Room 20: EFL Thoughts

Two days ago I wrote about my doubts about many teachers’ true interest in technology. I said I’d do some informal investigation during the event I just attended at the Instituto Cultural Dominico-Americano in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

I gave my three technology talks and attended one given by Susan Gaer. I observed the teachers and asked some direct questions…and these are the results:

Unsurprisingly, all but two teachers had cellphones….and almost all had digital cameras or had access to them. Out of a group of 30, about 10 had i-pods. I didn’t find this unusual…some of the teachers were relatively young and a few around my age…(those of us who remembered teaching with cassette taperecorders).

In my plenary, I had around 200 attendees. I asked how many used google and most said they did. Around 60% used Wikipedia, but from their reactions I could tell many didn’t trust it. Around 50% had read a blog and, interestingly enough, 10 had their own blogs.

Now, from my research for the talk, I know the Dominican Republic is not really typical. According to Internet World Stats (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm), 23% of the world’s population uses the Internet, but 31.6% of the population of the Dominican Republic uses it. This was as surprising to the attendees as it was to me. Many had said (as some teachers always do in my tech talks) that no one could get online, that it was just too difficult..although they admitted there were cybercafes all over and they charged less than a dollar an hour (just like I’ve found in Mexico).

So…what’s my conclusion…I really can’t say. I’ll be giving “tech” talks in Colombia and Chile this summer and in Mexico in the fall, so I guess I just continue my informal investigation….

Any comments?

Beginning tomorrow, I’ll be attending and presenting at “ELTing in a Hi- tech World” at the Instituto Dominico Americano in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. I’ll be well accompanied since Susan Gaer will also be presenting. I’ll be giving a plenary, an introduction to Web 2.0, and two talks on blended learning and listening comprehension.

I’m writing this from Santo Domingo…a very nice place. However, here come my doubts. More and more schools and organizations are planning events dealing with technology and teachers attending the events seem to come to the “techy” talks, but how many of these teachers will really use what they see? Not because they don’t want to, but rather because the speakers are assuming a much higher level of technical knowledge than the teachers have.

I hope I’m wrong, but I really don’t think most classroom teachers use technology much beyond the level of checking email and making calls on their cellphones. (Just to be clear, I usually give my technology talks in Mexico, but I have given them in other Latin American countries.)

I must admit, I have noted changes in the last few years. Around two years ago I was surprised when I asked a group of middle school teachers outside of the Federal District in Mexico if they had email addresses—they all did.

Recently I have asked attendees if their schools have Interactive White Boards (IWB)…very few do. When I ask if they use the Internet, most raise their hands and when I ask if they have read a blog, maybe 75% have. However, if I ask if they have a blog (even if they write in it as irregularly as I do), I only get one or two hands raised.

I plan to ask participants here in Santo Domingo how much they use different kinds of technology in their classes. I’ll report back on the results on Friday.

I’ve just finished an interesting book: Glenn Fulcher, Testing Second Language Speaking (Pearson-Longman, 2003). I was very interested in reading it since I am often asked to help schools develop speaking sections for course assessment exams. When I saw the title I was thrilled since I expected it would explain all the theoretical issues I have with developing relatively valid oral exams.

I was disappointed though…just like so many facets of language teaching and assessment, very little has been done theoretically in oral testing. I’d previously found the same issue when investigating communicative testing. Everyone seems to think they have the best way to do things, but no one can justify why.

Apparently a lot was done in the 80s on oral testing and most of the specific references in the book refer to these articles. However, from what I read I gather many of the results are questionable.

This leaves me, a non-theoretician, no place to turn for suggestions on how to include valid techniques in my exams.

The exams I recommend are done as pair-work and between the teacher and the student. This apparently isn’t bad (whew…) . However, I find it difficult to relate the needs and financial possibilities of a school looking for an assessment instrument that is not only easy to write and administer to a large number of students, but that is also inexpensive to create. The Fulcher book has an interesting discussion of the financial burden incurred when devising an oral testing instrument for a high-stakes, proficiency exam at a school.  Incredibly he estimates (and supports the estimate) it would cost almost 63,000 pounds to do one cycle of the exam. This, of course, is beyond the possibilities of most language schools.

An oral exam, when developed by a school for use for its students must include the following:
1. It must be transparent and have face validity both for the teachers and for the students taking it. It must seem to reflect what has been done in class.
2. It must be possible for the teachers (often untrained in test writing techniques) to be able to produce alternate versions of the exam so it can be used more than once.
3. It must be easy to give and involve a minimum of class time. The teacher, who will often administer the exam and rate it alone, has to be able to test up to 30 students in a 50-minute period.
4. The rating scale has to be transparent and easy to use. It also must be compatible with the grading system used by the institution.
5. Finally, the total financial investment must be reasonable. An oral exam is almost always just one aspect of the student’s final grade and usually represents a small percentage of it. Schools are not willing to dedicate either excessive time or money to the development of an oral exam.

Now, this doesn’t mean the schools don’t want a valid test instrument. It only means they can’t spend either the time or money to develop one and adapting an instrument that was developed for a different purpose is disastrous.

So, what am I recommending. I am asking researchers to investigate realistic, inexpensive testing methods that are valid and that can be used in small-scale situations. Most investigation is dedicated to large-scale testing situations which in reality represent but a small part of all the exams that are given every day.

After months of ignoring this blog, I’ve decided to make a concentrated effort to add to it regulary. I still haven’t defined regularly, however.

I really don’t know why I find it so difficult to come in and write something. Writing is something I do every day in my work….I suspect I need to find a topic that interests me at the moment and address it. Hopefully I will be able to do this…

More questions:

6. How did people learn other languages before “grammar” was invented? I have always wondered how people managed to learn other languages before “grammar” was invented. Just imagine having to explain to someone how to transform an active sentence into a passive one without being able to refer to the subject, object, auxiliary, and verb tenses. This of course is exaggerated. No one regularly transformed active sentences into passive ones until grammar and the modern language classroom were invented, but people have been learning other languages for thousands of years without textbooks, teachers, classrooms or even “grammar”. Just imagine a small isolated agricultural community in the middle of a picturesque mountain range five thousand years ago. Not everyone probably dedicated themselves entirely to farming. A few hardy souls took excess produce and handicrafts to other villages to trade for what their area didn’t offer. Others dedicated themselves to trade, walking from village to village selling and trading. But these villages were so isolated they probably spoke different dialects and as our adventurous traders got farther and farther from their home villages, the language they spoke would be completely different from that of the people they traded with. They had to learn the other language to communicate or at least develop some system of commonly understood gestures or a lingua franca. They couldn’t go to their local language institute and take a course or two. And these weren’t the only cases where someone in this remote time might find themselves immersed in a culture that spoke another tongue. What about stolen brides taken to live with a family whose language they couldn’t understand, or slaves thrown together with others from different regions who had to learn to understand the language of their masters and of their fellow slaves just to survive? They weren’t supplied with private tutors to help them get through those first terrifying months of true “cultural shock”.

Obviously our modern language learning methods are artificial. The human brain had uncountable generations to evolve a system of true “natural” language learning that didn’t require books, teachers or grammar. Our problem now is to find out how to take advantage of the resources the brain offers and learn to apply them in our formal educational systems.

7. How do illiterate people learn another language today? In reality, we don’t have to travel in time to find situations in which people learn other languages without recourse to texts, classrooms or grammar. What about the more “primitive” areas of the world where people still live in isolated villages and whose neighbors probably speak a completely unrelated tongue. Has anyone ever examined how people living in remote regions of the Amazon or New Guinea learn new languages?

8. How do we learn languages? I don’t think I am the first to ask this question and I really wonder if we’ll ever know the true answer. Personally I’m convinced that what we, as teachers should do is just provide sufficient input, perhaps limited to the level of language attainment our students have or perhaps not…perhaps just realistic language in comprehensible situations and then let the brain take over. I’ve often compared learning a language with learning how to ride a bicycle. When your five-year-old wants to learn how to ride his bike without training wheels, you don’t just take the little wheels off and give him a hour-long lecture on the theory of bike riding. Here in Mexico, parents spend hours pushing their kids around on the bike with a broomstick (to save their backs) and then give them a hearty push, watch them fall off, dry their tears and convince them to get back up and try again. How does the child learn to ride? Somehow the brain figures it all out. Parents (or “pushers”) just supply the input. The same with languages. The teacher supplies either realistic or contrived situations in which the learner can listen to models and later try to communicate her own ideas in the new language. The student makes errors that impede her communication (falls off the bike….), the teacher pats her on the back and sets her off again to experiment until her brain forms the correct rules to allow adequate communication.

9. Are all those grammar drills and practices doing more for language learning than just giving the student exposure to the language that could be given in a more pleasant way? I really wonder how much help grammar practices, drills, homework, diagrams, colored arrows and underlining really are in language acquisition. Isn’t it possible that it is the time the student is spending doing the activities that facilitates language learning and not the activities in themselves? If this were the case, I would hope we could find more entertaining ways to immerse the student in the new language to allow the brain to find the rules to allow communication. Thinking of many teen learners I’ve had, wouldn’t an hour playing a video game in which the student had to interact with various characters in order to pass to the next level be more entertaining than an hour of fill-in-the-blank grammar exercises in the workbook? Or maybe time spent listening to a popular song, trying to hear and understand the lyrics would be more productive than the kinds of listening comprehension activities most usually found in textbooks? Or an hour on-line chatting with someone in another country or using free Internet long distance telephone calls, or a walk with the class through a park, commenting about the people, plants and animals found on the way or watching a movie and commenting on it afterwards with friends, or…..

Grammar tends to run our professional lives. I can see myself walking into a Teacher’s Room 20 years ago and asking a colleague, “What did you do in your Course 3 today?” “Oh, I taught the past tense.” All of our classes were defined by a grammar structure and we even were so overconfident we presumed to have “taught” the past tense in one fifty-minute class. At least we didn’t say the students had learned it. OK, you say, that was 20 years ago…but isn’t it also true today. Don’t we judge students’ proficiency by the complexity of the grammatical structures they have mastered? Don’t we have that itch to explain a structure to a student who errs in its use? Aren’t some of the most popular books sold in our field grammar references? Don’t students complain if we don’t “teach” enough grammar?

Here are a few questions I’ve had about how we “teach” grammar.

1. What exactly do we “teach”? How many times have you ever looked at the list of grammatical structures your students have to “master” to finish your courses? If you use a textbook, look at the Overview at the beginning of the texts. It often amazes me how much students are expected to learn and be able to produce in one or two years… present tense, past and future, nouns, adjective word order, relative clauses (restricted and unrestricted) and all three (or four) conditionals. Some curricula basically cover the entire English grammar system in three years of study. Here in Mexico until recently all Middle School students did this and when they got to High School they started all over and did it again.

2. How many of these “grammar structures” are really parts of the lexicon? Many “grammatical structures” are really just lexicon: frequency adverbs, possessives, modals, comparatives, etc. They should be taught in the “Vocabulary” sections of texts and not as grammar structures. And which “structures” require “analysis” and which are really just sentence patterns? In reality, most of the structures listed in our Overviews are really predictable patterns. Even the past tense questions: What / Where / When did [person] [verb] …? By learning the basic chunk, students can produce many different questions effortlessly. There is no reason to analyze the structure, draw colored lines transforming the affirmative sentences into the question, etc. Verb tense formation, many clauses (If I were you…., When X happened, [person] was/were [verb + ing], and other structures fall into this category.

3. What is more important—the correct form of a verb or knowing what the tense means and being able to use it when it’s needed? Teachers spend hours teaching students the correct forms of verb tenses (comparatives, clauses, etc.), but often forget that what is the most important is that the student understand what the structure means and how to use it. What use is it to the students if they can form the present perfect without error and know how to use it when they see since in the sentence, if they don’t understand what the tense really means in different situations and if they can’t even translate a sentence into their native language (a true test of understanding)?

4. How do you respond to a student who asks a question like: Why can’t I say he don’t if I always hear Americans say it on the TV? The question is, what is correct English and for whom? Why is a serious error for a beginning English student a common colloquial variant in many English dialects. Why do teachers get so upset when students make “errors” when speaking that not only reflect their level of language development, but also are real variants in many spoken dialects? Or How do you respond to this question from a beginning English speaker, “What happens if I forget the –s on the verb? Won’t people understand me?” I always tell them that they will be understood, but they will probably be branded as a being at a beginning level. This is probably a good thing if they are just learning the language since the person they are speaking too will probably speak more slowly and clearly and use simpler vocabulary. Of course, if the student isn’t a beginner, it isn’t the impression they want to convey. So, certain errors that are acceptable at one level, might be taken negatively if the student is more advanced.

5. In what order are “grammar” items taught and in what order are they learned? A few years ago I helped organize an Academic Panel at the Annual TESOL convention. Our topic related to why textbooks don’t always reflect what we want them too. On our panel we had some highly qualified writers and editors, including the prolific Jack Richards of Cambridge University Press and Sue Jones, an editor from Macmillan. The audience was free to ask them questions. We discussed regional vs. “global” texts and other relevant issues. One question I made was, “Why do all textbooks present grammar structures in the same order (BE, present, present continuous, past, etc.) even though research has shown that this order does not reflect the order in which these structures are acquired by the learner?” For example, research has shown that the –s on the present tense is an extremely complex form that is acquired late and how many of your students take years to use his/her correctly in speech? However, it appears in most Beginning Level texts. I asked why a text begins with the present and then much later teaches the past tense when most students are more interested in talking about the past (and future) from the beginning and many situations related to the present tense are really forced (How often do you tell someone what you do every day?). Besides, the past or going to future formation is much easier than that of the present. Sue Jones gave me an answer which, while it really didn’t answer my questions, limited further discussion with those commercial publishers…she said, “It won’t sell.”

A related question…should all grammar be included in textbooks? Many structures that students are expected to master at a beginning or intermediate level, either aren’t commonly used in speech these days (If I were you…, sequence of tenses (He said he would be late) or are really never acquired: I’ve never heard one of my students spontaneously use tag questions in their speech…unless they are doing a grammar exercise, of course.

To be continued….

A few years ago I read Michael Lewis’ books about the Lexical Approach and it changed my professional life. Before reading them, I had been a run-of-the-mill teacher, happily planning my classes around a grammar structure (with occasional forays into functions). Once I finished the books, I began to have doubts. I began to question one of the fundamental principles of the field I had chosen…..I began to wonder if “grammar” really exists and if I abandoned “grammar” my students might learn English more proficiently.

The following few comments will be dedicated to the questions that have popped into my mind recently. A few clarifications before we begin. When I refer to “grammar”, I am referring to prescriptive grammar, not descriptive grammar and I will be referring to beginning and low intermediate students. I haven’t gotten around to thinking about more advanced ones yet.

I began my introspection with some research. I discovered that whether grammar exists or not has been asked before. In fact, in 1972 H. Douglas Brown questioned the “psychological reality of grammar in the ESL classroom.” He thought “grammar” was a very abstract concept, “a rather ill-conceived notion in many textbooks and curricula.”

Knowing I wasn’t the only one questioning grammar, I decided to investigate definitions of grammar. The Cambridge Dictionary of American English defines it as “the study or use of the rules about how words change their form and combine with other words to express meaning.” I liked that part about including the word “meaning”. Too often do we forget that all of what we are doing in the classroom is directed at helping students learn how to communicate meaning in a new language.

The Encyclopedia Britannica says grammar is the “rules of a language governing the sounds, words, sentences and other elements, as well as their combination and interpretation.” This is more a definition of descriptive grammar…not what we use to teach English in class.

For my research I delved into the Encyclopedia Britannica, root of all knowledge. I discovered that grammar isn’t new. The Chinese had scholars who were interested in phonetics, writing and lexicography, but they considered grammatical problems to be more related to the study of logic. I guess they never used it in a classroom to teach another language. Sanskrit speakers considered the study of grammar to be an intellectual end in itself and began studying it over 2500 years ago. Again…an intellectual pursuit, not a teaching instrument.

My research then led me to Europe. I discovered the Greeks had grammars which they used to study literature or, in Alexandria in the first century BC, to preserve the purity of the language. The Romans applied the Greek system to Latin, again to preserve their language (It didn’t work very well…if it had, we wouldn’t have French, Spanish, Portuguese or any of the other Romance Languages.) Grammar wasn’t used to teach languages until the Middle Ages when it was used to teach Latin, the Lingua Franca of the era. In the 11^th century, a British abbot (Aelfric) wrote the first Latin grammar in Anglo-Saxon and proposed that it serve as a model for an English grammar…thus sticking us with the Latinate-grammar definitions, parts of speech, irrational conjugations that have plagued English for centuries.

After probing the historical roots of grammar, I will in the next installment look at vocabulary and lexicon and talk a bit about Michael Lewis’ theories before we move on to other iconoclastic musings.

References:

Brown, H. Douglas. The Psychological Reality of “Grammar” in the ESL Classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 1972. Vol. 6, No. 3, 263-269, Sep 72. (Paper presented at the TESOL Convention, February 29, 1972, in Washington, D.C.)

grammar. (2005). Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved November 23, 2005, from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9037632

Lewis, Michael. The Lexical Approach: The State of ELT and a Way Forward. LTP. 1993.

—–, Implementing the Lexical Approach: Putting Theory into Practice. LTP. 1997.

—–, Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach. LTP 2000.

When I started working at the Mexico City Binational Center (Instituto Mexicano Norteamericano de Relaciones Culturales) in 1976, the word communication was never used. We were in the last days of Audio-Lingualism. Language learning was still seen as acquiring habits and that was done through repetition.

We used a textbook that had been written at the school in the 1950s and that was still very popular throughout Mexico. Each unit was the same, beginning with a series of sentences containing the grammar structure being taught in the unit. Supposedly the teacher was supposed to model the sentences and the student repeat them chorally. (Just to make it “fun”, we sometimes had the class repeat in groups of men and women or by sides of the classroom and sometimes we let individuals repeat.

The next pages were dedicated to a grammar explanation with examples and then substitution drills. In these sections the teacher said the model sentence: John has a ball and the cue: You. Students were to make the transformation in chorus: You have a ball. This was done even with structures where there was no morphological or syntactical changes: Peter is more intelligent than Paul. (studious) –> Peter is more studious than Paul. After the repetition exercises, students dedicated themselves to written exercises, often of a similar repetitive nature. (My Mexican husband once turned in his homework by doing one or two of the items in each exercise and writing “ditto” for the rest.)

The theoretical logic behind all this repetition was that students had to repeat a sentence many times to learn it. In fact, memorization was considered to be the “maximum”. It was all based on B. F. Skinner’s studies of stimulus and response. The teacher gave the stimulus (the model or cue) and the students responded.

In this model there was no space for creativity. Vocabulary was limited and all emphasis was on structure and pronunciation….Yes, it was VERY BORING, for the students and especially for the teachers who taught 6 or 7 50-minute classes every day.

I must admit that many teachers liked the boredom. Two of our older male teacher were infamous at school. One of them used to give the students written work and sit back and read the newspaper. Another would sneak out and go call his myriad girlfriends on the phone (he was over 60 ….and married, if I remember well)

This boredom led me to one of the most creative periods of my life. Many of us had no faith in the Audio Lingual method so we started using what was called “the Eclectic Method”. What was the Eclectic Method? Basically it meant doing what you enjoyed doing and what you, as the teacher, felt helped the students learn. We started inventing and sharing in fun activities and games. We made posters, cards and cut pictures out of magazines (the activities I mentioned in my second Blog came from this epoch). None of the activities would be considered “communicative” nowadays. Most work was Teacher-Student, but we did begin having students work in groups, even if the activities were very controlled. “Free conversation” was the only open activity we did and it was relegated to Fridays when we were just too tired to teach or for when we substituted classes and had no idea what to do.

Teaching/Learning has changed a lot in 30 years. Students are now more responsible for what they learn and the teacher’s role has changed from the audio-lingual “orchestra conductor” to the modern facilitator, but I often wonder if that “rush” of creativity we felt from around 1977-1979 (when communicative teaching was born at our school) still exists or if the plethora of material now available (in texts, resource books and online) has perhaps limited the creative process and rendered it dormant.

Since I started remembering what English teaching was years ago, I thought I’d continue. I remembered two techniques we used years ago that seem to have disappeared. They really weren’t very “communicative”, but students enjoyed them. I’ll describe them briefly.

Materials: A large sheet of paper. (Big enough for everyone to see from their seats.) Color markers.
Preparation: Draw a grid on the sheet, either 3×4 or 4×4. In the top three/four boxes either draw (or paste magazine photos) three/four different people (could be family members), one per box. Outline each box with a different color. In the bottom boxes, draw (or paste photos) different activities/belonging (for have)/occupations (for be). You can even add a clock for time relation. Outline each box with the color that represents the person in the upper boxes who is related to the activity/belonging/occupation.
In class: Put the AV on the wall and be sure students know the vocabulary involved. Then, in groups they can make sentences about the people and their activities or ask each others questions about each one.

(2) The Lady or the Dragon. We used this game to review any structure. Basically it is just an artifice for any two-team game. Instead of just counting points, you use the drawing. It might seem very childish, but adults and adolescents enjoyed it.

Preparation: Draw a princess tied to a stake with 4-6 ropes visible on one side of the board. Draw a horrible dragon on the other side. Draw 4-6 (the same number as the ropes) ocean waves between them.
The game: Form two teams. One team is the princess and one is the dragon. When the princess team gets a point, erase one of the ropes. When the dragon gets a point, erase a wave. The princess team wins when there are no more ropes and the princess escapes. The dragon team wins when there are no more waves and the dragon eats the princess.

Hello. I’m JoAnn Miller and I’ve decided to start this blog in order to share my over 35-year experience as an EFL teacher in Mexico. I’ll start with a brief introduction. I originally came to Mexico City from San Diego in order to get my Master’s degree in Spanish at the National University, but fate stepped in and I was given the opportunity to teach an EFL course in exchange for a discount in my tuition. It was a terrifying experience. First of all, I had had no previous experience teaching English and when I asked what textbook they were using, I was advised to go to the nearest bookstore and choose any text I wanted. Thank goodness, back in 1971 there weren’t many texts on the market…I chose one of Robert Lado’s classics. I remember my first day of class I was shaking so much I couldn’t take role. I guess the course wasn’t a complete disaster because some twenty years later I met a wonderful high school teacher who told me she had been in that class and I had inspired her to continue studying English and become an EFL teacher herself.

I can’t say I continued in EFL from that course onward. I didn’t. I went to the University of Wisconsin to continue my Spanish studies for a few years and I taught Spanish (a good experience, being a non-native language teacher, but more about that in the future). Little by little I found myself studying fewer literature courses and more linguistics, and then I started a minor in English. When it came time to do my dissertation, I knew I’d be returning to Mexico sooner or later. My thesis director was into dialects and wanted me to describe a Mexican dialect, but that topic just didn’t seem to be “me”.

I returned to Mexico and began an 18-year stint teaching and coordinating at the Binational Center in Mexico City (Instituto Mexicano Norteamericano de Relaciones Culturales on Hamburgo St.) I abandoned my dissertation, becoming a permanent ABD (All But Dissertation). When the Institute closed, I moved on to a multi-campus private university and after teaching a year, I became Institutional English Coordinator and helped organize English language programs at some 15 campuses throughout Mexico. I quit a few years ago and have dedicated myself to materials writing for the Macmillan Company.

During the time I was teaching, gave many talks both at our local MEXTESOL affiliate conventions and TESOL conventions, I edited the MEXTESOL Journal for some seven years and a few years ago I was elected to the Board of Directors of TESOL (I’m in my final year of service right now).

In the future, I plan to write about my experiences and give hints for classroom activities. I have specialized in teacher training, on-line teaching activities and assessment and I imagine these will be some of the topics I’ll hit upon.

I’d welcome any comments or suggestions.