Job Discussion Forums

[Ben Round de Bloc]

[Patrocleides]

Thanks for the encouragement, Ben!

Yes, that phrase "teaching style suited to the American classroom" was awfully confusing. Now I don't understand what I meant by it myself. That you pointed it out is suggests that I should take a look at things from yet another perspective.

Your experiences in your school sound like you've found a better environment than I have run into in my digging around. What you describe is what a lot of my students in fact did, felt, and said--when they weren't being messed with and were being taken seriously. Many of their evaluations were--at least in some hands--plainly just fodder for staff politics. It wasn't what the students said, it was what supervisors said they said.

One issue makes life complicated. Mexican students are not openly confrontational in the sense that they'll go directly to the teacher and discuss their issues. They'll involve somebody else who will, of course, introduce his own interests into the mix. That creates a kind of unpleasant "triangle" that turns things into knots rather than resolves issues.

Generally I had more of your results than anything else, but one incident left me angry and a little bitter. Too thin-skinned. Luck of the draw, perhaps. My na�vet�, possibly. Perhaps I was in denial of my own flaws. All water under the bridge.

Unfortunately, bad texts show up because schools buy for price and the major publishers whose failures would otherwise be recycled dump their stuff in M�xico where they try to get top prices for it. The schools who want to buy sheep and the publishers who want to sell deer compromise; it's called a comisi�n and what it is is a payment made by the publishers to the school buyers to reward them for their enthusiasm for the publisher's text. Even years ago, that could be a lot of money if it was a big school.

Outside of M�xico that's a "conflict of interest" case if not a blatant bribe. But we're in M�xico, and it's entertaining in a way listening to former teachers who've got into publishing and suddenly find the most remarkable pedagogic justifications for purchasing their text. We won't get into the TESOL "experts" from the States who find it quite lucrative to do road trips in M�xico. The objectivity of their opinions is, of course, never influenced by "gifts" and handsome honoraria. Nah, no, of course not.

[Patrocleides]

I really am beginning to wonder if I've got things all wrong. When I think of young people in class taking English as a foreign language and young people at work using English and Spanish as working languages, I get the feeling that I'm really listening to two radically different populations. For a while I kept scratching my head wondering how to move "advanced communicatives" along the road to "effective bilinguals" as if it were all really one road they were on. I'm getting skeptical about that.

Mexican-American bilinguals seem to inhabit a world in which both languages seem to co-exist in the same mental space. They use them together, code-switch, don't seem to bother with translation although they can translate very well and have a kind of real-life fluency that doesn't happen in the classroom to the same degree. French-Canadians, I recall, seem to do the same thing.

Schooled speakers seem to have to construct a separate mental wing for their "foreign" language and to spend a lot of time shuffling back and forth. To make progress they have to be deeply immersed in the "target" language, avoid code-switching and translation all the more so because they can't do them easily. Real-life fluency is awfully hard for them.

If there is this kind of psycholinguistic split between them, the people have an "other" language and the people who migrate to a foreign language, then it might mean different teachers, texts, methods, materials for the two groups.

Has anybody had any experience of a class in which both people who picked up English in context before they really could or would think about vocabulary and grammar and sentence order and people who are learning it the usual EFL way have been mixed and treated as one group?

Maybe we should have a different set of programmes for "bilinguals from the start becoming ever more proficient" and "proficient unilinguals acquiring competence" in another language. Maybe bilingualism breaks down into "other language" and "foreign language" populations which are just not on the same psycholinguistic tracks. I know I interact seemingly in two different ways with them and plainly I belong to the "foreign language" learner category. The "other language" types seem to interact with each other easily in both languages at once or whenever they feel like it--as if "bilingual" were really their "mother tongue."

Makes a confusing situation even more difficult, doesn't it?

[Patrocleides]

Ben Round de Block:

[DavefromWandsworth]

[Patrocleides]

DavefromWandsworth wrote:

[Guy Courchesne]

I've been reading a recent book on the UN where the author describes the functioning of the institution as an overwhelming dedication to process and ideals, at the cost of anything actually being accomplished. Struck me as similar to how you are describing Proulex, et al.

[DavefromWandsworth]

[Patrocleides]

Thanks, Guy and David, for persuading me that I haven't fallen completely into the trap of talking to myself.

We're all in this globalism business together now that English has become the medium of the globalists. It's definitely changing the language. I've had friends remark that English is becoming less and less a natural language and more of a kind of "code of directions" with all the richness rubbed off. I do know that when I worked with Korean colleagues that what emerged was a kind of dialect based on a much reduced language. If I wrote the sort of English that I feel comfortable with, they simply wouldn't understand me, no matter how plain I thought I was. Spanish speakers with good commands of English are reduced by "customer service" protocols to a very repetitious and little inflected English. Their English is better than they actually are allowed to use.

One possibility among so very many is that economic-political-ethnic "class distinctions" are producing two kinds of English and two kinds of bilinguals, upper class users who do speak English often quite admirably and lower class English skills users who'll use English for their limited business, technical, and entertainment purposes but never grow into well-educated bilinguals. That may mirror the distribution of wealth, prestige, and authority that's emerging globally: a relatively few who are disproportionately well-off, hold the few really "good jobs" available, and exercise influence vastly beyond their numbers. The rest can speak "Spanglish" or "Black" or "Singlish," and fulfill the fear that "One day the whole world will speak English--bad English."

I now run into two classes of Spanish-English bilinguals, the ones who've had a bit of a class edge, gotten to live and work and learn in English-speaking countries or, at least, had parents with enough money to send them to good private schools, and the young people who get what the schools think they can sell. The old class distinction between the "well brought up" children of "good families" who speak "properly," and those who speak "street" or "dialect" seems to be repeating itself globally for the same class-based reasons that used to separate, say, "BBC" from Birmingham, Boston from Brooklynese. Those who have more get more, in this case, better English.

That growing inequality I fear is happening leaves teachers to wonder where they stand when they teach English and to worry that the same drift toward an "�lite" and a "working class" is going to create even more of a class division among teachers than exists already. Seemingly the classroom teacher is closer to be a much-managed worker and those who have become researchers, authors, "doctors of education," administrators and educational entrepreneurs closer to becoming an "upper class" of education. The author of a bad text peddled by publishers who can't be bothered to review the package and correct the howlers nonetheless can go on tour and collect quite handsome honoraria while those who know that the stuff being peddled isn't good but it's all they are going to get are the ones whom administrations all but force to teach out of it and out of little else.

The issues are hugely complex and confusing and hard to express without a lot of omissions and inconsistencies, but I'm beginning to feel its the institutions associated with language learning are dictating the course for English and not the quality of English setting standards for the institutions, industries, and "schools" involved. We're getting a class-based distribution of English skills and a class division between English teachers. Globalism seems to be encouraging more inequality and teaching is trapped in globalism as much as anything else. EFL teachers are very weak players in this sort of global game. Hopes for higher standards and more substantial professionalism may be less and less within reach for the most of us.

Admittedly, there's not too much that's precise and practical in all this, but, looking at the "bilingualism" I've seen, I'm becoming a somewhat pessimistic old man.

[Patrocleides]

[Patrocleides]

I just took a quick look at a very recent TEFL package, not enough to review it carefully, but just enough to alarm me.

What struck me is that it left the teacher with virtually no free time, no discretion, no "enrichment" or time-out for "explanations." The school that settled on this particular new model (I am told) actually prevents teachers from using outside material--as if the minute-by-minute page-turning of the pre-planned lessons allowed that in the first place. That means that the professionalism of the classroom teacher is reduced to the well-scheduled efficiency with which he delivers the package. That's not what "professional" means to me.

Professionals have professional judgment and authority over the manner in which they practice their trade. Professional in this context simply means following the book and doing precisely and unfailingly what the commercial school's administrators dictate. Change anything, even for the better, and in your evaluations you will suffer the consequences.

This is what corporations describe as professionalism in their assessments of their employees. The dialogues that I skimmed in this text were almost exactly of the type scripted for, say, telephone services in India dealing with customer requests, or the kind of English that an employee of a McDonald's in Acapulco might expect to have mastered in order to be considered "bilingual" enough to be employable.

"Do you want that with french fries, Se�or?"

At least the prescriptive grammarkins accorded the teacher enough respect to assume that he could parse a sentence and explain an idiom. The students were assumed to be intelligent enough, educated enough in their native language, to be able to grasp notions like a possessive case and the if-then order of a conditional sentence. This text presumes no ability on the part of the teacher to do that and no need on the part of a student to grasp the language well enough to get through a literately written newspaper.

Basically, global English language instruction now reflects the kind of class distribution that globalization is creating: An entry-level, low-skilled, labor and service class who speak what an ill-educated person would learn if he were simply dumped in the United States, given nothing but entry level jobs, and picked up English along the way, and an �lite who get the kind of English instruction which will qualify them to do business at the managerial level or attend English language college courses.

Teachers are caught in the same cleft: "Tesol" administrators, consultants, researchers, text assemblers, examiners, and such, well-acquainted with government and the publishing companies, and, Yr 'umble Sarvints, Sor, who get stuck in classrooms with texts they can't change and have to tug their forelocks at every passing administrator or school proprietor.

It's idealistic to think we can upgrade the TEFL instructor and what he does in the classroom. The TEFL establishment and its commercial associates and customers have already upgraded themselves, leaving the poor teachers not much more than people who have to buy credentials to get a job every bit as much as their students need "English Certificates" in order to compete for miserably underpaid entry-level jobs. That's class and class conflict in the New Global English Order: a servant class, precious few in the middle, precious little real mobility, and a relatively restricted upper crust who can write the rules and pick their perks.

I am more and more for "open source" English. Those young people are great with phones, digicams, networking, games, videos, sound and the 'net. There's every possibility there to outflank the parallel strategies of Communicative English and Scripted English with a "Virtual English as a Second Language" environment available cheaply and not in the hands of controlling schools and domineering corporate trainers. Hackers and pirates are beginning to look good to me, compared with the profiteers and hacks of global English.

[DavefromWandsworth]

Patrocleides, this is ranting of a high order & I'm reading it with interest still (!), but unable as yet to engage with its substance due to other commitments.

(Is there anything of value in these trends/patterns of which you write so well but, perhaps, too negatively? Or are they all to you, as Philip Larkin wrote of books, 'a load of c***'? )

Discuss?

[Patrocleides]

Dave,

Frankly, I am certainly a bit too general, a bit too negative, but the changes produced by "globalization" are so pervasive and so perturbing that, as teachers of some sort, we can't help but be worried. Teaching has never been a strong profession. Doctors, lawyers, clergymen and accountants can resist having their professions broken down into parcels of limited skills and those routinized in a way that their practitioners come more to resemble office workers and factory workers with a little seniority than they do traditional autonomous craftsmen, but teachers of English can now be reduced to people who have no more skills than are required to deliver a completely scripted package.

I first taught at the university level nearly forty years ago. It was my first teaching job. I was a lecturer, the authority on my subject, and I was responsible for the syllabus, the readings, ordering books, lectures and assignments and grades. If I were to start up again either in a school or a bilingual office, I would now have absolutely none of the responsibilities and privileges I had when I was young and green. Chances are somebody the age I was then with no graduate degree, no professional training, no teaching or business experience, not even an adequate command of English would be in a position to direct me, advise me, evaluate me, and micro-manage my classroom decisions. That's the situation an educated and experienced bilingual is going to encounter in these global, English-using corporations and the situation an educated and credentialled native-speaker with real teaching skills is going to encounter going to work for commercial schools. In the past schools were not companies and companies were not schools. In the present EFL situation that distinction is obliterated and professional teachers and profesionales who might as well be clerks and camera salesmen are more and more reduced to the same sort of "package delivery" people. I suspect EFL teachers are just going to see more of this rather than less.

Ten years ago I could have run off to Bali with a suitcase and Betty Azar's texts under my arm. I would have found a job, used what I could find at the school, scraped together supplemental material, designed the course, accommodated myself, adapted this and that, adopted some things and abandoned others, but I would have been a teacher working at his trade.

Now all that academic freedom, all that professional discretion, is being squeezed out of "international teaching." Students smart enough to get an educated grasp of their own language are treated as if their education in anything other than an English institution had no meaning. Bilinguals who managed the hard work of gaining fluency in English--often under difficult circumstances as "illegals"--are treated as if they were incapable of improving themselves and had to be micro-managed down to their last trivial on-the-job decision by some American corporation whose condescension towards non-Americans just oozes through in every line their employees are required to recite.

That's the "infantilization" of students, bilingual young adults, and classroom teachers by establishment TESOL professionals, vast publishing concerns, and the bigger chains that survive when all the smaller schools are getting crowded out of the field. It's the "de-professionalization" of English teaching, or rather its reduction to "language trainers" on one hand, and, on the other, the teachers and writers who write for teachers and teach them what they choose to write. That's class differentiation and it's global.

Social class can be looked at in terms of someone's ability to make independent decisions with more than marginal consequences for themselves and their associates. The decisions I might now make in a typical EFL institution are less than marginal--they are downright trivial. When that happens a profession (whatever the titles and credentials) has been shoved down into a "lower class" position. The more degrees, credentials, years and kinds of relevant experience I might have, the less professional status I now have to enjoy. When I had much, much less, I had much, much more.

This phenomenon has, of course, happened many times before. The Printers' Union in the United States forty years ago was composed of very literate, very skilled, very entrepreneurial people, who, even if they worked for larger businesses, had a clearly professional role to play. Technological change on top of the propensity to reduce craftsmen to performers of productive routines has all but eliminated that once distinguished near-guild of craftsmen, business folk, and professional employees.

If we look at language teachers in the United States, is it that much different? To get a job, they must get an array of credentials. To get the credentials, they must learn a bit of linguistics, language acquisition, acculturation, methodology, and so forth, all taught by "teachers who teach teachers," not classroom instructors. Once in the classroom, they get a very expensive package of language materials, all approved by the State for "appropriateness," evaluated by publishing corporations for "marketability," and they teach to get their students credits, take the tests, and score the grades. They make no decisions, take no initiatives, do nothing that supposedly that they went to school to learn to do. They have precious little discretion to exercise and their evaluations of the "language course" are not heard and not wanted. They have been labelled "credentialled" and, at the same time, reduced to something scarcely resembling a "profession." In M�xico and, I would guess, in most of the developing world, it's long been worse than that. I did not come to M�xico to teach like a Mexican teacher is forced to, a standard package delivery person, but, increasingly, that's what an EFL teacher gets.

Yes, in the classroom with those smart, funny, agreeable youngsters there's always a moment of joy in teaching, but the growing subservience of the teacher in "global English" more and more takes the joy out of it. The famous "psychic rewards" that teachers are supposed to pay the rent with are fewer and fewer, even dramatically fewer, in the last decade alone.

Maybe I'm just a cantankerous old curmudgeon or a chronic rebel, but a don't like to see "middle class" professionals distributed in such a class-biased way, a very few to the well-rewarded top, and disproportionately many to what amounts to jobs in which little real growth and gains are possible.

[Patrocleides]

I sat through a couple of evaluations of employees conducted by a "bilingual office." The employees were recorded answering calls from English-speaking clients and the calls were scored according to a company protocol by bilingual evaluators with perhaps the equivalent of American "high school English." Conspicuously frequently mature native speakers with a rich command of the language and American experience in sales and customer service scored worse than twenty-year olds who repeated virtually verbatim a customer service script and employed as much as they could of the mediocre English supplied by the client company. A supervisor sat with the employee, explained the evaluation, and got the employee's consent to engage in "improvement opportunities."

Basically the competent speakers had to "improve" and those who parroted a script and spoke with accents and errors got "perfect" scores. Competence was not the issue; compliance with company training was. The effects on the employees' progress in English were quite obvious. A month's experience dealing with the variety of accents used in the United States and they stopped learning, became bored with the work, and, since their bonuses were linked to their evaluation scores, they conformed to the pressures to repeat over and over again as rapidly as possible the same deplorable script and give the same pretense at service. The company provided absolutely no opportunity for the employees to improve their English or enrich their knowledge of the clients. They hired very credible bilinguals and promptly reduced them to production line repetitive verbal motions. So much for the language experience opportunties offered by "bilingual offices." The upper echelons, of course, spoke far better and far more diverse English, but the youngsters had no possibility of upward mobility. The turnover is apparently very quick.

Under commercial pressure--and Mexican language schools are intensely commercial--the same developments are likely to occur in schools: canned materials, scripted packages, closed networks, computer terminals with audio-visual support, and supervisors who monitor students' "improvement opportunities." Just as the supervisors themselves are reduced to monitors, "teachers" in such classrooms will be reduced to floor supervisors themselves, and evaluated as closely as supervisors themselves are monitored in a "bilingual" office.

It's sad that students will go through the motions to get certificates in English which they may require just to get jobs in which they'll use little or poor English and eventually lose what they've learned. It's still more sad that teachers will be compelled to get still more credentials just in order to get jobs in which they will have little or no opportunity to develop their skills or use the materials they supposedly learned at "teacher school." Basically teachers will become, like students, more and more certificate-consumers not to be traditional teachers, traditional professionals, but to get jobs and be highly compliant classroom supervisors.

The current materials at Proulex (as one example) I am told are the only materials used; the teacher delivers the package and is not permitted to use "outside materials." The "lesson" is planned for them and leaves them no freedom for personal creativity--very much like the hapless bilinguals whose hard-won English gets reduced to accented parrot-babble in a "bilingual" office. The more professional credentials, the less the professional responsibility, the less the "academic freedom" of the teacher. Would-be teachers will spend more time, pay more money, do more work just to get a job that will use little of what they've learned, much like students spend time, sweat, and cash to get English certificates that might help get jobs in which their English will never improve past a certificate test score.

The managerial �lite will, of course, be able to afford "real" English, have real exchanges in business English much as the TEFL "establishment" will be the only ones who get to define what teaching is "appropriate" to the EFL classroom. Students and teachers, like employees and supervisors, will get stuck with "packages" and "scripts" that will leave them dead in the water as far as "improvement opportunities" are concerned, and get nothing but "jobs" and "paychecks" for their efforts. That's the development pattern I see in "international English," and it's markedly a class differentiation trend that favors neither students nor teachers. School-bound students won't get past "communicative English" that won't work in any bilingual setting, and bilinguals won't get past whatever they've learned to advance to "native fluency" standards. The managerial �lite will probably speak excellent English, and the TEFL establishment will enjoy positions teaching teachers that pay far better than classroom teaching ever will. Schools, being the commercial animals they are, will simply replicate the pattern. The proprietary class and the favored administrators will do very well by themselves, but the student-customers and the teacher-supervisors will find the job strait-jacket getting more and more tightly cinched.

Again, I can hope that a "Virtual English as a Second Language" environment will develop on an open-source basis. As long as students have access to a computer, the net, a video-cam, mike, and headphones, they should be able to pursue something like an English-on-the-net second language learning experience. They will have to become independent and community learners, however, because teachers tied to the necessities of a job and a paycheck will be locked into a "school" environment the way hapless bilinguals are locked into the protocols of "bilingual" offices. It's going to be interesting to see whether or not this develops and what kind of teaching-learning might evolve that's not bound to commercial schools or corporate training and evaluation pol�ticas. Perhaps they might escape the "publishers" who constrict what's produced for English-learners and evaluate instructional materials strictly in terms of compliance with their efforts to dominate the markets.

[Patrocleides]

Setting aside intellectualized critiques, I've now had a chance to get familiar enough with a "90% bilingual office" to respond to it as intuitively as I might to a classroom and to start data-gathering.

Of over two hundred working bilinguals of whom I've had directly or indirectly some report, only one was a graduate of a local commercial school. Between graduation and his certificate, he spent close to three years pursuing his interests in English language media--films, particularly. It was from those, he says, that he gained his fluency in English. He should be classed as an "independent student," quite like those who've picked up their English from comics, tourists, and films.

None reported having learned from either a private tutor or from some company-based English program for employees.

Some workers had fortunate enough to have parents who could afford to send their children to bilingual schools, primary and secondary chiefly, where they had native speakers who taught their subject material in English, alternating every day or so with classes in Spanish. The products of these schools "learned nothing" from their preparatoria courses in English or from any commercial school program they encountered in Guadalajara. Others could afford to go to schools in England and in Canada for up to two years and to live in those countries in exclusively English-speaking environments. These were a relatively well-off minority, perhaps not more than ten percent of the work force.

The rest had lived, gone to school, and studied in the United States for at least a year on one occasion, and most had done more than that. One had taken course work in M�xico, spent an intensive six months in the United States, and continued occasional advanced classes and independent work in M�xico.

The reaction of efficient bilinguals to communicative English students is instructive: "They had bad accents and use strange words." The office won't even give workers time to attend "language classes." The results are more nuisance than they are worth and there are no plans to work with any school peddling its services to corporate clients.

In plain numbers, ninety-nine out of one hundred "90% bilingual employees" do not come from the typical older-student oriented commercial schools, nor, for that matter, from any company-based English program for employees. They simply do not produce "bilinguals" by any "reality-based" standards. "Biling�e en un a�o" is pure nonsense. It belongs with stop-smoking-and-drinking-and-lose-weight-and-get-fit-thirty-days rubbish. The numbers are the bottom line and they say it all.

To be fair, schools don't promise to deliver capable office workers, just to get people "communicative" and, perhaps, perhaps, to the stage where they might consider doing TOEIC, TOEFL, and the Cambridge exams, but neither do they frankly admit they can't do it if the test is efficient bilingualism. To put schools behind them and to cross the gap between schools and real life employment is a long march that students-to-workers have to do by themselves. It's an instructional no-man's-land that few students produced by the schools survive.

Whether schools with their much of a muchness packages and EFL teachers reduced to monitors and package handlers are worth the money students spend is very, very questionable. The EFL Establishment seems to have served its own interests quite well and the publishers are not noted for skipping profit-taking, but companies willing to hire effective English-speakers haven't noted such benefits in the labor pool.

This particular corporation has no apparent intention of setting up its own school or letting any "school" set up a program. It is however, concerned with keeping its good staff, reducing attrition and turnover, helping with some issues, and supporting bilingualism-enhancement efforts. It's willing to explore the possibilities, of course, and to take "a positive attitude" and see basically if people who are educated enough, experienced enough, interested enough can manage their own English-enhancement activities.

What it looks like prospectively is an "employee-centered-and-staffed" Virtual English Environment operating using the company's own facilities and "open source" resources. Whether it's another bright idea that doesn't work, or whether it evolves into something that does is presently quite uncertain. What it will not be is a "school" with an EFL-ESL program. The results of that are obvious--and a reasonable corporation has no intention of tossing good cash, work, and time down that particular drain for no significant return on its investment.