than in traditional English training’. M Takino (2019) looked at how people become users of English. Informal learning is what’s really happening …. you don’t necessarily need to pay a teacher for it. ‘Microlearning’ is a key feature of HR conferences now. 10 minutes of learning languages on the train, in a queue, etc. Bite-sized chunks, and it’s happening everywhere.
5) ‘Learning clusters ’ are used for teaching. Surround the learner with ‘meaningful learning assets’. It’s not just organising courses for people, it’s doing more.
6) Teachers and trainers need to work together with other people within the company. There is a huge system here, supported by different aspects of people in the company. ‘Almost all of our trainers are full-time employees. Our strengths are our well-developed learning ecosystem and corporate learning culture’ – people who are part of the company as in-house trainers. Content is developed based on in-house case studies.
7) Formal and informal learning should be retired as a distinction. People are moving away from formal learning, and moving towards learner experience.
8) There’s a shift to outcome indicators, and away from effort indicators.
9) So this is where we are:
Conclusion
I tip my hat to Evan Fredo. I’m going to suggest to Neil that this talk should be immediately included in the course SLB is currently running on TBLT.
So much to think about, so much to encourage me – and others – to take more interest in the world of English in the workplace.
ELT conferences are upon us. Who will challenge coursebook-driven ELT? Or the grip of high stakes tests? Or the precarity, low pay, & bad conditions of teachers’ jobs? I bet real issues are ignored while everybody babbles on about translanguaging, teacher identity, bla bla bla
I added:
Questions for ELT conference goers: Who wins and who loses in the current $200 billion ELT industry? What say did you have in the programme? How do the plenary speakers address issues that directly affect you? Why is the Exhibition Hall the real hub of the conference?
and
Advice to ELT conference goers: there’s an inverse relationship between the value of a presentation and the size of the room it’s in.
I’ve just had a look at the IATEFL Conference 2023 programme, and I’m sorry but not surprised to say that there’s little on offer to challenge my cynical prediction.
IATEFL’s Big Mistake
The founder of IATEFL, Bill Lee (a real tyrant in many ways, as Rixon & Smith’s (2017) excellent A History of IATEFL makes clear) had very fixed views about what the conference was for, viz: to get leading figures in ELT together to talk to colleagues and engage in open discussion of the best ways to teach English as an L2, and he fought hard against interference from commercial concerns, insisting that they should be limited to a display on tables in the foyer of relevant books. The first time that presentations on behalf of publishers were admitted to the programme was in 1983. When Lee was finally ousted in 1984, the floodgates opened, so that nearly forty years later, in Harrogate next week, publishers and other commercial outfits rule the roost. They sponsor a significant proportion of all the presentations that take place in the big auditoria, and the Exhibition Hall is the hub of the whole damn show.
The ELT Hydra
The 2023 IATEFL conference is, yet again, a showcase for commercial interests. As I’ve argued many times, the $200 billion ELT industry is an inter-locking hydra composed of publishers, teacher trainers, course providers and examination boards. All four heads of the ELT hydra focus on selling products, which has led to reification – mistakenly changing abstract ideas into something real that stands in their place. For example, proficiency is changed into the CEFR scale. The abstract idea of language learning is changed into products for sale.)
The products of ELT are:
coursebooks and related materials;
training courses like CELTA and DELTA, and CPD courses offered by a host of teacher educators;
EFL/ ESL courses like those offered by private outfits (International House, the British Council, Berlitz, etc.) and public schools across the world;
Exams such as the IELTS, the Cambridge suite and TOEFL.
All these products wrongly assume that knowing things about the L2 (e.g., in English, to form the 3rd person singular of the present tense of verbs, add an “s” to the infinitive) leads to the ability to use this knowledge for practical purposes. But teaching students about the L2 doesn’t lead to an ability to use the L2, as shown by the experiences of the billions (sic) of students who have been taught about an L2 and who end up, after hundreds of hours of instruction, incapable of using it for any communicative purpose.
SLA scholars today agree that people learn English as an additional language through a process of interlanguage development and that this process depends fundamentally on unconscious, internal mental processes. Given the right opportunities – rich input and communicative exchanges – learners will work out for themselves how English (its grammar and lexis and pragmatics) works. Simply put: sixty years of research strongly suggest that learning an additional language is a matter of learning by doing, of using the language not treating it as an object of study. This suggests that current coursebook-driven ELT is inefficacious. Using a synthetic syllabus which treats the English language as an object of study and obliges teachers to spend most of classroom time talking about the language is fundamentally mistaken. Much more efficacious is to use an analytic syllabus, where the English language is treated more holistically and where students are given tasks which give them opportunities to communicate with their peers and their teacher, thereby acquiring the procedural knowledge required to “do” English, not just demonstrate their knowledge about it.
The difference between a synthetic and an analytic syllabus is hugely important. It isn’t just a question of emphasis – a bit more or less time devoted to so-called communicative activities, too often in the form of Initiation-Response-Feedback routines often beginning with display questions. No, it’s a true paradigm shift: a radical rejection of one type of ELT in favour of another completely different type, and it depends on respecting rather than ignoring everything we know about how people learn an L2. Coursebooks use synthetic syllabuses which ignore robust research findings. Why? Because synthetic syllabuses are the perfect vehicle for packaging a course of English and selling it for the biggest profit. Coursebook-driven ELT commodifies language learning. It pushes relentlessly towards the packaging and sale of products like coursebooks, teacher development courses, English courses, and exams which are judged by commercial, not educational, standards. It rides roughshod over what we know about language learning. Even judged by the declining standards of education today, current ELT is rightly seen as a pariah, an inefficacious disgrace to research-driven education.
Harrogate
Back to the IATEFL 2023 conference. What’s it about? Well, while there’s no over-arching “theme” in the title this year, the programme in general and the plenaries in particular suggest that the organisers have caught the zeitgeist – it’s all about you and your myriad identities, not forgetting everybody else and their myriad identities. In trying to be the best “you” that you can possibly be, how do you resolve the fluid and contradictory, socially-constructed yet deeply individual ideas you have about your various identities, including that of teacher, while respecting the equally complex struggles everybody else has with similar problems? What is your story? What are their stories? Is there a narrative that makes sense of it all and is that narrative capable of impacting on teaching praxis, going forward? To take the most pressing problem: What are some of the more inclusive, multi-self-affirming uses of personal pronouns likely to be found in the 2024 edition of Headway Intermediate?
OK. So here comes a summary of what awaits the 5,000+ teachers who will attend the awful show.
The plenaries
*** Evan Frendo. English for the workplace – looking for new answers.
Adjust your identity to suit Big Business.
*** Divya Madhavan.Lean on me: stories of coaching, mentoring and teacher resilience.
Teachers need help with identity. How to be a coach and mentor that fixes the problem.
*** Lesley Painter-Farrell. Sharing words and worlds: ESOL teachers as allies, advocates, and activists.
How to support teachers in navigating and addressing their learners’ linguistic, social, and emotional identities, sorry, needs.
*** Ofelia García. Translanguaging and teaching English as a foreign language.
How two EFL teachers have developed a “translanguaging juntos” stance. How the opening up of translanguaging spaces within EFL instruction enables students to act in English without giving up their identities.
*** Awad Ibrahim. Race, popular culture and ESL in a post-George Floyd moment
We must engage race and pop culture in our ESL classrooms.
That’s it. Note that none of this does anything to encourage teachers to challenge the fundamental ways in which they do their jobs (i.e., the syllabuses and materials and assessment procedures they work with), or to demand better contracts, pay and conditions.
The presentations
Here are a few of the presentations that will take place in the biggest room in the conference: the Auditorium of the Convention Centre, 550 audience. I list enough to give evidence for my claim that commercial interests pervade and that there’s little that challenges current ELT practice.
Herbert Puchta, promoted by Cambridge University Press, talks about assessment and promotes his book Think.
A promotional spiel. His book’s called “Think”? Really?
Rod Bolitho and Alan Maley talk about the personal qualities of great teachers.
Two old timers shoot the breeze. This is a session I’d happily attend. Alan used to be quite radical, now he’s an IATEFL treasure. Hey ho. .
Steve Copeland, funded by British Council, presents the findings of a research project which aims to identify key trends that will define the role of English as a global language in the future.
Why sit there? Just read the report. It’s out next week and deserves careful reading. The BC is a snobbish, right-wing, profit-crazy outfit with a very uncertain future.
Penny Ur (Retired) reviews recent research. One of the advantages of being retired, Ur says, is that one has more time to browse through recent books and journals in search of interesting research studies. In this session, she’ll share some of them and discuss “the possible implications for practice”.
In previous posts on this blog I’ve made my view clear: Ur is a bad intermediator, a poor conduit, between teachers and researchers. Among the things that Ur has told teachers are these gems:
“There is no evidence that TBLT works.”
“Pienemann’s teachability hypothesis has only very doubtful implications for teaching.”
“Researchers have very limited or nonexistent teaching experience so their ideas on the pedagogical implications of their results may not be very practical and need to be treated with caution”.
It’s certainly possible to write helpful and valid professional guidance for teachers with no research references whatsoever”.
There’s a long list of researchers, including Doughty, Long, Pienemann, Nunan, Richards, Rogers, Skehan, Foster, Cook, Crookes, Alright, Schmidt, Robinson, Reves, Medgyes, Prodromou, Norris, O’Neil, Mackey, Munoz, Lewis, Li, Jenkins, … the list goes on, who have ample teaching experience. Furthermore, there’s an obvious non-sequitur involved. Even if Pienemann had never set foot in a classroom, his Learnability Hypothesis, and the derived Teachability Hypothesis should be evaluated by appeal to rational argument and evidence, not by appeal to worn-out clichés about the nontranferability of good old, down home teacher experience. The teachability hypothesis has screamingly obvious implications for teaching (the clue’s in the name, as they say), and it’s typical of Ur that she should so airily dismiss them.
Nowhere in any of her published work has Ur attempted to describe and evaluate arguments and evidence from academics whose work challenges her own traditional approach to ELT, and nowhere does she encourage teachers to engage in any serious criticism of current coursebook-driven ELT practice. I have seen nothing published by her that addresses any of the major issues currently being discussed by sociolinguist or psychlinguists in the field of SLA. Her best-selling book “A Course in English Language Teaching” is devoid of even the most rudimentary discussion of SLA research. That Ur should be chosen to review research (again!- I seem to remember that she gave a hopeless review of research in a plenary at a previous IATEFL conference many years ago) is an indication of how little regard the IATEFL organisers give to the academic credibility of their favorite speakers.
Samuel John Williams, promoted by Black Cat Cideb, explores how to use social media videos as a valuable lesson resource with Black Cat readers.
Pure promotion. I bet it’s slick.
Nathaniel Owen and Colin Finnerty, promoted by OUP, report their experience in using the new Handbook for Aligning Language Education with the CEFR (2022).
It’s not surprising that it takes two clever chaps from OUP to help the average Joe to make sense of a Handbook that attempts the impossible.
Hugh Dellar, representing his company Lexical Lab, takes us “Beyond the native-speaker paradigm”. He’ll suggest that ideas such as ‘British’ or ‘American’ English are “simply constructs” and that the reality is both more complicated and more liberating. The classroom implications will be explored.
The view that native speakers of English are the best source of information about how English is used is not a paradigm. And the claim that British and American English are “simply constructs” suggests that Dellar doesn’t know what a construct is either. In this, his latest opportunity to finally get the better of his notes on the big stage, Dellar will surely delve, yet again, into his already well-plundered treasure trove of lexical chunks to showcase twenty or so more of them. At least he can be sure that everybody in the audience is likely to be equally baffled, regardless of their L1, dialect, sociolect or idiolect.
*** Jeremy Harmer and Jane Revell talk about “Silence and noise: modes of being in the classroom.” They promise to explore the advantages and disadvantages of both, using examples from the second edition of Revell’s coursebook American Jetstream.
As with Penny Ur, I’ve done a number of posts on this blog about the work of Jeremy Harmer, who is, in my opinion, in a class of his own when it comes to making a career out of what in yiddish is called “chutzpah”, and what in cockney is called “front” (as in “Ronnie had more front than Harrods”). He’s the Boss of Bluff and Baloney, the High Priest of Hogwash. Surely the award for the worst presentation ever made at an IATEFL conference must go to Harmer for his 2015 talk “An uncertain and approximate business? Why teachers should love testing”. Click here to watch the video.A Spanish colleague of mine told me that he felt such “vergüenza ajena” (embarrassment for another) watching Harmer perform in a video that he crawled under the bed. After another car crash of a presentation in Armenia in 2017 (he looks like he was in a car crash an hour before he walked on stage), I thought we’d seen the last of him, but he’s back, and, of course, he’s in the biggest capacity room of the conference.
His co-presenter is Jane Revell, who tells us that she is “a very well-known and highly-respected international trainer and consultant”, and also a “Master Practitioner in NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming)”. Twenty years ago, NLP was quite popular in some ELT circles. Revell, with co-author Susan Norman, wrote several articles and two books, the first called “In Your Hands: NLP and ELT” (1998), and the second called “Handing Over: NLP Activities for language learning” (1999). Thanks particularly to Russell Mayne, who gave a very well-received and influential presentation in a small room at the 2014 IATEFL conference, NLP has now been thoroughly discredited, condemned as useless and even dangerous for ELT, and thrown into the dustbin of history, where it belongs. It is classic pseudoscience. “It masquerades as a legitimate form of psychotherapy, makes unsubstantiated claims about how humans think and behave, purports to encourage research in a vain attempt to gain credibility, yet fails to provide evidence that it actually works. ((Roderique-Davis, 2009, cited in Mayne, 2017, p.47). Subsequent editions of Richards and Rodgers’, Scrivener’s, and Harmer’s best-selling “How to teach” books all quietly dropped any mention of this bogus nonsense.
So the Harmer and Revell session should be a real treat, if you’re into the theatre of the absurd and have a ghoulish sense of humour.
Conclusion
I hope these examples are enough to persuade you that whatever delights are on offer at the IATEFL 2023 conference, a serious challenge to coursebook-driven ELT is not among them. At least, not if you follow the crowds. Recall my tweet alerting conference goers to the inverse relationship between the value of a presentation and the size of the room it’s in. On the final day of the conference, at half past one when everybody’s having lunch, in Queen’s Suite 6 of Harrogate Convention Centre which can hold 43 people, Steve Brown will talk on “The profit motive: time to problematise capitalism in ELT?” His blurb says “While the merits of capitalism as a system of global governance face increasing scrutiny, capitalist principles remain highly prevalent in ELT, with profit-orientated organisations heavily influencing our teaching practice, materials content and assessment. This talk questions the role of the profit motive in ELT, explores its negative impact, and calls for a re-assessment of priorities within our profession.” Steve is a great speaker, has more to say than all the speakers I’ve mentioned above put together, and I’m sure that everybody who attends his talk will get lots from it, not least a feeling of shared solidarity. A detailed search through all the talks going on in similarly small rooms at awkward times might well turn up enough good talks to make the trip worthwhile.
On Friday, 3rd Febrary, Scott published the Tweet, above. I replied
Scott replied:
And I replied:
Finally, Scott:
The exchange between Scott and me went on for a bit longer, and there were quite a few comments from others. We all, I’m pleased to say, kept it courteous and I think most of those who followed the discussion agreed with Scott’s point of view – no surprises there.
In this post, I’d like to make to my case more fully. I’ll restrict it to ELT, but it applies also to teaching other additional languages.
I want to start by saying (again!) how much I respect Scott, and how much I value much of his work. We agree about a lot, but we disagree about quite a lot, too. I hope that airing our disagreements will help promote constructive discussion and change.
Scott, Peter Watkins and Sandy Millin have just published a second edition of Scott and Peter’s best-selling books on The CELTA course. As is evident from Scott’s reply to my initial Tweet, the 2nd edition attempts to address many of the criticisms made about CELTA, but I suggest that it remains a woefully inadequate pre-service course.
The CELTA website (Cambridge Assessment English, 2019) states that “tens of thousands” take the course every year at more than 2,800 centers in 130 countries around the world. A full-time course typically involves about 120 hours of work (homework apart) and lasts between four and five weeks.
The CELTA Syllabus consists of five modules:
Topic 1 – Learners and teachers, and the teaching and learning context
Topic 2 – Language analysis and awareness
Topic 3 – Language skills: reading, listening, speaking and writing
Topic 4 – Planning and resources for different teaching contexts
Topic 5 – Developing teaching skills and professionalism.
Assessment is a combination of marked written assignments, and continuous assessment of participation in tutorials classes and teaching practice, which is a vital part of the course, with trainees being required to teach students at two different levels.
The only attention given to learning a second language is in the first written assignment, but even here there is no requirement for trainees to investigate the process of second language learning or to discuss teaching implications.
Some general weaknesses of the course are:
It is far too short in duration.
While there is no requirement in the CELTA course that coursebooks be adopted, coursebooks are, in fact, widely used in the tutorials, class discussions and teaching practice.
The CELTA course descriptions make no mention of the distinction between synthetic and analytic syllabuses, or of the need to engage in any critical evaluation of the methodological principles which might inform pedagogical procedures.
The teaching practice fails to give trainees any real opportunities to learn how to teach
The course makes isolated practice of the four language skills a major part of the syllabus and a crucial influence on materials design. Skill separation makes little sense and is in fact, a remnant of the audiolingual era with little empirical or theoretical justification. All SLA research points to the need to integrate language skills for effective language teaching.
Brandt (2006) reports a number of problems with the teaching practice. Most trainees feel that success in teaching practice involves being seen to adequately use key techniques, such as transformation drills, marker sentences, counselling responses, concept questions, elicitation, and Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) routines. But since different tutors have different, often contradictory, views about teaching techniques, trainees’ success or failure depends on keeping in tune with the particular preferences of whichever tutor is observing them.
Brandt also found that trainees felt they were not free to experiment and make mistakes without being judged; that they were given few opportunities to reflect on their performance; and that they perceived the purpose of their short teaching practice sessions (lasting from 40 to 60 minutes) as being to show what they could do, rather than to help the students to learn. This feeling among trainees that the teaching practice was something of a sham, that they behaved more like performing monkeys than genuine teachers, was echoed by responses from tutors who complained about experiencing “a dual, conflicting, role: that of guide (to the practising, developing teacher) and that of assessor (of the trainee’s performance)” (Brandt, 2006, p. 256).
Brandt concludes that the CELTA framework fails to recognize the diversity and opportunities of each language learning classroom, and also fails to take into account the distinct contexts in which the course is offered around the world. The course encourages a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, restricting trainees’ opportunities to adequately prepare for the challenges they will face in their local environment, and promoting a view of teachers as “contextually-isolated technicians” (Brandt, 2006, p. 262). Furthermore, the teaching practice tends to treat language learners as ‘tools’ and ‘guinea pigs’, expecting them to jump through a set of hoops for the teachers’ convenience, and the lessons given by the trainees are thus a means of assessment, rather than opportunities for genuine practice.
Regardless of all the efforts the authors of the 2nd edition of The CELTA Course books have made to address these weaknesses and those highlighted by Scott in 2017 – the widespread assumption that a grammar-based, structural syllabus as laid out in coursebooks provides the framework for ELT; the predominance of IRF exchanges and display questions; the superficial treatment of texts, the high activity turnover and the prioritising of ‘fun’; etc., – the CELTA course remains an almost insultingly short preparation for the job of teaching English as an L2.
We arrive at the question: Just how incompatible are the CELTA Course and Dogme?
I suggest the answer is: completely! Most importantly, perhaps, is Dogme’s underlying view of language learning. Scott, following Larson-Freeman, Nick Ellis and others, adopts an emergentist view of SLA which, pace Krashen and a great many other prominent SLA scholars, claims that languages are not “acquired” but rather, language “emerges” through use. Without going into details here, the implication is that the kind of pedagogic grammar you find in coursebooks is a fiction, and that using a grammar-based syllabus as a framework for teaching English as an L2 contradicts the way emergentists understand language learning.
Scott is famous for lampooning the way teachers serve up innutritious “grammar McNuggets” to students and he applauds Long’s description of teachers haplessly throwing students bits of grammar as if they were zoo-keepers throwing fish to seals at the lunchtime show. Cutting up the target language into items and then presenting and practicing them in a pre-determined linear sequence on the assumption that this will lead to communicative competence is anathema to emergentists like Scott, who believe that language emerges when learners engage in communicative interaction.
The learner talks; others respond. It is the scaffolding and recasting, along with the subsequent review, of these learner-initiated episodes that drives acquisition, argue proponents of task-based instruction, with which Dogme ELT is, of course, aligned. ‘In other words, the emphasis shifts from the traditional interventionist, proactive, modelling behaviour of synthetic approaches to a more reactive mode for teachers – students lead, the teacher follows’ (Long, 2015, p. 70). Or, as Michael Breen (1985) so memorably put it: ‘The language I learn in the classroom is a communal product derived through a jointly constructed process’ (Thornbury, 2017).
It follows that teachers should not follow an externally-imposed syllabus; rather, they should scaffold student engagement in communicative activities and allow the syllabus to emerge as the course progresses.
It’s difficult to exaggerate the difference between the Dogme approach and the CELTA approach to ELT: they comprehensibly contradict each other! I know that Sandy Millin takes a different view, and I suspect Peter Watkins does, too. I assume that they are both sympathetic to organizing a course of English around a synthetic syllabus, to using a coursebook, to the use of drills, to explicit grammar teaching, to separate skills development, and so on. But Scott is not. Scott is the original creator of Dogme which, on the basis of an alternative, well-articulated understanding of language learning, urges teachers to free the classroom of published materials and coursebooks and to adopt a learner-centred approach where the L2 is treated more holistically, and where the learners and teacher co-construct an emergent knowledge of the L2 and how to use it.
Scott says that he can live with the contradiction between the CELTA approach and the Dogme approach because “I’m confident that experience has taught me what is needed and feasible on preservice courses”. This is nonsense (sic). What is needed and feasible on preservice courses is an understanding of how languages are learned, an understanding of how to organize a course (i.e. syllabus design) and an understanding, gained partly thru guided practice, of classroom management. The CELTA course imparts no adequate understanding of any of this. It encourages participants to study English morphology, grammar and pronunciation in order to teach an English course which involves the teacher treating the language as an object of study, talking for most of the time, explaining the language, and organising the students to do some whole class / group /pair activities to “practice”. And let’s be crystal clear about one thing: despite everything Dogme has to say, the vast majority of CELTA courses worldwide use coursebooks in the teaching practice component of the course, and assure that when they’ve graduated, teachers will go on to use coursebooks in their jobs.
There is, IMO, no rational way that Scott can reconcile writing this new edition of The CELTA Course while simultaneously writing books and doing courses which promote Dogme. To claim that CELTA gives a good foundation, while Dogme can help experienced teachers to improve their teaching is no justification for encouraging teachers to do a course whose methodological principles and pedagogic procedures flatly contradict those of Dogme. Dogme is a brave alternative, a rejection of the status quo in ELT, a call for radical reform which offers a bright, vibrant, efficacious learning experience. CELTA is an important pillar of established ELT practice which commodifies language education, fails students, and leads to de-skilled teachers doing precarious, badly-paid jobs.
CELTA makes an important contribution to current ELT practice. More than 90% of those currently teaching English as an additional language are non-native English speakers (British Council, 2015). Most of these teachers have done pre-training courses which echo CELTA’s reliance on the use of courseboks which implement a grammar-based, synthetic syllabus, and it’s shocking how many of them fall down in their ability to communicate fluently in English. The fault lies with the way they themselves were taught. Various studies cited in Jordan and Long (2022) give support to the view that, despite being told of the value of CLT in helping students use English for communicative purposes, and despite stating in their answers to researchers’ questions that they firmly believed in the value of spending classroom time on communicative activities, when the teachers’ classes were observed, it became obvious that their lessons were teacher-fronted, and that the vast majority of the time was spent using a coursebook to instill knowledge about English grammar and vocabulary. When asked to explain the mismatch, the teachers explained that they lacked confidence in their command of English.
A 1994 study by Reves & Medgyes (cited in Braine, 2005) asked 216 native speaker and non-native speaker English teachers from 10 countries (Brazil, former Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Israel, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, Sweden, former Yugoslavia, and Zimbabwe) about their experiences as teachers. The overwhelming majority of participants were non-native speakers of English, and in their responses, 84% of the non-native speaker subjects said that they had various difficulties using English and that their teaching was adversely affected by these difficulties. Difficulties with vocabulary and fluency were most frequently mentioned, followed by speaking, pronunciation, and listening comprehension.
Unless we reform ELT practice, by taking Dogme, TBLT and other alternative approaches more seriously, this vicious circle will continue. Scott needs to appreciate that he can’t have his cake and eat it without damaging his own credibility and the hopes of a brighter future for ELT.
Scott was recently asked by Dwight Atkinson of the University of Arizona to talk to his MA TESOL students about the theory-practice interface. I find his talk heart-breakingly disapponting. The man we look to for radical change, he who invented and promotes Dogme, who famously lampooned coursebooks with his talk of grammar McNuggets, and who adopts Nick Ellis’ emergentist view of SLA which emphasises the primacy of implicit learning, here serves up a dish of feeble, non-nourishing thin soup which does precisely nothing to further the fight for change.
Nowhere in this I’m-a-teacher-not-an-academic, laid-back chat does Scott properly consider the interface between theory and practice. His discussion of theories of SLA and their implications for ELT practice is vague and avoids arguing for any coherent view of language learning or for any approach to teaching. If you protest: “It’s only a 30 minute talk, for God’s sake!”, I reply that the theory part of the theory-practice interface can easily be done in ten minutes. There’s no complete, unified theory of SLA, but there’s complete consensus on this essential point: learning an additional language is different from learning other subjects like geography or biology, because procedural knowledge is the goal, and procedural knowledge is not gained by focusing on formal aspects of the language in the false hope that, with a bit of careful practice, declarative knowledge turns into procedural knowledge. Learning a language is essentially a process of learning by doing. That’s the theory. As for practice, the theory calls for the rejection of coursebook-driven ELT, of A1 to C2 labelling, of high stakes exams like IELTS, and of training programmes like CELTA, all of which Scott has, in his own carefully-hedged way, succintly criticised in his published work.
Scott’s presentation does nothing to promote the needed push-back against coursebook-driven ELT. It’s nothing more than comfortable, charming pap, likely to get warm murmurs of support from the tethered sheep everywhere. Where wolf?
Below is the recording, and after that some comments.
Summary
All teachers have theories about how people learn an L2, however inarticulate they may be.
Teachers’ views of L2 learning become slowly articulated. They develop through reflecting on their experience. Scott gives the example of teaching the present perfect when a student responded “meaningfully”, disregarding the form. “Were I and my student operating in different, parrallel universes?” he asked himself. He resolved “the dilemma” by reading Skehan.
Moral: teachers who bump into dilemmas like “teaching the present perfect didn’t go as my implicit theory of language learning led me to expect” can gain by looking at SLA research that explains interlanguage development. Scott says that reading about the early morpheme studies, which suggested that learners have their own in-built syllabus, solved his dilemma. He then gives a list of phenomena that SLA scholars examine:
As he goes through the list, Scott hums and haws about what they might mean to teachers, without (of course!) coming to any firm conclusions.
Teachers who want to read more are recommended to read books like these:
But, Scott warns, it’s important to keep abrest of developments in SLA. The original morpheme studies, for example, have been seriously questioned by further research. So heed Ur’s words of wisdom
Anyway, some reading and more experience will put teachers in a better position to reflect on their teaching. Scott provides a handy chart:
And thus, through a bit of critical reading and lots of reflection, helped by the handy “My reflection chart”, teachers develop from their original implicit theory of language learning to an informed theory and finally to an adaptive theory which takes their own particular circumstances into account,
If all goes well, teachers will be better able to answer these questions:
Finally, the takeaways:
Discussion
The takeaways reflect the banality of the presentation – who could possibly argue with them!
Of course teachers have their own unarticulated views of language learning, and of course becoming familiar with SLA research will jolt that view. The important thing, however, is to encourage teachers to appreciate the implications of the research, because, if they do, they will recognise that current coursebook-driven ELT is inefficacious. All branches of science, and the teaching of most subjects on a modern school curriculum, have advanced thanks to due regard to research findings. ELT lags behind because it refuses to recognise the implications of robust findings about how people learn languages. Explicit teaching about the language must take a back seat and priority given to getting learners to use the L2 to perform communicative tasks that are relevant to their needs.
Scott deals with his list of the phenomena studied by SLA scholars as if he’s picking over a few enigmatic, quasi-philosophical conjectures. “Ooo, Aghhh” he goes, “Look at this: second language learning is variable in its outcomes. Now there’s a thing! Well, well. Maybe if we reflect on this, it could have some influence – don’t ask me what, precisely – on our teaching.” He does absolutely nothing to properly organise the phenomena in question, or to join up the dots, or highlight the importance of the second one on his list: “2. A good deal of SLA happens incidentally”. He should have said “Most of SLA happens implicitly”, and he should have linked it to “9. There are limits on the efects of instruction on SLA”, but anyway, he sails past this “phenomenon”, ignoring the fact that it is the key to the whole damn problem of current inefficacious ELT.
There is absolutely no point in discussing the theory-practice interface in the way Scott does. He follows the awful fashion of encouraging “teacher reflection”. Well how the hell are teachers supposed to reflect if they’re not in possession of the information they need to move their reflections beyond folk lore? Scott suggests three books they might read, and you can bet your hat that most teachers won’t read them. They rely, quite understandably, on teacher educators who are supposed to read this stuff and keep them informed about it. But teacher educators fail miserably in their duty to tell teachers about how people learn languages in their initial training, or to keep teachers informed about new findings in SLA in CPD programmes. Why? Because ELT is a commercial multi-million dollar business, built on selling coursebooks, high stakes exams like IELTS, and training programmes like CELTA.
The truth about how people learn languages is deliberately misrepresented, but the truth will out, and ELT will change – with or without Scott’s help or hinderance.
“Recuperation” was the term the Situationist International coined in the 1960s to characterise the move from capitalist control of the means of production to advanced capitalist control of the means of consumption. This was surely the Sits most notable contribution to political theory. Recuperation describes the process by which radical ideas and images are defused, incorporated, annexed and commodified in order for their threat to be neutralised. It changes the meaning of radical ideas and appropriates them into the dominant discourse of the status quo.
Mick Jagger starts out as an outrageous drug-taking rebel and ends up as a multi-millionaire appearing on a BBC arts programme discussing culture with the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The fashion industry re-invents punk, selling ripped jeans and dog collars to the masses.
Tattoos are recuperated from their original cultural representation and become a universal “must have”.
Banksy’s street art is sold at Sotheby’s for millions.
Environmental warriors see the language of transitions to sustainability being recuperated by those seeking to delay and deflect the transition.
Bastani writes of the “recuperation of the internet by capital”, describing how billion dollar corporate media quickly recuperate the internet so that it now reinforces and promotes the interests of the status quo.
Recuperation offers an explanation for what happened to Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in English language teaching (ELT).
CLT began as a protest, a rebellion, whose proponents were signaling their dissatisfaction with the then dominant approaches to ELT. To quote from Jordan & Long (2022)
They wanted to replace teaching the structural aspects of language with “doing” language, with helping students to express themselves in the L2. This was truly revolutionary; they argued that the typical classroom routine:
• Teacher: “I am leaving the room”. (Walks towards the door.) “What am I doing?”
• Students: “You are leaving the room”
Should be replaced with
• Teacher: “I am leaving the room”. (Walks towards the door.)
• Students: “Hurray!”, or “Wait for us!”
Or, to paraphrase Hymes and Halliday, they thought their job should focus on helping students to appreciate the communicative value of utterances, the functional, as well as the structural, aspects of language. “For, after all, there is rarely a direct equivalent between form and function: the illocutionary force (i.e., the speaker’s intention) of “I’m leaving the room” can be “I feel ill”; “I’ve had enough”; “It’s dangerous to stay”; and many other things besides. As Hymes (1971) put it, “There are rules of use without which rules of grammar would be useless.”
CLT stressed that language should be treated not just as a collection of grammatical and structural features, but also as a system of categories of functional and communicative meaning which are used to construct discourse. … CLT’s emergence in the 1980s coincided with important developments in the study of second language learning, and thus it also stressed the importance of teaching in a way that respected SLA research findings. Perhaps the most important assumption here is that learners learn a language through using it to communicate. Following on from this, CLT adopted a humanistic theory of learning and insisted, therefore, that learning can often be promoted by getting students to work together, often in small groups, on activities which involve them in using the target language in meaningful communication so as to complete relevant tasks.
CLT flowered in the late 1970s and early 1980s; see Earl Stevick’s A Way and Ways for descriptions of some of its more outlandish expressions.
The tremendous potential of CLT was snuffed out by the arrival of the modern ELT coursebook, which recuperated CLT and turned it into a harmless component of the new, almost perfectly commodified version of ELT we have today.
To be clear: modern coursebook series, with all their add-on components, recuperated CLT, commodifiied ELT and returned it to exactly the type of teaching (a focus on learning about the language rather than on learning by doing) that the pioneers of CLT were rebelling against. Coursebooks pay lip service to CLT, but the syllabuses and classroom practices which flow from them contradict the principles and the spirit of CLT. Promotional materials for these coursebook series claim to be promoting CLT in the same way that politicians today in the UK and elsewhere claim that they’re promoting “levelling up”. They talk it up, they misrepresent it, and they betray it. They’re bullshitters blinded by their own bullshit. Karl Marx, George Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Erich Fromm, Jurgen Habermas, and dear old Paulo Freire (probably the sufferer of the most severe recuperation in ELT literature!) described aspects of alienation that are all too evident in the stuff you read by coursebook publishers and in the stuff teachers hear at conferences and workshops delivered by their well-paid representatives.
In the ELT establishment today we have a plethora of now very rich individuals who took part in the initial push towards CLT and who were “neutralised”. Richards & Rogers and David Nunan are the most spectacular (sic) examples: three radical pioneers of CLT who are now multi-millionaire apologists for today’s inefficacious ELT practices. Less academic, more popular figures such as Alan Maley perfectly represent recuperation: long ago they encouraged rebellion, today, they’re respected, well-heeled members of the establishment, supporting coursebook-driven ELT and voicing their skepticism of Dogme and strong versions of TBLT.
More evidence of recuperation is found in the work of today’s ELT influencers. They come in two categories. First are those who claim to be radicals with no credentials or credibility. A good example is the work of Hugh Dellar, Leo Sellivan and others who peddle a “Lexical Approach”. They claim to offer a radical alternative to established ELT practice, while turning the work of pioneers like Pauly & Syder into dross: they write coursebook series and books aimed at “teacher educators” which nullify the radical content of their sources. Another example is the work of Tyson Seburn, who promotes himself as a radical champion of the rights of LGBTQ+ people without for a moment considering, let alone challeging, the commodification of ELT.
Then there are those who simply ignore what’s really going on. Badly-informed gurus like Jeremy Harmer and Penny Ur continue to tour the conference circuit, nodding at CLT without the slightest commitment to its core principles or its real value, while promoting their own, best-selling, truly appalling books on how to teach.
And then there’s the curious case of Scott Thornbury, one of our best ELT educators, who seems to actively participate in the recuperation of his own work. Scott is the proponent of Dogme, the prime supporter of the “Hands Up” project, the man who invented the now famous “teaching grammar McNuggets” meme, the leader in many ways of today’s gathering push back against coursebook-driven ELT. Yet Scott refuses to outrightly reject courses based on grammar teaching in particular or coursebook-driven ELT in general. “There’s no perfect method”, he says, as if anybody suggested that there were. He tells his huge following that if teaching grammar is the basis of their teaching, if they use coursebooks as the syllabus, then who is he to say they’re wrong.
Maybe, as usual, Scott is ahead of the game. Maybe he’s a pioneer in the next stage of post-post-modernism, the inevitable successor of those described by the Situationists. Maybe Scott deliberately contradicts himself. Maybe he’s the new version of Wittgenstein’s beautifully enigmatic volte-face: if you’ve followed me so far, you’ll know I’m talking nonsense. “Don’t do as I say, just kind of soak it up in your own way. It’s all bad, but if it’s good for you, who am I to disagree, as the song goes”. Scott acts out the mismatch between theory and practice like a jester: he’s a radical at heart, wearing a conventional suit betrayed by a swiveling bow tie. Actually, now I think about it, forget Wittgenstein, the real reference is Hegel. Scott goes beyond thesis and antithesis, marching on towards true, dialectically resolved synthesis. I’m joking.
The vast majority of the “influencers” in the huge, multi-billion dollar industry of English language teaching (ELT) are fakers and pretenders.
An influencer is someone with sway.
ELT Influencers do the conference circuit, giving plenaries at the international IATEFL and TESOL conventions and at as many other of the hundreds of ELT conferences around the world that they can. They write best selling “How to Teach” books. They write coursebooks. They design teacher training courses and they contribute to high stakes tests. They have a big presence on social media.
Most ELT influencers fake knowledge about language learning and pretend to know how to teach. They know next to nothing about how people learn an additional language and, as a result, they base teaching practice on unquestioned false assumptions about language learning.
As in all walks of life, ELT influencers give the impression that they’ve convinced themselves that the bullshit they spout isn’t bullshit. Are they sincere? Does their absence of pretence, deceit, or hypocrisy shine through?
Most ELT influencers are in the pay of the business people who run ELT for profit. Ergo, most ELT Influencers are reactionary.
A few ELT influencers are progressive and challenge the status quo. Most of them will be recuperated, bribed back into compliance.
What do you think you're doing? 