Interview
Peter Viney
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On Teaching (cont'd)
The use of multimedia and the Internet is becoming increasingly popular in ELT.
What are your views on this?
Dull exercises on a computer are nearly as dull as dull exercises in a book or on a
tape. The problem with computers is material. The internet is a huge resouce and it's
largely in English. Everyone's been trying to create useful ELT computer materials,
then web materials for years, and we've wasted many hours on aborted projects. I suspect
really good purpose-made material will only arrive once publishers have discovered a
foolproof way of getting paid for their efforts in small increments.
Does the student
want to pay $5 by credit card to download some activities? Probably not. But say it
becomes 10 cents an exercise? Possibly, but then there has to be a system for paying
in 10 cent (or one cent) blocks and for collecting lots and lots of tiny sums of money.
And they haven't worked one out yet. I can't see the necessary investment being made
until they've found a solution.
You'll need enough fast connections in the country to allow video and audio to be
delivered at a better speed (which is coming). You'll need improvements in video
(which are just about there already). Download time for video may have been the single
factor that's been slowing this all up. Storage space was next, but with recordable
DVD drives it's all getting more feasible.
How will English be taught in 10 years time?
In all countries primary school and secondary school teaching of English is improving,
and will continue to improve. This should lead to adult teaching at a higher average
level than now. However, I think there will be an even greater demand for keeping up
your level of English by continued practice and conversation. The impact of technology,
especially the internet, will lead to more demand for proficiency in English, as well
as more opportunity to practice.
I'd expect to see video (whether delivered by TV, video, DVD, or the internet) as the
basic teaching tool. But I said that ten years ago.
The net will cause some changes in the written language. One popular prediction is the
demise of the capital "I" in favour of "i" which seems to be happening
in e-mails already. I somehow doubt this prediction, though capital I is easily confused
with "l" (lower-case L) and "1" (one).
Do you remember the first days
of computers when we had computer-style typefaces? ELT books still like to use these in
showing computer messages which is ridiculous as technology soon allowed a great range of
fonts. Computers allow italic for quotes within a text rather than "inverted commas
within a text" and British books tend to use bold for speakers in dialogue. American
books prefer to retain the colon, which I consider Luddite e.g.
Kevin Hello.
Camilla Hello
Kevin: Hello
Camilla: Hello
The net has slowed this tendency as most people don't know how to program italic and bold
in HTML. But in the next generation of HTML...
On Japan
What do you think of the ELT scene in Japan? What changes have you seen since you
first arrived here?
The first time I was in Japan was 1979 or 1980, and I came every alternate year until about
six years ago. I haven't been at all recently. I felt the country changed enormously in that
period of time. Things became more westernized, but the West changed to. I can get sushi at
my local supermarket in Britain (not as good as the real thing, I hasten to add. I think
tinned tuna wrapped in rice rather loses the point!) On my first visit I seemed to be at
colleges or universities far more.
Actually, a surprising number of faces stayed the same
– my first meal in Osaka way back then was with OUP and Jack Richards. Robert O'Neill
was at the same book fair in Osaka. I remember we foolishly volunteered to help carry the
book exhibition tables downstairs together. As with everywhere else in the world, the
students have changed more than the methodology. This generation has a different attitude to
the more widespread education system. There is more incentive to learn English too.
Do you remember your first experience of teaching a Japanese student?
Not specifically. It would have been on my first day at Anglo-Continental, where we always
had a significant number of Japanese students. I would have taught my first all-Japanese
class there too. That was one year when they did an "English + Golf" course with
English lessons in the mornings. After I'd left home, my mother used to be a "landlady"
for students from Eurocentre, and she'd had a lot of Japanese students staying with her before
I ever started teaching full-time, so the accent and problem areas were already familiar.
What was good, in retrospect, was that my first meetings with Japanese people were in a social
setting not a teaching situation. I still remember private lessons from 1971. One gentleman
from Sony presented me with a tiny radio that was the envy of all my friends for about three
years. Then of course everyone had them.
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