The Spanish and Bulgarian Ladies-and a little TBL

Chilly in the house of Angeles this morning and thoughts naturally turned to weather. Pavlina decribed in amazement how there had been 'rain of ice' ...'what is this in English?' as we went into the living room and sat at the impromtu class desk, normally a handsome dining table. Now covered in books and various dictionaries and notebooks. Ready for the off. 


'Drop that lesson plan,' I thought,' today we're going to talk about the weather!' And we did. 
'hail(v) and 'hailstones' (n), Two items that gave birth to a 'lesson' in comparing the climate in Valencia, coastal and inland Bulgaria and the good old UK. An avalanche of language, useful and real-next time someone asks them 'what's the weather like?' they had better be prepared for...well, 'a deluge' or 'torrent' of adjective and noun pairings with a quantity of 'absolutely freezing's and 'drops in temperature's thrown in for good measure.


I've turned them on to register and now Pavlina in particular is always asking whether that's formal or informal...could I say that at a cocktail party? All three are married to NATO guys and mix a lot in the international community in these parts. 




So we looked at a few patterns and lexical items coming out of the initial conversation before giving each of them an extended turn at desribing the weather typically experienced in each of the four seasons back home. I provided a model with a description of the changeable nature of weather in the UK and finally brought it all together by desribing and comparing with the weather  in this part of Portugal. This extended to criticism of house-building techniques here- the ineffective central heating made this a must, and then to them going away promsing to check out the weather on the net and TV, in English of course. Some choice language they saw today included;

stable conditions (adj + v), not too hot, considerable variation in temperature, quite windy, a light/heavy shower, double-rainbow, the average temperature, damp vs dry, forecast (n. v) etc. 

Lancaster in the snow.


A TBL lesson out of the blue, and it worked. They communicated inaccurately of course (they are at the cusp of A2/B1 all three)  but experienced the pleasing sensation  of exchanging meaning and went away being able to do so again when needed, as well as having picked up a load of useful language to reivew and study as they wish.  Much confidence building and it's great that they don't just take my word for things. Now if only I could them to put their pens down.

Remains of the Day-Thoughts on Marketing and the LTO

Coming back to Carcavelos on the train I started one of my new books- The Ultimate Small Business Marketing Toolkit  by Beth Goldstein of Boston University's School of Management  
(McGraw Hill, 2007) A practical choice I made yesterday in buying this, and I'm glad I did.  A great opening quote from George Burns to muse over as I fixed my gaze momentarily on the high night waves through the carriage window  crashing over the beach and sea -wall at Estoril. Darker than Homer's 'wine dark sea', splendid in their strength. 


'I honestly think' said the great American comedian, 'it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate'. It made me think that it's worth the risk of setting out on this new adventure and making the effort required for the journey. Come what may, And effort there will be, as surely as those waves will break on the Atlantic sands every winter. 


But where to place that effort best is the question, and right now it's got to be on the enterprise-more precisely on how to reach out and connect  to the many who can benefit from the service. Customers, in short. 


According to Goldstein 'marketing and customer relations are intimately related to, and required for, ultimate business success'. (ibid ix) So how does this translate to the new world we are about to enter and how are we deal with the triumverate of client, the academic veracity we seek to inform our efforts and the online delivery we propose? 


The nexus where these three mesh  may well be the indicator of the making  or breaking of a project like this one. (The point of contact between the client and the academic have surely been a serious failpoint of the standard.) How do we ensure that we know our clients needs as well as  they do, deliver a service that may be at odds with expectancies of those clients, and yet ensure that we project the trust and credentials that motivate us to bring our offering to market?  A tall order no doubt and all about management of these three strands. One eye  should  be  kept on the ball at all times. As we all know, many a good idea motivated by misdiercted passion has floundered and many a business gone under due to missing the (in retrospect) obvious. 
   

The classic problem of LTO management is the coupling of the fact that the client is, more often than not, rarely in a position to judge how well they are being served, while  management are unable to get a true reflection of the quality of delivery of their service-save for a few sporadic, feared and polished, or otherwise,  performances in observations. Another peculiarity of this industry. But this is vital territory. Successful marketing is about information loops-knowing how things are changing and why viz a viz client needs and directing the service to provide  the benefits that come to light.  It doesn't deal in prescription. 

Here lies the paradox. (I do love a good paradox-Zeno et al) Any enterprise in education embodies the prescriptive in some way. Natural selection by evolution is a fact.The Earth really is a speck in a gigantic uncomprehending universe, No matter how we twist and turn we will fail to escape these basic truths. Language has systems and learning languages is something that takes a very long time, as well as considerable effort. It is not a product or an accessory and it would do well to be informed by those who spend their lives with an open scientific spirit finding out how the whole thing ticks.It is from here that our veracity should come. We know now that a small number of words are key and that the patterns in which they are most often found account for the lion's share of our talk and writing. We know that collecting and storing prefabriacted lexical chunks plays a major role in how languages are acquired and we know that context plays a key role in how meaning is exchanged. 

We need to be able to stand firm and take these and other facts about language as given. I'm not suggesting that learners need to become adept at describing such facts, or using the associated metalanguage. We just need to be sure in our convictions, This will engender the trust that will open the floodgates to the feedback we need to be both successful marketers, trusted experts, and as a result effective facilitators of learning, not to mention successful in business. 

I believe that a large number of LTOs pay lip service to client feedback while perpetuating tired myths which pander to the common unwisdom of folk theory on language learning. The erroneous beliefs of the public are taken above those of the teacher and the system perpetuates itself in the name of convenience. 

They do themselves and their clients a disservice in doing so. I once worked at a school which proudly displayed a sign which said 'Aqui o cliente é rei!'. The truth was that their cash- flow was king and education barely entered the equation-except of course as an accessory. Oddly enough this school was but a stone's throw from the breaking waves of Estoril and typical of many hundreds of such places dotted around the globe. Which brings us to the third strand of our  three. But its getting late now. I open the kitchen window and can hear the waves crashing in the distance making for good night of sleep ahead. 

  

Remains of the Day-Thoughts on Marketing

An entertaining afternoon in Cascais and  looking forward to my B1 class tomorrow.

Bookshop Heaven & TEFL Gripes

Got to Cascaishopping early (for Dulce on a Sunday morning). I'd already been for a walk and a coffee down in the village, as Linda-a-Pastora still is, despite its proximity to Lisbon and being hemmed in by piles of expensive housing with rare signs of habitation, except the lines of new, or brand new, cars outside them all. All the owners being potential English learners I'm sure. On arrival, a couple of old guys discussing Sporting vs Porto drinking their single beers and a hearty and genuine  hello from the owner. I hadn't been there in some time. So back up the hill smiling, past the blue tiled houses and the grubby looking new ones. People  hanging washing out of their windows to dry in the weak winter sun while they can. Rain is forecast. And rain means business here.  Feeling the chill a bit while looking down on the mouth of the wide old Tejo and the Atlantic beyond. 

I checked out my Twitter account back in the warm and that got me going for the day. Scott Thornbury had left an enticing thread on 'the most influential coursebooks' which I followed to Peter Viney's blog. (http://peterviney.wordpress.com/about/elt-articles/influential-elt-books/#comments). I couldn't find the right words to say on this, as I have so much to say, composed a short paragraph-unsent. This conversation says a lot though. Thornbury voted Headway the number one and I'd have to agree that it's 'malign influence', and that of its many immitators, has been influential in helping stall progress in our world considerably-but not fatally. 

But there's a lot more to it than this. Sentence level grammar reigns supreme on the ground and it's far from being coursebooks that are entirely responsible for this. The industry, if considered as a profession, has the unique property of  its practitioners virtually ignoring all relevant research into their work area and of, deeply and very, very sadly of being, on the whole, almost entirely ignorant of the alternatives to the prevailing wind. Imagine biology without evolution, astronomy before the Hubble telescope, modern literature without the novel. 

That's where we are at when I lead training sessions wherein practising teachers have no idea what is meant by the term 'collocation', have never heard of Chomsky-really, systematically skip all pronunciation work, ignore texts not directly related to the grammar point being taught in that lesson, wander in the dark  blissfully unaware that their such a thing as a 'spoken grammar', think 'discourse' is a fancy word for 'conversation' and harbouring beliefs about 'correctness' that went out with the ark-or did they? 

As well as the appeal to tradition championed, as Scott put it,  by the likes of Headway and followers, there must be a deep set of causes for the fact, and surely it is a fact, that sentence level grammar both rules the understanding of what language is, in that all else must be subsumed beneath its dominion in the heads of many, if not most, practioners and dictates how classes are organised, delivered and judged. It has become an irritation to many to have this belief questioned. My mission, like any good sceptic and as an avowed innovator - is to challenge view and in all its manifestations. 

A cursory read of the contents of any general book on English language teaching and learning or applied linguistics, or a two minute tour of the appropriate section of a university library ought to sufficient to do quick  justice to this pervading myth. But not a cat's chance in hell of that happening without major upheavals from the evidence I've seen-which is considerable. Major changes are needed in this industry if it is ever to gain the credility it deserves and to serve its clients in the way they deserve. We ought to be the experts on our field and this ought to shine through, every day-only then can we dispense with the, as Russell put it 'uncommon  sense of common sense' which repesents the opinions of the general populace regarding language and its acquisition. This is really why the blow that Headway and co. dealt the profession  is so very counterproductive. It pandered to the erroneous views that pervade this key element of  being human- if in any doubt  read 'Language Myths' (eds. Bauer & Trudgill, Penguin 1998). There are a whole cluster of myths associated with this continuing narrow focus on sentence grammar at the expense of all else and people do have strong opinions about language. However, like it or not,  very often they are simply mistaken. Should language teaching professionals have a duty to inform them so? I think they do. But before they can, they need to inform themselves.

Witness- the hundreds of observations I have carried out over the past four years as EAC Area Academic Manager wherein somewhere over 80% of them have  lesson plans attached that detail how they are going to practice 'the use of the present perfect' or 'comparative adjectives etc. (with no reference to why and to what useful purpose for the teenage learners we serve, assuming this approach is effective, a very large assumption if we are to take relevant findings in SLA seriously). And these were produced by a wide sample of teachers working, in their day jobs, all over the world who are asked, begged, gently shown alternatives etc. to repect the fact that these courses are meant to be informed by 'a communicative approach' to language learning and teaching. It's in your manuals for goodness sake! It's like walking in sludge at times.

As well as selecting material from the allocated coursebook on the tired old basis of 'we are going to do (sic.) the '1st Conditional' today', the situation I've observed in many, many teacher rooms is one of teachers cobbling together lessons with added material from the nearest convenient 'resource' book tacked onto the grammatical 'point' chosen for that day. It's insidious and extremely frustrating to those of use who are teacher educators and continues to be the norm. 

And yes, I headed straight for the 'métodos de línguas' section on arrival at FNAC. It didn't help. A micrcosm of the world of language learning. The most populated little section of the shop, it really was. Young 'n' old like bees around a hive. The need is there. What was on offer-awful! And that's just the books  addressing the patent and well-motivated and wonderful desire to learn languages-to communicate! At even best LTOs, the market leaders, and I've worked at them all in this country, I've overheard comments to make the blood boil-at least mine! 

'I don't like Cutting Edge... there isn't enough focus on grammar'. Teacher at the British Council, Porto

'I don't bother writing worksheets anymore....these new resource books are great'. Teacher in Lisbon

'I'm not doing any pron work...there's no need.' Teacher working in Lyon, teaching A2  level French business people

'We are doing 'model' (!) verbs in my next lesson...this session should be useful'. Pre-session chat in France

What's gone wrong? How did the profession get into this state? Is it, except in the eyes of a few blessed souls, a profession at all? I'm not blaming teachers for this state of affairs and do my best daily to inform, guide and challenge them at every available turn . There are deep rooted causes for at work here. They need to be brought to the surface. But that's why god created sceptics. More on this later.

In the end I shelled out on a book on marketing small businesses, a history of the migration of people in Europe at the beginning of the christian era and a book on Keynes!! Great reading-but I'll have to squeeze them in somehow. Courses to edit and teachers to find... I always hope for the best. You really have to in this field of work, and they'll get the guidance they need...and that is sure to be considerable. But that's fundamentally a good thing-we are in the business of education after all.

Saturday morning in Cascais with kids

The sun is setting fast over Carnaxide on a cool winter afternoon. Over the terrace wall glass-fronted blocks catch the weak pink tones of a fading day. Less cold than Newcastle and no hope of snow- getting soft they might say, but there is a real chill in the air.  A full lunch of 'cozido á portugesa'- real winter food with stuffed full of simple goodness and bits of pig-followed by an hour flat on the sofa watching a silly but funny romantic comedy about a con-woman and a divorce lawyer. ( I didn't miss the connection to my own life there). At last the weekend.


Recovery process after a frantic Thursday and a three hour session with my young teens. It's test time for them. Of most value was the speaking evaluation which revealed that, in contrast to the mid-week group, on paper more studious, more focussed, these guys are full of energy and were motivated by being given the chance to get to grips with the spoken word. As it should be. 


They can be such a problem as a group in a less than spacious room, but get them in twos or threes with a structured task and a real exchange of meaning taking place and they really shine. Great turn-taking skills, clearly pushing the limits of their resources, twisting and turning to get out what they wanted to say, helping each other out-and so considerate with each other. Mature beyond their years, and usual behaviour, and totally contrary to the myths surrounding Portuguese inability to hold a well managed conversation, they were great. I don't expect wonders on the written part of the test but who cares. 


And a flash in the pan? Something to build on, phoenix-like from the ashes of a class where control is an issue. Positive washback for the teacher too. Looking forward to next Saturday now.


This all linked rather nicely with the training session on Task-Based Learning I gave on Thursday. The test was structured as per Cambridge TESOL exams and was the first time any of them had done this kind of 'evaluation'. I praised them copiously at the end. They deserved it.


But the point was that they had something to say, accuracy was under-emphasised and  they completed the task producing some great language. Copious notes made for feedback and I may just have them doing the same task again before long.


Dark now and attention turns to material writing for Anton's project. Warm inside at least.   

First Day

A cold day for here. And I've been at it since nine this morning. A Skype call from my friend Moray in Thailand and plans being laid. 


So it starts, much work to do to find the right platform for my attempt (well-founded) to revolutionise the shoddy world of TESOL by dragging it into the 21st Century.