If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there, as the saying goes. Without a vision of the future, we remain stuck in the status quo, mired in our old beliefs and misconceptions.
English Language Teaching Now and How It Could Be by Geoff Jordan and Mike Long provides such a vision, giving a sharp critique of the status quo but also sketching out future possibilities. To coincide with the book’s publication, we interviewed Geoff, and a big thanks to him for answering our questions. We should also say that Mike Long sadly passed away during the writing of the book and Cathy Doughty, his wife, played a key role in getting the project over the line.
For those new to Mike’s work, a good place to start is his book on SLA and Task-based Language Teaching or this interview he gave a few years ago to SLB. To read more of Geoff’s writing, go to his blog or find him on Twitter as @GeoffJordan16
Finally, if you have any comments, thoughts, criticisms, or reactions to where ELT stands now and where it might go in the future, we’d love to hear them!
Who is your book for, and why did you write it?
The book is aimed at two audiences. First, undergraduates and masters students working towards a qualification in teaching English as a foreign language or applied linguistics, and second, practicing classroom teachers of English as a foreign or second language to adults. We include the second group because many practicing teachers began careers in EFL or ESL with minimal training, or with training that was not well informed by theory and research in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) i.e., the process English Language Teaching is designed to facilitate.
‘We wrote it because we think it’s important to expose the current ELT industry as a commercial racket that defrauds students and impoverishes millions of teachers and support staff.’
We wrote it because we think it’s important to expose the current ELT industry as a commercial racket that defrauds students and impoverishes millions of teachers and support staff. We argue that to teach languages well, you need to know how people learn them, and that current ELT practice largely ignores this vital question. We offer an up-to-date, accessible discussion of recent developments in knowledge about second and foreign language learning, as well as implications for language teaching, and then we provide a critical analysis of the current ELT industry, arguing that its increasing commercialization has led to poor teaching, dull materials, inadequate second language teaching education, and testing procedures that are unfit for purpose. We then expose the often-hidden political and economic interests at work, and we end with suggestions for how ELT should be organized for the benefit of all.
What are some of the key problems with how English is taught now?
We see current ELT as coursebook-driven. To quote from the book:
“Coursebooks represent the commodification of ELT. Grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, lexical chunks, discourse, the whole messy, chaotic stuff of language is re-constituted and neatly packaged into items, granules, bite-sized chunks, served up in sanitized short texts and summarized in a well-sequenced procession of simplified lists and tables. Communicative competence itself, as Leung (2013) argues, is turned into ‘inert and decomposed knowledge’, and language teaching is increasingly pre-packaged and delivered as if it were a standardized, marketable product. ELT becomes just another market transaction, in this case between teachers and learners. De-skilled teachers pass on a set of standardized, testable knowledge and skills to learners, who have been reconfigured as consumers. At the heart of this neoliberal version of education is the coursebook, which dominates a huge, profit-driven ELT industry. The publishers use multi-million-dollar marketing budgets to persuade stakeholders that coursebooks represent the best practical way to manage ELT, they deprive alternative approaches of oxygen, and they stunt the growth of innovation. A hydra of publishing companies, examination boards, educational institutions and teacher training outfits together offer a unified set of well-packaged products, with the coursebook as the centerpiece. The coursebook rules, to the detriment of learners, teachers and good educational practice everywhere.”
What’s wrong with coursebooks in particular?
‘Most of the hundreds of millions of students of English as an L2 fail to reach their objectives.’
Coursebooks follow a “synthetic-type” syllabus which treats the L2 as an object of study. The language is cut up into hundreds of “items” – bits of grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, pre-fabricated chunks – which are first explained and then practiced bit by bit, in a linear sequence from one Unit to the next. Such a syllabus rests on 4 false assumptions which are refuted by robust SLA research findings:
i. Explicit knowledge of the L2 forms the basis for language learning.
ii. Declarative knowledge about the L2 converts to procedural knowledge.
iii. SLA is a process of mastering, one by one, an accumulated collection of “items”.
iv. Learners learn what they are taught when they are taught it.
Furthermore, coursebook-driven ELT leads to teacher-driven instruction, where the teacher talks about the L2 for most of the time, while students get scant opportunities to talk in the L2 (i.e. engage in communicative tasks where the focus is on meaning or use the L2 for real, relevant, practical purposes). The result is that while students quite often know enough about the L2 to pass various tests, they far more frequently find themselves unable to use the L2 confidently and fluently in real life situations.
Most of the hundreds of millions of students of English as an L2 fail to reach their objectives. As an example, a majority (65% +) of the teachers of English for whom English is an L2 – including teachers in China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil who are the participants of studies which the book describes – report feeling such a lack of confidence in their communicative competence that they deliberately avoid “free practice” speaking / discussion activities in their English lessons. These teachers were themselves taught English by teachers using coursebooks.
You put forward SLA theory as the body of work that should guide ELT practice. Can you share three research findings from the field of SLA that English teachers should know about?
i. Second language learning is predominantly a process of implicit (unconscious) learning.
ii. Second language learning is a process of interlanguage (IL) development. Learners slowly develop their own autonomous mental grammar with its own internal organising principles. Acquisition of grammatical structures, and also of pronunciation features and many lexical features such as pre-fabricated lexical chunks, collocation and colligation, is typically gradual, incremental and slow. Development of the L2 exhibits plateaus, occasional movement away from, not toward, the L2, and U-shaped or zigzag trajectories rather than smooth, linear contours.
No matter what the order or manner in which target-language structures are presented to them by teachers, learners analyze the input and come up with their own interim grammars, the product broadly conforming to developmental sequences observed in naturalistic settings. The acquisition sequences displayed in IL development have been shown to be impervious to explicit instruction, and the conclusion is that students don’t learn when and how a teacher decrees that they should, but only when they are developmentally ready to do so.
iii. Adults’ ability to learn a second language is maturationally constrained. There are “sensitive periods” in SLA. For most L2 learners, the sensitive period for native-like phonology closes between age 4 to 6; for the lexicon (particularly lexical chunks, collocation and colligation) between 6 and 10; and for morphology and syntax by the mid-teens.
While this remains a controversial area, there’s general consensus that adults are partially “disabled” language learners who can’t learn in the same way children do. And that’s where explicit learning comes in. The right kind of explicit teaching can help adult students learn bits of the language that they are unlikely to learn implicitly. Mike Long and Nick Ellis call these bits “fragile” features of the L2 – features that are of low perceptual saliency (because they’re infrequent / irregular / semantically empty / communicatively redundant / involving complex form-meaning mappings) and are likely to be late, or never, learned without explicit learning.
You write in the book ‘Imagine medical training without any attention to the workings of the human body’. Why did you choose this metaphor and how does it relate to teaching?
Just as doctors need to understand the workings of the human body to do their jobs well, so teachers need to understand the special process students go through when they learn an L2 in order to do their jobs well!
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