I would like to share the ORE Directory (Open Research in English Language Teaching). This is a brilliant resource that I came across on Twitter, thanks to Huw Jarvis. Basically, it’s a directory of Open Access journals on (English) language teaching-related topics. There is a similar function in DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) but that doesn’t seem to be actively maintained.
ORE would be great for anybody looking for work from a specific country, or just in general to see some different journals. It would be especially good for DipTESOL and Delta candidates, too.
I was humming and haa-ing about whether or not to publish this on my blog seeing as it findable by my name. What if it damages my career prospects? Well, I decided, frankly, that if anybody wouldn’t hire me because of my ADHD, well, bugger them.
I sent this to IATEFL IPSEN SIG ages ago and it got published last year and they have just made it publicly available this week. The article started out life as some CPD I did for my current department just before I joined, but fleshed out a bit, and peer edited.
It isn’t very long, and if you need it (you probably do, seeing as us ADHD people are estimated at about 5-15% of the population including as yet undiagnosed people).
Feel free to let me know if it’s useful to you, or if I have made any glaring mistakes.
Collocations are one of the things that teachers get tasked to teach often, mainly because collocations are one of the things that appear in books often. I reckon it’s because collocations lend themselves to matching exercises and gap fills rather well. I think both the materials teams and teachers mean well.
The problem is how to get a ton of collocations in your brain to recall almost instantaneously. How do you prioritise the ones to teach and the ones to avoid? It’s the problem that underlies Geoff Jordan’s frequent criticisms of The Lexical Approach. Geoff dismisses Hoey’s work on lexical priming as poorly thought out. I don’t, but nor do I advocate a lexical approach, either. The way I understand Hoey is that words that are frequently used together give us an expectation of being together. For example, how would you finish the utterance “I fancy a ham and pineapple…”?
Nosebleed? (That was the first noun that came to mind.) Pizza? Probably the latter, because it fits due to both our experiences of the world as well as the semantics of the grammar. Lots of work by people at or from Kutas Lab (particularly Kutas & Hillyard, 1980; Bentin et al 1993; Lazlo, S. & Federmeier, 2008; Van Petten et al 1999.) has looked at these semantic expectations in reading, and some in listening, and brain scans showed that when the semantic expectation is violated, our brains produce a much larger N400 event-related potential (ERP), basically a negative electrical charge about 400ms after the stimulus, than when the expectation is met.
In a really interesting, long, quite technical article that I had to read for my MA dissertation, Nick Ellis (2006) uses psychological cueing as the foundation of his theory of learning a second language. Basically, if you see X happen shortly before Y, you associate X and Y. Cues can be stronger or weaker depending on how often them being experienced coincides for the learner. This is where I think Ellis overlaps with Hoey, and the Kutas lab work. I think it also has a lot of ramifications for teaching and learning.
Unlike Geoff, I am not quite so pessimistic about the collocation/colligation problem, or even thinking about the need for something as complex as construction grammar. Think about needs of students, think about the kinds of language experience they are likely to need, make it as understandable as possible, and cover the most commonly occurring items as often as possible – and by items I mean phonological as well as lexical and syntactical. This should help build up psychological cues.
Is it a perfect system? No, it is not. Rarely, if ever, does classroom language teaching come close to the ideal of learning a language as a child. But, the theory says it is likely to work, with some hiccups along the way. Some of the bits of language that are not salient (easily paid attention to) could fall by the wayside. There might be interventions by teachers here as when it is deemed necessary.
So, if we teach in a naturalistic way we should build up cues, no matter how long that takes, and without worrying if they are going to be anywhere near as strong as first-language cues. That, I think, is a realistic goal for language teaching.
References
Bentin, S., Kutas, M., and Hillyard, S. A. (1993) Electrophysiological evidence for task effects on semantic priming in auditory word processing, Psychophysiology 30(2), 161-169.
Ellis, N. (2006) Language acquisition as rational contingency learning. Applied Linguistics 27, 1-24.
Van Petten, C., Coulson, S., Rubin, S., Plante, E., & Parks, M. (1999). Time course of word identification and semantic integration in spoken language. Journal Of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, And Cognition, 25(2), 394-417. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.25.2.394
It’s almost the end of the semester in Japan, and therefore time to be considering new syllabus ideas and whatnot. Also, somewhat serendipitously, I heard the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episode with Harriet Schwartz, where she talked about Connected Teaching and Relational Cultural Theory (RCT) . It sounded interesting, pondering how we react to the relationships we have with our students.
Basically, RCT started in psychiatry, and was a reaction to the science of treating everyone based on studies by/for white men. It is a radical theory that, boiled down, says we thrive on relationships and support rather than hyper-independence and individualism.
The outcomes of connected relationships brings about more energy (‘zest’ in the literature), clarity, sense of worth, empowerment and a desire for more connection (Hartling & Sparks, 2008). This should, in my opinion, bring about more motivation to spend time in the classroom and for autonomous study outside to prepare for deepening communication for deeper relationship building in the classroom. It also benefits teachers (or me, seeing as I am looking into it for my own classes), to have more sense of worth and purpose, and more energy, etc. That can’t be a bad thing, either.
All of this, I think, links to building/co-creating learning and Freire, and also with critical pedagogy in general. I am planning to write more on this, and will flesh out links to other concepts and applications then.
Reference
Hartling, L., & Sparks, E. (2008) Relational-Cultural Practice: Working in a Nonrelational World, Women & Therapy, 31(2-4), 165-188, DOI:
10.1080/02703140802146332
I was intending to have this up a lot earlier. Hopefully it gives some food for thought!
References
* Hayes-Harb, R., Nicol, J., & Barker, J. (2010). Learning the Phonological Forms of New Words: Effects of Orthographic and Auditory Input. Language and Speech, 53(3), 367–381. https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830910371460
** Mathieu, L. (2016). The influence of foreign scripts on the acquisition of a second language phonological contrast. Second Language Research, 32(2), 145–170. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658315601882
Showalter, C. E., & Hayes-Harb, R. (2013). Unfamiliar orthographic information and second language word learning: A novel lexicon study. Second Language Research, 29(2), 185–200. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658313480154
*** Glanz, O., Derix, J., Kaur, R., Schulze-Bonhage, A., Auer, P., Aertsen, A., & Ball, T. (2018). Real-life speech production and perception have a shared premotor-cortical substrate. Scientific Reports, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-26801-x
**** Iverson, P., & Kuhl, P. K. (1995). Mapping the perceptual magnet effect for speech using signal detection theory and multidimensional scaling. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 97(1), 553–562. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.412280
Unlike some of my favourite people on Twitter, I haven’t gone to IATEFL conference in Liverpool. It would have been nice to meet people I know face-to-face, especially colleagues in the SLB co-op. Anyway, this isn’t about that. It’s about Paula Rebolledo Cortés’ plenary on Teacher Empowerment. Loads of people were tweeting about it. I was wondering if it might live up to the hype, which says more about me (horrible, hard to please, cynical) than about her.
Against ‘gurus’
In my opinion, as somebody who tends to fixate on side details, I wondered about the tweets which said Ms. Rebolledo was sick of gurus. I guess yes, it was true but it wasn’t the kind of anti-expert stuff that’s sending half the world (at least) to hell. It was about claiming expertise in our own experience and also examining it carefully and reflecting and testing our assumptions. She was championing classroom research, which is very important, even on a personal level but also more widely because we can compare and contrast between classroom experiences and outcomes.
‘Empowerment’ doesn’t mean anything
One of the biggest things for me was that Ms. Robelledo seemed quite annoyed by spurious claims of empowerment made by people trying to sell stuff or promote themselves. Yeah, I know, I am blogging, and am part of a Task-Based Language Teaching course but I am not eating foie gras with Bill Gates in Davos. My main job is very much based around my 30-odd contact hours of teaching at universities. Anyway, empowerment happens when development and education are supported and appreciated but teachers feel. disempowered when this development and education is rejected.
So, this is a flashback to the immediate aftermath of my DipTESOL. All this effort and learning and what happened with the language school/agency I worked for? Complaints that I was teaching beyond the materials. What happened at school? I got to change things a bit, through ‘job-crafting’ (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001; Falout & Murphey, 2018), often without permission, if I am totally honest. This is where I think I have to go off on a tangent about being empowered.
Empowerment is everything
You have power, at least some of the time. I mean, obviously there’s a difference between the circumstances of needing to get money to actually provide food and shelter in the short term and the slack that comes with having savings and low unemployment. In my case, I could just quit if I wanted to because I was with five different employers at that time. You might also have the power if it’s more inconvenient for your boss to fire you than to keep you even when you don’t agree with their decisions and undermine them when it’s justified. This sounds unprofessional, and I suppose it is if you see professionalism as sycophantic in support of business and capitalism; however, I see it as highly professional because I was supporting my own expertise and knowledge, and more importantly my students’ learning opportunities.
It’s the connection in my head between this plenary talk and Rage Against The Machine. “We gotta take the power back!” (Rage Against The Machine, 1992). My worry when I heard about this plenary was that it gives the corporate pigs at the ELT industry trough enough of an opportunity to assimilate teacher empowerment into the hegemonic narrative, and turn it into something it isn’t. There could end up being moves made to ’empower’ teachers through student monitoring exercises written into poor coursebooks that don’t address the needs or desires of the people in the room. However, what we could see is the teachers who can afford IATEFL tickets standing up to their bosses and not compromising on principles for the sake of purely financial concerns. Hopefully, this trickles down in stories to other teachers elsewhere and then maybe we might have a chance at getting the profession into the state it deserves to be in.
References
Falout, J., & Murphey, T. (2018) Teachers Crafting Job Crafting. In Mercer, S. & Kostoulas, A. (Eds.) Language Teacher Psychology. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Rage Against The Machine (1992) ‘Take The Power Back” in Rage Against The Machine (Track 3). Sony Music.
Rebolledo Cortés, P. (2019) Teacher Empowerment: Leaving the Twilight Zone. IATEFL 2nd April 2019. Liverpool.
Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001) Crafting a job: Revisioning plus as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review 26 (2), 179-201.
One of the hundreds of things that annoys me about language teaching1 is the use of jargon to the exclusion of all else when explaining how something works in a relatively simple way. Sometimes it’s not all that simple, but what could happen if we take the approach of keeping things simple and explaining everything as we go? Perhaps people will stop saying that the alternatives to the status quo in language teaching in general and English language teaching in particular are unworkable.
Image: Night of the Living Dead, Public Domain.
With this in mind, I decided to write a book about Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) to demystify it and make it accessible to ordinary teachers who would like to try it but got put off it by the complexity and the density of the research literature. Then I put it off because my colleague in SLB Co-op, Neil McMillan, told me about his and Geoffrey Jordan’s plan for an online course to make TBLT a bit more viable. He then asked if I wanted to be a part of it. I jumped at the chance.
I’ve wanted to make TBLT less of a messy learning process since I had a messy learning process with it myself during my DipTESOL. It is with hindsight that I realised it really should not have been that way. If I had a mentor to guide me through the contradictory information regarding different task-based models (and there are some different ones, which I’ll look at below), and talk about how to sequence lessons and what the prerequisite work is before you even start teaching, I am sure that my stress levels would have been lower and my students might have had a couple of more straightforward lessons.
Generally speaking there are three main ‘task-based’ approaches.
1. The Nunan (2004) model, which uses tasks but really is just a Present-Practice-Produce lesson done as Produce-Practice-Present because the teacher has preset plans for focus on language items.
1a. The Willis & Willis (2007) model, which does pretty much the same as the Nunan model (in my opinion) but uses a task cycle and greater reflection but still with the focus on language items but advocating more focus on lexis.
2. The Ellis (2003) model, which mixes ‘real-world’ tasks with tasks that exist solely for pedagogy, using what Skehan (1998) calls “structure-oriented tasks” (Skehan, 1998. p. 122-123). Essentially, there will be tasks that are only there to induce use of certain grammar, vocabulary or functions. However, there is more room for Focus on Form (looking at language that learners have shown they need, rather than what the teacher presumes they need).
3. The Long (2014) model. The syllabus is created by needs analysis, and the typical language used to do it is sourced by an “analysis of discourse” (Long, 2014. p.??) Put simply, find out what learners need to do with the language and how it would normally be done. There is no looking at language just to shoehorn a language point into the lesson. Instead, there is only Focus on Form, again focusing on language learners have displayed a need for in their output (bits of speaking or writing that are not quite what would be considered an appropriate way to communicate within the group of people one intends to communicate with) or displayed a lack of understanding of in their input (i.e. bits of reading or listening that have not been understood).
SLB Co-op prefer the Long model, but acknowledge that it can be somewhat difficult for teachers without a university department full of applied linguists supporting them. This is why we are going to look at how we make TBLT workable in the real world.
The course, created by Neil McMillan, Geoffrey Jordan and I with guest contributions from Mike Long and Roger Gilabert, starts next year. To be a part of it you can find out more here.
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.
Radio silence! I have syllabi to write and such. It is the very short break between the end of one Japanese academic year and the start of another. It is my first year that I will be mainly a part-time university teacher at three universities with marginal face-to-face freelancing.
One of my sweet distractions lately has been that, should my pipe dream of being a tenured lecturer not actually materialise, it might not be a bad thing because the working conditions for tenured staff can be absolute crap anyway. No, I haven’t been listening to The Auteurs again. I’ve been reading about alternative academia, or #Alt-Ac.
I don’t get grants to do research because I am part-time and I am – without doubt – not even registered as a blip to the people in charge anywhere that would fund anything as someone who would be doing anything remotely worth money to research and take time out and have a weekend at a conference and blah, blah, blah. The research I do is because either:
it would be useful once and I might be able to use it again;
it might be something I can show in a portfolio to get a better job;
I might be able to sell something like materials based off the research and thus be a provider of children’s shoes to my household.
Would I be a better or a worse researcher if I were actually forced to be in an office dealing with millions of emails and several meetings and whatnot? I don’t know, but it would be rather nice to learn about research methods from media other than books and podcasts. A bit unlikely for a serial part-timer, mind but I do have an embryonic duoethnography probably underway once I actually get my arse in gear.
I keep entertaining doing a PhD (and will probably do a MRes so I can get academic credit for a biggish project I have on my mind). The only problem with a PhD is thinking about recouping the cost if I did one part-time or even recouping the cost of a wage cut if I did one full time. I know money isn’t everything but it’s very difficult to support a family on scholarly knowledge alone.
But Marc, you are getting ahead of yourself. Aren’t you a mere part-time instructor? Yes, I am. I also know that I have publications coming out, the probability of more, and might even have more publications than existing full-time instructors. I am pretty sure that my corpus work, if it actually ever sees the light of day when it is reviewed will be decent, and it’s not like there are a ton of ESP corpus linguists in Japan at the minute, unless I am woefully ignorant (and I kind of hope I am, in this case). There is a shortage of people obsessively interested in teaching listening and/or pronunciation (again, prove me wrong. Please!). There is no shortage of Task-Based Language Teachers in Japan, and my new job may mean that I get a bit more input there but I don’t know, so I’m not looking to carve a path there exactly though I have a book idea I am trying to work on because I have one more day off per week this year!
So, the new academic year: I am really looking forward to it, I have some cool courses to teach, some old and some new. I will have international students for the first time in about five years as well, which is nice because it keeps me on my toes pedagogically. And I can probably get at least a few blog posts and maybe a paper out of some stuff.
Anyhow, unfocused ruffian seeks tons of cash to research listening or make corpora. Hit me up in the comments if you want to give me money (joke [perhaps]).
You may also want to avail yourself of the not dry at all Research in Action podcast by Dr. Katie Linder.
There is a massively underused number of potential journal articles resting on teachers’ hard disks, cloud storage and flash drives.
This is how I sorted out my dissertation and took some best bits from other assignments for articles.
If you are interested in doing it, this might be useful. It’s how I did it and no indication of good practice.
Open Word file and save as something else. Probably in a ‘working on’ file.
Go through the dissertation. You need it to be between 3000-7500 words including references.
You will keep much of the literature review unless you have a long lit review or a literature review of several parts. What is essential. Feel free to come back this later.
Discussion and evaluation. Cut the fat. If you are doing half the dissertation this means only the pertinent bits. The evaluation only needs your caveats, probably.
Results. Maybe you just need to give the results, maybe you need a minimum explanation.
Methodology. Keep the what and unless you did something crazy and new, discard most of the why. How should be bare bones.
OMG. Still over. Check refs. Do your quotes need to be full quotes?
Damn. Sacrifice your favourite bit that is a bit odd. Is it coherent?
Finished? No. You have to strip the metadata in preparation for a double blind.
Set aside at least two hours to submit.
Rest for 3-9 months. Seriously.
Go through the dissertation. You need it to be between 3000-7500 words including references.
You will keep much of the literature review unless you have a long lit review or a literature review of several parts. What is essential. Feel free to come back this later.
Discussion and evaluation. Cut the fat. If you are doing half the dissertation this means only the pertinent bits. The evaluation only needs your caveats, probably.
Results. Maybe you just need to give the results, maybe you need a minimum explanation.
Methodology. Keep the what and unless you did something crazy and new, discard most of the why. How should be bare bones.
OMG. Still over. Check refs. Do your quotes need to be full quotes?
Damn. Sacrifice your favourite bit that is a bit odd. Is it coherent?
Finished? No. You have to strip the metadata in preparation for a double blind.
Set aside at least two hours to submit.
Rest for 3-9 months. Seriously.
This is just my experience. I used part of the Applied Linguistics module, my DipTESOL independent research project, a corpora essay and half my dissertation.
