Interview

Mario Rinvolucri

Mario Rinvolucri is a well-known teacher trainer and has been in the English language teaching field for over 30 years - the last 26 years with Pilgrims. Rinvolucri also edits Pilgrim's online magazine Humanising Language Teaching, and his latest work is the CDROM-based language-learning software, Mind Game. (March 2000)

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On the Profession

ELT: How has the EFL field changed since you started in the 1960s?
MR: Changes? Providing English has virtually become a utility, like providing electricity or water. In many countries knowing some English is one of the things necessary if a person wants to rise into the lower middle class. It is a social gateway skill. In Athens, Greece, where I taught my first TEFL classes in 1964, the elite had learnt French but their children were dropping it in favour of English. In those distant days you could still talk of a rivalry between French and English to serve as the main lingua franca of the world. Today, French is not in contention anymore.

As is normal in world history, the spread of a language is linked to military and political matters. The last 40 years has seen the parallel spread of US political, military, commercial, scientific, intellectual and linguistic domination of the globe. In a very real sense EFL teachers are as much propagators of the Imperium Americanum as F22 pilots or managers of Kentucky Fried Chicken stores.

How about changes in methodology?
When I started teaching English in Greece in the mid-1960s there was nothing around called 'methodology'. There were one or two things you did like dictation and gap-filling but the techniques we used at the time could have been summarised on four sides of A4. The creation of a huge bank of techniques had to wait until the 70s, 80s and 90s. In 1986 Paul Davis published a book called Dictation with Cambridge University Press (CUP) that offers 30 or forty ways of giving a dictation. I would not have taken a second look at a book with that title in the 60s; my reaction would have been "What do you need a book for? Everybody knows what dictation is."

Alan Maley and Alan Duff started creating the wave of teacher's resource books in the mid-70's and here is where you will find most of the innovative ideas that feed the profession today. The creation of a serious body of techniques for teaching language has impacted world EFL very unevenly however. The Chinese learnt English in the 60s with the grammar translation and rote learning methods. This is still mostly the case today. When I visited the Malay University English department in 1989, I found the gap-fill grammar exercises that Stannard Allen stuffed into his Living English Structures to be still alive and flourishing. Filling gaps was the main way that Malay University students passed their time in EFL classes. CUP's most popular grammar book in the world market today is Murphy's English Grammar in Use, which is full of mechanical transposition exercises. In the late 90s Hong Kong-based Clarity brought out a CDROM called Tensebuster, crammed with yet more gap-fill stuff.

Yes, the picture of methodological change is very uneven. In Europe, take Austria. In the 90s the books of Herbert Puchta and Guenther Gerngross came to virtually monopolise the state secondary school market. These coursebooks are strongly multi-sensory, they draw on all the latest techniques and both the authors are strong NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) practitioners. Teachers in the secondary State sector across Austria have been directly trained in the use of the books by Herbert and Guenther rushing round the country and doing teacher training workshops on the lower slopes of almost every Alp. Neighbouring Germany plods along 2 language teaching decades behind Austria, with its coursebooks created to the satisfy the prejudices of seventy-year-old committees on the various State Education Ministries.

On Teaching

What particular aspects of language teaching methodology interest you?
I am a person who is happiest thinking about very detailed practical things. In the area of methodology I am interested in the scenarios that stimulate students, scenarios that keep them awake, that have them access reasonable levels of energy. I am interested in the choreography of lessons, in the rhythm of lessons, in the beginnings, the middles and the endings. Like a medical surgeon I am proud if a good teaching technique is associated with the Pilgrims group I work with or with me personally. I have no time for the sort of waffly discussions that filled the UK airwaves in the 80s and 90s, for example the writings of Widdowson and Brumfitt. What had their musings to do with the nuts and bolts of language teaching?

When did you first have the concept of the on-line magazine Humanising Language Teaching? How much time do you spend on it?
In 2000 we are bringing out six issues as against the eight we produced in 1999 and Pilgrims gives me 2 working weeks to edit the magazine. I guess this year's editorial work will take more like three weeks, if you think of the working day as eight hours. I am a very commissioning editor always asking people to write things for HLT. But I not a very editing editor. I don't spend hours helping people to hone their stuff to perfection. You will find some marvellous stuff in the magazine but if you are a perfectionist you could be disappointed.

We got the idea of starting an online magazine by looking at OUP's Spectrum and thinking that it made their book-selling site more interesting. By late 1998 we had established a solid, navigable site for selling our courses but it was a bit boring. We only changed it significantly each January. HLT is there to make the Pilgrims site more interesting.

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