ELT News Think Tank

The "Think Tank Live" Panel

Stephen Krashen	Michael McCarthy	Susan Barduhn	Peter Viney	Marc Helgesen
(Susan Barduhn was the moderator for this event, held at the JALT National Conference in Nara, November 2004)

Panelists: Stephen | Michael | Marc | Peter
Date: November 2004

Topic: "What are 5 things you wish you'd known when you started teaching?"

Michael McCarthy

I wish I'd known...

1. ...that focusing on vocabulary is the secret to success in second and foreign language learning.
When I first entered the ELT profession, we were still being browbeaten by linguists into believing that syntax was the be-all and end-all of language organisation, and that understanding how the acquisition of syntax took place in some magic way explained the whole of 'language acquisition'. Since then I have worked with wonderful mentors such as Tony Cowie of Leeds University, UK (one of OUP's best lexicographers, now retired), and John Sinclair (the best mind I have ever encountered in my profession), and realised that vocabulary is at the heart of language use and language patterning. In my own experience of learning three foreign languages, I've now realised even more that building a big vocabulary is far more important than getting stressed over grammar. Grammar is important, but not half as important as vocabulary.

2. ...that the computer would come along with corpus information to challenge the madder assertions of linguists and their invented sentences.
I've not only been a teacher of English; I've also taught Spanish for five years, and so I have seen language teaching from the perspective of the native- and non-native user. As a non-native teacher of Spanish I was very insecure, and always sought help from a native speaker when in doubt about usage. I wish I'd had a corpus (especially of spoken Spanish) and the simple software available nowadays, to enable me to observe directly how Spanish speakers used their language, to give me confidence, to give me naturally occurring texts from which to derive materials and ideas, and to offset the written-language bias (almost entirely literary) which I received from my university education in Spanish.

3. ...that I should not have been ashamed of speaking a non-standard British dialect in class.
I was born and brought up in Wales, and spoke a so-called 'non-standard' dialect of British English. When I first encountered ELT textbooks, I found a world of Southern-England, middle-class, white, male-dominated English. It made me feel inadequate because I spoke differently from the texts and audiotapes. Since then we've done our best to remove sexism and racism from our teaching materials, but we still haven't done much about the class bias, and assume that our students will either be middle-class consumers or will aspire to middle-class language, and are basically only interested in shopping. But at least now we are respecting non-British and non-US varieties of English, international English, English as a lingua franca, etc., so I think no teacher should be afraid to display his/her local variety with pride, while of course respecting the wishes of the students as regards what they want to hear and learn.

4. ...that we should treat new ideas with respect and caution rather than always jumping on the latest bandwagon.
New waves come along, and I've seen a few: notional-functionalism, total physical response, task-based learning, autonomous learning, focus on form, data-driven learning, etc. What I've learnt is that each of them probably have something good and new to add to our techniques and methodologies for teaching English, but that none of them has the sole answer. I always believed in eclecticism as a gut instinct, but now I believe in it through experience. What disturbs me sometimes is the almost religious zeal with which academics and materials writers and publishers promulgate new ideas and how intimidating this can be, especially for young and inexperienced teachers. Now I'm old enough, when someone comes along with claims about new solutions to language teaching and learning, to say 'prove it'.

5. ...what a big place the world of ELT is and how important local knowledge is.
I have taught English in four countries and lectured about the English language and English teaching in 35 countries. I have learnt now, which I didn't know when I blithely sauntered off to Spain to my first teaching job 38 years ago, that people are different but the same the world over. They are different because they have developed different beliefs, ways of thinking and doing, ways of teaching and learning, ways of interacting, all of which should matter to the teacher who comes in from the outside, and who should respect local cultures, learn from them and not remain isolated from the local context in some padded, ex-pat world. But people are the same because they all live, love, laugh, cry, eat, sleep, dream and die. And we should never think people are stupid because they speak with a struggling accent or because they are poor, young, elderly or from a developing, non-industrialised culture. Because of this we must never patronise our learners and treat them as incapable of thinking intelligently about language and understanding what it's all about just as much as we think we do as academics or pedagogues.

Panelists: Stephen | Michael | Marc | Peter

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Michael McCarthy, Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham
Internationally recognized authority on ESL/EFL and Applied Linguistics

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