Editorial

I was reminded this week of how readily we assume our knowledge of English to be perfect, especially when in the presence of non-native speakers. One of my Japanese friends was set to rights about a particular phrase by an American teacher recently. "Thank you for your custom" she was told, is not proper English. The teacher objected to the use of the word "custom" and suggested "business" as a replacement.

In fact, the phrase is correct but the friend was nonetheless guilty of using British English.

Many years ago I remember being bemused by a Japanese friend's frequent use of "Later!" when signing off in an email or saying goodbye in person. Was this some strange Japlish I was hearing? A barbaric contraction of "See you later!"? I set her to rights... but in fact the friend was only using the common corruption she had learnt on a homestay in America when she was young and impressionable. I blamed the parents.

Through TV and films, Brits like me are more familar with American usage than vice versa of course, but I still hesitate to judge when I hear strange phrases coming out of the mouths or pens of normally fluent practitioners. If you're in the same position, do what I do and use Google as a corpus to see whether the phrase is being used (and by whom). You might end up exclaiming, as Larry David often does in Curb Your Enthusiasm: "Who knew?!"

The Week in English Language Teaching
We're now updating our news page weekly and putting more frequent updates on our Facebook page. On the main site we'll summarize notable events in ELT here in Japan and around the world. If you or your organization would like to be considered for inclusion just drop us a line.

Jobs on ELTNEWS.com
Our jobs board is now free for all schools and publishers in Japan, so if you're looking to hire teachers or other staff, this is the place to do it. And, of course, if you're looking for a job, then the ELT News Jobs is the place for you.

Until next time.

Russell Willis

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People are often amazed at the amount of content available on ELTNEWS.com. Having been around for over 10 years, it shouldn't be surprising that we have built up a fair bit of content but it's always hard with websites to get a full sense of what they contain. With a book or magazine, you can take its heft as a guide, but a website (or CD-ROM, or smartphone app) is much harder to judge.

So let's take a look around...

Interviews
We have a veritable "Who's Who?" of ELT interviewed with the likes of Henry Widdowson, Mario Rinvolucri, Michael Swan, Catherine Walter, David Crystal and Raymond Murphy talking about their careers and their views on ELT.

Check out the full list of interviews here.

Jobs
Our jobs section is free for schools in Japan who use the ELTBOOKS.com online book service, and the section is visited by thousands each week. If you're looking for a job, or you're a school looking to find a teacher, then this is the place for you.

Check out the Jobs section here.

Book Reviews
Our book reviews column is currently looking for a new reviewer (get in touch if you're interested) but has dozens of reviews of some of the most important books in ELT.

Check out our Book Reviews section here.

Mike Guest
Our most popular, entertaining and controversial columnist, Mike is a superb writer who goes where angels fear to tread in his column, The Uni-Files. If you haven't been keeping up with Mike's views on the world of ELT, then you're missing out, plain and simple.

Check out Mike Guest's column here.

News Archives
We have a searchable archive of the daily news going back to 2002. Diving in, it's interesting how the same news topics come around again and again...

Check out the News Archives here.

And that's just scratching the surface. Here's a quick overview of the other sections of the site:

Columns
Writings on ELT from current and former ELTNEWS.com columnists such as Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto (author of Let's Go), David Lisgo, Mike Guest and Greg Crawford.

Features
The Think Tank | Guide to Japan and Teaching in Japan | Fun English | Games Reviews | Japan Book Reviews | Kids' World | Teaching Ideas | Special Features

And of course, for those who are interested in buying English-language magazines and newspapers, there is our Japan Store.

So that's ELTNEWS.com. Remember you can also keep up to date on news through our Facebook Page, and if you would like to contribute to ELTNEWS.com then please get in touch. We're interested in news about your project, school or company and are always looking for good columnists who can write on a regular basis. If you don't want to write on a regular basis but have something important to say then, if we agree that others would like to hear it, we'll publish what you have to say in our Guest Column.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Russell Willis
Founder, ELTNEWS.com

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It was good to see one of the Extensive Reading World Congress plenary speakers, William Grabe, end his presentation with a call for more research. In opposition to the previously quoted nonsense about research from Nunan (formal experimental research in ELT is "useless") and Larsen-Freeman ("insight rather than proof should be the standard of research"), Grabe recognized that if Extensive Reading (ER) is to be brought further into the mainstream then what is needed is proper experimental research providing hard evidence of ER's efficacy.

But such calls are not enough. Ben Goldacre in his brilliant book, Bad Science, notes that the phrase "There is need for more research" has been banned by the British Medical Journal for many years on the grounds that it adds nothing. Instead, academics need to get specific -- what research is missing, on whom, how, measuring what, funded by whom, to what timetable etc.

So this moment should not be lost. If the case for ER is "inescapable" then let's make it unassailable. Specific proposals for research should be detailed and funding applied for.

What funding? Well, a remark I heard at the final plenary revealed a possible benefactor. Apparently, Pearson generates more cash from graded readers in Japan than from any other ELT source. This sounds likely, and in any case, readers are big business for publishers. Should they not be donating money to organizations (perhaps like the Extensive Reading Foundation) to oversee research into the efficacy of ER?

Such research, providing hard evidence of the effectiveness of ER, would be a win for teachers, students and publishers alike.

Russell Willis
Founder, ELTNEWS

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Getting ready for Kyoto
At the stately mansion from which ELTNEWS.com operates we are running around in a rather unrefined manner in preparation for this weekend's Extensive Reading World Congress at Kyoto Sangyo University (you can register upon arrival -- full details here).

I'll be giving a presentation on the Monday at 3:30 pm, taking a look at how extensive reading and listening can be implemented on the iPhone and iPad and other devices. I'll be drawing from my experience working on the smartphone versions of the Oxford Bookworms Library (which are being properly launched next week but some of which are available now) and taking a look at how the proper use of computers and software can help writers, editors and publishers create even better extensive reading titles. I hope you'll be able to come along and keep me company -- each member of the audience will get a free iPhone / iPad extensive reader title to try out. (iPhones and iPads not included, unfortunately!)

Of course, I'm worried about the attendance for my presentation as there are so many interesting speakers at the conference. In fact it has been agonizingly difficult to choose which presentations to go to as there are so many interesting ones -- but to give you a flavour of the conference here's a PDF of the presentations I'll be trying to attend. And don't forget you can download a PDF of the full conference program here.

Tell us about your teaching experience and win a free iPod touch
ELT Services Japan is the company, headed up by Matthias Reich, which runs ELTNEWS.com, ELTBOOKS.com and Eigo Kyoiku News. It also offers IT and marketing support for publishers and teaching organizations. Right now we have a client that operates a number of schools around the world and is interested in hiring teachers. As part of that we are running a competition to find out more about teachers' attitudes towards teaching here in Japan and in other countries. The prize is an iPod Touch which will be given out at the beginning of October. In order to enter, please click here.

Hiring? Hunting?
Speaking of services, teachers looking for jobs will be interested in our Jobs section, and school owners will be interested to know that they can place job ads for free on our jobs section, as long as they are customers of ELTBOOKS.com. Take a look.

That's all for this week. Don't forget to join our Facebook page for regular updates on what's going on in the world of ELT in Japan.

Russell Willis
Founder, ELTNEWS.com

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A missive from Cambridge
So I finally got a reply from Cambridge ESOL last week -- as I had suspected, my message had been lost in their automated email inquiry system. Luckily, Monica Poulter who is "involved in the production and delivery of Cambridge ESOL's teaching qualifications" came across my plea for some communicative activity and wrote a very nice response. I'll be returning to Monica and that response after a bit of a digression...

Fads and fashions...
Back in February, when I wrote the "Teachers Should Know How to Teach" editorial extolling the virtues of the CELTA (or RSA Cert as it were when I were a lad), I assumed that a qualification with the backing of Cambridge University would have been subject to some formal research into whether students learnt more quickly with teachers who had the CELTA than with those who had no training at all. I mean, my beloved CELTA couldn't be a course informed by fad and fashion, guru and grant, without any concern as to evidence for its efficacy, could it? Or could it?

It was true that I had often had discussions about ELT that felt similar, I imagined, to homeopathic practitioners discussing the most effective way to do violence to vials of water. Plenty of discussion of thumping technique but little discussion regarding research into the effect of such imaginatively and skillfully-executed thumping...

Bloodsucking leeches and Uri Geller
Of course, the making of claims unencumbered by evidence is hardly limited to ELT or homeopathy. Experts have historically asserted all sorts of dubious things based on intuition and "insight": the virtues of bloodletting with leeches for fevers and using mercury for scraped knees being just a couple of relatively recent and less barbaric examples that spring to mind. And people easily bamboozle themselves and others... I think it was after reading, back in the early 90s, the magician James Randi's expose of everything from horoscopes to levitation to spoon bending (Flim Flam!) that I realized that an insistently intuitive or emotional approach to beliefs wasn't kind of quaint (as I had previously thought) but potentially quite harmful, especially when that approach touched on issues that affected other people. Issues like health... and education.

In promoting the CELTA without any compelling evidence of its effect on learning outcomes, was I putting myself in the same camp as the proponents of homepathy, reiki, astrology and magic crystals? I felt like I was, and it wasn't a camp I wanted to be in...

Teachers in Britain and Bad Science
In his brilliant book, Bad Science, the British medical doctor and Guardian journalist, Ben Goldacre describes (amongst many other things) how British teachers have fallen for a modern snake oil called Brain Gym:

"Children are routinely taught -- by their teachers, in thousands of British state schools -- that if they wiggle their head up and down it will increase blood flow to the frontal lobes, thus improving concentration; that rubbing their fingers together in a special sciencey way will improve 'energy flow' through the body; that there is no water in processed food; and that holding water on their tongue will hydrate the brain directly through the roof of the mouth."

If teachers, schools and education authorities could be duped in this way perhaps I shouldn't take it for granted that academics in ELT knew what they were doing...

A quick flip through the index of Richards' Approaches and Methods... nothing under "research"... maybe "evidence"?... nope... How about A–Z of ELT ? ... nothing there... Hold on... Nunan and Bailey have a newish book on this... Exploring Second Language Classroom Research...

And here is where I really started to worry. Nunan and Bailey's book on research pays a substantial number of pages of lip service to formal experimental research -- you, know, the type that has led to the most astonishing improvements in the way we live. It's not long though before we see where their hearts truly lie, first noting that for researchers like Larsen-Freeman "insight rather than proof should be the standard of research" (I can feel those leeches now...) and then quoting the slightly more engaging:

"If you study grains of sand, you will find each is different. Even by handling one, it becomes different. But through studying it and others like it, you begin to learn about a beach."

Well, that is certainly one approach that will keep a lot of academics in academic activity for the rest of their tenure... You could alternatively, of course, study the way beaches behave as a whole, define representative types of beaches as samples to study, make hypotheses about how they might behave, falsify the hypothesis, renew your hypothesis, study again, and iterate until you've got something that is difficult to falsify and works in practice, that, for example, allows us to do something useful or at least build hotels, ice cream stands and piers on beaches. Of course, if studying every grain of sand on a beach can get us there too, I'm all for that, as well. Let us know when you're done.

In Bad Science, Goldacre sees the poor (often negligent) reporting of science by many journalists as a result of the media being run by "humanities graduates with little understanding of science who wear their ignorance as a badge of honour." As a non-scientist myself, I think this is too harsh -- but I was a little surprised by Nunan and Bailey feeling the necessity in a book "suited for candidates in teaching credential, master's degree, and Ph.D programs" to explain the word "hypothesis". Did they think ELT was composed of lots of anti-science humanities graduates?

In any case, it certainly doesn't seem that Nunan is in favour of doing much externally valid empirical research. In fact, Dr. Nunan has kindly written to me to say that he feels that formal experiments are "useless". Too many variables, which make them too expensive to do properly -- if, in fact, they can be done properly. How expensive? Well one estimate is around $100,000 dollars... Goodness, that is very expensive, indeed.

But now bear in mind that Cambridge University has ELT-related revenue of over $150 million dollars.

That's right. $150 million dollars. Annually. One might be confident that they had spent some of that money for some formal research into the efficacy of their courses.

Why should we care about evidence?
So, finally, I return to Cambridge ESOL and Monica. I actually care whether Cambridge ESOL are able to provide evidence that learners learn better with CELTA-trained teachers than with teachers who haven't been trained at all or have been trained by some dodgy diploma mill. (I could word that more precisely but you'd have to pay me $100,000 and I've gone on long enough already...)

And I want to show this evidence because:

1) I took the CELTA, I thought it was great and that it made me a better teacher (as defined by my students learning better), and I'd like to have my no doubt faultless insight backed up by some evidence, so I don't get accused of hypocrisy by my reiki-loving, "moon goddess" sister. Umm, bit selfish on that one...

2) There are too many people who mix up experience and expertise and believe that because they've been teaching for years they don't need to be trained -- and anyway they "know someone who never got trained and he's a brilliant teacher". (To these people, I would suggest that there are quite a few superb untrained mini-cab drivers in London but if you had to bet your house on getting to your destination, would you choose an unlicensed mini-cab at random or a licensed black cab with a driver who has done The Knowledge?)

3) When organizations like Gaba or AEON or the Japanese government consider whether they should employ trained teachers, I want to point out to them that students learn better with CELTA (or DELTA or Trinity) trained teachers. Right now these organizations feel perfectly entitled to hire untrained teachers, as there is no hard evidence that trained teachers are any better.

4) Those dodgy organizations offering training won't be able to imply: "we're just like the CELTA -- they don't have any proof and neither do we. And look we have an academic advisor!"

5) If the evidence is there, then more organizations, governments, and companies will hire trained teachers and -- most importantly, as a result, people should be able to learn English more effectively.

Monica's answer
Sadly, Monica from Cambridge ESOL doesn't seem able to help me out, polite and thoughtful as she is. In answer to my question:

"Do learners of English learn more effectively (however defined) with CELTA-qualified teachers? What studies have been done to show that they do (or don't) ?"

she answered:

"As far as I am aware, no comparative longitudinal studies with an equivalent qualification have as yet been undertaken, and given the range of variables involved in any dynamic learning-teaching environment, it is unlikely that such studies would be considered valid by the ESOL academic research community."

The ESOL academic research community. I see. Apparently unable to conceive of an acceptable study, properly controlled, properly funded, that would show, for example, that CELTA-trained teachers promote more effective learning than untrained, or dodgily-trained teachers. You know, in general. (Which would, by the way, tend to help validate a lot of the other current thoughts on methodology in ELT, given that the CELTA distills best practice and theory in its course.)

Are researchers too busy climbing academic ladders publishing articles about those grains of sand on the beach? Perhaps, but if "academic ESOL" (whatever that is) and Cambridge ESOL don't want to be accused of having houses built on sand, they should get their research houses in order, and start doing more studies that have practical value in the real world -- for learners, teachers, language schools and policy makers alike.

Russell Willis
Founder, ELTNEWS.com

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• Proper English and Google
• Showing Off – All About ELTNEWS
• Publishers Should Fund More Research
• Extensive Reading World Congress!
• We Need Evidence-Based ELT
• The Heat is On...
• Ramblings: Faith, Hope and Charity
• Back to School
• Doing What We Can...
• Teachers Should Know How to Teach

• Proper English and Google
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• We Need Evidence-Based ELT
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• Publishers Should Fund More Research
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• 5 Important Issues for ELT in Japan
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• Ramblings: Faith, Hope and Charity
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• Teachers Should Know How to Teach
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    - Paul
    - Dan
    - t
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• Revealing hidden voices
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• How I spent the weekend in Nagoya
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• Be Part of Something Bigger than Yourself
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• Sitting quietly and listening intently?
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