Why everyone in listening texts is a moron

If you’ve ever done voice work for an ELT listening text, I apologise. This is not a criticism of your acting abilities. I’m sure you did your best to imbue the dialogue with the gravity, levity or Marco-from-Brazil accent it required – but you still came off as a moron. Wow, that film sounds really interesting! Shall we see it together? Hey settle, Malibu Stacy. I love science-fiction films! What kind of films do you like? What, seriously? Oh, right. I like romantic films. Can’t get enough of that shit, matter of fact. My favourite film is The Notebook*. Have you seen The Notebook**?

via http://savona93.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07
/top-15-episodes-of-simpsons-according.html

Why are listening texts so crap? If I was an actor, I’d probably blame the writer. But I’m a writer, so I’m going to say that actually, although I have penned 10 appalling dialogues this very afternoon, it’s not (entirely) my fault either. And this is why.

Listening texts are inherently crap, and they always have been. Back in the day, when men were men and a television set was a luxury, they sort of made sense. In 2014, it’s nothing short of madness (Dear Hackney Council) to persist with them. When, in the real world, do you listen to, but not participate in, a conversation between two or more people that you can’t see? EAVESDROPPING, that’s when. And while eavesdropping may be a skill worth learning in both a first and second language, it ought to be part of a much, much larger aural repertoire.

Listening texts are crap for the same reason that radio advertising is crap: in the absence of visuals, context must be made verbally explicit. In Listening World, if someone spills their milkshake on my skirt I have to say Ohhhh! The milkshake is all over my skirt! in a ludicrous Home Counties way, because you can’t see the milkshake or my skirt or my terribly British, trying-not-to-mind face. What would actually happen (in normal Britain) is something like

A: Oh god, I’m so sorry.

B: Don’t worry about it. It’ll come off.

A: Are you sure? Sorry. God, SORRY. I’m really sorry.

On top of the visual issue, writers are often asked, for the purpose of exemplification, to shoehorn particular vocab items or grammatical structures into their dialogues – resulting in formality where there should be idiom, full sentences where there should be ellipsis, and ‘short answers’ that make you sound like you’ve got a twig up your bum. Can you speak Turkish? Yes, I can. Bzzzz. The correct answer is either Yeah a bit (if you’re fully proficient) or Haha no (if you’re not).

And that’s before you’ve even started on level-grading and appropriacy. For its apparent simplicity, the dialogue above is a nightmare on toast: come off is a phrasal verb at C2 (i.e. the highest possible) level; Are you sure? actually means ‘thanks for being nice about this’; and you can’t put god in there because religion and don’t take the lord’s global marketplace in vain.

So basically there are three problems – visuals, shoehorning and levels – with, I think, three reasonably straightforward solutions. If I was a proper writer who designed her own materials from scratch instead of spooning and smoothing words into someone else’s template, I would of COURSE implement these straight away. But I’m not, I’m just having a grumble, so proper authors (and dogmeticians) will just have to take responsibility until I pull my finger out. Many thanks in advance.

Visuals. Why are we still just listening to dialogues, when we can easily watch them? We have DVD players, laptops, projectors, interactive whiteboards, tablets and smartphones. Yes, there are classrooms around the world where none of this technology is present, but right now we’re treating those exceptions as the norm to the detriment of everyone else. There’s no reason to keep churning out ‘pure’ listening texts except maaaybe for certain context-free pronunciation activities, or because That’s the Way We’ve Always Done It. Which is pretty much the worst reason for doing anything, ever.

Shoehorning. The issue here is that we’re working backwards. Instead of writing a dialogue around a lexical set or grammar point, why aren’t we finding authentic dialogues and highlighting the language that’s actually used? As long as we work in this arse-over-tit way, even well-intentioned writers with desktop shortcuts to four different corpora are making their own lives more difficult and feeding students artificial language in the process.

"Excuse me. Have you ever won a
competition? What did you win?"

Levels. But what about the levelz? You can’t just go chucking authentic dialogue at beginners. Or can you? In a short exchange, is there any reason why we can’t focus on short chunks and collocations? The lexical approach says not (example: I knew and used the common Thai phrase mai bpen rai – ‘no problem’ – long before I knew the meaning of its three component words). If we insist on sticking to present simple and continuous at A1, present perfect simple at A2 and so on, we condemn learners to endless spiralling drivel about what time Zhang Li eats breakfast and whether Mohammed has ever ridden a horse. Motivation? Relevance? Poof.

I know I’m oversimplifying. More nuanced takes on the issue would be welcome. I’m just bored of scripting vacuous conversations and cross with myself for adding to the problem. Everyone in listening texts is not a moron; they’re forced to speak a version of English that doesn’t exist outside of coursebooks. But if, in five years’ time, we’re still skipping to track 32 and wondering why grown people are not fascinated by Maria’s morning ablutions…well, that makes all of us pretty moronic.

* My favourite film is Jurassic Park. ** I have never seen The Notebook.

The 10-year TEFL itch

New Year sends everyone a bit cuckoo.

An arbitrary progression of numbers on the Gregorian calendar has us all promising to run thrice around the block before sunrise when for the past 364 days we’ve stumbled out of bed at 08:52, snagging pyjama buttons on nostrils as we go, or to forsake delicious red wine and apple crumble for undelicious tonic water and millet crumpets until we’re the same size as when we entered puberty. Whence comes the madness?

In this marvellous article, author Emma Forrest suggests we resolve to stop hating ourselves this year (for jogging and self-loathing are surely fruit of the same tree) and I’m very much down with that, although so far I’ve resisted making any resolutions at all for 2013 – not because nothing in my life needs changing, but because everything does.

And as that sentence was unintentionally melodramatic, I shall backtrack a little.

2013 is the 10-year anniversary of my CELTA and the beginning of my teaching career, and I feel like I’ve ground to a halt. I’ve taught ESOL, ESL and EFL. I’ve taught beginners and I’ve taught advanced students. I’ve taught kids, teenagers and adults. I did my next-level teaching qualification and started an MA in Applied Linguistics, before realising my heart wasn’t in it and stopping as soon as the PGCert was under my belt. I’ve forayed into teacher training (which felt like being one step removed from the action) and academic management (which feels like being paid an extra €400 a month to answer half-hourly ‘Where is…?’ questions with something more specific / courteous than ‘Wherever you left it’).

I know I’m being a brat. I realise there’s a lot I haven’t done and don’t know and could learn, and I still enjoy being in the classroom, but the fire isn’t there. In short: I’ve got the 10-year TEFL itch. So now what?

The absence of obvious ladders to climb in this industry is lamented loudly and often, so I won’t tie myself in knots over it here, but I’ve become a mid-career cliché: don’t want to be a manager, don’t want to be a teacher trainer, better become a writer. For the last year I’ve been writing a coursebook in my spare time for a Taiwanese publisher, which has been educational and frustrating in equal measure (fixed-format chapters not being particularly conducive to creativity) but which has set me thinking about how I make my living.

Why do I work for the Man? The Man I work for is in fact a very nice Man, but that isn’t the point; in the 10 years that I’ve been a teacher, technology has changed the world of work beyond recognition. ‘Work’ is a now a dynamic concept (danke schön, internet!) and freelance writing, which seemed like a hopelessly impractical career choice when I left school, now looks like a manageable challenge. Not only manageable; joyous. Saying that I’d ‘better become a writer’ puts a facetious gloss on something I’ve wanted to do since I was small but somehow talked myself out of, and the prospect of spending my days writing does fill me with joy. I know I’m opening the door to pennilessness and rejection, but the freedom to bang out my own rhythm instead of shuffling along to someone else’s seems like a reasonable trade-off.

So this is my solution to the 10-year itch. If you’ve had (or heaven forbid, are having) a similar crisis I’d love your advice because it feels a bit like running away to join the circus, bar the unicycling clowns honking about the place before garrotting you with a tightrope as an elephant looks blithely on. What if writing turns out to be as hopelessly impractical a career as I feared at 18? What if I miss teaching? What if I'm...eek...not good enough? I guess the thing is just to get on and try. In 2013 I resolve to be brave, which will probably do me more good in the long term than jogging, choking down a millet cookie or signing up for a night class in contemporary tapestry.

[Images from here and here.]

Help! I've forgotten how to teach!

Well, gamarjoba. I’m in Tbilisi, and very pleasant it is too. Lest anyone is interested: it is currently 20-25°c in the daytime; you literally can’t move for BREAD; sheets of toilet paper are twice as long as they should be and light switches are upside down; and here is where I am right now (International House staffroom):

IH Tbilisi staffroom

But this blog post will be less about the fascinating city I’ve ended up in and more about my shaky return to the EFL classroom after a two year absence. Teaching, it turns out, is not quite like riding a bike (I blogged about this back in February).

Actually, although I say return to the EFL classroom, really this is my first EFL job apart from a disastrous three-month stint in a Chinese university that I’ve attempted to scrub off my CV. In London I taught – if you still believe these acronyms hold water, and I kinda do – ESOL, and Sri Lanka and Malaysia were ESL contexts (an aside: Georgia, as a post-Soviet nation, is culturally more baffling to me than either Sri Lanka or Malaysia as post-British colonies, and there’s something a bit wrong about that). So I guess one of the first challenges is getting my head round the fact that I’m truly teaching a foreign language here, in spite of Tbilisi’s scattered environmental Roman script and English-menus-available-on-request.

I definitely went into my first class on Monday with my ESL hat on (Lord knows I wish that was an actual hat, alas no) and I think perhaps that was at the root of some of the problems I had. The students were very weak for Upper Intermediate, I decided, and this was going to be an issue because the designated coursebook for the level, Speak Out, is already extremely dense and challenging, and we have only sixteen weeks to get through it, and there was no way we could possibly…

…aaaand breathe.

As I flopped down in the staffroom during the break, babbling agitatedly about levels and testing, my three wonderfully sane and rational co-managers pointed out:

(a)  I’m not in Borneo any more (in case the BREAD was too subtle a clue). Although coursebooks, testing and other remnants of a somewhat bygone education system are still the norm in Georgia, they need not dictate what I do in class; our purpose is still to teach. (Huh? And no-one’s going to complain if I don’t complete every single exercise?)

(b)  As an ADOS, I actually have the power to change things – or at least, I have the ear of the person who waves the wand of change. Novel.

(c) The students have just returned from a three-month break in which they were likely exposed to minimal or zero English, and they therefore appear weaker than they are.

We're not in Borneo any more

I’m still not sure I can guide students though a whole level in 100 hours when for many of them, the material is interlanguage+2 and requires considerable scaffolding – but the obstacles are definitely not insurmountable. I’ve spent the last couple of days drawing up a sample syllabus and mapped test, based on the book. Yesterday I also suggested (in a hamster voice, I suspect, as it was my first management meeting and I’d already sat in Someone Else’s Chair) a move towards continued assessment, which wasn’t immediately balled up and chucked out the nearest window, so time will tell.

There will be other, more personal challenges too. I noticed a lot of rustiness in my own classroom practice, for example:

* I talked way too fast. My CELTA tutors were calling me out on this nine years ago.

* The students all spoke over each other and I felt powerless to stop them (‘Welcome to Georgia’ – DOS), although things were slightly better in the second class when I knew their names.

* My instructions assumed far too much prior understanding and I think I may even – once – have checked them with ‘Is that clear?’

* I had to look up the rules for indirect questions. For me that’s less shaming than not looking them up, but I’m pretty sure I knew them a couple of years ago.

* My boardwork was shocking, like a kid had set about the wall with a crayon. In the absence of IWBs or OHPs, I’m going to need to plan what to do with my shiny white metre-squared much more thoroughly.

* The last time I taught a language class I hadn't joined Twitter, and now I know how very very very much I don't know, I'm apt to be hypercritical of a perfectly acceptable lesson :) But maybe this is good?

Respect my authoritaaii.

On the plus side, one thing that hasn’t disappeared is my love of teaching. The five classes I’ve taught so far have been a pleasure, in spite of cringing at myself every few minutes, and the students have left each one smiling. I’ve convinced myself fairly thoroughly that these were smiles of pleasure rather than bemusement. I've realised I actually learnt a lot about pronunciation in the last twenty months, having been forced to focus on it in Borneo, and I'm now hearing and challenging stuff that would previously have passed me by. And another huge plus is that the majority of students here are professional people with study skills and opinions and pretty strong motivation to learn. It’s nice just to feel that I’m not dragging horses to water.

So no, teaching is not like riding a bike, and I might need stablisers for a while yet, so I feel fortunate indeed to be surrounded (both physically and virtually) by such knowledgeable and supportive educators. As for the other part of my job, 'managing' - well, haha, there's a project of many years' duration, if I'm ever batpoop-crazy enough to apply for another senior post. At present I have the authority of a handkerchief, so expect more posts as events warrant.

Confessions of a coursebook-writing rookie

I’ve not been posting much recently. Partly this is because I’m preparing to leave my job in Borneo and all kinds of stuff has been happening in my personal life, but partly it’s because all my free time has been sucked up writing an EFL* textbook. It’s the first book I’ve written, the learning curve is steep and I’ve allowed myself to back-burner almost everything else…but this morning I thought, well, isn’t this exactly the sort of thing I should take time out to reflect on, and blog about? So here I am.

Power On Level 2. I'm writing Level 3.

First to say a little about the book I’m writing: it’s called Power On and it’s for upper-intermediate/advanced university students in Asia (the publisher is based in Taiwan). It focuses on reading skills, so each unit of 36 includes:

Lead-in exercises
A 350-word reading passage
Exercises on a dedicated reading skill
Exercises on a dedicated grammar point
Reading comprehension questions
Target vocabulary exercises
Critical thinking questions

This tightly prescribed format has proved to be both a blessing and a curse: on one hand, each chapter has been easier to write than the last, since I am merely slotting information into holes rather than evaluating different pedagogical approaches; on the other, I’m feeling increasingly ambivalent about having my name on the cover of a book which looks so unlike something I would have designed under my own steam. But we all have to begin somewhere, and the prospect of having my name on the front of a book is still rather thrilling (may the ELT gods strike me down for my vanity).

Aaaanyway. Here are a few rambling reflections on the past few months of writing.

My 10 year-old self knew best

When I was a kid, I wrote and wrote and wrote. My teachers told me I was good at it, and I had faith in my own abilities. I wanted to be an author or a journalist (I also wanted to be a detective, briefly, and spent a number of Saturdays experimentally dusting the neighbours’ fences for fingerprints and running errands for my mother ‘in disguise’, but it’s easier to gloss over that for the purposes of this post). But something happened during adolescence that even now I can’t explain – I left school not knowing what I wanted to do. Where did the writing dream go? Did I start to understand how competitive a field it was, and how much I was opening myself up to the possibility of failure? Had I just gotten distracted by too many teenagery things? I drifted in and out of jobs and courses until I found teaching which, don’t get me wrong, I still love. But having started purposeful writing again I realise how much I also love that process, and how much I wish the confidence of my younger self had managed to smother my later neuroses.

You become what you say you are

When I joined Twitter I wrote on my profile that I was a ‘teacher / trainer / freelance writer’. A somewhat surprised friend asked me what I was writing, and I was forced to admit that I was only actually um applying for things and it was all a bit presumptuous; a month later, I had the Power On contract in my hand. A month after that a restaurant owner friend asked me to write the copy for her recipe book, and a few months after that, a local photographer asked me to write copy for his website. Believing I had the right to call myself a writer has made other people believe in me too. What other areas of my life can I apply this to…?

Interesting work doesn’t feel like work

...and the sun rises in the east, giraffes are quite tall, etc. We all know that tailoring classes to students’ interests (within reason) is likely to produce better results. You wouldn’t force a class of young adults to read about, oh I don’t know, insurance policies, would you? Ahem. The last Power On unit I wrote was on the topic of insurance – not my decision, needless to say – and I may be way off the mark here, projecting my own preferences onto a class of financial-services-obsessed undergraduates, but I just can’t see it capturing the imagination. Writing it was an interminable struggle (although I became quite disturbed by how easy it was to vomit such gems as ‘Home is where happy memories are made. Safeguard yours by investing in our ever-popular building and contents policy. Exemptions may apply’) so I can’t imagine how dull it will be for the students upon whom the chapter is eventually foisted. Conversely, for the previous unit, I did a personal interview with a teacher here in Borneo. It wrote itself.

There are 36 separate reading skills?!

Reading skills – that’s skimming and scanning, right? Wrong. It’s been educational.

Am I contributing to a faulty system?

This sounds ridiculous, but I’m not sure whether I’m writing a class book or a self-study book. The introductory exercises are supposed to include ‘work with a partner’ type activities, and yet the grammar page must be written as explanation >  example > instructions > exercise, with no open-ended questions like, ‘Can you see a pattern in the phrases below?’ that could be discussed in lessons. I can only surmise that the books will be used in classes where the teacher doesn’t speak much English, and sees their primary role as reading out a handful of answers every 20 minutes and assigning any uncompleted exercises as homework. Not a cheering thought. Is it unethical of me to write this kind of book without challenging its structure?

Does the contemporary ELT world even need any more coursebooks?

Just a thought.

Corpora have got a whole lot better since 2006

The last time I used a corpus in any real sense was six years ago, as part of a degree module. We received a trimmed-down version of the BNC (British National Corpus) on CD-ROM and in terms of usability it was roughly akin to BBC BASIC (10 PRINT “LOOK AROUND YOU” / 20 GOTO 1O etc). How things can move on without you even noticing! A quick Google search now yields a plethora of user-friendly corpora, which have been invaluable in creating vaguely authentic sentences to test target vocabulary. I know I’ll be using them much more often when I return to classroom teaching this September. (By the way, you should totally watch this 10-minute Look Around You video. Edtech at its zenith.)

I have more free time than I think

I’m managing to write a coursebook at the same time as working, and I’ve managed to write this post in two hours today at the same time as writing a coursebook. I need to sharpen my time management skills J

If you have any experience of coursebook writing and would like to chuck any advice in the direction of this rookie it’d be gratefully received below.

* Or is it? Check out Michael Griffin’s blog post on EFL vs ESL vs ESOL vs TESOL vs ELT here.