Interview
Steven Gershon
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On the Profession
A significant number of schools in Japan, particularly in the conversation school
sector, don't require teaching job applicants to have any formal teaching qualifications.
What are your views on this?
I certainly would not myself like to be paying good money to a school and be expending
countless hours of energy trying to learn at a school that doesn't make sure their
teachers are professionally qualified. That said, I also don't think one has to have an
MA to be an effective, successful classroom teacher. The key for me is the role the
teacher is expected to play in the design of the curriculum, the development of the
materials and the assessment of the learning outcomes.
If a teacher is expected to simply
implement a pre-designed curriculum and use a prescribed text, then I would say that what
is most important is for the teacher to have ample training in the classroom skills
appropriate for the particular teaching situation, and enough professional knowledge to
understand why a particular curriculum or syllabus is being used. If, however, a teacher
is expected to make a contribution to the overall planning of the program's goals,
curriculum and material, then he or she must have a strong grounding in
EFL methodology.
Finally. What major changes have you seen in the ELT field since you entered the
profession?
I entered the profession around 1978, which is not quite as long ago as Mario Rinvolucri,
the last interviewee, but still long enough, I suppose, to have seen a few changes.
In general, I guess the biggest change, as Mario pointed out last month, is the explosive
growth in the ELT field itself. Indeed, ELT, with its publishing , teacher training,
conferences, internet technology and such, has become a major world import and export.
Great for all of us in the profession, to be sure, though one may question whether
students these days are learning English any quicker or better than they were before.
I'd like to think they are, but...
When I entered the ELT field, it was via the RSA certificate course in London and then,
soon after, the MA in Applied Linguistics in Britain (Reading University). At that time,
if I remember correctly, the notional functional syllabus was being presented as
'the way forward', and its proponents were providing learners and teachers with
lots of new, interesting materials to choose from, and providing MA students like myself
with lots of fodder for thesis work. Moreover, at that time, I seem to remember, a
prominent feature of (heated) ELT discussions was the relationship, if any, of (applied)
linguistics and language teaching.
Of course, the functional syllabus, or at least some variation of it, is still being used
a great deal today all over the world, as is the traditional grammar-based syllabus (and
the discussions about the relationship, if any, between linguistics and ELT). However,
what is a more recent development is the corpus-based approach to language teaching and,
related to that, the work done on spoken grammar. Though I'm not sure what kind of
prevalence this work has had yet in the ELT field world-wide, I find it exciting and
important, and imagine that its impact will increase. The key will be to link the data
and findings with classroom methodology that can work with large numbers of students.
Perhaps another obvious development in ELT has been the increased emphasis on learner
autonomy and content-based teaching approaches. We see most new textbooks these days
including more 'content', instead of just functions and situations, as well
as more and more work on developing transferable learning strategies, in other words,
helping students learn how to learn.
I think all of the changes I've mentioned are positive and necessary for the development
of ELT. However, as Mario hinted last month, in many ways, the more things change, the
more they stay the same. I agree that methodological change continues to be uneven. Here
in Japan, for example, one usually only has to walk a few steps down the corridor from
one classroom to another to see the gamut of new and old approaches being used. As change
tends to be cyclic, I'm sure this will always be the case. Nonetheless, cyclic or
not, life is change and change always brings new possibilities for further growth.
Amidst it all, I am happy to be in the ELT profession and still find that I have lots
to learn.
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