The English UK Teachers' Conference 2008

Another year, and another chance to shine before my peers at the English UK Teachers' Conference, held once again at Prospero House in Southwark. This time, I was acting as co-presenter and official hand-holder for my colleague, Chloe, whose presentation it was really. I was there to describe the technical bits. Our presentation was on Online Records of Work, a subject that may sound so tedious as to make you wonder why I bothered according it capital letters: However, these are a devastatingly simple and effective solution for dealing with groups that have more than one teacher or for instructors (like me) who can't be bothered to fill in the paper version after the end of a long evening slaving over the Present Perfect. If you're interested in the idea, go over to http://eflstuff.wikispaces.com and have a look.

Anyway, we arrived at the venue with no incident, apart from me letting loose an urban legend, while trudging and lurching through a tube station with several hundred other people, about how George A. Romero had based his Zombies' shuffling gait on the movements of London commuters on the underground. I said it loudly enough for several pairs of ears to hear me. I wonder how long it'll take before it gets published somewhere or other.

Prospero House has seen a few changes: The ground floor has been refurbished and made to appear wider by the judicious removal of the pokey little rooms facing Borough Road. In their place, a coffee lounge has been opened, complete with baristas in green aprons, attentive to everyone's needs. The pokey rooms have been shunted upstairs and given inspriational names like 'Express', 'Smile', 'Inspire', 'Poke with a Stick'. I've made one of those up. Why on earth give rooms names? Does it make the average conference delegate think 'gosh, I'm in a room called smile, I'd better look amused or something'? I suppose the designers thought it made themselves look more creative than appellating them room 1A or something.

We'd already missed half the opening session, so rather than furtively wander into the back of the room, we decided to have coffee and investigate which room we'd be using. It was one of the pokey rooms – Smile 1. It contained twelve chairs, an old projector on an old stand at a dodgy angle, no projector screen, one flipchart pad and a view of dilapidated buildings on Borough Road. And, somewhat crucially we thought, considering we were going to be given a presentation on computer-based admin environments, a laptop-sized hole. Fortunately, I'd had the foresight to bring my own along, and Chloe had four memory sticks, a CD and a printed version of the whole presentation, just to be on the safe side. And she'd emailed it to me and herself.

Anyway, we had plenty of time: we weren't due to deliver our presentation until the afternoon. We looked through the programme and decided which of the other presentations would be worth going to. This year, it seemed that there were an awful lot of company reps flogging their wares – sorry, giving meaningful and useful shows while utilising certain branded products. We decided to try and give these a miss and watch what other instructors were doing. Our first stop was motivated solely by self-interest, rather than any attempt at gathering information from as many different sources as possible to later disseminate – or, in the truly dreadful jargon our institution employs, cascade down – what we'd found out to the rest of the teaching team. No, we wanted to find out how to get published, and become full-time EFL publishers and live on yachts, drinking champagne like Liz and John Soars. So, we went to the excitingly-named 'Get your name in lights! How to get published', presented by the excitingly-named Celia Wigley. She was in Smile 1. We tried to smile too, as fifteen people attempted to squeeze in, mostly middle-aged older TEFLers who had all been seduced by the exclamation mark in the middle of the title. Celia was waiting with a brittle, nervous smile at the front, occasionally being kicked accidentally by people stretching out their legs, and looking anxiously at the laptop that someone had dug out, or possibly up. She had every right to look anxious, as the thing wouldn't work. Mark Rendell, the English UK organiser, appeared, and sent someone else off to find a techie guy called John. In the hiatus now offered us, Celia hemmed and hawed and introduced herself, and explained a little of her background. More from what was left unsaid, it was obvious that she'd followed the classic late 80's/early 90's route into TEFL: leave university; do some crap job for a while, while waiting for someone to give you a dream job and/or the world to sit up and realize what a wonderful genius you are; realise that actually you haven't got a clue what you are actually good at or for; see an ad in the newspaper saying 'teach your way round the world!!!' (see, those tempting exclamation marks again!!); go off on some dodgy teaching course or other while instructing a conversation class of 50 exhausted Indonesian businessmen; suddenly wake up and realize you've been in the job 10 years. However, she had, to her credit, managed to land a publishing job with EF. After a few more minutes of waiting, one techie arrived, followed by another, and they gesticulated at the computer for a bit, before disappearing. At this, Celia completely clammed up, claiming that she needed her presentation; So why hadn't she made any prints of the slides?

This afforded us all several more minutes of quiet contemplation, during which I marvelled at the clothing choices of my fellow TEFLers. Celia herself was dressed in a fairly standard long black woolen dress affair, complete with sparse pieces of chunky jewelery. The other women (apart from Chloe, I must say) seemed to have mostly got dressed in the dark with the aid of a guide dog with no aesthetic sense, and had their hair done in a variety of exciting, not to mention haphazard, ways, involving attempts to make grey hair more interesting. The men were far duller; corduroy, twill and tweed predominated, along with slobby jumpers. For the record, I was dressed in black trousers with a fine grey pinstripe, a grey and black striped shirt and black shoes. What the men lacked in spectacular sartorial wear, they more than made up for with the variety of stains of different hue on their clothes, and the various methods employed to try and disguise baldness.

Eventually, John the Head Techie arrived with another laptop, plugged it in and got the whole show going, some twenty minutes late. Actually, it was a shame, because there was quite a lot of potentially useful information about the publishing process itself. What there wasn't was any particularly useful or concrete advice about getting oneself published, just info about the arduous path the neophyte TEFL writer must wander. Fooled by those damned exclamation marks once again! It wasn't helped by Celia being not exactly well-prepared or practiced, either. It never ceases to amaze me how people whose profession involves standing in front of a load of strangers and communicating ideas to them in an alien language suddenly all go to pieces and forget good practice in front of their peers.

Anyway, after the end of her presentation, Chloe and I went our separate ways, her to a presentation on EAP methodology, me to one entitled 'Explore the subtleties of language', fortunately exclamation-mark free, which promised to explore the subtleties of literature, poetry, music and text within an upper-intermediate/advanced context. It was hosted by Karen, the DOS of a language school somewhere in London. She had bags of enthusiasm. She had big glasses. She had hair that had obviously been large and roughly the same shape as Carol Decker's from T'Pau in around 1986, and which had gradually worn down over the intervening years. She had a bright red cardigan and green dress. She had a brittle smile that kept on saying 'please like me'. Sadly, what she didn't have was a) enough photocopies to hand round, b) even a basic powerpoint presentation or c) a clue. The following fifty minutes was an object example in someone's enthusiasm overtaking their ability to express themselves clearly, or to actually analyse what it is they're delivering in class.

What was was, her reading and listening material seem to have expired at some point in the late eighties. We were treated to an extract from an early Jaqueline Wilson book, lyrics from heavy metal group Queensryche and Bon Jovi, and a newpaper article which, as she put it 'is written like he is dancing'.

Karen proceeded to hand out her materials, saying all the while that she loved them and they were excellent. What she did not do was explain methodology, approach, and practice. Instead, she encouraged us to analyse the text, looking for similes, metaphors, and tenses. Why? What for? The most appalling was the Bon Jovi lyrics, for Dry County, which are absolutley chock full of Christian imagery and allusion, and particularly imagery that resonates to an native English speaker. How on earth was it possible to make it relevant or interesting to non-native non-christian students? All in all, a total waste of everybody's time, in my opinion.

Deeply disappointed, I met up with Chloe again and we ate our buffet meals, most of which seemed to have been deep fried even if iy didn't want to be. We discussed final strategies and what we'd seen so far. Around us, other teachers sat in small groups, chatting of this and that. I watched one guy struggle with a daub of ketchup on his plate and something resembling a goujon, finally adding to the stain collection on his shirt. We finished off quickly, the went upstairs and set up our show. In fact, it was a good job we did, because it took us twenty minutes to set up the bloody computer. However, we managed it, and managed to start our presentation on time to a select audience of, er, ten. Well, strictly speaking, nine, as one had clearly overdosed on deep-fried substances and fell asleep at the back. We delivered the whole thing successfully and, amazingly considering our lack of practice, seamlessly, even though I was occasionally distracted by the sight, through the window, of a naked woman casually wandering around the flat above a shop on the other side of the road. What feedback we got was very positive indeed, and I think we provided something useful and tangible for those present.

Finally, there was the closing session, with Hugh Dellar, who was delivering a talk called 'the curse of creativity'. He works for the University of Westminster and has produced several textbooks. The talk was clearly one he had delivered before, but no worse for that. It was an entertaining performance and a good way to end the conference. Hi s basic premise was that teachers spend far too much time trying to be creative at the expense of the students actually learning anything. I think he has a point: why try to recreate the wheel in every lesson? However, I think he missed out a really crucial point – namely, encouraging creativity in students, even though he touched on a point about the Japanese concept of 'shu-ha-ri'.

And it is difficult to take seriously anyone wearing white shoes – SHOES, not trainers – with a cowboy shirt. At least the shirt was stainless.

Ten Thousand Hours

...the length of time, according to research reported by this guy, it takes to achieve mastery over any given field. Read this; It's important. I also believe it has signficant implications for learners of language and language teachers. Basically, this article is an extract from a book, looking at how really successful people are successful because of a combination of talent, luck, timing and application. What is of interest, however, is the figure in the title. If you think about L1 acquisition, that roughly equates to two and a half years of waking existence, the kind of age where children start to have a clear emerging language, rather than babble and lumps of vocabulary. Of course, they don't have mastery, yet the brain has acquired the bare bones of the language by then, the simple version of the operating system it will use over its lifetime, if you like.
In terms of language learning, would ten thousand hours of practice equate to mastery? Research suggests it would. After all, the requirements for Proficiency level state that someone who has studied for far less than this figure will achieve this level. And when a student has the opportunity to be entirely immersed in an English-speaking environment, we should point out how swiftly that can, in theory, become masterful. Let's take an example of someone with mastery of the English language: Joseph Conrad, someone who knew nothing of the language before the age of 19. Now, he came from a family that were hard-working and determined, and he had hour after hour to learn English while aboard boats, criss-crossing the oceans. In the end, he began writing, and look at his work! But I bet you that the aforementioned figure , all that time in practice and learning and practice again, had to be crossed before he even set pen to paper.
And as for being a teacher, what of that? After reading this article, I reflected on how many hours I've put in, both in the classroom and in preps, practice etc. I must have done, on average, about 20 hours per week of direct class contact over the last 15 years. So, 20 x 44 (don't forget holiday times, when I do my paperwork) x 15 = 13,200 hours of class time, plus planning & admin. Have I achieved mastery of my subject? Well, no, because I can always find something to learn, and there is always something to learn. But also, yes, because I know that I can walk into a classroom or even a circle drawn on the floor, with or without materials, and still deliver a good lesson.

English UK conference, again

Yes, another year, another invitation to speak before my peers. This year, I'll be doing a bit of practical stuff - online records of work, with my tag-team buddy Chloe Courtenay. We had a practice run-through of what we'll be doing next saturday (15th) at the conference. Something we've all been experimenting with is using a VLE tro support the paperwork side of things , and especially the record of work where a class is shared between several people. Having a document that is readiliy available anywhere just makes it easy to do.
As you might remember, last year I was up against Adrian Underhill; This year we're going head to head with Jim Scrivener. No probs.
Anyone interested in online records of work could do worse than visit this site, where I'm playing with them, alongside other stuff.

Acquisition and Learning

Well, the original purpose of this journal was to help with my studies and my work. Here's an essay I've just completed: see what you think.

Compare the concepts of language acquisition and language learning with reference to your reading and experience. Explain their relevance to three different learning situations in which you have had a direct teaching role.

Introduction
Since the nineteenth century and the rise of various theories of how languages are learned, one consistent area of research has been how children learn their mother languages, and how best that can be replicated in the language classroom in order to facilitate the simplest and easiest way of learning a target language. Since the 1970s, further research has been undertaken into understanding the differences between the seemingly unconscious way in which young children learn and the way in which adult learners learn languages, what processes are involved and how these might affect how we learn, and teach, languages. Arguably the currently most dominant theories are those of Stephen Krashen regarding language acquisition and language learning, as laid out in Second language acquisition and second language learning (1981), and how they relate to his and Tracy Terrell's Natural Approach theory (1983). While the Natural Approach, according to Krashen himself, falls under the umbrella of the Communicative Approach, nevertheless his own theories on Acquisition, learning and the differences therein has had a significant impact on language teaching, methodology, materials and texts since the 1980s. In this essay, I will compare the concepts of acquisition and learning, first exploring in brief some of the historical background behind the rise of Krashen's theory of second language acquisition. Next, I will compare the concepts in relation to classroom practice, based upon current materials and my own classroom practice, and explain three teaching situations which illustrate the concepts, and finally I will explain my own attitude towards acquisition and learning based upon my own experience.

The historical background behind acquisition and learning theories
It may be said that, broadly speaking, earlier approaches to language teaching and learning focused either on grammatical accuracy or on seeking to create conditions in which language is learned in a way closest to how a child acquires language, the two prime examples being the Grammar Translation Method and the the Natural, or Direct, Method, of ca.1900. The latter involved in its initial stages the instructor reading a text and then asking questions in the target language, often involving 'a great deal of pantomime' until the learner could comprehend phrases and sentences in the language being studied. It would only be after this initial phase that he or she would be expected to produce, and only later that grammar would be studied. While the Natural Method should not be confused with the much later Natural Approach, it did have something in common with the later idea. It is only later that there was consistent research into and analysis of what learners actually do. It was long held, for example, that (adult) learners of language would learn grammatical structures with greater or lesser speed depending on how close or distant their L1 was from the target language. This 'Contrastive Hypothesis' maintained that the learner's L1 could exert a positive or a negative interference depending on whether the language being studied contained the same grammatical feature as L1. However, when language learners were actually subjected to research during the late 1960s and 1970s, this hypothesis was found to actually have very little bearing on how L2 is learned. These 'Morpheme Order' studies sought to discover whether there is a natural sequence in which the structures of any given language are learned. While the initial studies have now come in for criticism, an outcome was that there does indeed seem to be a universal order of acquisition, and that we have an innate capability to acquire a language system from birth. Moreover, adult language learners appear to acquire language in much the same order as a child acquires his or her L1. However, there are still differences in these two processes: acquisition and learning.
What is Acquisition?
Acquisition, according to Krashen (1981), is the process best described as the 'natural' way in which first language development occurs in children. It is an unconscious process, involving the development of language proficiency by understanding a language and using it to communicate effectively and meaningfully. Krashen and Terrell (1983) state that the primary use of language is to communicate, and as such, language is naturally acquired in morphological 'chunks' – either word by word, utterance by utterance, or phrase by phrase, and that grammar has little to do with the natural way in which languages are acquired. Research does bear this out: Children acquire words according to their needs, and only later develop the 'framework' to create longer, more complex structures, the better to convey more complex meanings and information. Moreover, this framework takes time to become fully realised, and in the intervening time, children use an interlanguage – a form of the child's L1 in which he or she can experiment with language and where the rules and conventions are seemingly arbitrary and flexible. I can attest to this from my own experience of bringing up two children in a bilingual household. In the case of my first child, he initially acquired one language in preference to the other (in this case Turkish over English). However, due to a change of country just prior to his second birthday, he was plunged into a new language environment, and began to learn solely English, and his linguistic development subsequently proceeded in that language. By contrast, his younger brother (currently two years old) is exposed to both languages simultaneously at home, and also to Arabic via his childminder. When he speaks, he freely produces words in all three languages, but is at the point of clearly showing preference of lexical item depending on who he is communicating with. Nevertheless, his emergent interlanguage is still a mixture of vocabulary items from the languages he is acquiring. What is very clear is that there is very little discernible 'grammar' as such.

What is learning?
Language learning is a very different process from acquisition. It involves a process where the learner develops conscious rules about a language. It could be said that he or she learns about the language before learning the language itself. The outcome of this process is that the learner has clear, understood, knowledge of a language and can then verbalize this. In many respects, this means that a learned language is information learned much like any other subject, rather than the means or vehicle by which information is learned and disseminated, as is the case with L1. In contrast to acquisition, learning occurs in a formal taught environment. The development of the rules governing the target language may be helped by formal teaching techniques, such as error correction and testing. According to Krashen's theory, Learning cannot lead to acquisition, mainly because of how learning occurs, but also because of two other factors: the learner's internal 'monitor' and his or her 'affective filter'.

Acquisition, learning, the monitor hypothesis and the affective filter hypothesis
I have described above how acquisition is the process by which children acquire L1, and also how there seems to be a universal order of acquisition by which certain structures begin to appear in the learner's production. Research indicates that this order of acquisition also occurs in the way in which adult learners, whether in an informal or formal learning environment, acquire a target language. For example, the manner in which the negative is formed in English is typically initially expressed by putting 'no' before a verb ('I no go'), then by using an auxiliary correctly in one way, but incorrectly in another ('I don't go', but 'he don't go' or 'he don't can go'), before finally mastering the structure. This research into adult learners puts into question the entire notion of a grammatical syllabus. Surely we should teach English in a manner which most closely resembles the way in which we naturally learn our mother tongues?
This is in fact what Krashen and Terrel propose in the Natural Approach (1983). Some of the key features of this, according to Richards and Rodgers (2001) are that, firstly, the approach is designed to help students develop from beginners to intermediates in the target language; That specific objectives depend on learner needs; And that content selection should be interesting and foster a friendly, relaxed class atmosphere. The feature most relevant to our discussion is the role that the learner is expected to take. In the initial phases of a Natural Approach-based course, the student is not expected to contribute or produce until he or she feels ready to do so – in other words, once he or she feels a need to do so, imitating the need to communicate that is believed to drive language acquisition in children.
However, Krashen goes on in his SLA theory to describe other factors that distinguish Learning from Acquisition. First of these is the 'Monitor Hypothesis'. In short, this states that conscious learning functions only as a monitor,or editor, of what is uttered (as initiated by an acquired linguistic system), and provides a way of correcting language when we communicate. The efficiency of the monitor is affected by three conditions: Time, where there must be enough time for a learned rule to be chosen and applied; Focus on form, where the speaker is focused on accuracy or the form of what is produced; and knowledge of the rules, where the speaker, or performer, has to know the rules. As we have pointed out earlier, in second language learning, the rules of a language are generally learned along with the language.
Another factor that has been described is the Affective Filter Hypothesis. This states that the adult learner will be more or less successful in learning a language depending on the strength of their affective filter, that is, the emotional state, attitudes, motivation, self-confidence and anxiety he or she brings into the language learning environment. Krashen states that the lower the affective filter, the more successful the student will be in learning.
In other words, an acquired linguistic system is one learnt free of anxiety, or prior assumption. On the other hand, adult language learners have a set of assumptions and attitudes towards the target language and its culture that may or may not impede the process of learning.
One more important point to raise before we move on is this: Learning does not occur within acquisition, yet acquisition may, and does, occur within the learning process.

Examples from teaching situations
All my own teaching experience has been with young adult and adult learners, so I see students who are very much in the process of learning rather than acquiring English, albeit with some individual exceptions. One example was a student who had acquired highly fluent spoken English. Prior to entering the classroom, he had never formally studied the language: Instead, he had acquired what he knew of the language from his job as a waiter and bartender in a holiday resort, even to the extent that he spoke with a distinct London accent, despite never having been to the UK. Given his level of spoken English, it was anticipated before his initial assessment that his reading and writing would also be of the same standard. Instead, he tested out at ALTE level C2. He was disappointed by this, and once on the course with people with far lower levels of spoken fluency than him, he rapidly became frustrated and disillusioned, to the point that he stopped trying to learn any further.
The difficulty lay in that he needed to learn rather than acquire, even though he had acquired listening and spoken skills necessary for him to function, and function at a high level. Looking at his case through Krashen and Terrell's Natural Approach Theory, he had succeeded in acquiring a language in the most naturalistic way possible. However, in order to further his own career, he also required reading and writing skills, and this required a much more formal learning environment. In order to facilitate this, I had to first encourage him to continue learning. This I did by making him think about what it was he wanted and needed to learn, why this was, and how he could do it. This developed first through conversations, then through writing down his targets, then by breaking these targets down and showing him what he needed to learn. By involving him in the actual process of learning, and making him learn about language learning he managed to progress swiftly and far more happily.
I encounter similar issues with ESOL groups. Quite often, there is a disparity between spoken language, where long-term residents in the UK have acquired functional spoken capability, albeit one that is often limited to a specific set of social and work-based contexts, yet have highly limited reading and writing skills. Also, ESOL groups are frequently unfamiliar with the metalanguage and terminology frequently used when teaching a language, further evidence that they have not experienced a formal learning environment. Only through individual appraisals is it possible to devise an effective way of approaching how they need to learn further and what techniques are most likley to be effective.
By contrast, I have also dealt with groups (in the case I am thinking of, monolingual groups of Chinese students) who in had a technically high degree of knowledge of English, yet were incapable of functioning in the language environment simply because they could neither understand nor react to spoken English, nor were sufficiently capable of producing it to the degree that their grammatical knowledge suggested they should. In their case, they had achieved a great deal of learning but had experienced next to no acquisition. In their case, their frustrations with the language, while ostensibly similar to the first two examples, were in fact caused by the incapability to express the knowledge they believed they possessed, and this was compounded by the fact that they had to express themselves since they were studying in the UK. Many of them had aimed to go on to study at a British university after a year of studying English: with the realisation that they could not understand spoken interaction even at a relatively basic level, they became further discouraged. In the case of these students, exposing them to spoken interaction in class, encouraging them to listen to as much English as possible in their free time, and ensuring they reassessed their expectations all helped.
Conclusions
There is little doubt in my mind that Krashen's theories about acquisition and learning are, by and large, true. However, it may seem that some of his ideas are too simplistic, too much of the obvious being stated: one critic (Gregg, 1984) even goes so far as to suggest that he has no theory of language at all. I would take issue with the affective filter theory, and with some of the other features that he describes as distinguishing learning from acquisition, as I believe there is may be another way of explaining the difference. However, that falls outside the remit of this essay.
What we cannot do is invoke acquisition in our students in the classroom environment. Nor can we teach in a way that perfectly mimics acquisition. All we can do, within the class, is try to create a synthesis between how languages are picked up and an analysis of how the language works. What we can also do is encourage students to explore the language outside the classroom: we can direct them to discover for themselves as much as possible, to expose themselves to the target language as much as possible, to immerse themselves within it. And most importantly perhaps, we should encourage them not to be afraid, to play with language, to be flexible and arbitrary, to seek to be creative, to turn off their critical, affective filters and experiment with what is possible – in other words, let each student be comfortable in their own interlanguage as they learn.

sinking!

you find me buried neck deep in work and studies, hence my not writing on here as much as I would like to be doing. This time of year is always a hectic pace, and for me it is not helped by the fact that a) I'm trying my damndest to get my Dip done, and b) I'm now also doing, at the same time, my Diploma in Teaching for the Lifelong Learning Sector, or DTLLS for short.It would be fai to say that I have rather a lot on my plate right now. You might be asking, why the hell are you doing two courses? Well, it is soon to be a requirement in the British FE sector that all instructors have a qualification to teach specifically in the further education area - all part of a drive to push up standards etc. So, every wednesday this year, my services will be required in a classroom to discuss this, that and the other - currently, curriculum design. It promises to be rather a long slog, and, if the word of some of my colleagues who have already done the course is to be trusted, there's a bit too much of the old jumping through hoops while dotting 'i's and crossing 't's about the whole thing. I'm just trying to see where I can make the work cross over the two courses, as it were.

Neologisms Corner

An occasional series of entries devoted to the wonderful world of Neologism spotting in English. An awful lot of new words, meanings and phrases enter the language each year - on average, one every two hours - and an awful lot of them are total rubbish. Take this prize example, heard on the BBC news earlier on today. A police officer was describing the scene of a crash between a car, a bus and a tram in Croydon, which had left one person dead and several others seriously injured. He was explaining that they were waiting for the place to be forensically examined: '.....we are treating the scene as a crime scene, and are waiting for it to be forensicated..'
Totally bloody ugly word.

Wake me up when September ends.

Oh well, back to the whiteboard. I returned to work on monday: Now for another term full of testing, enrolment, stress and acquired colds. I'm still getting back into my stride and going through one of those 'bugger this for a game of soldiers' moments. However, there are fairly good reasons for this - we are chronically understaffed, we have a new Curriculum Manager, we have an administrator who still needs a bit of breaking in, I'm busy testing out new systems, I don't know yet how many students I'm going to have coming through the door, and the University Reprographics department has run out of its budget and doesn't have any paper. That's right, we can't print anything up. Oh, and there's been a nasty snafu about the enrolment sessions involving a buggered up booking programme, two classrooms and too many potential ESOL students. On top of that, I'm having a mare finding time to study - and there's another thing: I will have to do my Cert Ed this year on top of completing my Dip. Joy.
On the plus front however, I found this electronic version of the European Language Portfolio, which will hopefully make using portfolios with my students much, much easier.