Jeremy Harmer's Blog

One of 11 pages from the 2015 edition of the Practice of ELT; there are ideas everywhere!!

I didn’t want to write this blog post. I still don’t want to but events, and the ever-grinding wheels of the ELT rumour mill, make it almost unavoidable. Coupled with that is the fact that, with no intention or action on my part, things are being said and discussed which are to some, it seems, frustratingly opaque.

In case you have no idea what I am talking about it is the accusation, made in a closed Facebook group where (quite rightly) I have no access or ability to defend myself – and since repeated elsewhere – that I stole someone’s talk (and others’) and passed it off as my own. If that accusation was indeed true I would be guilty of severe professional misconduct.

Every talk I prepare – and I assume this goes for other conference speakers and workshop leaders – takes a long long time to put together. Weeks sometimes, sometimes much much longer. In that process we read, listen watch, attend other talks, have conversations, and suck in information from all sides. Speaking personally it is sometimes an incredibly lonely process interrupted by sudden flashes of excitement and the wonderful moment when things start falling into place – so that a talk finally emerges. Ideas, during this process, fly around everywhere.

In the case in point I became interested in a particular topic because of a plenary I attended (and have acknowledged everywhere) nearly two years ago. I used that talk as the basis for planning my own session on a similar topic. During the subsequent months (in this case literally months) it took to put my talk together I scoured the internet, read, referred back to my earlier talks, blogs, books etc and kept my eyes and ears wide open to what was going on in the world and which might add ‘grist to the mill’. And had a number of conversations. One of these – stimulating, wide-ranging and enjoyable – lead to the current accusation, even though it was only one of many many sources for my thinking and talk development.

It gets difficult, this blizzard of ideas etc and can sometimes lead to accusations, for example, of using someone else’s ‘meme’ or idea – even where such ideas are in common currency all around us and no one can really claim ownership of them.

This kind of problem is not new: classical music composers have always incorporated parts of other people’s work (even where they are not conscious of it). They use folk tunes, and draw from a tapestry of all the other melodies floating in the air around and above them as they seek for inspiration. I think of the times, sitting in orchestra, rehearsing a symphony by X and suddenly thinking ‘wait a minute – that’s a direct copy of something written by Y’ – though it wasn’t really a copy at all, at least not a deliberate copy, just part of the creative sharing, borrowing, and unconscious intertexuality of music creation. As a songwriter myself I understand the difficulty (aka impossibility) of ever producing a song which is genuinely melodically original. To say nothing of the lyrics.

And what of ELT and the talks and workshops that many of us (wish to) offer. I have an endless supply of memories of sitting in a conference hearing someone else tell a joke or anecdote that I thought was ‘mine’!! (which it almost certainly never was; I will probably have got it from somewhere else myself). I think of the many many times when someone has used my formulation of something (from, say, one of my methodology books) without saying where it came from – because it had become, in some way, common currency. Or worse, that sinking feeling, as you attend someone else’s talk, that yours has ‘had it’, because theirs is so similar (and usually better). And yes, inadvertently I may have done the same with other speakers’ content (that is if it WAS their original content in the first place), though I try to be as scrupulous as I can be about these things (as do my peers, the ones I respect anyway). The fact is that we learn endlessly and continually from the amazing wealth of talent around us all in the field of ELT. In that context, if someone brings a lack of attribution to our attention (that we didn’t give proper credit where credit was due) we are honour bound to do something about it.

In the case that provoked this post, amongst the many other speakers, books, sources I referenced during the talk (and there were a lot) it IS true that I was discourteous enough not to mention my conversee as one of the many people I had read, watched, listened to or talked with; made aware of that I instantly did so – as I am and was honour-bound to do – in the places where such acknowledgement might be useful or helpful for them. (I have resolved never to give the talk again, as it happens; I have no desire to cause anyone upset, even if I disagree, categorically, with their view of the situation. There are a lot of other things to talk about in ELT).

This whole area of ideas and who they belong to is, as I have said, complex and difficult to negotiate. An accusation of stealing is serious; a carelessness in giving credit is regrettable. So if there is anyone else out there who thinks I (or other speakers) have stolen their talk or ideas, please let us know and if they are right I (and I am sure colleagues in a similar situation) will instantly do something about it (if anything can be done). In my case I should point out that I have a detailed record, going back to 1993, of exactly when I first (and subsequently) gave the many talks I have worked on. That should at least make it easy to establish any causal chronological relation there is (if there is one) between someone else’s work and mine, for example. In the muddy in-between? More difficult (as this blog suggests), but we’ll try. At least I will.

So that’s my blog. Please feel free to comment – respectfully, as I have tried to do here. The real question is this; who owns ideas and how should we deal with that?

[image error]On the way to Stansted to attend a conference a few days ago I found myself (in the car) listening to a BBC radio programme called ‘Breakfast with the disruptors’ in which someone who has disrupted an industry meets up with someone from that industry who has been ‘disrupted’. Like the winner and loser after a boxing match, I suppose

In case you are wondering, disruption is a buzzword around the business community. It describes a situation of either ‘high-end disruption’ (where some new product wipes out a product that people used to use – think digital vs Overhead projectors) or ‘low-end disruption’ (where someone comes up with a better, cheaper, easier or more efficient way of doing something – think old check-in desks vs online check-in and boarding cards on mobile devices). Those aren’t my terms. They come from a book by Clayton Christensen called ‘The Innovators Dilemma’. He points out that low-end disruption is by far the most dangerous, because if someone can come up with a business model that completely undercuts yours (both financially, emotionally and in convenience terms) you’ve had it.

My interest in disruption was first aroused by a plenary at the English Australia conference in Brisbane in November 2015. The speaker (it was a brilliant plenary) was Dom Thurbon; he showed the power of disruption with examples from around the world of business and invention. With reference to the demise of Kodak he came up with the mantra that ‘change is slow until it isn’t’ and then gave us examples of how people re-think what they do to try and stave off the danger of disruption. ‘In times of change’, he said ‘the primary driver of success was an ability (and willingness) to challenge assumptions’.

The question of course is whether the ELT ‘industry’ is vulnerable to disruption and in what way. Well for a start, it’s not as if people haven’t been trying to do this for some time now. The whole ‘adaptive learning’ industry (so ably tracked by Philip Kerr on his remarkable blog) has been trying to disrupt language teaching -without, it must be said, too much success so far; testing (and the teacher’s role in it) has been disrupted by computer grading. Meanwhile marketing and solutions expert (and speaker) Jacqueline Kaasteen has been talking up disruption and suggesting ways that organisations can deal with this in terms of marketing, recruitment and delivery (I have benefitted from discussions with her on this topic).

My own interest (for obvious reasons) is more methodological/pedagogic than anything else. For example is the grammar syllabus REALLY the best foundation for learning? Maybe Stephen Krashen is right and comprehensible input is the ONLY way people get language (although that is, not unsurprisingly, a somewhat controversial view)? Does the increasing popularity of CLIL suggest major pedagogic disruption? What about Sugata Mitra and his ideas of ‘minimally invasive education (MIE)? Or what about that school in Berlin where they just set students tasks – with little teaching (in the traditional sense? Perhaps it’s time to revisit TBL big time?

What do you think? Are we vulnerable? What assumptions would you challenge? What do YOU think is going to happen to us? Bye bye ELT?

The photograph is a still from ‘Teachers at Work’, a video which accompanies the 2015 (fifth) edition of  The Practice of English Language Teaching. We filmed primary, secondary, tertiary and adult classes in Mexico, Turkey and the UK.

‘PELT’ was first published in 1983.  That first edition was written while I was involved in teacher training in Mexico. It came about because on returning to that country after completing an MA in Applied Linguistics my brain was so addled with undigested applied linguistics my trainees couldn’t understand anything I said. But they could understand the written notes I gave them after my mixed-up input sessions! Those notes became the first edition of the book.

In 32 years the book has become something of a standard and because of this it has become absolutely necessary to update/upgrade it over the years (1991, 2001, 2007, 2015). Speaking personally it has been a kind of self-willed CPD (continuing professional development).

So what is new in 2015? What are the issues in today’s English language teaching world?  How has the ‘ELT world changed in 32 years. It seems to me theatre about three big areas to think about:

1 The world off English and English language teaching has changed out of all recognition. First speakers of English as a second or additional language outnumber first-language speakers (‘native speakers’) but a factor of maybe 2:1 (Rajagapolan)4:1 (Crystal) or 5:1 (Graddol). Which means that the varieties of properly functioning English that are spoken have multiplied enormously. Furthermore the majority of English-language conversations in the world take place between people, neither of whom have English as a first language. And so all the discussions about what variety to teach, about ELF (or English as an international language) are absolutely vital – and the raise concerns about the mean of accuracy as Scott Thornbury articulated so well recently.

2 Technology is the big game changer I guess. Is Adaptive (teacher-less) learning the way forward? If you want to know about that read Philip Kerr’s informed and somewhat chilling blog. Do we believe in the ‘technology can solve everything’  SOLEs world of people like Sugata Mitra? Is the course book doomed – with access to the internet and the ubiquity of mobile devices (but careful! Remember that 60% of the world’s population have no access to the internet according to Sir Tim Berners Lee a few months ago)?

3 And leading on from that, are any materials necessary? What ARE the best ways to learn a language? Is the mind a computer (e.g. Chomsky, Krashen etc)? Does explicit knowledge about language help learners? Is communication the key – and, leading on from that, is interactive group work the way forward? Is dialogue necessary (pace Dogme or unplugged teaching)? And what about CLIL (content and language integrated learning?

There are other issues too: modern digitally delivered tests – with free speaking and writing marked by computers, not humans – threaten to break an essential student-teacher link; ‘western’ language teaching is not universally exportable. We (people brought up on western-style methodology) have to learn to be importers too; the whole learning styles discussion has been enliven by people who question its lack of evidence base.

etc

But what do YOU think are the pressing issues for language teaching today?

In these ‘method talk’ postings I am sharing paragraphs I have recently been writing about issues to do with methodology and teaching. They are attempts to ‘call things as they are’ and to reflect both a ‘con-sensus’ and ‘common sense’ (though that always begs the question ‘common to whom?’)

I would welcome your comments (praise, perplexity, disagreements and brickbats equally!)

So here goes:

1 How helpful is research?

It would be extremely useful if we could simply read some research and know, as a result of it, how to teach and what methods would be most useful. We might then be able to say with conviction that method A is a better way of teaching than method B or that Technique C works but technique D doesn’t – and so on. But of course it’s not that easy. For as Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada point out  “All of the theories…….use metaphors to represent something that cannot be observed directly.” (Lightbown and Spada 2013:120). We can not ‘see’ learning and so we try to find metaphorical ‘parallels’ to explain what we think is happening. The problem, of course, is that theorists don’t necessarily agree, whether their insights come from classroom research or from profound beliefs about what is going on. As a result “Educators who are hoping that language acquisition theories will give them insight into language teaching practice are often frustrated by the lack of agreement among the ‘experts’. (Lightbown and Spada op.cit:121). “There is,” writes Rod Ellis, “considerable controversy.” (Ellis 2014:32) In particular there seems to be little agreement in SLA research about the exact usefulness of focused instruction or even about whether corrective feedback works or not.

What should teachers do with the differing accounts of learning success that research offers them? One possibility is just to ignore it completely and go on teaching as before. However, that would be unfair not only on students who might not always respond to ‘as before’ teaching, but also on teachers themselves who benefit hugely from constant questioning and investigation about what they do. Furthermore, the constant demands of in-the-classroom teaching sometimes mean that we just don’t have space to think about what we are doing as much as we would like. Researchers, however, do exactly the kind of thinking that teachers would do if they had more time. And each account of the research they do is like another piece of some vast pedagogical jigsaw. Sometimes the pieces don’t fit, sometimes they do. But the thinking they provoke is the life-blood of the inquisitive and enquiring teacher.

This does not suggest that teachers should read theory uncritically, nor that theory should necessarily dominate teacher thinking. As we shall see, the ability to assess what theorists tell us is a vital teacher skill. But we might go further too and say that research that is divorced from teacher reality is not very useful. Indeed the kind of Action Research that teachers do is, in many ways, just as important as the (sometimes) more cerebral research carried on by SLA theorists. In an ideal world, therefore, there would be satisfying two-way channels of investigation between teachers and researchers so that what teachers have to say is valued as much as what researchers are trying to tell them.

References:

Ellis, R (2014)   ‘Principles of Instructed Second Language learning’ in Celce-Murcia et al Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. Heinle Cengage Learning

Lightbown, P & Spada, N (2013) How languages are learned:4th edition. Oxford University Press

Last Saturday Sugata Mitra gave a plenary at an international teachers’ conference. When it was over a proportion of the audience gave him a standing ovation, but an equal number refused to get to their feet and a proportion of the ‘reaming seated’ crowd expressed outrage and fury at what they had heard and seen. He was an angel. He was a devil. You can watch the plenary in question here, and you can read Graham Stanley’s careful response here.

I have blogged about Sugata Mitra before in reference to his TED talk – and his plenary at the IATEFL 2014 conference over a year later was not significantly different from his TED appearance. And back then, like most speakers at TED conferences, Mitra was encouraged speak passionately and idealistically about something he believes in – and something which promotes technology’s ability to answer all problems – and to be sure of a rapturous reception. TED audiences only have to listen to 20 minutes or so and are primed to accept all visionaries as, well, visionaries. It’s like being at an advertiser’s pitch where everything sells and there are no problems with what is being said.

A group of practicing teachers (all of whom wrestle daily with issues about education, educational restrictions and how people learn) presented him, I suspect, with something more of a challenge.

Briefly (because you can find out what he thinks in many places). Mitra advocates SOLEs (self organized learning environments) where children group round computer terminals to find answers to big questions such as ‘why do men and not women have moustaches?’ or ‘Did dinosaurs really exist?’ He reminds us that children are capable of learning a lot by themselves in this way – much more, perhaps, than in a traditional transmission-based classroom. And in situations of educational deprivation, especially, if we can make that information available online the sky is, literally, the limit. Mitra promotes schools ‘in the cloud’ where children who have no (or unenthusiastic) teachers can learn and develop in an internet-rich utopia. Thus he has set up computer centres in rural Indian villages and UK schools, and these centres can be visited virtually by ‘grannies in the cloud’ (an unfortunate nomenclature in my opinion) by which he means older adults with time on their hands who can probe the children’s knowledge, interact with them, enccourage them, show them things etc. In his post-plenary interview in Harrogate he says that one of the roles of such cloud grannies is to say well done etc.

My description doesn’t do justice to the heady excitement of what he has to say. I am not immune to it. The idea that if you prime children properly and give them the right tools there is no limit to what they can do is tantalisingly enticing. Such child-driven learning is, according to the SOLE toolkit ‘self-organised, curious, engaged, social, collaborative, motivated by peer interest, fueled by adult encouragement and admiration’. Not only that, but the dream of bringing such education benefits to disadvantaged communities is intoxicating. No wonder he has won prizes and is garlanded with flowers.

And yet there are three problems I have with this over-superficial (it seems to me) account. I write about teaching methodology, after all. They are these:

1 Any teacher with experience knows that it is one thing to put educational temptation in a child’s way (or an adult’s); quite another for that student to actually be tempted.  Mitra’s claim is that this always works, a kind of learner autonomy nirvana. Yet we know this is just not true. Some students try to be autonomous and some don’t. Some succeed and some don’t. In any group different roles are played; not all learners learn equally. There is nothing wrong (and everything right) with discovery-based experiential learning. It just doesn’t work some of the time. Yet Mitra’s discourse includes no doubts or caveats. His well-rehearsed and extremely effective ‘show’ exists in TED-land, not in a discussion of teaching reality.

2 What good teachers know is that the precise nature of teacher intervention is crucial. Our job is to keep students on task, help them to focus, help them when they are having problems, find different solutions as problems emerge, be a resource and a prompter, a motivator – and much more. I hear little about this from Sugata Mitra except for the general role of cloud grannies to use their apparent ignorance to get kids talking, and their encouragement. Yet the pedagogy of what he claims to be (remember, this claim is important) revolutionary needs to be considerably more fleshed out than this. What interventions are successful and which are not? What precisely is the role of a cloud granny and how can she (or perhaps he) make the whole experience more productive.

3 Sugata Mitra claims, perhaps jokingly, that we don’t need to know things any more because it is all available online. This goes hand-in-hand with his belief that the education system is ‘outdated. We don’t need it any more’ (in his TED talk). Yet without our accumulated knowledge and memories what are we? Our knowledge is, on the contrary, the seat of our intuition and our creativity. Furthermore, the gathering of that knowledge from our peers and, crucially, our elders and more experienced mentors is part of the process of socialization. Humanity has thought this to be self-evident for at least 2000 years and though it is the responsibility, perhaps, for younger people to constantly challenge the status quo, still that social interaction between experience and inexperience, age and youth etc is the way society grows and how children become socialized. Grannies in the cloud? To give Sugata Mitra deserved credit, that’s a lot better than nothing. As an alternative to decent schooling? I don’t think so.

I am a paid-up technophile and love what technology allows me to do and experience in our present reality. But as Gavin Dudeney has said (again!) it’s not the issue, especially when it is being used to promote dodgy pedagogic practices. I do not accuse Sugata Mitra of that. But I do accuse him of oversimplifying complex issues of pedagogy to offer an over-idealistic technology-fuelled solution to everything.

So I guess it’s over to you, now.

I was reading the Guardian yesterday and came across a short interview with the singer Sheryl Crow during which she responded to the question ‘what have you sacrificed for your art?’ with the answer “my love life. I think whatever you give your attention to is what thrives.” And this chimed in with a topic I’ve been working with for some time, namely what I have called ‘the force of focus’ (in contrast to multi-tasking, for example). And today, once again, I have been working with teachers in Antwerp (Belgium), trying to pin down what students should give their attention to and how to make sure it has an impact.

But before we go on, and in case you haven’t listened to Sheryl Crow before, here she is singing an old (but to my mind beautiful) song called ‘The first cut is the deepest’.

What you give your attention to is what thrives? So the real task of a teacher, perhaps, is to direct the students’ attention so that this will help them (in this case their language) thrive. And let’s be clear, if you let your attention wander – and if there is too much distraction – then nothing thrives. At least that’s what William James wrote in 1890 in his Principles of Psychology. He said:

“Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.”

So focusing matters in language study and language practice, much as, perhaps, musicians who practise need to concentrate, be analytic, take small passages and work them through rather than noodling around. Or, as Anders Ericsson says “If you’re not practicing deliberately -whether it’s a foreign language, a musical instrument or any other new skill – you might as well not practice at all”

What then are the best ways of getting students to direct attention? Do ‘old’ techniques such as PPP (presentation, practice, production) do the trick? Or do we need more ‘heart’ involved? More creativity perhaps? More personal involvement? But if we have real buy-in (emotionally) might that distract our students from the attention that they should be giving to language analysis (that’s what Sheryl Crow, the other way round, seems to be suggesting!) If, for example, we have students involved in communicative activities, all fired up with tasks etc, then the attention they should be giving to exactly how the language works may be diverted elsewhere.

And one last crack at this conundrum. In his 2013 book ‘Focus: the Hidden Driver of Excellence’ (Bloomsbury), Daniel Goldman quotes Albert Einstein who said that “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is its faithful student. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.” I have been pondering this for days now. Because the challenge is how to get students to use their rational mind when analysing language (that’s the focusing part, and the attention that may help their language learning thrive) whilst at the same time using their sacred gifts – because surely that’s a good idea too, isn’t it? How on earth do you do that?

I wonder.

Any ideas?

I was very taken with Luke Meddings’ recent blogpost about the tensions between education and big business (amongst other things). He suggested that whereas we teach to reach students, to help students reach their potential, others see teaching as a form of investment, a money-making opportunity. It was not difficult to agree with his heartfelt plea for less ‘interference’ in the (language) classroom.

Meanwhile, however, the British Ofsted chief (Ofsted = office for standards in education) wants tests for 7 & 14-year olds back; they were abolished because many teachers  thought, I surmise, like Luke. Sir Michael Wislhire, the Oftsed chief) is having none of it. “Talk to any good head teacher,” he writes, “and they will tell you it was a mistake to abolish those tests. That’s because good teachers  use those tests to make sure every child learns well. In getting rid of the tests we conceded too much ground to vested interests.” etc

Confusing, no? I made a little videoblog (or Vramble = video ramble) on the subject. Very naive. Recorded on nothing more hi-tech than a Flipcam (the fancy microphone wasn’t connected)….

What’s your view about all this? I’d love to know. Then perhaps I’d know what I thought too!

Someone (let’s call him Marc Prensky!) once came up with a rather neat description of the difference between some kids and some older people. The former, he suggested, were digital natives who grew up with technology all around them as a given – as a normal part of their lives –  whereas the latter (that’s people like me) were digital immigrants who had to learn how to join the technological world.

At the time, I remember, this distinction seemed to make some sense. After all when I was a child we didn’t even have electric typewriters. When I started teaching there were no photocopiers – we used Gestetner machines (hands up if you can remember them!) – and even the OHP (overhead projector) hadn’t turned up yet. So as a kid I was technologically pretty backward (and backward in other things too – but this isn’t that kind of blog!!) So when, in 1985, I think it was, I got my first BBC B computer I was pretty excited.  But I was, er, already quite old when that happened – long before, I suspect, most kids around at that time came anywhere near anything so high-powered (sic). So, even in 1985, was I a native or an immigrant?

An Acorn BBC computer – like my first…

I’ve had a love affair with technology ever since that first computer. And I’m pretty adept at using it too, I reckon in teaching, presenting and just living. But whereas other people know more about, for example, using Voki and Second Life (because they use them frequently or have need or a desire to use them), I am significantly better at using Logic Pro software for recording and mixing on my computer than most people (including most of those pesky ‘natives’). I have just published three new songs/tracks which I did here in my flat using relatively  complicated technology. Most kids, however, couldn’t or wouldn’t stand a chance. Who’s the immigrant,then, who’s the native?

Logic Pro screen for my song ‘Barefoot through the desert’

But my real complaint with the native/immigrant distinction is not so much whether I buy into it (I think it had some resonance once, perhaps, but that was then, not now); no, what really upsets me is the baleful effect it has had on the way people think about children and adults. It has effected the way teachers, in particular, talk, think and act. For example I recently read another article about how parents (aka teachers) always have to get their kids to help them solve techhy problems. And just recently at the 40th MEXTESOL conference, one of the plenary speakers came up with the same old trope – that our students know more about technology than we do and it is up to us to get up to their speed.

What absolute rubbish! Because, in my opinion, the effect of the wretched native/immigrant duality is to suggest that all kids are techno wizards. That all kids absorb technology like they breathe the air. And you know what, IT JUST ISN’T TRUE! Some children are instant techno wizards, but many others aren’t. Some kids spend all their time gaming, others don’t. Some kids spend all their time on Facebook, others don’t go anywhere near it (and are probably migrating away from it anyway as I write this blog). And you want to know more? Some adults who came to computers late are techno wizards and some aren’t. Some adults (I have met a few of them) spend hours of their life gaming, some don’t. Some adults spend all their time on Facebook. Many don’t. And, to go back to Logic Pro the recording software, some kids (a few) spend hours playing with it and so do some adults (a few). Many kids and many adults just wouldn’t know where to start.

Back in 1996 Theordore Roznak wrote a piece about computers for The New Internationalist. Much of what he says sounds ‘quaint’ now, but one thing is true. “It is a myth,” he wrote, ” that all children born since 1990 have an innate ability to use computers.” And though the world of computers has changed beyond our or his wildest dreams back then, still the idea that kids come from their mothers’ wombs with a digital predisposition – that they learn ‘digital’ as a mother tongue – is just not sustainable. We might as well say that kids don’t need to be taught to write! Or that all children are good writers. And you KNOW that’s not true. Why else do tech wizards Gavin Dudeney and Nicky Hockly (not kids, the last time I looked) need to write books on the importance of teaching Digital Literacy. As Argentinean secondary school teacher Vicky Saumell wrote on Facebook recently “I do lots of technology integration and I have to TEACH my teenagers how to do most things. They only know their FB and Twitter, and of course nothing about privacy issues.”

So (from the heart) let’s STOP talking as if kids had some superior technical ‘connection’. Such an absurdity (like the native/immigrant duality, which may have had currency once but doesn’t cut it for me any longer) is just not sustainable and it peverts the way we discuss education 

Phew! I got a bit excited about that. How do you feel about it? If a speaker at a conference talks (again) about how kids know more about technology than teachers do, how will YOU react?

As October faded into November I found myself giving talks at the fabulous TELLSI conference in Mashad, Iran, immediately followed by a stint at the IGA conference (Instituto Guatamalteco-Americano) in Guatemala City, and then MEXTESOL in Queretero, Mexico. That was special because it was the organisation’s 40th anniversary, and I have to admit (proudly, come on, proudly!) that I spoke at MEXTESOL’s first ever conference in Tampico all those years ago.

Perhaps the most interesting of the three conferences was the one in Iran. Why? Well because it’s not so easy to get to Iran right now (though it may, InshAllah, get easier soon if our governments talk more to each other). But the conference was beautifully organised, the welcome was effusive and the standard of presentations was terrifically high. I found myself wishing that there had been more international visitors listening to the riches that Iranian ELT has to offer.

In Mashad, at the Tabran Institute of Higher Education I spoke in a large theatre, more or less rectangular-shaped, with me on one of the shorter sides (in other words it was a kind of vertical arrangement, full frontal – see the photo)

The teachers at the 2013 TELLSI conference in Iran

In Mexico I spoke in a massive modern theatre with galleries and circles things. But other large-audience speakers found themselves speaking in  rectangular rooms, only they were on one of the long sides of the rectangle. In other words they had a kind of horizontal room to deal with. That’s often happened to me, as in a Pearson conference in Mar del Plata, Argentina some years ago (see picture)

The thing is, I find it much much more difficult to animate one of those ‘sideways-on’ rooms than a long vertical one, and I wondered whether there is something wrong with me! But all the walking from side to side is sooo tiring (maybe I should stay still)! With a full-length room you can still feel like you are talking to the back of the room, but in a sideways-on room I always feel as if some people (especially in the front rows) are far far away. Rooms like that never get so engaged (I think) as vertical rooms.

Or is it just me? Or are there other things going on? For example, I reckon the acoustics make or break a presentation. I was in a large room with echo-ey acoustics in Montevideo a few weeks ago and I couldn’t understand a word the speaker said (but that might have been my Spanish!). Is the distance of the stage from the audience a factor (if you can’t get down to the audience level)? Or is the deciding factor (for success./engagement etc) the amount of available space? Do you prefer (both as speaker and participant) a crowded or nearly empty space?

If YOU were designing a new conference space how would you design it? When you go to a presentation where do YOU like the speaker to be? If you are a frequent presenter, what’s your favourite and least favourite space?

I’d be fascinated to hear your views.

I wonder if you have seen the Roman Polanksi movie The Ghostwriter, or read the novel The Ghost by Richard Harris that it is based on. The premise of the film and novel is that the central character is hired to ‘ghost’ the autobiography of a past unpleasant and venal British prime minister (not unlike – though the author unconvincingly denied it – Tony Blair). By ghost we mean, of course, that a professional writer interviews his or her subjects and then crafts their words into a book so that their name (not the ghostwriter’s) appears on the books covers.

If you haven’t seen the film, here is the trailer for it.

Of course lots of skulduggery (‘secretly dishonest or illegal activity – also used humorously’ according to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English)  take place in the book and the film, but ghostwriting itself is widely practised. Most of the politicians’ and sportspeople’s autobiographies you have read are ghosted. As Ewan McGregor says to the ex-prime minister “I interview you and turn your answers into prose”.

Might ghostwriting be a nice way of approaching storytelling and storywriting for upper intermediate/advanced students (or for that matter any level students)? I think/thought so, and used it in my demonstration ‘lesson’ at IATEFL Poland in Łodz two days ago. But like all teachers’ (my?) ideas it hangs on a filigree thread of plausibility!  Even if it is a good idea it’s probably been done by millions of others before me, anyway.  Whatever. I tried a number of things with my ‘class’:  for example (after they had watched the film trailer) I got my ‘students’ to watch a teacher telling a classroom story. Then they had to think of all the ‘ghostwriter’ follow-up questions they could have asked her to learn more about the incident and, perhaps as a result, make her story even more dramatic. We then thought of other ways she could have introduced her anecdote/story. After that we talked about getting students to research some of the vocabulary (collocations, chunks etc) of  key concepts of the story so that they could use them and thus ‘bump up’ the story’s impact. My ‘students’ told each other stories and were then interviewed in more depth about them, and then the ‘ghostwriters’ had to turn what they had heard (those stories) into 1st person narratives – as if it was their story (that’s exactly what a ghostwriter does).  My ‘students’ also looked at a faithful transcript of the anecdote they had heard/watched and talked about how to turn it into elegant written prose – and we discussed how this transcription and tidying up can be a useful way of analysing language and language use. I said I’d write a blog about it so that they could post any of their ghostwritten stories if they wanted.

They/you probably won’t! But you (dear reader) could always post your own ghostwritten paragraph or two if you felt like it. In other words, how could YOU best tell somoene else’s story?

But what do you think of ghostwriting? After all we all tell stories all of the time, and everyone has stories to tell. Might this be a way of getting really good narrative-writing results. Is it an effective way of having students analyse language (see transcription above). Is this better than teaching students stuff? Should students be given good models of ghostwritten narratives to look at first (as someone in Łodz suggested)? And anyway, how DO you get advanced students to write, and is narrative a useful or important genre anyway?

So many questions! There always are. Everything we do has a chance of working (even if, as perhaps here, it doesn’t quite come out right)