Interview

Rod Ellis

Rod Ellis is the Head of the Applied Language Studies and Linguistics Department at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of a series of books on Second Language Acquisition. He graciously accepted our request for an interview that was completed in late December 2001 in Tokyo by then editor Kevin Ryan.

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ELT: Before we get started, let's run through a quick history…
RE: I started off as an English language teacher in Africa, working in Zambia in 1967. I then went into teacher training in Zambia until 1977. After taking some postgraduate courses at Bristol University, I was employed by St. Mary's College in Surrey, based in Twickenham. And then I became head of the ESL Department of Ealing College of Higher Education, which eventually turned into Thames Valley University.

I left in 1989 to work, initially, for one year at Temple University in Japan. I liked Japan so much that I decided to give up my position at Ealing. I worked at Temple University in Japan through 1993 when I was offered a tenured position at Temple University in Philadelphia. I stayed five years in Philadelphia until I moved to my current position, which is at the University of Auckland in New Zealand in the Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics.

Should we mention your visiting professorship at Showa?
Tomoko Kaneko, Showa Women's University English Department head, was the first Ph.D. graduate from Temple University in Japan in 1989. Since then we have kept in contact and I do two weekend seminars each year for the graduate school at Showa. This semester I'm a visiting professor here at Showa, and will continue with twice-yearly visits to Japan for the weekend seminars.

What do you see as the relationship between research and teaching?
>My career in this field started out as a classroom teacher, and research is something that I learned to do later. I have always felt that the kind of research that I do has some kind of relationship to actual teaching, to its practice. These days you read a lot about the gap that divides research and teaching. To a certain extent, there is undoubtedly a gap. Researchers and teachers belong to different kinds of communities, different allegiancies, and they are evaluated in different ways.

In my own work, I've increasingly felt that what researchers do cannot be used to describe what teachers should do. That all it can do is illuminate some things. But it seems to me that some of the major developments that have taken place in teaching have been top-down. They have been from researchers or theorists.

An example, perhaps, would be notional-functional teaching, the origins of the communicative approach. But equally, a lot of the other ideas in teaching come from the bottom up, from those who are daily involved in classrooms. I think to a certain extent task-based teaching began that way. Very often ideas begin with teachers and then are taken up by researchers and investigated that way, and maybe further developed. So there is more of a symbiosis between teachers and researchers than is often admitted. People tend to focus on the differences rather than on their points of contact. And they are many points of contact.

Do you have any suggestions for teachers doing research?
The gap between research and teaching, as I said before, is less than it seems. In a way, all teaching is research because when teachers go in with an idea for a lesson they are, in effect, seeing whether that idea works. So teaching is research, but there is one difference. Research by definition has to be something that is systematic and has to, potentially at least, be public. And that is what makes the difference between what we do as teachers and research.

Suggestions for teachers for research is perhaps simply to do some of the things that you like doing, and you think work, but to try to find out, actually, whether they do work, and be prepared to make public your findings in one form or another, at a conference, for example.

So this can be done in a fairly simple way. One simple way is if you have an idea for an activity that works in the classroom then, research it. But that means thinking about how you can decide whether in fact it really does work, how you can collect some evidence to actually find out whether it is working in terms of the way that you think it might work.

So the first step is to form a research question?
Yeah, the research question could be quite simple, it could be, "Does X activity work?" Then you have to operationalize what you mean by "X activity" and what you mean by "work." Because it is how you operationalize those two terms that will enable you to actually do the research.

And it also affects how much you can generalize your finding to other situations.
Right. I mean, many teachers' idea of an activity that works is an activity that gets a good response from the students. So that would then lead you to think, well, "How can I measure whether the response from the students really is good?" What is an adequate way of measuring that, and therefore obtaining evidence as to whether the activity works?

The easiest way would be to, perhaps, record a lesson and examine the nature of the student participation. How many students are participating? How much are they participating? How long are their turns? Are they producing one-word responses or short phrase responses? Or are they producing somewhat more extended responses?

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