Interview

Mario Rinvolucri

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On Teaching (cont'd)

Do you think technology will play a role in TEFL in the near future?
The Web is already playing a major role in the lives of language learners. They are learning a huge amount of English simply by their general interest in searching for things on the web in English. And this is happening outside the control of any school or teacher.

The problem is how to persuade 40 year-old teachers into cyber times. Only one or two of my local Pilgrims colleagues here in Canterbury, UK, actually go to the web to read their own magazine! Over the past year I have printed out the table of contents and one or two articles so that they have the pages in their hands. I hope that gradually they will acquire a “periodical” web habit. How long will it take? Wakaranai.

Are there any Web sites that you visit regularly?
At the moment my web interests are dry and narrow, and largely confined to EFL. I keep an eye on other web magazines and try to learn from them. I keep in personal contact with a large number of print and web EFL editors. What I plan to do is to use the web to start keeping up to date with advances in brain neurology since this is a central field for anyone interested in how language is learned and spoken. My problem here is that I find six Web sites on something like the anterior cingulate cortex (a bit of the brain linked to error correction) and find I don’t have the lexis to understand any of them! I need to take a year off to study basic brain anatomy and neurology.

On Teaching Teachers

How and when did you become interested in teaching teachers?
When I was working in Chile during the Allende period, 1971-3, in a small university we had bright 4th and 5th year students who worked with us as assistants in the first and second year classes. I really enjoyed team-teaching with Erasmo and Sergio and this was my first and maybe best teacher training. It was 'doing together', a sort of apprenticeship scheme. It is a much better model than 'input sessions' and observed teaching.

Do you think the current syllabuses, such as CELTA and Trinity adequately prepare a teacher for teaching English as a foreign language?
Well, no but it is hard to blame the course designers. Who, in their right mind, believes you can fully train a professional in a hundred to two hundred-hour course? These courses are brilliant in their directness and practicality. They are modelled on no-nonsense army courses. They shine in comparison to most MA courses, replete as these are with aboutism, half-baked theorising and vapid intellectualisation. But they are insultingly too short.

What syllabus components would you add to or emphasise more?
1. Knowledge of your own person. When you teach a language you inevitably teach yourself, you teach your own ways of feeling and thinking. As a teacher you need to know a bit more about who you are and how you affect others, you need to know something about your hidden demands from students and how you create your "bad student". You need to know about the sort of projections you indulge in and the particular ways you map reality. For more on this see Bernard Dufeu's brilliant book with Oxford Teaching Myself (1994 ).

2. One-to-one teaching. I feel that teaching practice should start with several hours teaching of one student, so you really have to cope with his or her needs as a learner and so you cannot hide behind your lesson plan or the fantasy of the group. Your teaching career would thus start in the interpersonal area, not fiddling with grammar explanations and lesson plans.

3. Cultural awareness. Certainly for those who are going to teach English in lands they do not belong to this is a central area that the short training courses deal with very skimpily. Cultural awareness is a big chapter and it cannot be learned simply intellectually. It has to be visceral learning, and so hard to achieve, maybe, on a course.

On Writing

Many first-time teachers come across your name through your 'Grammar Games' series. Did you write the various activities with a book in mind?
In the case of that project yes, I spent the best part of six months coming up with different activities and testing them out in classes in the Cambridge Eurocentre. I had an intense conviction that there really was a book there. Grammar Games came out in 1984 with CUP and has now sold well over 100,000 copies, which is not bad for a teacher's resource book. Yet it is not my best book, whatever the market's judgement is. The one on story telling with John Morgan, Once Upon a Time, (CUP 1985) is way better, as is Ways of Doing, with Davis and Garside. Ways of Doing opens up the whole exploration by the students of their own processes, it is like an initial action research guide, but for students - not teachers.

You never thought of writing a coursebook?
Financially… of course. But never seriously. I firmly believe that what happens in my classes arises from the meeting between the students and me and the students and each other. How, rationally, can any outside person map this meeting out in advance? Suppose you go to have dinner with a few friends, do you all arrive with a pre-arranged conversation script? A coursebook is as daft and off-course as that. Feeling this, how could I contemplate writing one?

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