Category: Uncategorized

More Utopian Thinking

Marc Jones / / Uncategorized

An air freshener called Sanity

Today has been a thinking day. First Achilleas Kostoulas posted about some nonsense, then Michael Griffin asked ‘Are we there yet?’ (regarding his imminent keynote-plenary thing at KOTESOL Gwangju) to which I replied ‘We haven’t even met the scarecrow yet.’ Mura Nava then asked ‘Why are we (teachers) not in driving position? Who’s driving?’ Which I replied to saying that we lack sufficient scholarly leadership. I think what I meant is somebody who can spread a message with credibility but who doesn’t dumb down. Somebody who makes people feel clever and worthwhile.

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2018: A Review

Marc Jones / / Uncategorized

20171011_1616522143287734.jpgI’m writing this in snatched time while I’m walking to the supermarket. To be honest this year hasn’t been one of the best years for me, particularly my mental health. However, I managed to find the Holy Grail of a full-time job to start in 2019 though it has made me a lot more aware of the precarious nature of English language teaching more of which later.

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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/

Underneath the pavement, the beach

Marc Jones / / Uncategorized

This is the follow-up to my previous post, ‘Find someone who‘ which detailed several problems with the TESOL sphere. The title for this post comes from the Situationists, and is a reference to the sand found underneath the paving stones torn up in the Paris 1968 revolutionary clashes.
There is little to be achieved by only complaining about one’s problems. Certainly, it is relieving to vent. After the venting, however, we have inaction, a restored status quo. There needs to be some sort of action, no matter whether it is a tactical advancement or sabotage.
A lot of us work outside our contracted hours. For those of us creating material to be used in classes and where we retain copyright, I would absolutely advise you to sell this on. Could you sell it as an ebook? As a zip file of materials? If you don’t retain copyright, could you subvert laws and means by only using Creative Commons Share Alike media in your materials? This means that anything created must be shared with the same license. It would also mean that your organisation doesn’t benefit at the expense of everyone else, even if they do stop you from selling it on yourself. If not, totally ensure that you provide only a paper copy to your organisation so that they cannot make a digital version without some effort. Mostly PDF scans look like PDF scans. Remember to add your name under the title or at least somewhere that is a pain to cut it from. If your materials are good and you get acknowledgement without any kind of benefit other than kudos, you might as well be paid in social media likes.
Working to rule is still a thing that feels a bit mean to some of us. I disagree, though I believe I ought to do it more. It’s doing what you are contracted to do. Essentially, anything else is a freebie. If you are freelance, you probably think that freebies are horrible. If you work for an institution, these are often disguised as ‘Everybody normally comes in early to prep and leaves late after marking’. I bet everyone did it because everyone else did it before. Do you know whether everyone else has the same contract? Have you considered that working those extra bits normalises working for free? If you can afford to work for free, lucky you! Just don’t help bring about a culture where everyone else does.
For some of us, we do a phenomenal amount of CPD, including paying for our own qualifications which our organisations benefit from through bragging rights to students. If it isn’t recognised, don’t do it, or if you want to do it, don’t declare it. If your employer wants to parade your CV around, they ought to damn well pay for what’s gone onto it since you’ve been with them. This is one of the reasons I stopped working for one agency: they wanted an updated CV, but there was no extra to be paid as a DipTESOL holder. It doesn’t have to be a diploma or degree, though. Courses, conferences and even webinars take time away from our families friends and chances of getting a nutritious meal instead of being too tired to cook.
If employers are trying to deskill the profession, we need to fight back, and perhaps even fight dirty. Abandon new syllabi and teach better, knowing its better for students to not get the advertised ‘product’. Or transform the materials in such a way that only the highly skilled can use the supplementary materials. Make lesson plans unintelligible except to the initiated. You might get a stern talking to, even a warning. I might advise you, however, that the writing is already on the wall in this case and that you should probably be seeking alternative employment.
The social side of things is a different beast. Staff rooms not being safe, well, I have no idea beyond hoping others will call out bullshit if you can’t. Sometimes, even this doesn’t work. If you can keep a diary of anything, get it down on paper, or even have sympathetic witnesses who can vouch for you it might help (but equally might not). If you really can’t take it, you could consult your union if you have one if your employer is unwilling to act. If you don’t have one or get no joy, and you don’t mind burning your bridges consult the department of employment or similar. You might not have a job to go to for that employer and there would be no good reference, but there would be some kind of record of complaint at least. A declaration that there are problems. I don’t have any easy solutions here.
Similar to the invisibility of LGBTQ+ identities because it can be risky. Does one out oneself to make a point of visibility or look after oneself? I think it’s a personal decision, and you might have to go the union/department-of-employment route here, too.
I started with the Situationists and I will end with them. “Be reasonable, demand the impossible.” What is ‘impossible’ for employers and the industry at large is frequently not; it is only ‘reasonable’ and therefore right.

Find someone who…

Marc Jones / / Uncategorized


Find someone who works more than their contracted hours without monetary compensation.
Find someone who hasn’t had a pay rise for the last five years.
Find someone who can’t afford to buy a house despite home ownership being common among people their age.
Find someone who works in a place where the staffroom is smaller than a classroom yet caters to the same number of people.
Find someone who is praised for their preparation and achievements without any recognition in job security.
Find someone who is constantly job hunting in order to transcend precarious employment.
Find someone who has made sacrifices for their workplace in spite of there being no reciprocation.
Find someone who is expected to conduct research despite having no allotted time nor payment provided to do this.
Find someone who has their working hours cut due to undersubscribed courses while their employer looks to finance new campus buildings.
Any other ideas, add them to the comments.

Resource: Intonation Graphs

Marc Jones / / Listening, Pronunciation, Uncategorized

As regular readers know, I love phonology and anything to do with pronunciation and listening. I also have a need to make my learners aware of what happens in the stream of speech. They need to catch the intonation to be aware of any discourse functions, any attitudinal functions and, to the extent that they can be considered anything beyond rules of thumb, grammatical functions.
So, intonation graphs. Get the graph, draw the pitch and even write the words on the graph. Something like this.
A graph. X axis is Time. Y axis is Pitch. In the middle of the Y axis, parallel to the X axis is a midline. This graph shows the rough intonation pattern for Michael Caine's line in The Italian Job, "You're only suppose to blow the bloody doors off!"
Get it here as a Word document or PDF.

excitELT: workers rake the coals

Marc Jones / / Uncategorized

night-of-the-living-dead-group

Image from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, 1966. Public domain. Could it be a group of teachers worrying about whether they will survive the industry/profession dichotomy?

OK, I know. “Marc, you are one of the people that are involved in Teachers as Workers, aren’t you?”
Actually, probably less than you think but, you know, I support them. I just don’t know how much I actually do apart from I’ve wrote a blog and struggled to archive some stuff for the group.
Anyway, yes, I could have submitted a presentation about how ELT is less exciting and more exploitative. However, I did a bit about listening, and other people did stuff about working issues for teachers.

***

Peter Brereton presented Teacher Low Points: Disillusionment, Demotivation, and Burnout. Sadly, I ended up walking in halfway through the 10-minute plenary because I had other stuff to sort out upstairs, but what I did see was good, engaging and made me happy that somebody is talking about this.
Bill Snyder talked about the notion of isolation in teaching, despite being part of a community. There was also the difference between isolation and solitude, and the amount of anxiety and how we can help each other by talking and stuff.
Sam Morris talked about emotional authenticity in teaching, and the issue of rife fixed-term contracts and the massive amount of part-time teaching (in universities) happened to crop up, because teachers sometimes become more “emotionally authentic”, or ‘themselves’ close to the end of a contract. Basically teachers who know they are getting to the end of the contract, with job anxiety and such, stop worrying about masking their feelings and let them out. I raised the question about whether there was a link in the research about whether there was any link to teaching quality by keeping teachers precarious. He said he’d read research and it pointed to the opposite. I think I also had a longwinded comment-question thing (yes, I can be am one of those people) about feeling guilty for being open about my feelings with adult students. I think the crux was: students are adults, they arguably need English of the real world, feelings are the real world, why hide feelings (though, don’t be weird, you know).
Of the videos, Scott Thornbury painted a vulgar picture of the Spanish ELT employment scene, with pitiful wages and no development to speak of in the language school sector. That would be mainly the same in Japan, though there are a very few cracks of light to be found outside the chain schools.
On a side note – I was a bit worried that it was going to be a bit of a talking shop for people who just work in universities, which kind of happens at a lot of conferences, I guess, and that was the majority of people, but there were some people from language schools and high schools as well. I like talking to people, especially people who don’t just work at universities, because what is a conference for if not to learn from people you might not otherwise meet? (Not wholly a rhetorical question, by the way).

Do Lines Need Drawing

Marc Jones / / Uncategorized

IMG_1199
Over the last couple of weeks, a lot of my communication online and offline has been about English language education and the status, stage and purpose it occupies, for teachers as well as students. There are the usual gripes of coursebooks, which I am not going to get into here because I have looked at it before (on more than one occasion), and also the state of the industry/profession and the definitions of ELT, (T)EFL, (T)ESL, (T)ESOL (and Steve tweeted that maybe this is not actually the case now).
So, a bit of background out of the way, on to Mordor!

Us and Them

Most English teachers are, like most people, nice and just trying to go about their day. I’m not going to talk about the outliers who are just unpleasant. This is for the rest of us, and I’m going to talk about a few types of people and it gets political, actually. Sorry, but I’m not sorry.
English teachers generally tend to be a bit bleeding heart. English teachers generally need money to feed themselves and do nice stuff. We can kid ourselves that we are helping make the world a better place. However, why not indulge me and just consider the following questions.

  • How much do we dripfeed the subliminal message that English makes the world go round and anything else just is a bit substandard?
  • We need work, and if Chain Language School can offer enough work to ensure one doesn’t end up homeless even though they drive down wages by aggressive undercutting, is this a wise choice?
  • Do you teach people or content? I’m not even talking about methodology here.
  • Are we, as teachers, being enabled to use a book in a pedagogically sound way and being enabled to deliver content in a standardised way?
  • Are we thinking about how to enable language acquisition to take place?
  • Are we thinking about how to enable acquired language to be used to perform tasks or even speech acts appropriately?
  • Are we given time and resources to provide the best teaching possible?

While a lot of these questions have answers that seem obvious, I am going to say that a lot of us say one thing and do another – and I am holding my hands up here and saying I am not perfect but I try to be good. Eating requires money and so on. Luckily, I don’t require a fast car or designer clothes to feel good about myself. I do have a child and this means the earning of money and the teaching of language.
The problem is that other forces, basically capitalism/neoliberalism manipulate the environment and how easy it is to make wise choices all the time. I’ll go out on a limb and say that several of the larger publishers even obfuscate what a wise choice would even be, because it would actually cause the teachers and administrators who buy/order books to see that buying more books that are pedagogically unsound is, well, unsound and so they would stop ordering and the publisher would cease to exist.

The differences between us

Look, I don’t  want to be a snob (actually, even an anti-snob), nor do I want to be telling anybody how to live their life, but if people can’t actually see what’s at the end of their noses when somebody is pointing it out, I would have to say they’re wilfully blind.

  • Deskilled teachers.
  • Unskilled ‘teachers’.
  • Edutainment.
  • Marketisation of standardised tests of reading and listening used as a benchmark for communicative skills.
  • Use of a standardised test to assume someone can do a job when there are no similar instances of domain-specific language.
  • Book as syllabus.
  • Book as content.
  • E-‘learning’ of multiple-choice questions.
  • Making everything about jobs rather than edification.
  • Making everything about financial return for companies rather than value for money for students, teachers and education providers.

We have a whole culture of spending a month to do a course to get a credential to prove you can be in a classroom and not have chaos ensue. We have companies who will take bachelor’s degree holders and have them provide lessons and have essentially the same credential experience without the credential. This is seen as enough. This is seen as the terminal qualification, the furthest one needs to go, in a lot of commercial language education providers.
We have a culture of needing to move out of the classroom to make adequate money to raise a family. Time in the classroom is not rewarded. Unfortunately, this culture is being passed from commercial entities to schools and colleges. Teaching ‘only’ requires navigating content, providing it, and are we back at audiolingualism yet, because we have presentation of language, practice with behaviourist gap-fills and behaviourist CALL/MALL? Nothing moves on or needs to move on if money can be made.
We have experts and ‘experts’. We have people who have looked at learning, looked at other people’s studies of learning and tried to apply the findings. We also have people who have paid lip service to these studies, dismissed them because they don’t fit with what is convenient or what they have always done. We have providers of continuing professional development who are providing merely orientations to their products.

By any means necessary

You can’t fight cash fluid market leaders with merely a better lesson. You cannot provide lessons to everyone. What can be done is to show what you are actually doing. If you do good work, show it. Somebody might nick your idea. This is actually a good thing because this will raise standards. I mean, yeah, get pissed off that the idea thief didn’t do the legwork to be original or even helpful, but if the idea disperses, good stuff comes. If you have a better alternative to coursebook ELT, you need to have a tangible version of this. People are busy and they need, sadly, to just be able to print something, see what to do, and do it (I am working on something about this).

Standing on the other side of the line

I think we, as the critical wing of English teaching, need to define ourselves in opposition to the dominant idea and practice in English teaching, which usually gets called ELT (I’d say ELT Research Bites is far out of this dominant idea). As nothing bloody changes for the better and Silicon Valley gets lionised in society more and more with poor-quality MALL becoming more prevalent, we need to draw the line to stop frankly awful quality pedagogy in language education becoming the norm, stopping poor pedagogy being acceptable in language teaching, and stopping the rot. You can’t do this by just accepting it, doing your own thing and hoping that others will somehow see what you are doing and do it. We need to speak about the poor side of stuff when it dominates. We can see the rubbish – it’s in every bookshop, every catalogue you get sent, every commercial presentation at a conference, every pointless app that gets recommended for students.
Show your good stuff. The good will out. Now let’s change things.
 

Demotivations in Language Teaching

Marc Jones / / Uncategorized

Uber cynical post warning. Consider this warning a warning and your last warning.
So, I’m back after the holidays at one of my places of employment and freelance me has already been out on the road and in cyberspace. This post is mainly looking at the institutional side of language teaching and the demotivations from my point of view as a serial part-timer.

“CPD? Computerized Personal Data? I don’t know.”

There is no continuous professional development on offer; a DIY approach is essential, there are no books available except my own personal collection and that of one of my coworkers. There are limited discussions about teaching, pedagogy or learning of languages, just firefighting conversations about students who do things they ought not to do or teachers who basically can’t teach.
Contrast this with one of my universities that has a fantastic library just for the teachers and a decent library with English books about language teaching and learning in it for the English majors and another university that cries a bit hard up but has kept subscriptions to TESOL Quarterly and a few other journals. Something always beats nothing.

“Align the tests with… the tests.”

I make the tests. This is in my contract. I make the tests and then show them to the head of English for the year group and he (or she depending on the year, but mainly he) approves it. Or not. There was one year that my coworker and I decided to be idealistic and actually attempt to assess the students by assessing what we teach. This is, clearly, madness. What is the most logical idea is to give an essay topic one week prior to the test periods for a speaking course and have students write a page on one of the topics. The week after that they will answer questions or formulate questions based on a list of questions the teacher/assessor will ask and a list of answers from which to formulate a question, provided with the essay topic. After that, there will be a paired conversation based on an everyday situation except that all students will have half-arsedly memorized a script instead of reacting to questions, leading to such gems as:

S1: What are you going to do tomorrow?
S2: I am going to Disneyland?
S1: Where are you going to go?
S2: I am going to go with my friend.

This is purely because language is expected to be taught as a content-subject, not a skills subject. Recalling facts about morphology and syntax, but we are employed to teach “natural English” and “help the students communicate naturally”.

“Oh, can you proofread this?”

This is in the contract. I don’t mind doing this, actually, because it is interesting, English teachers essentially having a fetish for odd points of grammar, pragmatics and semantics. Except I don’t like the one person who gives something in the break between second and third lesson and expects it to be done by lunchtime. So in ten minutes. Or 8 if I am teaching far from the teachers’ room. The same person, who is usually considerate except for this time. I do not wish to become overly curt, I bite my tongue, but there is a veritable cesspool of swearwords waiting to be expelled on the walk between the school gates and the convenience store.
There are lovely things about the job, mainly the time off and the bonus (kerching – except actually it could just go on the monthly pay, couldn’t it?) but I would love a bit more of a free rein. Perhaps the worst thing is knowing I have free rein at university and then back at school.

At university there are only a couple of demotivators:

“How many times have I been absent?”
Too many for B but you’re probably OK for a C if you’ve made it and found me.
“I left my homework in El Segundo. I got to get it back. Can you come to university tomorrow to get it?”
No, but there was this amazing invention in the 20th Century called email. Use it!

Paleontology and Fossil Gathering

Marc Jones / / Uncategorized

A brontosaurus diagram from the 1880s. Factually inaccurate.
I was involved in a serendipitous exchange today on Twitter, that started with my friend James musing about yetis possibly being a kind of undiscovered polar bear. I said that given the evidence of polar bear distribution of polar bears and yeti sightings it would be unlikely but not impossible for it to be a kind of bear. One of his followers, Helen, joined in and said something about dinosaur skeletons being reassembled in weird ways to make monsters and it got me thinking about Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and language teaching.
SLA is a relatively new science, much like paleontology. We know some things from observing evidence (if how people appear to learn or not in SLA; of typical anatomical arrangements in paleontology) and making hypotheses to test in order to go on and construct theories.
We also have language teaching. Some language teaching is informed by SLA and some is not. Some fossil gathering is done by people who read up on paleontology and some is done by people who are interested in finding cool stuff, and some is done by accident.
What’s the point? Well, have you ever heard of a brontosaurus? Of course you have. It’s a massive thing with a long neck and a long tail. And the wrong head for years. And endless debates about whether it is the same as an apatosaurus. There is mainly scientific agreement to say the brontosaurus is a kind of apatosaurus. There are still some who say it warrants a distinct genus.
There are plausible ideas in language teaching. Grammar can be learned in a linear way from simple to complex, that massive exposure leads to massive gains. Unfortunately the evidence doesn’t hold up. Grammar (or actually morphology) appears to be learned in a sequence of acquisition with a lot of gaps in the evidence, rather like the allegorical dinosaur skeletons. Some people will go with what we know from science and hold out for the gaps to be filled before making bold claims. Others may try to put a pile of bones together to make a “Harryhausen Cyclops” (thanks Helen) and hoping it’s so, despite a lack of evidence or even overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
There’s also overplaying what science says and making conjectures look like fact. What colour are dinosaurs? Green, yeah? Lizards are green. But not all. There are lots of different coloured reptiles. The skin colour of dinosaurs is conjecture, based on evidence, but taken as fact, per se. Babies are exposed to loads of language, babies get fluent in a language therefore exposure equals acquisition? Perhaps, but there are more factors than that, as any migrant language teacher knows from colleagues who are exposed to the local language but never acquire it (and often never bother to try and learn it).
So what? Well, I think that, no shit Sherlock, getting more SLA literate and informed would help the profession to be less like would monster makers but more like people putting a stegosaurus together. Or having a collection of ammonites, which, while not sexy, are important to natural history.