Interview

Tom Kenny

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On Publications

How did you get into writing course textbooks?
Nobody calls you up out of the blue and asks you to do it, that's for sure. And you don't start by saying, "Hey I want to be like Michael Rost when I grow up, so how do I get on that gravy train?" You start by using everyone else's books, seeing what works, discarding the stuff that doesn't make sense to you, while all the time you're building your ideas about what learners need –at the level you're teaching them—to improve their acquisition. The 'Nice Talking With You' text came out of the materials that we (gradually) designed for our classes at Nanzan University, beginning in 1994.

I'd felt for a long time that university freshmen in Japan need to master basic lexical phrases & communication strategies. To my ear, that's the stuff that's missing from their "question-answer, question-answer" type conversations. The other thing is that they need the chance to talk A LOT. And I don't mean just regurgitating memorized dialogs, or going through tightly-controlled "Information gap" exercises – I mean, letting them experiment with spontaneous, interactional language in free practice. I also discovered a few other cool things in teaching them–

* by giving them a framework (how to begin & end their conversations) and by keeping conversations short (1 or 2 minutes at first, longer by semester's end) they gained a lot of confidence in free practice.

* because the conversations were short, I could train students to notice language items their partners' used or that they used.

Giving them a brief period of reflection after each conversation helped to reinforce what they were learning. Anyway, Linda Woo, who was just coming into Nanzan full-time, and I started working on this material together. We made up a list of basic phrases that we felt our students just HAD to know, and then integrated the phrases into some easy topics, so that we could push fluency out of our students.

It worked so well for us! Our classes were very bright, very active. With noticing we felt like our students were not just better speakers, but also better learners. By the time our students had been through 2 semesters with us, we could see that they were more confident. We felt like, because of the material, our classes really made a difference in our students' learning.

We brought the material to Macmillan Language House, who (gratefully) gave us the freedom to keep it really different from any other conversation text on the market. They let us keep the material's methodology woven right into the syllabus as it was. This will probably frustrate teachers who expect a text to teach itself, you know, the type who is concerned only with making sure that students' time is occupied for 90 minutes. Nice Talking With You won't let you do that. You've got to keep the big picture –your vision for your students' learning— in mind. It is definitely the kind of text where it helps to read the teacher's book!

What advice would you give to prospective textbook or material writers? What essential points must be covered before submitting proposals and ideas to publishers?
Most publishers are rather conservative, so if you have a text that is very different from anything else on the market, be ready to explain the ideas that support it. Make sure that you know how your book fills the need in the market. Finally, don't count on your publisher to do all of your selling for you – get out there & spread the word about your text!

On Research

Are you engaged in any academic research right now? What avenues are you pursuing and why?
I really love to read and write and talk about what I'm learning. I get together with a handful of colleagues pretty regularly, and we talk about the articles we've stumbled across, or the books we've picked up recently. It's fun. We're just grad students at heart, I guess. In second language acquisition, I'm doing a lot of reading in listening, speaking, and lexical acquisition. I'm much more interested in the spoken language than in reading & writing. In linguistics, my favorite areas are pragmatics and discourse analysis. I'm constantly searching for insights into language that I can apply with my learners.

How many presentations do you give every year? How do you select the theme of your presentations? What themes are you going to cover in future events and conferences?
I give about 8 - 10 presentations a year, including JALT's national conference. The themes are almost always related to what I'm doing in the classroom, so they're about ways to improve students' fluency, consciousness-raising activities, and learner self-evaluation. Lately, I've been working in listening strategies and communicative competence. I'm also finishing a study on the effect of teaching pragmatic markers. Stay tuned!

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