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?"

Peter Viney

I wish I'd known…

1. … it's OK to say 'I don't know.'
There is constant pressure on the teacher to be the source of all knowlege rather than being an imperfect participant in the learning process. It's hardest for the novice teacher, probably because 'I don't know' is too near the truth. I still shudder at the memory of my first week as an ELT teacher. 24 years old, confronted with fifteen students, at least ten of whom were older than me. Someone asked the difference between each and every. I decided on an impromptu explanation on the board. None of those fifteen grasped the difference, nor will ever, and I'd still be hard put to explain it now. You have to be confident to admit lack of knowledge (or ignorance).

In classroom management, never be afraid to say (a) I'll tell you tomorrow ­ then make sure you do, or you lose all credibility. (b) Let me get a reference book. Lawyers are better off than teachers, not because they've stored more knowledge, but because they work in an area where knowing where to access information replaces the teacher's perceived need to have all of it stored for immediate recall. Like lawyers, make sure you have access to the information: a student's grammar, a book explaining grammar concepts for teachers and a monolingual learner's dictionary. For years I carried a battered copy of Robert O'Neill's English in Situations (OUP, 1970) with me because there was always a neat comparative contextualization that you could find and use. 'I was wrong' is even harder than 'I don't know' so I'll leave that until later as a higher skill.

A recommended basic reference list:
Grammar for teachers: Grammar for English Language Teachers, Martin Parrott (CUP, 2000). Explanations from a classroom point of view.
The English Verb, Michael Lewis (LTP, 1986), which covers so much more than its title suggests.
Grammar for students: Practical English Usage (New Edition), Michael Swan (OUP, 1995). Also for teacher reference. If you can only carry one with you, this is probably it.
The Good Grammar Book, Michael Swan & Catherine Walter (OUP, 2001) if you want exercises, too.
Monolingual learner's dictionary: There are five good ones at least (from Oxford, Cambridge, Longman, Macmillan and Collins). Even if you're teaching the lower levels, you need an advanced level one.

2. … that many activities are nit-picking.
These range from intricate exercises on stress within words to grammar for the sake of grammar. As a materials writer, I was once asked to help write an upper-intermediate lesson on 'the semi-modal dare' because my then boss felt there should always be a 'new structure' somewhere however nit-picking it was. I declined, as it's worthy of passing mention, no more. The message is too often 'I know. You don't.'

Pronunciation is a major case in point. The ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) movement focuses on mutual intelligibility and questions native-speaker 'ownership' of English. Having spent much of my working and social life with bilingual non-native speakers, all with some degree of 'foreign accent' (compare also Joseph Conrad, Henry Kissinger and even Arnie) I believe that it is futile and inefficient to waste time trying to get adult learners to be imitation native speakers. A miniscule percentage of people learning a foreign language after puberty manage to exchange their accent for one of the native speaker accents. I'd also question the 'authenticity rules' school of thought and the direct applicability of corpus transcriptions of NS > NS interactions to classroom material, when it is said that 80% of interactions in English are NNS > NNS. Something can be useful and efficient for the learner without necessarily being 'authentic'.

Reference:
Jennifer Jenkins' The Phonology of English As an International Language (OUP, 2000) is one of the most important (and readable) books for teachers since Michael Lewis's The Lexical Approach and deserves to have similar currency.
On Joseph Conrad's accent (purely for interest) see Alicia Pousada's article from English Studies 75 (1994) which is on the net at: http://home.earthlink.net/~apousada/id4.html

3. … that teaching beginners is the most rewarding job of all.
It's the one that requires the greatest classroom skills, and one of the oddest facts about ELT (education in general, actually) is that the most experienced teachers get the more advanced classes. I would reverse the process. The bias towards the upper levels is implicit in teaching materials which emphasize the needs of the long-haul traveller, the one who's going to study through five, six or more years. As a result there's an unfortunate assumption that everyone starting out on the path has the ultimate goal of reading English language literature in the original. The literary bias can be seen in contexts, extracts and the setting of goals. Let's admit that many of our students are there for the short haul, and have more limited aims which are not best served by assuming that they all will want to read Shakespeare one day. Some do, of course … but there's probably a decent translation anyway.

In teacher-training I would shift the focus towards performance/ communication skills in the classroom in the initial stages. I find it absurd that trainees spend as much time 'writing their own material' as learning how to function in the real world with material that is given to them (or dumped on them, if you prefer). Someone teaching well with the so-called "wrong method" will always be more effective than someone teaching badly with the so-called "right method." In the end, the teacher's personal input / impact / motivation is more important than the material used, the method or the philosophy behind it.

4. … that when I was young, ignorant and bursting with a desire to communicate I was just as effective as now that I'm (nearly) old and burdened with knowledge.
Youth and enthusiasm should not be discounted. When I started teaching, I was happy to spend Friday nights over a pizza with my classes, which allowed time for informal input in a low pressure setting. Now I can think of a dozen things I'd rather do on a Friday night. I'm more skilled, more competent and more knowledgeable nowadays, but I would restrict the amount of informal socializing. In my own department at a large private language school in the 70s and 80s, I was aware that as we became more professional (it was an era of rapid progress and new ideas), we were less effective in other ways because we spent less time outside class with students. They got a more focussed learning environment but less 'acquisition-rich' time. I was very aware that we needed a balance of young enthusiastic teachers.

Entertainment is part of this. In his recent BBC TV series, Himalaya, presenter Michael Palin was shown confronted with a class of kids in the foothills of the mountains. He started off way over their heads, but soon modified his language down to the level. A few seconds later he was clowning around hitting himself on the head with his shoe. Cheap? Probably. Engaging? Definitely. Palin is older than me, in fact, but young at heart.

Reference: Himalaya, Episode 1 (BBC TV)

5. … that my students were human beings with their own troubles, homesickness and pressures rather than just an audience for my performance skills.
Going back to Michael Palin reminds me of his Monty Python partner, John Cleese and the character of Basil Fawlty. Basil used to say 'Don't state the bleeding obvious …' and I guess this is a pious statement that it's impossible to disagree with. I spent the first half of my career teaching in the UK, and students were homesick, shell-shocked even. I'm shocked to realize how little account we ever took of this, especially as most of them were in their late teens and early twenties, or younger than my kids are now. I'm amazed at how well they coped, plunged into a foreign culture as beginners and apologetic that we saw them as one-dimensional beings. We lost opportunities to learn from them and from their cultures ­ I've taught every nationality from Europe, Latin America, The Middle East and most from East Asia as well as French- and Portuguese-speaking Africa.

The small task of writing your own learner-autobiography helps to get you into the mindset of students. It brings back the pronunciation point above. When you correct a student's grammar or choice of vocabulary, you're pointing out a gap in their knowledge. When you reject their pronunciation it is more deeply personal, because you're correcting the person rather than the gaps in the knowledge base. We need to be open to learning from the learner.

Panelists: Stephen | Michael | Marc | Peter

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Peter Viney, Freelance ELT Author

Co-author of New American Streamline & Grapevine. Peter's Web site

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