Month: September 2018

Does it Matter if You’re Casual?

Marc Jones / / Uncategorized
night-of-the-living-dead-group
Still from Night of the Living Dead (1968)

The Casual Disadvantage

I had two interviews this month. I prepared loads for them and didn’t get either position. I want full-time university work and promotion prospects. I also want my teaching to be better.

What difference does it make whether you are part time or full time? Quite a lot, actually. As Ema Ushioda put it in the latest TEFLology podcast (2018):

“Because  teachers working with a group of students, they know their students and they get to know their students better over the course of study. I think what would be important would be as a teacher – certainly as a teacher I always want to do this – is to get to know my students individually, try to understand where they are coming from and try to understand what motivates them and what doesn’t motivate them.”

TEFLology (2018) 30:55 min on.

So, if you work every hour teaching in a part-time, precarious position, do you get to know your students and understand their needs as much as someone with more time to meet with students freely in office hours rather than someone rushing between classes with little time for pastoral issues or consultation than the transition time between classes which is often not enough time for much to happen. There’s also a lot less time to reflect on the needs of students in our classes if we are working in precarious positions due to the need to keep up with other classes due to a larger teaching load, as well as keeping up with general CPD and also, possibly more importantly, the constant search for newer, better paid, more stable work.

So, what can we do?

In my context, there’s not a lot being done by unions, because not many people are in unions because I imagine that a lot of us are reluctant to declare to supervisors or deans of admin that we are unionised because it could mark us as trouble. There’s not a lot being done at all, formally, other than the whispers in the teachers’ room that university X pays badly, Y has poor conditions or seeks its pound of flesh for the money they pay, and Z only takes people on for two lectures a day so it’s hard to make up the work (and therefore money) elsewhere. This can be tiring, and also tiresome because there should be an end in sight to it but all too often there isn’t.

However, just imagine greater stability, not needing to carryquite so much information around in our heads due to a lower teaching load and with time to get things done. Imagine the greater contentedness in teachers’ rooms. More importantly, imagine the greater contentedness in classrooms from not only the teachers but also students feeling appreciated and listened to because their teachers are not harried, hurried and hustling to get by.

References

TEFLology (2018) TEFL Interviews 45: Ema Ushioda on Motivation. Retrieved September 28th 2018 from https://teflology-podcast.com/2018/09/26/tefl-interviews-45-ema-ushioda-on-motivation/

The Possible Weaknesses of Conferences in ELT

Marc Jones / / Research

Today loads of stuff has been in my Twitter feed about conferences. My fellow socio at Cooperativa de Serveis Lingüístics, Tom Flaherty was asking why ResearchED Scotland can be so reasonably priced when other educational conferences (and I’m reading between the lines here but I reckon he means English Language Teaching conferences) are so expensive. One of my favourite JALTers, Louise Ohashi was sending out a survey about conferences. And then as part of my prep for a research degree, I was reading posts on The Research Whisperer, when I read this one about the negative aspects of academic conferences.

I have posted about the negatives of conferences (or the, why not post your research), before. Instead of retreading old ground when there are hyperlinks in the last sentence, let’s have a real think about the ELT conference.

Working Papers?

I look at loads of ELT conference lineups both in Japan and abroad, because I like to download the slides if they’re up and/or follow the Twitter hashtags. I’m going to make a bold claim here, and I’d love to be wrong, but it seems that there is a complete absence of working papers shared at conference. This is a bad thing, I think, because it means that there is only completed research being presented which means, to all intents and purposes, the presenter has made up their mind. This means that there is no dialogue, just the illusion of dialogue. People pay money for other people to pay someone else’s money to talk at them. There has to be some better way to facilitate professional development and/or vocational learning.

Sharing is caring?

Ah, but Marc, what of the shared practices? I think it could be good, but are you getting enough information to be able to replicate the good bits and also avoid the potential pitfalls. Hopefully yes, but perhaps not because nobody wants to look like a failure in front of strangers and acquaintances a lot of presenters might be giving the most optimistic look at their stated classroom practices (which might be very different to what actually happens).

Labcoat envy

I think the heart of the matter is that ELT wants to be a science, so that it is a serious academic discipline (and I want this, too). Unfortunately, I do not see that half of ELT is fond of the science that supposedly informs it, be that SLA, psychology/cognitive neuroscience, or even applied linguistics. This is down to the schism, (or “schizophrenia” as Paul characterises it but it’s not a term I’m fond of) between professional ELT (where I would like to think I work)  and industrial ELT (or selling coursebooks to anybody, whether suited to them or not). But because it wants to be a serious discipline, it needs conferences. Unfortunately, professional ELT has no money to spare, really, so it’s left to industrial ELT to foot the bill. Industrial ELT doesn’t want to unless there’s some kind of return on investment so you have big commercial conferences to enable publishers to flog books and organisations to flog courses and study abroad options and whatnot.

To have and have not

I’ve been to small conferences. I’ve helped a little bit with the logistics of ExcitELT, too. However, most of the English teachers I know in my small corner of Tokyo have never been to a conference nor have even dreamt of it. There’s the cost, for one; the needing time off for another, seeing as most conferences happen on weekends and most English teachers outside school and university contexts work weekends. Add to this, relationships with partners, family and friends as well as just the need to wash clothes and have a clean home. Add to this the fact that a lot of teachers just do not get paid to plan lessons or do admin that we are promised is quick but actually mounts up and you have a mass of teachers with too much on already to even think about conferences on their days off.

Alternatives

I do think it’s high time that we looked, as a profession, at alternatives to this. What could it be? As much as I hate Silicon Valley’s hegemonic grip on culture at the moment, a hackathon – a concerted effort to create something worthwhile – would be a useful idea. Imagine actually creating useful listening materials together with a peer group, then going away and refining them. A round table, where people really share their ideas and experiences would be helpful because that information can then be synthesised and mediated through our own ideas and experiences, and honestly, with an exchange of knowledge I think people would be more amenable to sharing what hasn’t worked as well as what has. These are only two ideas late at night but I know that there could also be a larger number of workshops (with actual work being done and gathered and distributed) and discussions. I think these could be better returns on teacher investment than conferences, which considering ticket prices and travel, work out less economical than an academic book for a lot of us.

Performative Teaching

Marc Jones / / Pedagogy

unicycle

I’ve spent time agonizing over my own teaching. What went wrong, what went OK, what went disastrously? I’ve mulled over a concept in my head that I call performative teaching, and I am  going to use it in this post.

One important thing to note is that I mean something entirely different to the definition in Naidu (2017), where it is described as:

“[Teacher and student] could co-enact in in quasi-theatrical fashion, any question or answer that might arise in class… Such a method invited the participation of students beyond merely listening and taking down notes. It also notionally and visibly shrank the class.” (Naidu, 2017: p. 462)

Instead I see it as a performance of teaching without the consideration of learning taking place. It may happen in classes where the teacher has planned activities for learners but a significant proportion of the learners do not engage with it. This lack of engagement may be due to amotivation (Ryan & Deci, 2017), an absence of motivation because of a lack of perceived ability to take part in or succeed at the activity or else a failure to see utility in the activity. Obviously this is far from ideal, but what is a teacher to do?

One option is to panic and teach anything, and this is what I mean by performative teaching. It is the teacher performing the art of teaching, but the art of teaching is much like the art of live music or theatre; the ‘audience’ or community of learners may be engaged in alternative activities at the same time, such as texting, having side conversations among others. Yet the show goes on. However, without students paying attention to what is being taught can the teacher even begin to imagine that anything is being learnt?

Of course the other option is to stop the ‘performance’. If the planned activity is not appropriate, or felt to be as such, if it is forced then not much is going to happen except for a bit of resentment and perhaps even some foreign language classroom anxiety (Horwitz et al, 1986). “Because complex and non-spontaneous mental operations are required in order to communicate at all, any performance in the L2 is likely to challenge an individual’s self-concept as a competent communicator and lead to reticence, self-consciousness, fear, or even panic.” (Horwitz et al, 1986: p. 128) Therefore, it would probably be best to not have the whole class and the teacher in a state of anxiety or panic. A brief acknowledgement that things are not quite going according to plan is fine because we are all human, after all. Think about what could be done.

If your classroom culture is one where there is an expectation of student-teacher exchange of opinions, you might even get students co-creating an activity with (or without) you. You don’t even need to ditch the plan that didn’t work because maybe it’s something that would work better on another day. If not, perhaps you have a particular activity that you use as an assessment task that you could instead use for formative assessment (see where students are at and what they should work toward next). It might also help you to see what students might not have felt ready for in the ditched activity.

However, as a devil’s advocate here, let’s imagine that you’ve kept going along in your state of panic with an activity that nobody is into. If you’re like me and you have a task followed by (or in tandem with) a focus on form (Long, 2014) you have either not much to focus on or way too much to focus on due to limited output. If you teach forms – grammar, vocabulary, functional language – first (and I know some people are mandated to) and that’s gone OK but the following activity has gone awry, you could pay lip service to it and think of a different situation with the same language use, or even a few sensible questions with the language point and turn it back on the learners. Maybe this works better, maybe it doesn’t. Can you try to see why and how this happened, though. Sometimes people go into a classroom unprepared for learning and it isn’t the end of the world and isn’t always the teacher’s fault. As a teacher, maybe it’s worth learning from the experience, because if you have to be dripping in nervous sweat and having a painful pit of anxiety in your stomach, you should get some benefit from it.

 

References

Horwitz, E. K., Horwitz, M. B. & Cope, J. (1986), Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety. The Modern Language Journal, 70: 125-132. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.1986.tb05256.x

Long, M. H. (2014) Second Language Acquisition & Task-Based Language Teaching. Wiley.

Naidu, M. (2014). Engaged Pedagogy and Performative Teaching: Examples from Teaching Practice. International Journal of Educational Sciences, 6(3), 459–468. doi:10.1080/09751122.2014.118901

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. Guilford Publications.

Podcasts for Professional Development

Marc Jones / / Links

 

Have a good summer? I hope so.

I just wanted to get back into the swing of blogging again by writing a list of podcasts for English Language Teachers. Be warned, this skews toward higher education and adult learners a lot.

General Language Teaching

TEFLology (disclaimer: the podcasters are my friends and I am a junior coworker of one TEFLologist).

We Teach Languages – A wide variety of topics. Really good interviews with regular teachers.

General Higher Education

Research in Action – sometimes has pedagogy and productivity-relevant topics.

Teaching Higher Ed – lots of generally good pedagogical advice in the episodes I have listened to.

General Linguistics

You will feel very intelligent listening to these because they are very academic but also very accessible.

Lexicon Valley – a bonus here for the use of old Broadway show songs to illustrate linguistic phenomena.

Lingthusiasm