Interview

Vaughan Jones

Vaughan Jones has been involved in English teaching and ELT publishing for twenty years, both in Europe and Japan. He helped establish the Heinemann ELT publishing company in Japan and later returned to the U.K. and became an author himself. He is co-author with Sue Kay of the Inside Out and Inside English series. Jones is currently working as a teacher and author in Oxford. He gave this interview with ELT News editor Mark McBennett by e-mail in May, 2004.

Inside Out Resource Site

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ELT: How did you get into English teaching?
VJ: I suppose I've been involved in TEFL in one way or another for all of my working life. I stumbled into it early on in Grenoble, France where I had gone straight after university to seek glory on the rugby field. Sadly, in the early eighties, rugby was still very much an amateur sport so I needed a job to pay for the beer. Through various rugby contacts I got a teaching post at the local Chambre de Commerce and spent two very stimulating years relearning my native tongue through the eyes of my French students.

Attracted by the idea of "TEFLing" round the world but worried that I still didn’t know much about teaching, I decided to hang up my rugby boots, do the 4-week preparatory certificate at International House, Piccadilly and try and find a job outside Europe. After a very bizarre year teaching for a door-to-door sales company called HOLP in Yamagata, deepest Japan. It was like having my own juku. My 'classroom' was the lobby of the Hotel Green Tohoku and I taught students ranging from three-year-old children to a group of local neuro-surgeons. Character-forming stuff...

I then returned to work for the International House organisation and spent three fabulous years in Northern Spain where I completed my Diploma in TEFLA. After six years in the classroom and pondering that tricky question: "Now what?" I was just about to take up a post with the British Council in Kyoto when I spotted an advert for a Sales Rep. / Teacher Trainer with Heinemann ELT in Madrid. It was a great move and I spent the next couple of years careering round Spain in my Fiat Uno, talking to teachers, giving workshops and trying to explain to my publishing colleagues what sort of materials I thought were really needed in the classroom.

When and how did you make the move back to Japan?
Heinemann was expanding fast, and in 1990 I swapped the Fiat Uno for a Tokyo train pass and spent four very exciting years establishing Heinemann ELT in Japan and later on, setting up marketing operations in Korea and Taiwan. After coming from Spain where Heinemann was one of the established market leaders, it was weird being the new kid on the block. No office, no database and, at the beginning, no books to promote! However, our small team worked very hard and as the new publishing came through we enjoyed some success - particularly with David Paul's children's course Finding Out which I believe is still doing well. We also set up the relationship with eigoMedia (the forerunner of eigoTown, parent company of ELT News - Ed.) and the CD-ROM version of Finding Out which has just come out in a third version. It was an intense time but a really enjoyable one and I stay in touch with a lot of friends and colleagues from that era.

And after that?
After twelve years abroad, and with a baby recently arrived, my wife and I decided it was time to move closer to home. So we returned to Macmillan HQ in Oxford and I took up a regional role in Western Europe. The late nineties were a period of great change in the ELT publishing industry with lots of mergers and take-overs. A year before Heinemann was bought by Macmillan I had already decided to get back into the classroom and try my hand at writing materials. My move was born out of frustration really. My job had seemingly become a series of interminable meetings about sales forecasts and balance sheets - very little to do with teachers or teaching. I returned to the chalk face as a teacher and trainer at the Lake School in Oxford and have spent the past six years co-teaching and co-writing Inside Out and then Inside English with Sue Kay.

Can you tell us a bit of the background to why you decided to do Inside Out and Inside English?
To quote Scott Thornbury: "The great challenge of teaching is to set up activities which are essentially meaning-focused, but within which a focus on form can be engineered".

In Japan, the first thing students learn is that "This is a pen." Other countries have their equivalents: for example, "My tailor is rich." will bring back memories for tens of thousands of French people who studied English in the 1970s. Sentences such as these hold very little meaning for students. Their sole purpose is usually to exemplify or practise a particular language form. Taken to the extreme there are some fabulously absurd examples of the genre. Here are three of my own favourites from a list compiled by Michael Swan:

• "Come down from that tree I want to kiss you."
• "The oxen are standing on my feet."
• "Is that your leg?"

Apparently all of these have appeared in print at one time or another. It takes a particularly imaginative mind to invent a context in which they might be useful. Sadly, the same thing can still be said for a lot of the material we use in the classroom today. Even the most up-to-date course books are full of random, de-contextualise, meaningless sentences - particularly in sections dealing with grammar. The only 'context' is that the six or so sentences that make up the exercise all practise 'Object Pronouns' or the 'Present Perfect' or 'Question Forms' or whatever. This is just not good practice. It seems that when we focus on form, meaning goes out the window. We are constantly asking our students to exchange invented information about places they've never visited, or complete sentences about people who don't exist. Why?

All the research suggests that the optimum conditions for learning a language exist when meaning matters. As Peter Skehan has stated "...the teacher has to contrive a situation in which learners are simultaneously alert to language-as-form and language-as-meaning". You can't have one without the other. Meaning isn't an 'optional extra', it's a pre-requisite for successful language learning. Meaning should 'rule'.

Inside Out and Inside English are full of language practice activities where we combine form AND meaning. In particular, we've tried to develop exercise types that engage students on a personal level. We have long realised that the students are our richest resource in the classroom. So even at the nitty-gritty 'grammar-bashing' end of teaching, we have designed exercises that tap into our students' experiences, feelings or opinions. Quite apart from making the class much more enjoyable, we believe that this approach makes language learning more effective. Meaningful exchanges are possible when students relate form-focused sentences to their own lives. It leads to more grammar practice, not less.

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