Interview

Michael Rost

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You have written a great number of both textbooks and academic titles. Which do you enjoy working on more?
I personally need both, to keep some kind of balance in my life.

Academic articles and books are very fulfilling, because you can generally work at an academic piece indefinitely until you get it right. But it can get to be very stressful – the endless worrying about whether you've got the right resources, the obsession with wording your arguments, bracing yourself for the review cycle. And the review cycle for bone fide academic publications is absolutely brutal. Reviewers – anonymous reviewers – will attack you, attack your research models, attack your arguments, attack your language skills. But if you're in an academic field like applied linguistics, this is what you live for – you want to produce an original, enduring, influential piece of work that genuinely contributes to your field and that's valued by the top people in your field.

With textbook titles, the main criterion for success that most people use is not "does it contribute?", but "will it sell?" And that success is largely determined by marketplace phenomena rather than by an awareness of or an interaction of ideas. One thing I enjoy about designing textbooks and learning materials generally is the architectural aspect – syllabus design, information design, graphic design. With each page, or screen, or whatever medium you're working in, you are trying to present a learning concept or a learning task dynamically, visually and audially, in a way that's engaging. You're trying to create a simulation that's believable, almost in the way that novelist tries to build a engaging story.

You were heavily involved in the development of the Longman English Online project, which was subsequently taken off line. Was it too early for such an online project?
It's a long story, and I've certainly learned a lot from my involvement in the project. Pearson Education made a very ambitious commitment to this online intiative, and I was fortunate to work with some really brilliant people in editorial, design, and marketing.

Even though we decided to take the course offline, the upshot is that we now have a very viable multimedia course, called Longman English Interactive (Levels 1-4). The whole course is deliverable on CD-ROM now, with an accompanying classroom and home-study workbook. It has all of the content, the video, the dynamic presentations, and feedback functions of the online course, but of course, not the e-mailing, or website connections, or whiteboard interactivity of the online version. Users seem to be very happy with it – I guess it's what's most suitable for the educational market right now. The other online technologies – the email submissions, discussion boards, and so on can be added with WebCT or BlackBoard, or other dedicated online services, so teachers can have the original service if they need it. And the course is ready to go back online if there's sufficient demand.

What is your current work schedule and what projects do you have in the pipeline?
Like most people these days, I usually have 4 or 5 projects going on simultaneously, so it always seems that there's something to do.

I'm now doing a tour for WorldView, which is a new international series from Longman. I'm series editor and I travel around and give workshops on student motivation, grammar teaching, task design, topics of some interest to classroom teachers. It's been very enjoyable to work with teachers in different settings.

I'm also taking on a role as "oral language specialist" for the No Child Left Behind program in the US. (See also here). My contribution, as part of a team of experts, is – hopefully – to define and formulate the actual speaking and listening tasks that the learners are involved in in the school setting – academic, interactive, and social tasks. I'm trying to help move assessment into a task-based system, using video-based scenarios and inter-subjective evaluations, rather than purely text-based tests with discrete point objective scoring. As in language education in Japan, it's important here not only to create valid tests, where everyone agrees with the assessment purposes and understands what the results mean, but also to create a washback effect, so that teachers can identify the kinds of tasks and performance scaffolding they need to prepare their non-English speaking students for fuller participation in the classroom.

And I'm now devoting some energy to a pet project of mine, LingualNet. I'm teaming with a few people in the video gaming industry and the film industry to produce a kind of "language experience" resource online. We're experimenting with different models of language learning, alternate ways of making learning engaging and fun. These are the things I've been trying to do as a language teacher, and this is a new medium to try it out.

Well Michael, the best of luck with all those activities. And thank you for taking the time to talk with us.
Sure, my pleasure. And good luck with your work at eigotown.

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