(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.
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