Thursday 24 January 2013

How to create your own TEFL method


disclaimer: All methods appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real methods, living or dead, is purely coincidental


1. come up with a new theory


It doesn't really have to be new, it can be a rehash of old stuff with a new name if you like. Ideally it would involve doing the opposite of whatever it is teachers are currently doing. For example, if teachers are using textbooks, the your method should be textbook free. And if teachers generally like to correct students' grammar then your method should avoid that altogether. In fact it should expressly prohibit correction.


Teachers are constantly disappointed with the results they achieve. Like the overweight   making yet another doomed set of new year's resolutions, teachers' sense of hope is strong. They believe that if they can just find the right method, it will unlock the secrets of English for their students. Whip up some interest, -the thrill of the new, -claim that your method is "revolutionary" and make extravagant claims about it's effectiveness.

2. Give it a interesting name

Call your method something ear-catching and cool. If you can't do that then come up with an approach which ideally can be reduced into a three letter acronym like TPR, NLP, CLL, ELF, PPP or TBI. If you only have two then just toss in a meaningless word.  Like 'total' in total physical response.  Could we have HHPR (half hearted physical response) or NMPR (not much physical response)?


The more complex the name the better. Make it sound complex and scientific if possible -don't worry if you don't know the first thing about science, it doesn't matter!  Just grab some sciencey sounding words and paste them together. The more obscure the better.  Take Neuro linguistic programming for example, (NLP!) even the practitioners state, with no apparent shame, that it has nothing to do with neuro science or linguistics! 

3. don't really describe what it is

That is, tell people it's a new 'system' or 'approach' (don't call it a method!) that is concerned with the approach to humanistic and holistic autonomous learning spheres which takes account of students' multiple intelligences and promotes student-centric learning. Or something like that. Alternatively just define it as whatever anyone says it is, like this:

A: It seems to me this is related to motivation?
B: yes, motivation plays a part in it.

or

A: Is it related to teacher identity in the technological classroom?
B: If you want it to be

3.5 be a man 

No method has ever been invented by a woman. 

4. tell people it works
 
Nothing succeeds like success. In the same way. nothing works like things that people say work!  Just keep telling people that your idea "really works" that the students "love it" and that you have seen great improvements and eventually someone will become your follower and start saying all this stuff for you. After a few years you'll have a book out and be running training courses in your approach.

5. In case of emergencies

By this time your method becoming quite popular. This is when the backlash begins.  Don't worry about those spoilsports pointing out that your theory is meaningless, just carry on and be even more vague than you were before. Tell your critic that what you do is not measurable by their methods, but only by whole body and mind convergence and the nourishment of the soul!  Let's see them try to measure that.

6. If that doesn't work

Weird theories are oddly resistant so don't worry. Even if some bright spark shows you to be a complete fraud just nod sagely and say that "it's not for everyone" and that "teacher's and more importantly students can decide for themselves what works and what doesn't".  Another well worn trick is to throw out some of the troublesome bits of the theory and keep the popular bits. Strangely in EFL when something doesn't work teachers are very reluctant to throw it out but would rather keep using bits of it, so you'll still be able to sell books and appear at conferences. Also if you wait about 30 years your method will no doubt come back into fashion.

7. sit back and count the cash

Now you can relax and let your followers do all the work for you.  If you're as successful as someone like Chomsky you can move out of the field together, reappearing with a book every now and then!  Don't worry about being found out, the academic world is slow to process things and weighted towards the ones with the ideas, not those who point out they don't work. 

So what are you waiting for, get cracking with your new theory and good luck!









Sunday 20 January 2013

Skimming and scanning

For those of you who are firm believers in teaching skimming and scanning feel free to skim this post and answer the questions at the end…you have 1 minute…go! For those of you, like me, who are more sceptical…read on.

This is the second in my “reading skills” series, following up the piece on prediction. Like prediction, skimming and scanning are very attractive to teachers as they make the rather mysterious process of reading eminently teachable. Without “reading skills” teaching reading would resemble teaching the ‘Cinderella skill’, listening. But should we teaching skimming and scanning at all? I will argue 'no' for two reasons. Firstly, skimming and scanning don't accurate reflect the way people usually read and secondly because most students already know how to do them.
 

Skimming and scanning are pretty popular in EFL, with hundreds of web pages offering lesson plans for skimming and scanning classes. St Martins University are keen on them 
as is the 'teaching English' website and Harmer includes lesson plans with these skills as targets. Textbooks like Oxford's "Well read" and "Headway" include these activities and   Grellet’s book, which as Paran notes is probably responsible for the popularity of these skills in the TEFL world, has a whole section on “from scanning to skimming”. Telling though Grabe doesn’t mentioned them once in his book on the reading in a foreign language, something which Kerr describes as "eloquent commentary" (2009:29).

Skimming and Scanning are so pervasive that a large number of teachers, (like the one pictured above and me, for the longest time) have managed to convince themselves that this is actually how people read. But it isn't. At least, not usually. Usually we read one word at a time as you're probably reading now.

Skimming and scanning are classed as "expeditious reading" (Nation 2009:70) skimming is reading quickly and for the general or “gist” meaning. Scanning is trying to identify specific information in a text. The classic example was always a “name in a phone book” until phone books went the way of tape cassettes and chalk. Nowadays “bus timetable” is the most likely example. Not only is this a reading skill that doesn’t need to be taught, it’s a basic human skill that doesn’t need to be taught. People who disagree should read “where’s Wally”.
 

Gist in laymen’s terms means a general understanding devoid of specifics as in “I wasn’t really paying attention but I got the gist of what he was saying”.  But is this a teachable skill? Or even one that we should be teaching?

We may do reading activities like setting time limits for our students while reassuring them that they “only have to get the gist” but is this teaching them anything or merely expecting them to apply a skill we assume they already have. Is a teacher who says “skimming is just trying to get the general meaning” teaching or explaining a concept we expect students to already know? If it’s the former, we have failed as we haven’t ‘taught’ them how to do it; we’ve just explained what it is. If the latter, why do we assume they don’t know how to do this? After all plenty of monolingual EFL teachers seem to be able to manage skimming without prior instruction –hell they’re so good they can even teach it!

 Secondly, what exactly is reading for gist? If it were possible for me to read faster than I do now then I would do it. But sadly I can’t (so the pile of unread books and papers grows ever larger, staring accusingly at me). If a person reads for gist then they are necessarily losing something. Otherwise they are just reading. If I read faster than normal, then I ignore parts of the text –I miss bits out. These bits may be important, they may not. I just take my chances.

Often with skimming students are told to read the first and last sentences of a paragraph; or the first sentence, or the first and second sentences. Sometimes they are told to “run their eyes over the text” whatever that means. This advice might work at times but other times it may not. Would it work with the paragraph directly before this one? I think it possible could for a test question like “what is this paragraph about” but probably not for understanding the text. 
 
I have heard it argued that these techniques could be useful for EAP students looking through texts and trying to find useful ones in a hurry, or trying to locate relevant sections in a book, but students will almost certainly not be doing these things under timed conditions. They’ll probably while away many pointless hours in libraries reading the wrong books, -much like native speakers do. It’s also quite likely that once the “don’t use a dictionary –just get the gist” bullies are out of the picture and the students successfully make it onto their courses, they'll probably sit there (sensibly in my opinion) with a text in one hand and a dictionary in the other slowly trying to make sense of whatever tortuously dull and impenetrable academic text they are unlucky enough to find themselves having to read.

 
In fact, and rather ironically, these skills seem to be most useful for doing English reading tests. That is we, the EFL community, design tests which require students to employ reading skills they probably already know and then ‘teach’ them these skills in order for them to pass the tests we wrote! Genius! Perhaps we should also invent writing upside tests and tests of underwater listening.


Don't teach grandma to suck eggs

Skimming and scanning are at times, very useful; so useful in fact that every person who comes from a culture with a written language already knows how to do them.  Arguably though they are more useful to teachers than to students as they give us something to teach. Thornbury notes
 


Very quickly, skimming/scanning became an end in itself, and teachers were misled into thinking that, by having students skim or scan texts, they were developing the skill of reading. How often do you see this expressed as an aim in examined lessons: “To develop the sub-skill of skimming a text for its gist.”

The point he goes on to make, and one also made by Swan is that student likely already have reading skills in their L1. "Much of the teaching of reading skills is predicated on the assumption that learners do not already possess them" (Swan 2008:266) but they almost certainly do and we almost certainly don’t need to spend time teaching them.Swan and Walter in a piece called "teaching reading skills: mostly a waste of time" refer to research which indicates that students will be able to use these reading skills automatically when their language reaches a proficient enough level.

 
In defence of Skimming and Scanning
 

There aren't many defenders of skimming and scanning these days but one article written by Phillip Kerr could possibly be described as a “defence” but that wouldn’t really be accurate as Kerr lists criticism and then suggests that there might be some reasons why it might be OK to use them:

1. They aren’t very difficult and they don’t take much time and so they might motivate students to feel like they have achieved something.

2. Well-designed skimming and scanning activities can help students to decode and create meaning in a text.

3. The skills are short and though not perhaps helping students learn to read, may give them some impression about the text.

4. Good for tests

 
Number four has been already been discussed. Number two is the idea that these skills  belong to the psycholinguistic model of reading, criticised by Paran and Grabe. sampling a text is not how most people read, most of the time. 
 
But let me take a minute to talk about the other reasons. If you read the article you’ll notice Kerr wraps up his reasons in such apologetic language that you almost feel sorry for skimming and scanning and want to teach them just so they don’t get thrown in a bag with some Cuisenaire rods and drown. Kerr seems to be saying, “Well, look, we all know we don’t need to teach these skills but they’re awfully quick and they might make the students feel good about themselves and oh please! It’s awfully cold outside; these skills have no place to go!”

But don't feel sorry for these skills. Feel sorry instead for the poor students who are forced to do them, and the poor teachers filling up their DELTA lesson plans with skimming and scanning targets. Isn't it time we stopped teaching students to do things they can already do?












 

Monday 14 January 2013

My final post on language articles in newspapers (probably)

I've written a few posts about the (mis)treatment of linguistics and language in many newspaper articles. In short, it's bad. But then what should we expect? Journalism is largely page filling these day (for more about churnalism read this excellent book) So I've decided this is my last article about bad linguistic journalism. Whatever I write and no matter how much evidence can be brought to bear on these kinds of wrong-headed articles, history shows that they will continue to proliferate. However, as I will hopefully show, the tide of history is almost always on the side of usage.
 
The author of the today's article "There are lots of bacteria, but there is only one genetic code" Dr Dixon, is a scientist and unsurprisingly also an editor (like grammargirl). Many journalists have a seemingly fetishistic obsession with prescriptivism regardless of  the mountain of evidence against it. An example from an earlier post is Bill Bryson describing all the reasons why "whom" could be allowed to die a natural death but then stating "I, for one, would not like to see it go".  This is pretty much the way with many writers. Scientists who would question almost any claim about their field and demand evidence have seemingly no problem swallowing linguistic rules without the slightest curiosity as to their validity. 
 
Ironically, Dixon penned an piece complaining about the press' lousy coverage of science, yet he, -a non-linguist, has set himself up as an arbiter of proper language usage. And what particular idiosyncrasies does he have a problem with? Before I dissect the article in detail I would quickly like to go over the mistaken argument from linguistic regularity which, in short, is the assumption that languages are regular and logical. Like organisms, languages evolve and as with organisms this doesn't lead to perfectly functioning "designed" languages but rather languages with a lot of inherent waste.
 
In animals, an example Dixon might understand is the recurrent laryngeal nerve. the nerve especially in animals like giraffes is massively wasteful looping down then back up the neck when in reality, it only needs to travel a few inches. This is the result of evolution applying an "if it aint broke" approach.  Languages too have massive amounts of waste because they weren't designed either, though people like Dixon act as if they were. Phrases like "the reason why", "the end result" and "over-exaggerate" are redundant. So are things like the third person 's' on verbs, the word "whom" the word "fewer", the bizarre conjugations of the "be" verb and "do support" which only a handful of languages possess at all. As this chaos swirls around them the Dixons of this world accept 95% of the disorder but vehemently oppose the last 5% like victims of the titanic complaining that their shoes are getting wet.

So let's examine the article in a little more detail.



She's developed something called anorexia."

"I was reading about that in the newspaper. It's quite serious, isn't it?"

"Yes, and more young women are getting anorexia these days."

A simple enough conversation. What the speakers did not realise is that they were not talking about anorexia at all. Anorexia means loss of appetite. That is its definition in both medical and general dictionaries. There is, however, also a condition called anorexia nervosa – a psychological illness, commonest among female adolescents, in people who deliberately starve or use other methods, such as vomiting, to lose weight. But relatively suddenly, anorexia has lost its original meaning. In the media and in everyday conversation, anorexia now means anorexia nervosa

This reminds me of "Frankenstein's monster" bores who insist on pedantically telling everyone and anyone who'll listen that Frankenstein is not the monster! anorexia is understood by most speakers as shorthand for anorexia nervosa as "Frankenstein" is for his monster. Who cares about this? The good doctor apparently. He goes on:

Language and the connotations of words and expressions evolve over time – helpfully so, when new distinctions and subtleties arise. But meanings also change simply as a result of ignorance or error. So when, some years ago, more and more people began to say "disinterested" when they meant "uninterested", the misuse gradually became a normal meaning of that word
Dixon thus is quite happy for language to change, -so long as it changes in ways he likes. The short sighted nature of his rant can be illustrated be looking at some of the words he uses. "error" for example means to "to wander" originally, the misuse seems to have gradually become the normal meaning. More interesting is that Dixon is actually wrong as his potted history falls a little short of the truth. Etymologically speaking:

Disinterested and uninterested share a confused and confusing history. Disinterested was originally used to mean “not interested, indifferent”; uninterested in its earliest use meant “impartial.” By various developmental twists, disinterested is now used in both senses. Uninterested is used mainly in the sense “not interested, indifferent.” It is occasionally used to mean “not having a personal or property interest.”

So rather than switching, it's perhaps more accurate to say that they switched back to their original meanings. But don't let facts get in the way of a good old language rant Doc!

What seems to be happening today is that such shifts are occurring more and more quickly. Consider the word "issue". I heard a cricket commentator saying that an Indian batsman was "having issues with" an opponent's spin bowling. As recently as five years ago, he would have said the batsman was confused by the spinning ball, which he was failing to hit in the way he intended. "Issue" then meant something quite different. Since then, however, it has come to mean "problem".

Dixon offers (as all news articles it should be said) no evidence for his (amazing if true) suggestion that the pace and amount of language change is increasing in English. He seems to have issues with the use of "have issues with" (hohoho) and actually Google Ngram does show an increase in its use between 1990-2008. That said, if the alternative to "having issues with" really is "confused by the spinning ball, which he was failing to hit in the way he intended" then forgive me for calling it a welcome addition to English.
What is especially surprising nowadays is that misuses of words can increasingly be found even in specialised communications – as in my own particular field of science. Long ago, when I was a microbiology student, I learned that the singular of bacteria was bacterium. Then, towards the end of the 20th century, print and broadcast journalists began to say "this bacteria". And the alteration did not stop there. It is now affecting professional discourse too. In the past three months, I have seen "a bacteria" or "this bacteria" six times in research journals. I have even heard a speaker making the same mistake throughout his conference presentation.

Most of what is described here I have dealt with in detail in this post and so won't rehash suffice to say that what Dixon describes as a "mistake" is a change in usage and also that it is altogether unreasonable to expect foreign words to retain their foreign morphemes in a host language. Note that Dixon admits that it was not evidence of usage that led to his knowledge about "bacteria" but rather that that is what he was taught -and what he unquestioningly accepted. When his friends tell him that "this spaghetti is delicious" does he, I wonder correct them "THESE spaghetti ARE delicious!" Shoddy stuff for a scientist.
Sports commentators appear to be culpable in another area – the demise of the adverb. Within the past 10 years, firstly snooker commentators and then those in other sports began to tell us that "he hit that one strong", that "she's playing confident", and that "he's bowling accurate". The habit is now spreading more widely.

This is a pretty old chestnut. This type of inflexible thinking is what leads to people avoiding saying "I am good" (I am well!) and "This food is healthy" (This food is healthful!) A basic question to be asked when people talk about "bad" grammar is whether communication is actually breaking down. As with the pedantic parental chide "two negatives make a positive" (they don't) the listener understands perfectly what they speaker is saying but just insists that language must, for some unknown reason, stand still at this moment in time and stop changing. Really quite a bizarre position for someone presumably well versed in evolutionary theory. The good Dr. seems to be suffering from a linguistic form of the "golden age fallacy" namely that there was a time when the English language was perfect. Perhaps a little after Shakespeare and a bit before the Bronte sisters. Ever since then it's just been on the decline and will eventually reach a state where morlock-esque yoof roam the streets of Neo-England burbling an incomprehensible text-like patois to each other as society collapses.
In many cases, although it is impossible to pinpoint the initial change
 
And of course this is true though as a biologist such a statement should have him holding his head in shame. He's basically asking for a missing link which could never exist. Just as no old world monkey gave birth to a human, no linguistic change can really ever be pinpointed. As McWhorter notes, Latin didn't die, it turned into French, Spanish and Italian, but there wasn't a day when people woke up saying "OK, now we're speaking French".

the reason why people begin to adopt erroneous usages so quickly is probably one of fashion and a desire to demonstrate familiarity with the modish vernacular. Consider "fantastic", which is now a universal expression of hyperbole. Anyone interviewed in the media about anything that impresses or excites them will repeatedly call it "fantastic". Over recent weeks, I have heard a celebrity chef describe a particular dish as fantastic (when he meant unusually succulent), a drama critic call an actor's performance fantastic (when she meant disturbingly realistic) and a politician describe a party conference speech as fantastic (when he meant inspiring).
 

Reading this I'm almost tempted to think Dixon is pulling our collective legs. The idea that language use is something like wearing hipster jeans and not related to a complex set of social and psychological factors is quite staggeringly simplistic. Also does he really have a problem with the word 'fantastic'? Does he really expect people only to use the word only for "characteristic of fantasy"? He goes on to talk about 'literally' which I dealt with here and so won't go into nor will I again deal with what he calls the "important differences between 'who and whom'" (tl;dr = It isn't an important difference.)

At the end he wonders "why are even the editors of scientific journals adopting fashionable but incorrect usages?" and this is where I would like return to the point I made in the first paragraph. The reason that editors are (sensibly) adopting "fashionable" usages is because those usages will almost certainly, triumph. And for the second part of this (rather long!) blog I'd like to take you and Dixon on an Dickensian tour of the ghosts of pedants past. I'm hopeful there is still time for the good Doctor to have a change of heart. So here it is, a list of complaining prescriptivists throughout the ages:


George Fox (1624-1691) wrote in his Epistle:



If you're not getting that then Fox was complaining that only a ruddy great idiot would say "you" to one person, when as any fule kno the right word was "thou".

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) disliked past tense 'ed' being pronounced softly, (i.e. as we pronounce it now) he wanted it pronounced as the 'aed' in 'dead'. He also didn't like the words "sham, banter, bully, bubble, cutting and shuffling".

Robert Lowth (1710-1787) thought that (formal) sentences shouldn't end in prepositions. Somehow this opinion became accepted as a 'rule' by editor types at some point although almost everyone ignores it. Lowth also argued for "My wife and I" over "me and my wife".

William Cobbet (1763-1835) wrote "A grammar of the English language" and complained about the use of the following as past tenses "Awoke, built, dealt, threw, swam and meant" (among many others) arguing instead for the more 'proper' "awaked, builded, dealed, throwed, swimmed and meaned". (McWhorter)

Strunk and White, authors of a famous style guide loved by the likes of Dixon and first published in 1919, proscribed against the use of "hopefully", the verbs "host" and "chair" and the passive voice. Rather amusingly (or at least, this passes for amusing to sad folks like me) of the four examples they give of mistaken use of the passive voice, only one of them is actually passive. And this isn't their only mistake. As Pullum notes, they "The book's contempt for it's own grammatical dictates seems almost wilful." The awful situation therefore is that we have know-nothings telling others how they should be writing and incredibly being listened to.

Steven Pinker notes that the verbs parent, input, showcase, impact, and contact "have all been denounced in this century" (1994:379)


So, if we examine the broad sweep of history we can see that most of the things that have been railed against have become normal and natural. Dr. Dixon and people like him can get upset about usage but his views about the word "fantastic" will, if they don't already, eventually be seen as preposterous to future generations. I might be losing the battles against this type of newspaper article buthistory shows that the war is already won.










 






 

Tuesday 1 January 2013

Yobisute 呼び捨て request

This post is a request.

Yobisute 呼び捨て:  In Japanese, the act of addressing someone without an honorific title (such as san, sensei, sama, etc) where one would normally be required. For example, a student referring to a teacher as  "Suzuki" instead of "Suzuki-sensei"

I'm trying to write something on Yobisute in Japanese with regard to foreigners living and working in Japan particularly teachers. If you live in Japan and have had an experience of yobisute, I'd really love to hear about it. It might be that you have been addressed in a way you didn't appreciate (like the example here) or alternative that you have specifically asked to be addressed differently (like the example here) and don't like such titles.

Either way any info would be great and if you could include details such as how long you've lived in Japan, your level of Japanese, etc, that would be great. If you have problems posting then please let me know on twitter @ebefl.