In the first part of our interview with Geoff Jordan on his book English Language Teaching Now and How It Could Be, co-written with Mike Long, he spoke about why they wrote the book, and what ELT teachers should know about SLA theory.
In the second part of the interview, Geoff talks about the ‘interests’ that lie behind the status quo in ELT, or what is described in the book as the ‘hydra of publishing companies, examination boards, educational institutions and teacher training outfits’ who ‘offer a unified set of well-packaged products, with the coursebook as the centerpiece.’ And he talks about potential for change, and positive developments.
We hope you enjoy the interview. If you have any thoughts or reactions, then please leave a comment!
Your book doesn’t shy away from what you call ‘the often-hidden political and economic interests at work’ in ELT today? Can you explain what you mean by that?
The ELT industry has an annual turnover of close to US $200 billion. Apart from the huge profits made by publishers, examination boards, teacher training outfits and public and private educational institutions, there is the enormous “soft power” exerted by nation states through language policies.
To paraphrase Chapter 12 of the book, most language teaching involves the language of powerful nations being taught to speakers of less powerful ones. English has been the principal language of the two most economically dominant nation states of the past 300 years – first the UK, and then for the past 150 years, the USA – and not coincidentally, of the most powerful armies required to procure and maintain those colonies and economic dominance.
As a result of this history of savage imperial conquest, there are now roughly 400 million native speakers of English in the world, and over four times that number, 1.75 billion, for whom English is a second or auxiliary language. Already huge, the second group is growing fast, with more than two billion speakers projected by 2025. The ability to determine which shall be a country’s national language, or in the case of many multilingual societies, its lingua franca, is a vital source of power for nation states and for elites within them.
This is the single biggest reason why ELT is so important. When one country invades or annexes another, it is common for command of a particular, standardized form of the invader’s language to be required, officially or unofficially, of any members of the subjugated population seeking access to political power, employment, and key social services, especially education, or even for immigrant visas or citizenship. The newly imposed standardized form of the language sometimes not only displaces indigenous languages, but drives them, and often their speakers, close to extinction, as happened, for example, with Hawaiian, and many native-American and Australian aboriginal languages.
So according to your analysis of the ELT industry, who benefits, and who loses?
The winners are nation states, national and local economies, the bosses & shareholders of universities and private language schools, the top echelons of ELT teacher educators (often coursebook authors), publishers, and testing organizations.
The losers are millions of teachers and ancillary workers in universities, private language schools, publishing companies and testing organizations, tens of millions of language learners.
You co-wrote this book with the late Mike Long. Unfortunately, Mike died before the book could be completed. Can you say something about Mike’s part of the project – and how it eventually came to be published?
Mike suggested we write the book. We had a lot of long meetings, many in restaurants in Barcelona, planning the book. He did most of the work finding a publisher. We wrote 90% of it while he lived near Washington, USA and I near Girona, Spain. Everything he wrote, I commented on and vice versa. It was a completely shared, collaborative effort and it went through a lot of changes along the way. When Mike got diagnosed with cancer, he fought hard and very bravely, but he went downhill fast. It was only thanks to his partner, Cathy Doughty, that we got the book finished. When Mike died, Cathy continued with her vital role as main editor, and without that work, the book would not have been published.
Despite your criticism of ‘actually-existing-ELT’, do you see any bright spots on the horizon, and potential for change?
For us, the most promising bright spots on the existing bleak ELT landscape are various promising projects implementing Long’s version of TBLT, Scott Thornbury and Luke Medding’s Dogme, plus various initiatives that we discuss in the book. These include Ian McMillan’s work with the SLB cooperative in Barcelona; your work in Berlin; Nick Bilbrough’s work with the Hands Up project in Gaza and other parts of Occupied Palestine (where Scott Thornbury has been a powerful supporter); Clare Courtney’s Heart and Parcel project in Levenshulme, Manchester; and Ljiljana Havran’s work in Belgrade.
What ‘next steps’ would you like to see that might harness this potential, and actually start to change the direction of ELT today?
Despite the dominance of coursebook-driven ELT and the enormous power that the members of the status quo have to simultaneously promote themselves and deprive their critics of oxygen, I believe that we’re seeing encouraging signs of a surge in resistance to the model currently represented by the British Council institutes, the Common European Frame of Reference, General English coursebook series, training courses like CELTA, globe-trotting teacher “gurus”, and high stakes, unfit for purpose exams like IELTS. Similarly, there’s increasing criticism and push-back against global teacher organizations like TESOL and IATEFL that promote commercial interests, misinform teachers and do little or nothing to fight against teacher precarity, poor pay and conditions.
So the “next steps” can be seen as a quickening in pace as we retreat from the global commodification and standardization of ELT. All the projects we discuss in the book share a belief in local action: local groups organizing among themselves; local teachers taking control of their own on-going teacher development, meeting the needs of local people. TBLT projects seem particularly suited to local universities with a stable population of undergraduates doing courses in the same field (hospitality and hotel management degree courses in Barcelona, for example, where Roger Gilabert and colleagues are this year doing a specially designed English TBLT course for the twelfth successive year); Dogme courses seem suited to just about any situation where students want to achieve communicative competence, and my opinion they’re the best current implementation of a minimalist analytic syllabus, easily adapted to local needs.
For the rest, I think that Neil McMillan’s work in the SLB cooperative of teachers can serve as a model. It’s been a hard slog for Neil, but with a bit of luck, the coming years will see an expanding group of teachers (30 to 50, perhaps) sharing resources, doing teaching of various sorts (in classrooms, in companies, 1-to-1, on-line, etc.); networking with other local cooperatives internationally to build a bank of TBLT materials (the work has already started); offering an ever-widening range of teacher education programmes including small-scale local conferences; working on new technologies; contributing articles to (open-access!) academic journals; serving the local community’s special needs; supporting radical groups attempting to bring about radical social change.
In such a scenario, compromises will be made, but the hydra of current ELT practice will be a wounded beast, slowly giving way to a better, more vibrant, more interesting, more fulfilling job for “the English teachers of the world” to whom our book is dedicated.
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