Teacher Discussion Forums

Early in the 20th century the direct method of language teaching, somewhat communicative, was popular. Then, so they say, it was edged out because applied linguists research led them to believe that parroting things, the audio-lingual method, was the way forward. Then, extrapolating from Chomsky, there was a phase of thinking that input free chat was the best procedure. Nowadays this "CLT" is ever diluted - things seem to be in a theory free "mix and match" zone.
What an inglorious record this "science" of applied linguistics has. Could it be that this is because it is impossible to conduct experiments in the classroom, impossible to isolate factors in a scientific way? Or if it is possible then it must be done in one very limited environment - which may be why so many writers draw big conclusions from such petty little experiments. One eminent study claimed that slowing down speech is not helpful for understanding - is anyone daft enough to change their behaviour on reading such a scientific paper?

I learnt a number of languages - newspeak: "acquired" them - in the second half of last century, and I did quite successfully, as did most of my peers at that time.
We didn't know we were doing things the "wrong" way, as so many Chomskyans and Crashyans (deliberate misspelling) have everybody believe.
A lot depended on what we as learners did, and a lot less onus remained on the teacher's side.
Now I am teaching English in a country where all these new-fangled concepts from the U.S.A. and Britain are competing with each other, or sometimes one at a time in succession of another. I* can safely say, moder "applied linguistic" theories are a lot of ivory tower smoke, and the downside is that teachers get less satisfaction from working with students that are patently less well motivated to succeed than we were in our time.
These days, you have to please, entertain and amuse. Where has the teaching gone to?

I learned foreign languages at school under the much criticised "Grammar-Translation" method. While it gave me a good knowledge of the structure of a language, and allowed me to write in L2 so long as I had enough time to think about it, its shortcomings became apparent to me as soon as I visited the country. I was very disappointed that after 8 years of getting top marks in my Spanish exams, I could hardly speak or understand a native speaker in a Spanish-speaking country. When I became a language teacher, I resolved that I would do whatever I could to ensure that what happened to me would not happen to my students, which meant looking at other methods.

Now I teach ESL in the UK, my students have exactly the same problems I did; they've been taught to read, write and translate, sometimes for years, and still can't express themselves to native English speakers, much less understand what's being said back to them. I can't help but feel they've been let down.

Roger, you don't say what kind of school you went to or how representative you and your classmates were of the general population. Isn't it possible that what woked for you and your classmates might not work for everyone? Maybe you were so motivated to learn another language that dry teaching methods did not put you off, but others, who did not share your enthusiasm, needed something a bit more lively.
I'm not saying that all new methods are better than old ones (and I have a mistrust of Krashen's "Natural Method"), but if we don't reflect on what we do, how will we ever improve? It would be a very complacent practitioner who said "It worked for me so it has to work with my students, and if it doesn't it means they're lazy."

I'm quite confused about your title. Certainly, in my view of what "Applied Linguistics" is, it is no classroom menace. The menace would be in the application. Granted, I am many years away from my Master's in Linguistics (more like many many ). However, I remember my thoughts when I discovered how linguistics could affect my language learning, and therefore my language teaching. I was not very interested in the theoretical side, but in the practical side. I liked applying what I had learned.

The teaching approach that always appealed to me the most was the one dubbed "eclectic" because it allowed you to pick and choose ideas of whatever you wanted from wherever you found them. I believe that a lot of the strict practices, which follow a single theory, that are presented for ESL classrooms work great for the "true believers" and fail for those who don't feel comfortable with them.

It's always been a wonder to me how administrators could insist on picking up the "latest" fad just because it was "modern." The worst example of this that I saw was with regard to regular English classrooms. It was right after the beginning of "Transformational Grammar." My understanding at the time (I told you I went way back) was that transformational grammar was another way to look for relationships in sentences, to see how sentences fit together, to wonder about language. The textbook publishers took the idea and ran the wrong way with it. They made a prescriptive grammar book using transformational grammar to use to teach high school students English, thereby losing all the possibility for thinking creatively and discovering and experimenting with language, and instead added just another thing to memorize.

So where are we? Woodcutter has raised some provocative and vital questions that demand careful answers. Roger and lolwhites and lorikeet have ably expressed reasonable concerns in this area too. The ESL/EFL classroom is a complicated place. There are language issues, social issues, cultural issues, cognative-biological issues, as well as linguistic issues to deal with. We often have students who do not always understand what we say. Sometimes they do not care. Sometimes they are offended. Occasionally they are overjoyed. Perhaps there is much more to this than the latest applied linguistic theory. Still, woodcutter's question, if I understand properly, remains: how much weight should be given to classroom "methods" recommended by theorists who appear to be making sweeping claims based on the wispiest of factual information? We all recognize that linguistics is a young science, and is still struggling to gain its feet. Perhaps its respectability is still in question, and for good reason. Applied linguistics is even more in question because maybe it isn't even a science, but rather merely a series of recipies for teachers...particularly as applied by administrators and "educators". I like lolwhites' point that we teachers must reflect on our behaviors in the classroom else we will stagnate. I also like lorikeet's point that each teacher seems to have to find what works for them. Maybe in spite of Krashen or Chomsky or anybody else in applied linguistics, the most essential ingredient in language classrooms is what Roger pointed out: motivated students. There may not be any best method. Or, if there is, we clearly haven't yet found it. If we teachers have skill in a language, and we have students who want to learn what we know, perhaps there are many ways to successfully transfer our knowledge and skill. We already know that every class is different, and every student there is unique. Rather than a method, perhaps what teachers need is sensitivity and flexibility along with a fair measure of intelligence. Along with the academic freedom to apply it.

Larry Latham

Larry has, as so many times before, given a balanced recap of what has been said here. I can't add much except to say that the term "Grammar Translation Method" still baffles me, as it has done for these last 5 or ten years. Yes, I never knew this phrase before, although I am acquainted with some of Noam Chomsky's philosophy and a lot else.
When I studied languages together with the vast majority of my fellow countryfolks there wasn't much experimenting going on, and a teacher's personality could wreck your motivation, or he could motivate you, as the case might have been. I have been making a point in many posts that I deem "conversation classes" as highly useless, especially in the Asian Far East. Yet, this seems to be the most obvious cultural import that has been made here from the English-speaking countries, together with the language itself, and quite obviously, this approach fails in empowering our students here linguistically. It maymotivate (as it is so much more student-centred, entertaining and amusing), but it makes hardly anyone proficient at English.

I learnt to understand the languages first thing, then use what I was able to use competently. We wrote a lot, we interpreted a lot (but not from one language into the other except in Latin), and we had dialogues with our teachers ON OUR TARGET LANGUAGE; the target language served as meta-language. Our teachers spoke only in the target language albeit with their accent; I still can't see anything wrong with this. Accent? What accent? Does it matter? You can perfect it over time as you listen to tapes, CDs and watch native-language TV programmes or videos.

If I had an advantage, it was perhaps that my teachers were equally interested in their subject as I am now in English. They didn't regard it as "OWLEDGE" but as a skill. A skill is not theoretical. Theory only helps you understand how it works. Grammar may be "knowledge", but the use of grammar rules depends less on "knowledge" but on acquired proficiency, mental alertness, intuition, spontaneity.
These all come through training, not through classroom study work!
Of course, I don't think writing an essay is "studying"; it is training.

I noticed that Stephen Krashen postulates that students of a L2 can speak their target language once they have what he calls a "monitor" - in my words: intuition that helps them select correct and accurate phrases.
Unfortunately, in East Asia most people only care for what he says elsewhere - treat your students with sympathy; motivate them to speak.
Too much talking without having developed a critical sense for one's own foreign language production - and you see the results such as Chinglish.

"A lot depended on what we as learners did, and a lot less onus remained on the teacher's side."

As Roger stated in his first posting, the aptitude of the students is the main decising maker regarding who comes out of a class with a better competency in L2.

Although I humbly admit that I probably have only a fraction of anybody's experience here, and have only begun what I hope to be a great career in ESL/FSL teaching, I do have an opinion to add to this subject.

My first job teaching English was in Japan (3 years ago) for a corporation called Aeon. They had their own methodes that were solidified in the company's policies : to make sure the students feel that their expensive fees are put to good use, make they feel entertained and make sure they leave each class with only a simple linguistic concept achieved (that they'd mostly forget by the next class) I was horrified. The students who were the most competent in English were simply those who had spent time outside of their country. They volounteered to submerge themselves in an Anglophone community (NZ, USA, UK, Can) and came back with some incredible regional accents (combined with their own ) they acquired in those countries: "I moved to a new flat this weekend, Sensei!", "I can tell you're Canadian, eh?" It was quite an amazing experience for me! Remaining in a quite homogenious Japan didn't help at all for these people and. I found it difficult to change this.

When I came back to Canada, and started to teach French to Canadian Anglophones (mostly civil servants searching for a raise or promotion and 18-year-olds looking for a 'bird course' in university) and ESL to students from overseas, it was indeed clear that the learners who used their L2 outside of the classroom succeeded much more than any student who limited their L2 use in the classroom. I'm sure Roger would agree.

In my ESL classes, we have two types of students : those that remain only within their own ethnic group, thus limiting their potential use of English; and those who dared speak with as many individuals as possible, who'd never leave my side as I left the classroom, who'd ask for other ideas on how to find english-speakers to communicate.

In my French classes, this was even more rare. Believe me, in Ottawa, Canada, along the Quebec border, there's always an opportunity to speak to a native French speaker. The problem is that most Francophones follow a sociolinguistic rule that seems to be imbedded in Canadian society : they naturally accomodate Anglophones out of politeness by speaking their own second language - English -because Francophones are less in number. Francophones usually acquire English more than vice versa. The only way I developed a competency in French high enough to teach it was to use it every moment I could (my father "motivated me" during my childhood by gently elbowing me when an opportunity to speak French came about). One has to volounteer to break this Canadian sociolinguistic rule to develope L2 French. This is the only strategy that distinguished me from other French students in the immersion program I attended, and the same is true with the students in my present classes I teach. Too many people worry about seeming 'uncool' or 'unintelligent' in L2 and lack the motivation to take their competency a step futher. And this feeling seems more common among local Canadians than among ESL students from overseas.

So, my apologies for writing so much (don't want to sound like Shuntang here) but I find that no matter what I learned during my linguistics courses during my M.A. and B.A., no matter who says what about second language classes, I find that the motivation of the student is always the deciding factor, and no linguistics (or other 2nd language teaching text) will even mention that. Although there are somewhat uncanny students who manage to develope L2 while only using L2 in the classroom (the same who get A+s in every other classes), they lack the spirit and motivation that will always benefit those who get over that obstacle of nervousness to use L2 outside of the classroom in conversations with native speakers.

Roger and William, with their heartfelt eloquence, certainly have me convinced. So now, rather than spending valuable time trying (perhaps in vain) to find the right method, should we be trying to figure out how best to motivate our students? Who can help us here? There's always lots of (cheap) talk about "motivating" our students (with games, activities, and trivia), but can we do much better than that? Most of that stuff (with exceptions for the best of it) doesn't "motivate", but rather only serves to pass the time pleasantly. Where's the motivation in that? The burden will always be on our students in the end, but surely there will always be some students who are motivated on their own (no matter what we do), and some students who won't care a whit (no matter what we do), and then a large group of students who might be 'nudged' as William's father did to him, and who might be grateful in the end for our efforts to nudge them. What serious kind of work can we do that may help to genuinely heighten our students will to work harder, reflect more effectively, and do better?

Larry Latham

Roger wrote:If I had an advantage, it was perhaps that my teachers were equally interested in their subject as I am now in English.

From my limited viewpoint, in service of getting the ball rolling here, I believe Roger has said something truly important here. When I was actively teaching, whatever genuine good effect I thought I had on my students seemed to me to come from my real interest in English language and how it works. I am fascinated by it, and work on it all the time, even in my spare time. I read books by many authors. I listen to people talking at the mall. I think about what they say and why. I engage my colleagues in discussion over some of the finer elements of it to the point of their exasperation. I did this then, and still do here in this forum. When I was teaching, I'm pretty sure this showed itself in my classroom. I loved it, and if the students didn't, I did my damnedest to try to instill some of that love for English in them. I never even thought about my "method", although I read many books on the theories of language acquisition, and found them interesting most of the time, even if largely cumbersome as a classroom guide.

Many, if not most (but not all), of the teachers I encountered over the years didn't seem to have the awestruck amazement I have for English and how beautiful it is. How wonderfully it works as a medium of idea transmission. How it evolves and flexes according to the needs of the moment and of the times. Teachers often seemed to grudgingly learn as much as they thought they had to learn in order to be a teacher, but not more. Could I be wrong about that? Did I misunderstand, or misread them? Was I just that much more of a nerd than they? I don't know, really. But I do think Roger's statement above is delicious. If an EFL teacher loves his subject unabashedly and wholly, maybe many students will be "nudged" to greater effort. Perhaps it would be disrespectful not to be.

Larry Latham

Great discussion and at the heart of what I am interested in studying in the next year - both teacher and student motivation and how it applies to courses taught for ESL teachers. It sure must depend on your teaching course. Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada has a great one obviously in Applied Linguistics because I didn't experience any of the frustration with "theory" versus "practice" that you all talk about. It is hard to recap all of my courses there but the guiding principle seemed to be to question. My notes are full of questions. The whole thrust of the courses is to turn you into a questioning machine, to examine everything you are doing all of the time and how you fit into this tremendously complicated process. It is not just you and the students which is complicated enough but also what they bring from their culture, their home, their age, and all you have to deal with from above with textbooks, principals, school boards, Ministries, cultures and on and on. Devon Woods has a nice model of how this all works together. The motivation part is at the bottom of the model in the individual words we use as teachers in the classroom. If you use the right words and as Larry says, English has them in abundance and they are so powerful, then the students understand what they are to do and are motivated to do activites which then leads to the upper levels of fitting in with the Ministries goals or the private schools goals. When I post "activities" for teachers who are writing "help me please" it is a just a survival tactic and you are on a basic level of the model. I know how hard it is to be in another country with all the culture shock and not know what to do for the next day. You freeze, you get uncertain about your abilities and just need something that will be successful or open the doors to your own creativity. No one does what I say in the way that I would do it because we are all individuals and in Devon's model, bring all that into our teaching. I have seen the benefit of my teacher training as a regular teacher in the public school system in British Columbia, Canada(which was four years of practicums and four years of theory and practical courses)over the untrained teachers who are given a weekend course in teaching before they go abroad. It will be wonderful when we can insist on teachers trained this way in every part of the world but when you come right down to it, there are people who are just good at it naturally. They have the feel for it, the love of the students, and can put up with the frustrations of the job. They themselves are researchers and they find the individual solutions to their problems and the excitement of finding things that obviously work to inspire even the most recalcitrant of the students. There is just no question in my mind that there is a teachable moment when the mind of the teacher can get into the mind of the student and point them on. True teachers do inspire and no amount of great games or materials will make up for that.

Hey everyone.

This is, indeed, an interesting thread, it's been a while since I've been motivated to contribute.

In our final teachers' meeting the boss offered us the possibility of special workshops for next year. I'm an old dog with old tricks that work for me, so had little to ask for. However, all the other teachers agreed that they would like a workshop on motivating adults and teenagers in the classroom, on an oral basis.

I should highlight that these are good teachers who know their work. These are also teachers with discipline problems in the classroom. They also tend to teach sitting down. They stick closely to the textbook that is sold to the students at the beginning of the year. They rarely go beyond cloze exercises or a quick game of scrabble when offering alternative resources to their students. They have, some of them, gotten into hot water due to massive dis-motivation in the classroom. They do need some ideas to get on with their work.

I agree, it is my own personal motivation that motivates my students. I don't have adults dropping out of class like flies; I have adults who enjoy drill exercises and sing-alongs and role-plays. I have offered this same material to other teachers and they look at it and say "That's all fine and well, but where do they learn vocabulary?" I think they see themselves as "teachers" rather than "informants". I keep my professional distance from the students like anyone else might, but I don't hide the pleasure my work gives to me. Being motivated motivates.

That's long, and I have so much to comment, will do in another post.

peace,
revel.

The personal conflict I have with any teaching method is the generalizations that are implicit. It’s all fine and well to assert that we all have a LAN and so can and do all use it to learn languages, but many of us also have legs and yet some have two left feet when it comes to dance or soccer.

My understanding of Applied Linguistics is that it is a multidisciplinary field and that’s how I use it in the ESL classroom. In my case, it might even be holistic: there is nothing that is not of use in the class. Naturally, there are things I use more than others, and the criteria are not based on the value of the material but rather on whether that material motivates me to teach it. So the cute books with lots of pictures and soap-opera characters and little practice material (the classic model verb exercise with only five examples and you have ten students in the class and they can’t focus on the structure because they don’t understand half the vocabulary used….) don’t motivate me and so I don’t use them. These books do motivate others in my academy and that’s wonderful for them.

These colleagues look at my Grant Taylor substitution and transformation exercises and say “what boring material, how can you motivate students with this stuff?” Well, a musician, for example, does a lot of scales from the beginning of his/her education in the matter through the warm-up for his/her latest performance. Ballet dancers never stop taking classes and do the same twelve movements in different combinations in every class as well a before leaping out onto the stage. I apologized flippantly one day for spending so much time on a certain drill exercise and the ten adults unanimously retorted with what fun they had with this exercise, (we had certainly had a good many laughs about errors “I shot the back door a few minutes ago…”) how useful it was to their improvement, etc.

I made the sad mistake of commenting that I did not like a particular book that two colleagues do like, in fact think is excellent. I could only reply to their emotional defense of this book that perhaps it is my personal style that does not allow me to make good use of the material, which well may be excellent. I think what I wanted to say was that, that material was just not motivating to me. Old dog, old tricks, if what I do works, why spend even more of my free time getting to know a “new” method, or “new” materials? I’ve reviewed this book in question, don’t care for it myself and so look for, and find, alternatives.

More in another post.

peace,
revel

Finally, finishing up this exercise in improvisation, I wanted to get back to generalizations.

That any one or two or ten methods will work for all students is, for me, a generalization. Thus to search for that secret key to language study, teaching, acquisition, etc, is not doing a service to the students. I have been told that the classes must be standardized and that it is impossible to tailor classes to the needs of the individuals. And yet, I have been given (as I’m sure most of us have) classes that contained all imaginable “proficiency levels” that were organized because a minimum of four and a maximum of nine students makes the business run with a profit. Consequently, despite the belief of my boss that tailor-made is impossible, I always end up tailor-making. Fortunately I like the challenge and though everyone is aware that María José has a lot of troubles José Luis never complains that she slows the class down because though he is more “advanced” he also knows that he has a lot of trouble as well, just in other areas.

Rafael doesn’t care too much for the warm-up drills but does them because he respects my professionalism, he would not question his dentist either unless the end product was unsatisfactory. He also tends to not participate in exercises where one has to note things down. Being oral classes that doesn’t present a problem usually, but I also don’t insist that he write ten words he’s recognized in the film we are watching as the rest of the class is doing. He prefers to try to cement these words into his head than note them down in a notebook he won’t open outside of class. His attitude is a lesson to others who write everything down but are unable to spit it out.

One of my colleagues started out with a similar group of adults. He had eight intermediate students. He followed the book down to the last period. Additional material was limited to news articles from the Times (London, not New York). He has a crisis on his hands. In less than one trimester his class had fallen to three students. At the end of the year, only one student was left and the group was cancelled. He is not a poor teacher; I think his error was not having properly diagnosed the needs of his students and not having developed a mixture of resources to meet those needs.

Yes, I am dogmatic in class, but I would never insist that my method works better than another method. And that ought to be in plural, my methods work for what they are worth and my satisfaction is the satisfaction of my students. They may not leave the class with lengthy lists of vocabulary and complex structural charts noted in their notebooks, they may have simply gotten the hang of contracting the verb “be” or getting the word order right in their questions and negatives. We all know that in the ESL class we are simply informing, at times practicing, but that the real learning might just be in the real world, where we spend the majority of our time.

peace
revel

I wish I could be as philosophical as the rest of you, as you might have guessed, I am having to bite my tongue about my real opinions while pursuing a distance course in Applied Linguistics!

Sounds like your course leaves something to be desired.