A very long day not yet over brings on a moaning session which will be replaced, I'm sure, after  a reasonable night's slumber and  comfortable dreams by my usual enthusiasm for what we do. We all have our off-days and if this isn't the space for public catharsis, where else is? I'll no doubt be back on with the course writing in the morning non the worse. However, much of this will remain valid.  So here we go. Tomorrow is another day.

It's a sad  fact that the world of language teaching and learning lags far behind most other areas of professional, social and academic life.  The teaching of English, as a profession and as a business activity, has more often than not failed to provide solutions for those needing to use it for communicative purposes in their own special contexts, if treated in a predominantly statistical fashion. I am entirely conscious while writing this that much good-will and a lot of hard work is put into the construction, running and follow-up of learning encounters the world over. But all is surely not well in the house of TESOL. 

Working conditions are often, and notoriously, depressing, while delivery of service remains on the whole uninformed by the rapidly growing and extensive research being carried out at leading centres of learning throughout the English speaking world and elsewhere. Piecemeal approaches at the ‘chalk-face’ are routinely employed with little or no reference to objectives and learner wishes, needs and contextual peculiarities. No overall strategy is formulated and made public, except through occasional reference to the syllabus provided in the first few pages of proscribed coursebooks (most of which, willingly or otherwise, encourage the perpetuation of the popular myth that in order to be able to speak the desired language a thorough knowledge of sentence level grammar, as exemplified in the written form of the language, is the number one pre-requisite).  

As pressure rises to ´get through the book’, even those carefully crafted and professionally written, such vital niceties as the pronunciation system of the language and lexico-grammatical patterns at phrase level which, many commentators believe, form the backbone of the language, are treated as no more than areas for on the spot correction, a technique about whose efficacy there are serious doubts, and fall by the wayside. That there are such things as spoken grammars, of which ongoing research has identified deep rooted differences when compared to their written counterparts and features of which, since the advent of language corpora are beginning to be described in some detail, many teachers remain woefully ignorant. (This ignorance is far from being the fault of the teachers themselves-with no overarching  system of accreditation in existence and minimal and misdirected training being the norm.) Learner acquaintance with text level features of language are quite often given belated attention in EAP or exam class scenarios and more often than not, limited to the presentation and practice a standardised set of cohesive devices seen in written language, many of which are, in fact, sparingly used by native speakers and the misunderstanding of whose subtleties give rise to many a red line or exclamation mark.

Surely this ground level analysis paints too depressing a picture. But is it surprising when what happens in the learning context is very often, dependent on the goodwill of badly paid teachers, who themselves lack any viable support and have been trained either inadequately, or for far too short a time? There are responsible people and organisations out there. I'm working for one at the moment. But these are far outnumbered by the unscrupulous and it's taken as granted in most environments that novice teachers need to take care in selecting from the literally thousands of seeming opportunities out there.

Again this is hardly the fault of the teachers. Llearners in many cases are seen as little more than sources of ready income for unscrupulous owners of ‘language schools’, who have little or no background in the field, and even less interest in the exciting developments in research into the nature of language learning, teaching and the language itself coming out of leading tertiary education institutions from Adelaide to Oxford and beyond. Many are the tales of woe recounted by those working in this field, as a few minutes browsing the TEFL Blacklist (http://teflblacklist.blogspot.com/) will clearly show.  

This scenario repeats itself throughout the world, and it is little wonder that the author of an article in the Guardian some years ago coined the term McTEFL, a term which, painfully and sadly, all too accurately describes the experiences of many who have toyed with the idea of making this their calling and have been sent scurrying back with a year or two’s experience of living in Italy, Thailand or Bolivia to find a ‘real’ job with little or nothing to show for it except a few vague memories and a distaste for teenagers and public transport and absolutely for sure, no savings. Very often, and hardly surprisingly, many end up in situations which if not outright dangerous, border on the ludicrous when looked back from the safe distance of years and miles. 

Woe is me...for a while only! Someone's got to do something about this mess and maybe the internet is the way. I had better get a letter to the council written then-while there's still a council to write to and all will be right with the world. So to sleep then  Sleep-and the world will be a new place, a fresh place and opportunities will appear. LIke each and every day. Must be getting close to dropping-gabbling away. Better get dreaming.

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