No, I'm not a 'proficient English language speaker'

I’ve just been on Dave’s ESL Cafe. Not because I want to work 60 hours a week in a ropey kindergarten, but to see how companies are wording their recruitment ads these days. And amongst others, I found:

______ is recruiting female full time native-speaker teachers of English (Saudi Arabia);

We are currently looking for a full-time native English speaking teacher (Thailand); and

A small independent school in ______ is looking for experienced NATIVE English teachers (Japan – the caps are theirs).

So it seems that, yes, in spite of brilliant recent work from TEFL Equity Advocates and others, teachers are still being sought on the basis of their mother tongue instead of their qualifications. I want to say categorically that I think this is wrong. Utterly wrong. I’ve learned foreign languages from native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) and it’s been an insignificant factor in their competence. The former are quicker on collocations, perhaps, while the latter tend to have better grammatical awareness – but really, these are just stereotypes that cancel each other out. I want a teacher who knows what they’re doing and doesn’t stress me out. That’s it.

Click for bigger cartoon (credit http://www.itchyfeetcomic.com/) 

But the debate is taking an interesting turn. Last month, Laura Soracco wrote a popular post about doing away with the NS/NNS dichotomy altogether, which was picked up this week in a heated (OK, gas mark 2) Twitter exchange between Russ Mayne and others. Russ tweeted:

NS and NNS may be ‘flawed terms’ but that’s no reason to stop using them.

…and to be honest, my first reaction was oh Russ come on. So were several other people’s, apparently. Then I thought a bit more and realised we’re in danger of conflating two separate conversations.

For recruitment purposes, it’s pretty clear we should stop using the NS and NNS labels. They’re vague, they’re used to discriminate, and the non- prefix can’t help but imply deviation from the 'normal' or the desirable. Laura suggests proficient English language speaker, bilingual or multilingual as preferable terms to NNS, which any sensible person would surely struggle to disagree with.

However. For real life purposes, you know what? I’m not a proficient English language speaker. (Hang on, wait for the rest.) I’m a native speaker. I’m a native bloody speaker, like a Dane speaks Danish or a Turk speaks Turkish. I can emit sounds in several other languages, but I'm far from bi- or multilingual. English is the language of my dreams, my crap jokes, my blazing rows, my memories, my 3am confessions. For better or worse, it's the lens through which I see the world. Does that make me a superior teacher? Emphatically, no. But English is a massive, integral part of my identity that also happens to be the international language. Do I recognise all the unfair advantages conferred on me because I grew up speaking it? Absolutely. But I can’t truly be sorry about something as random as the circumference of my head, nor can I adopt, without hypocrisy, any made-up word that obscures or downplays what I am. I am English; hear me roar!

The real point, I suppose, is that we should have each others’ backs. It's not a zero sum game in which one group must be quashed for the other to rise (see also: feminism). At work it matters not one iota whether we were, as kids, read bedtime stories or histoires or 物語, and it’s all of our responsibility to challenge prejudice against bilingual English teachers in job adverts, from colleagues and students, or in the wider world. But by the same token, when we’re out of school we should respect each others’ right to define our own language use, however we see fit – and however flawed the terms may be.

Yes, you can break a window with an ashtray (some thoughts on learning ภาษาไทย)

If you can see my scrawlings, don't read them.

I’ve been learning Thai for eight months now. I go to the Walen International School of Achievement (two-fifths of whose name can be taken at face value) and I’m having a pretty bizarre time, partly because of all the purple, but mostly because of their highly specific and counterintuitive method. So I thought I’d share.

This is our coursebook. Clearly there’s quite a lot to say about this in design terms, but that’s a wholenother post. The point is that it consists of groups of words, followed by questions and answers containing those words, and that’s it. Each lesson goes like this:

14:00-14:20  In a circle, student 1 reads a question aloud. Student 2 answers and reads the next question aloud. Student 3 answers, etc.

14:20-14:50  Teacher 1 reads questions to each student in turn. Students are meant to respond with the exact answer in the book, but teacher 1 allows some divergence from the model.

14:50-15:00  Break. Students frantically learn words for the spelling test.

15:00-15:10  Spelling test (15 words).

15:10-15:50  Teacher 2 reads questions to each student in turn. Students are meant to respond with the exact answer in the book and teacher 2 insists on this quite strongly. However, teacher 2 also makes up questions of her own and expects students to say the exact answer in her head, which is quite the parlour game.

15:50-16:00  Students exchange looks, collect spelling papers and go back to their lives.

I should probably add a note about the questions and answers here, which is that they’re not immediately usable at a bus station or the doctor’s. Two genuine examples:

She’s got four arms, hasn’t she? No, she hasn’t got four arms. She’s got two arms. (I suppose at a push you could slip this one in at the doctor’s.)

You can break a window with an ashtray, can’t you? Yes, you can break a window with an ashtray.

And one more note about the levels, because this is the second level class. In the first level class, the structure is basically the same, but the students just take turns to spell out words. For two hours.

So that’s Walen. Sort of Callanesque, except if I was at a Callan school I’m convinced I’d have twice the communicative competence by now. I dread the lessons and squirm my way through them, terrified of making mistakes, longing for just two or three minutes of explicit grammar instruction or any kind of fun at all. And yet. AND YET.

I can’t help wondering if Mr/Mrs/Ms/Dr/Rev Walen is some kind of evil genius, because I can basically use Thai although I’ve been a dreadful student. I only have six hours of lessons a week, I do virtually nothing outside of class…and I can kind of read signs and menus. Slowly, but it’s Thailand and who’s rushing? Vocabulary I don’t remember learning will suddenly pop into my head, especially words with the diphthongs เอือะ (eua) or เอือ (euaa) in them, since they are two of the silliest and most satisfying noises humans are capable of producing. And again, I’m sure my tones are all over the shop, but it’s Chiang Mai and who’s judging?

Evil or genius? Lest anyone is thinking of signing up to the Walen International School of Achievement, I’ve knocked up a short list of pros and cons. You’re welcome.

Why the Walen method might be a bit genius

1. The initial focus on reading makes a lot of sense, because you’re not relying on unstandardised and imperfect transliterations of Thai phonemes. And the first time you manage to sound out ก๋วยเตี๋ยว (noodles) on a food stall without help you just want to jump in the noodles, whooping.

2. Thanks to the endless repetition of the same material (we’ve been through the book multiple times), it’s possible to absorb a lot of lexis by osmosis. Imagine what I could do if I actually put in the hours and left myself vocab post-its all over the house! Oh, good intentions, road to hell.

3. You’re forced to pay attention. Your turn to read aloud comes around every couple of minutes, so you can’t take your eye off the ball. It’s stressful, but it’s also stopped me doodling and staring at the Japanese ice-cream festival downstairs.

Walen. It's purple. It just is.

4. Experienced Walen teachers say very little. They don’t give you much time before they prompt you, and they often interrupt to correct your pronunciation (hello again Callan), but they don’t actually say a lot. That means you can focus on the key language in the book without having to decode the teacher’s stream of consciousness. However, see also point 4 below.

Why the Walen method is in fact unmitigated evil

1. It makes you feel rubbish. Walen operates a roll-on, roll-off system so you’re properly chucked in at the deep end and have no idea what’s going on. The first class vexed me so much that I managed to learn all 76 letters in the 48 hours before the next one, which was ultimately a good thing but seriously, hashtag affective filter.

2. There’s no explanation of anything, either written or spoken, so you’re forced to either (a) draw your own, possibly erroneous, conclusions about the language, or (b) ask the teacher, who may or may not have the English / ability to grade their Thai / subject knowledge to answer your question anyway.

3. The cognitive load is too heavy, too quickly. For example, I’m supposed to learn how to spell 45 words per week. In the first place I’m pretty sure there are some data somewhere that say people can’t deal with groups of more than 10 things, and in the second, because there’s no explanation of spelling rules, it becomes a sort of visual memory test. Which of the six /k/ consonants do I need? ARGH.

4. Inexperienced Walen teachers talk constantly and with scant regard for the fact that they’re in an elementary class. That is all.

I’ve got four months left on my current education visa, during which time I will likely be shunted up to the third level class. I’m horrified at the prospect – but also curious as to whether they’ll start actually telling us what’s going on. Or heaven forfend mix things up from one lesson to the next, or have us chat to another student for five minutes, or throw in a snakes and ladders past tense review. Dark laugh. They do say teachers are the worst students.

Where's the pleasure in teaching?

A long time ago, in an ESOL context far, far away, I asked a colleague to cover my class because I had to take an exam …

Lovely colleague: Sure.

Me: Shall I leave you a lesson plan and some materials?

Lovely colleague: I'll do my own thing, if you don't mind. Teaching someone else's lesson feels a bit like wearing someone else's shoes.

… and that analogy has always stayed with me. Because that’s exactly what it’s like.

Lydia Mann, "teaching_5052" September 29, 2005 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

At the organisation where I’m working now – for three more days – we’re piloting a new project. How it works is this: adult students can enrol online for individual classes of 90 minutes. They can see which teacher will deliver them, and what the content will be. Each lesson is standalone, so learners can attend every day / once a week / once a month / just once, as they choose. The materials are pre-prepared, so teachers can simply turn up and print them off, and divergence from the materials is not allowed.

This blows.

And presumably it’s too late to sack me for saying this, so I will say again: THIS REALLY BLOWS.

The title of this post – ‘Where’s the pleasure in teaching?’ – is not facetious (i.e. ‘Where’s the fun in that?’). I mean, literally, what is it that makes teaching pleasurable? I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, because this pilot takes away three conditions that generally make teaching a great job: the scope for autonomy, creativity and connection.

Autonomy

I don’t want to wear someone else’s shoes. It just doesn’t feel right, even if they’re limited edition Converse, and to be honest, more often than not, they’re Bata sandals which could do with re-heeling. Sound the analogy klaxons!

The teachers at our centre are being asked to use materials designed by people who work in different contexts from ours, who may or may not be professional resource developers. This would be of no consequence if the materials could be adapted, but they can’t, so in many cases experienced teachers are delivering lessons of a lower quality than they otherwise might. Which seriously doesn’t make sense.

Maybe, just maybe, when I was fresh off my CELTA I would have appreciated this zero-prep, one-size-fits-all approach. But more than 10 years down the line, to have it imposed as a modus operandi with no consultation is frustrating and diminishing.

Creativity

I’m slightly biased, perhaps, because I’m also an ELT materials writer. Turning complex ideas into coherent activities makes me very happy (oh yes, I shall impose my bento box order on the world). But of course, that’s not the only way to be creative. Braver teachers than me enter their classrooms with nothing more than a board pen and an idea, and run with whatever their students throw at them.

There’s an enduring cliché that most TEFL teachers are failed actors. Whilst I’m not sure that’s true, I think an awful lot of us are frustrated creatives. Some of the most brilliant people I know are underemployed TEFL teachers who only stay in the job because they have the freedom to experiment, and to design engaging programmes of learning based on what students actually want and need. When you take that away, you take a good chunk of teacher motivation away with it.

Connection

The biggest downside of this pilot is that you never know who will be in your class. OK, I can see how, on one hand, this might be an advantage. It keeps things fresh. But developing a rapport with students is one of the most rewarding and, I would go as far as to say, necessary elements of good teaching. There’s a reason why it’s assessed in observed lessons. It’s also important for students to build rapport with each other so they become more confident and take more risks, and it makes me uneasy to work on a project that immediately alienates more introverted students.

I want to find out over time what makes my students tick: what factors in their personal lives might keep them away from class; what kind of learning experience will bring them back again. I want to feel, at the end of a term or an academic year, that we’ve all somehow moved forward together. I just want to remember their names, frankly. But within this system, I can’t.

*  *  *

I always worry that I only blog to vent. I can’t pretend I’m not vexed right now, but in fact I just wanted to get my thoughts straight and take away something positive from this job. And I think the positive thing is that, if we consider what makes teaching pleasurable for us, we can ask better questions in interviews and find posts that support our individual priorities. So I guess mine would be:

* Will I be allowed to work autonomously, or are there systems in place which limit this?

* What opportunities for creative work are there for teachers?

* Are classes timetabled to allow teachers to develop a connection with their students?

For you, where’s the pleasure in teaching? What questions should we all start asking in interviews?

Give it everything, or get out of the way

Photo by @CliveSir via @ELTpics

In two weeks, I’m leaving the sixth teaching job I’ve had in five years of working overseas. That might seem reasonable to you. Nobody stays in a job for life these days, right? Six jobs in five years is no cause to throw yourself under a tuk-tuk. Except I know why I have such trouble staying put, and this confession does not exactly cover me in glory.

I can’t make EFL matter to me. I’ve spent – wait – 14.3% of my life doing something for the sake of fancy apartments in sunny climes (with the exception of Tbilisi, where I lived in an ice-encrusted cave). These jobs have all been a means to an end, i.e. living abroad and seeing the world. They haven’t kept me awake, or made me cry, or made me proud. They have just been … jobs.

Before I left England in 2009 I worked for five years in ESOL, which some people might take to be an artificial distinction from EFL, but I cannot. In London, what happened in morning classes was directly relevant to what happened in the real world in the afternoon. The immediacy, the usefulness of what I was doing, kept me working 50+ hours a week for a salary that barely kept me in popcorn and lentils. On top of that, because 80% of my students were refugees or asylum seekers – and this is hard to say without sounding like a hand-wringing grief vulture – I felt like maybe I was actually doing something good for someone else. Teaching women to read and write from scratch, because as girls they hadn’t been considered worth educating. Offering a more or less consistent adult presence to teenagers who’d arrived in the country with no family. Since I’d had the random good fortune to be born in a politically stable country, wasn’t it the least I could do?

  

But I left. I left for the shits and giggles (quite literally, in fact, as my first overseas post was in a highly sociable teaching centre in Sri Lanka). The material conditions of my life improved immeasurably, but the sense of self and purpose I once had never really returned. Which is not to say that I stopped enjoying teaching, or trying to get better at it: I still get a kick out of being in a classroom. I’ve had some fantastic students, and I know how wrong-headed it is to say that because they could afford to be there, I somehow cared less about them. But I guess I am wrong-headed, because – with exceptions, like the woman in Colombo who attended for three months each year and spent the other nine saving for the course, or the man who got up at 3am three times a week to get to my 8am lessons – I did, and I do, somehow care less.

Like I said, this post doesn’t exactly paint me as the kind of teacher I want to be. It was over a year ago that I first blogged about needing to get out of EFL, and yet here I am, faffing about with Primary Grammar Box and wishing I was somewhere else. I need to stop doing what I’m doing. The choices I've made in terms of roles and organisations were perhaps less than judicious, but there are so many people who could have done these six jobs so much better than me: the phenomenal teachers of my Twitter PLN, who think so deeply and blog so eloquently, and who doubtless improve the lives of every student they encounter; colleagues who are still in the staffroom at 10pm on a Sunday laminating cardboard ants because it Just. Might. be the thing to get those disruptive kids engaged. There are too many half-arsed people in this profession already. And I’m figuring, all too slowly, either give it everything, or get out of the way.

Having said that, I’ve no problem with short-term teaching to keep a roof over my head. Freelancing ain't gonna keep me in popcorn or lentils either, and after 10 years I think I’m competent enough not to actually waste anyone’s money if they pay me to teach them English. I'd also be a pretty crap ELT writer if I didn't spend a bit of each year in a classroom. But what I should be doing with most of my life is writing, because I want so badly to do it better and that's what will keep me jumping ('jumping') out of bed each day, and probably volunteering with refugees, because that’s just the sort of leftist dishcloth I am. Watch this space, I guess. And oooooh wow cardboard ants can I -

Cool things that happened today

…actually, these are cool things that happened yesterday, since finishing at 9pm doesn’t leave much time for reflecting on anything except stroganoff in the pub next door, but still: here is my response to Mike Griffin’s blog challenge.

•  I neutralised an incident with a phone in my teens class without any drama.

• Two teens with serious attention-span issues played a word stress card game for over 30 minutes without getting distracted.

• The teens were fascinated by the schwa, which they’d apparently never heard of before. They started asking about other symbols on the phonemic chart and if we could have a lesson on it next week.

• I realised how many class in-jokes the students have created in the last six weeks that actually relate to lesson content, suggesting a desire to bond with me and each other. (Slightly less cool thing that happened today: felt guilty again about leaving at the end of the month.)

• I also realised how much I’ll miss teaching them. Call me a masochist, but I think teenagers are great. They have strong opinions without being closed to new ideas, they’re optimistic and open to any kind of silliness you set in front of them. Don’t get old, you guys… *sniff*

• The man who totally dominates my adult class is learning to speak less when given subtle cues (and, ahem, occasionally direct instructions) from me.

• Consequently two women who were pretty much silent six weeks ago are speaking more, and using Georgian less, than they were before.

• Sexism has been a recurring theme in this particular class, and the external monologue guy has delighted in winding me up with ‘jokes’ about domestic violence. However, last night he said he thought no marriage could work unless the man and woman were equal partners in it, which I found reassuring, and on a similar note the two women told stories of how much better life is for them than their mothers, and predicted even better things for their daughters. Hurrah!

• I noticed how often I laugh in the staffroom (between endless placement tests and other stresses). I’m always grateful for quirky colleagues – and IH Tbilisi isn’t short of them.

Teach us like this

Two posts in a week! The world’s gone mad.

Actually, it feels like my advanced class has gone a bit mad. When we returned from the tea break on Friday, it was clear that something (else) was afoot. A deputation had been organised.

“Laura, there’s something we want to tell you.”

Heart beating fast (obviously all I was hearing was, “Laura, you are a TERRIBLE TEACHER”), I put down my mug and pulled up a chair to hear what they had to say. It was this:

“We don’t have enough grammar to cope with this book. That’s why we only got Cs in our test. You think we’re advanced level, but we’re not. In class we want you to explain basic grammar in detail and then give us exercises, and make extra grammar worksheets for us to do at home. That’s what the Georgian teachers do.

Why do we always have to guess things? Just tell us the answers. Don’t teach us any vocabulary in class, because we can learn the meanings of words at home and check them in the lesson by playing word explaining games. But no other games! The only ones we liked were the word explaining games and the prefix and suffix dominoes.

Don’t do listening in class either. Do grammar and writing, because we can’t make correct sentences when we write and this is our biggest problem. You should give us written tasks each week, and we email them to you, and you send them back with comments. Is that OK?”

Wowsers, right? I’m a terrible teacher and they hate this class. I’m a terrible teacher and they hate this class. I’m a terrible teacher and they hate this class. That was pretty much me on Friday night.

But now (Monday afternoon), having spent the weekend thinking on the conversation, I feel quite excited about what happened. I realised they don’t hate the class, as thirteen of thirteen have just re-registered for this term; they just felt comfortable saying what they wanted. And how often is this likely to happen? Having students who can and will articulate their needs is a rare blessing, so I should see this as an experiment rather than an indictment. I have a few comments on their comments, though.

First, I’m under no illusion that they’re advanced level. Since whole levels are completed in just 50 hours here they’re understandably upper-inty, so they’re right to say they don’t have enough grammar to cope with the book prescribed by the school. We’ve been using SpeakOut Advanced which is, I admit, a chewy little biscuit, and I often can’t do the exercises myself.

Second, the ‘word explaining games’ they mentioned are back-to-the-board and a card game version of it. I’m not sure why they got the seal of approval when other games are “a waste of time”, but the dominoes, I suspect, were successful because they were taken from an upper intermediate resource pack and were therefore of a more suitable level. And by ‘guessing things’ they meant deducing meaning from context, which to be fair is hardly a walk in the park when (as in SpeakOut) at least 50% of the lexis in any given exercise is new.

Third, their writing, unfortunately, is as bad as they think it is, and they do indeed need more practice. But when I’ve set written homework before only two-thirds of the class has handed anything in, and the half-arsedness was tangible.

Am I correctly interpreting the messages they're trying to give me? They find the class too hard, they didn’t like getting Cs and they find aspects of CLT infantilising? As graduates, they've passed all the way through an education system which prioritises rote learning and examination grades* so their feelings are not exactly surprising, but do I indulge the request or challenge it? Do they want better integration of technology? Some of the students bring iPads to class, yet the teaching centre has nothing so high-tech as an OHP between 25 teachers. Do I need to look into flipping my classroom...?! 

Basically, with thanks in advance, I’m soliciting advice from my PLN:

What would you do with this class?

* Perhaps Michael Gove would like to do a field visit.

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.

Education in Sarawak: an Outsider Looking In (or Why I Quit my Job)

This article originally appeared on the LoyarBurok website on 10 August 2012.

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education – Albert Einstein

It’s the superficial differences you notice first, of course. Sarawakian schools are better landscaped; British schools are better resourced. British schools have a greater sense of structure; Sarawakian schools have a greater sense of community. There are superficial similarities, too – it seems that teachers all over the world have parallel concerns about government interference and volumes of paperwork. But after 18 months mentoring English teachers here in Sarawak under the new KSSR curriculum, I hope I’ve started to get (ever so) slightly under the skin of the primary education system here, and as an outsider looking in, this is what I’ve learnt about…

…classroom pedagogy

KSSR classrooms are pedagogically chaotic. Sadly that is not to say that teachers are reflectively experimenting with different approaches, but that nobody seems to know what to do for the best with the incoherent textbooks and conflicting advice foisted upon them since January last year.

The KSSR was intended to help teachers move away from chalking-and-talking by introducing contemporary methodologies such as synthetic phonics and communicative language teaching, but teachers were given no training and the textbook authors often seem as confused as the teachers. My favourite Year Two speaking activity reads, bafflingly:

‘A chicken gives us meat and eggs. Talk about camels and ostriches.’

Having a ‘native speaker’ (many of us are native-level rather than native speakers but the assumption endures) in their classrooms has barely helped my mentees to untangle the mess of the KSSR. How can it? Teachers are being asked to embrace a 180-degree culture change by spending two to three hours a week with a mad foreigner banging on about group work. What I’ve actually done for the last year and a half is deliver a piecemeal CELTA course in an attempt to compensate for the lack of theoretical foundations laid down by the MoE – but intensive four-week CELTAs (or their equivalent) could and should have been delivered by qualified local tutors before the KSSR was rolled out. That way, I might have been more of a mentor than an instructor. It’s a shame.

It’s also a shame that those in power don’t recognise that constantly using teachers as political guinea pigs makes huge dents in morale. Which leads me to…

...motivation

I’ve met some fantastically hard-working teachers in Sarawak who take their professional development seriously and who really care what happens to their charges. I’ve also met some unpardonably poor ones who’ve long since lost the will to teach, who arrive late to class or not at all, who never plan lessons and whose classroom management skills extend only to wielding (and occasionally using) a cane.

Cane aside – corporal punishment in state schools has been illegal in the UK since 1987 – I wouldn’t suggest for a second that British teachers don’t also fall into these two camps, and many in between. The difference in Sarawak seems to be that, once you’ve entered the teaching profession, it’s almost impossible to be dismissed. Incompetent teachers might receive verbal or written warnings, or be unhelpfully shunted to another school, but fired? No. In rural areas especially, legends of sacked teachers and petrol bombs abound, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the system is clogged with poorly-performing staff who do nothing to merit their salaries. But education reform is not possible without a workforce of committed educators.

Children shouldn’t move through any school system encountering just a handful of dedicated, capable teachers. The best I’ve worked with, here and in other countries, have been intrinsically motivated. They (we) enjoy their (our) work and see the value of it. Carrots such as bonuses, and sticks such as unpaid suspension of duties, are often rubbished as ineffective, short-term solutions to a lack of employee motivation, but in this context the absence of sticks is disastrous.

Let those who are jaded (for nobody could blame you), those who would rather be somewhere else, be somewhere else. And let those who can, teach.

…testing

From the moment you enter a school and see the huge display board counting down the days to the UPSR examination, it’s clear that education in Sarawak is driven by testing. Sadly, this drive swiftly and routinely breaks down the natural inquisitiveness that new pupils and new teachers bring to the classroom, and without it barely any real learning can take place. Teachers say; pupils repeat. Teachers write; pupils copy. Scoring highly on the UPSR English paper requires very little in the way of understanding.

Although the MoE has wisely recommended (rather than mandated…or has it? A definitive answer is hard to find) that testing should be abolished under the KSSR and replaced with continuous assessment, this is not happening. Why? In addition to the lack of ministerial clarity on the subject, the data entry requirements of the fledgling continuous assessment system are arduous, and at present there’s a disconnect between the communicative focus of the KSSR and the grammatical focus of the UPSR. There also seems to exist amongst headteachers an unshakeable belief that parents will not accept any means of progress testing other than, well, tests.

The UK is hardly more sensible on this front, with children sitting standardised tests at four ‘Key Stages’ during their school careers (at ages seven, 11, 14 and 16). Finland, however, widely accepted as having one of the most successful education systems in the world and from whom many of the KSSR’s principles were appropriated, does not test its students at all until the end of their final year of secondary school. Until practice follows policy here in Sarawak, children continue to be force-fed information they can parrot but not manipulate.

Another delivery of 1Malaysia chocolate milk

…the broader learning culture

The behaviour we expect from children must be modelled by the adults around them. We expect children to read, yet a 2012 straw poll of teachers in the Padawan district (where I’ve been working) revealed that, in the last year, only one person of 30 had read a whole book for pleasure themselves and only two had read stories to their kids. National statistics suggest that the average Malaysian reads just two books per year.

We also expect children to develop critical thinking skills, yet schools offer scant opportunities for them to do so. The hidden curriculum of the Sarawakian education system teaches pupils over and over again that unquestioning adherence to hierarchy – being silent or speaking (reciting) only at the command of someone higher up the food chain – is the single acceptable model of behaviour, and that deviation from this ‘norm’ is likely to land you in hot water.

On a related note, we expect parents to take an active interest in their children’s learning but insult their intelligence at every turn. Whilst a lack of parental engagement is the commonest reason offered for low student attainment, parents’ imagined beliefs are still allowed to dictate educational practice. Pupils must complete every exercise on every page of their workbooks, even those with nonsensical instructions and grammatical errors (there are several), otherwise parents will complain. Pupils must take monthly tests and have letter grades on their report cards otherwise parents will complain. Has there been a consultation? Are Sarawakian mothers and fathers really so immovable on these pedagogical matters in which they allegedly take no interest? It doesn’t make sense.

...the learning environment

Environment affects learning. It’s certainly not the most critical thing, but when you have a class of fifty in a crowded room with no soundproofing, a fan that only works between 10:45 and 11:10 on a Tuesday, nothing on the walls and holes in the floor, it’s much harder for learning to take place. Sarawakian school architecture seems not to have changed in the last thirty or forty years, although a growing body of research suggests that both teachers’ and students’ achievement is linked to the buildings in which they work. What to do?

Lack of finances is the oft-cited explanation for crumbling classrooms, but it appears that money can always be found for projects such as ours with which political points can be scored, and for the fountain of 1Malaysia chocolate milk which never seems to run dry. Cynicism aside, I’m not doubting the budgetary constraints at both government and school level, but a more even allocation of whatever meagre budget there is would go a long way towards improving the environment of most schools.

The real business of a school is teaching and learning and this is surely where money needs to be directed. Style is consistently prioritised over substance – in the cultivation of immaculate gardens while classrooms remain unfit for purpose, for example. Of course it’s not realistic to expect interactive whiteboards (or even whiteboards) in every room, but there ought to be sufficient time and money for staff to make attractive, educational decorations for their schools. Displaying pupils’ work, especially, is motivating and requires almost no effort on the part of teachers, but audible encouragement is needed from the top for teachers to spend less time on, say, testing, and more on creating places where kids are excited to learn.

…myself

Perhaps what you’ve learnt about me from this article is that I’m some neo-colonialist busybody who’d do well to go back to England and stop meddling in your education system. I’ve heard it before, and I’d struggle to argue with you at this point.

But the most significant thing I’d say I’ve learnt about myself from my experience here is that I’m a teacher first and a mentor, trainer, whatever else second. Being an outsider looking in to other people’s classrooms has fuelled my desire to get back inside one like nothing else in the past nine years, which is why I’ve left the project in spite of a deep-seated affection for Sarawak. I’d like to thank you for having me, apologise for the very little impact I’ve been able to make, and I hope for everyone’s sake that my successor is a vocation mentor with a fondness for chocolate milk.

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.

Ten things teachers need their managers to say - and mean

How harmonious is your staffroom?

Sheesh, what with holidays (yay) and tropical fevers (boo) I’ve not blogged for nearly a month. But something has been on my mind for the last week that I’ve really wanted to write about, and it wouldn’t be prudent to go into the reasons why, but I’ve been trying to remember all the people who’ve managed me since I became a teacher. At one end of the spectrum there was Jennie, whose warmth, humour, intellect and sense of justice were and are an inspiration; at the other there was Neil – not his real name – whose incompetence-muffling authoritarianism drove away half his staff in six months. And of course, a whole lot of people in between.

The difference in their management styles, and the work they’ve got out of me as a result, is pretty remarkable. Inside the classroom I’d like to think the quality of my teaching is more or less consistent, but for good managers I’ve happily worked 50-hour weeks and for bad ones I’ve been out of the door the second the lesson is over, satchel flying behind me. The periods of time when I’ve had good managers correlate to the periods of time when I’ve undertaken the most CPD, volunteered the most, and been the least resentful of paperwork, even submitting it on time occasionally, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

What makes a good manager? Maybe I’ve no right to speculate. I have no aspirations towards management, hairdressing or chiropody, so perhaps I’d do well not to tell managers, hairdressers or chiropodists how to do their jobs. But the impact of being managed by someone at the extreme ends of the spectrum is so significant that I’m going to say my piece anyway: here are ten things which, in my view, teachers need their managers to say – and, more importantly, to mean. (Top tips for zookeepers to follow.)

1. ‘I’ll help you’

We don’t expect you to be able to fix everything. If the projector’s broken, the projector’s broken. But we do expect you to recognise that it might be inconvenient, arrange for someone to repair it as soon as possible, let us move our class to a new location if possible or provide a temporary whiteboard/flipchart. The day-to-day stuff matters. If you think you’re too busy or too important to help out with it, something’s gone wrong.

2. ‘Let’s try something different’

It’s your way or the highway, right? After all, who’s the boss here?  Except that nearly every problem has a range of solutions, and they’re not always apparent straight away. Embrace your school’s why-guy/gal and don’t be afraid to change things when they’re not working. Listen to ideas, and not just from other managers. (What if the woman who orders the toner is the woman whose brainwave is about to save you thousands of pounds?) And absolutely, categorically banish the phrase That’s just how it is from your vocabulary. It’s not a reason, it’s an excuse for inaction.  

3. ‘Well done’

Delivered sincerely and sparingly, Well done goes a very, very long way. We’re all suckers for praise. Add it to your arsenal.

4. ‘It doesn’t matter’

In short: choose your battles. If a teacher belittles students in class, or sets homework they never look at, it matters. On the other hand, if a teacher is 10 minutes late once a year, you know it really was because of an accident en route to work. Cover the start of the class yourself if necessary and let it go. Most of us love the job and want to do it well, so trust us until we give you serious cause not to.

5. ‘I know how you feel’

There’s nothing worse than someone telling you they know how you feel when they clearly don’t – and if you're managing teachers and can’t say this truthfully there’s a problem. You need to have had extensive teaching experience yourself and ideally continue to teach alongside your managerial duties, so when I'm having one of those days when someone is sick on my laminates and my brilliant intonation activity falls on its ass and running away to join the circus seems like a viable new career path, you really do know how I feel.

'Now it says on your CV that you're TEFL-Q'

6. ‘Tell me…’

Tell me how you feel. Tell me why you think that happened. Tell me what would make things better. Tell me is a much underused invitation to speak and be heard. When we’re not listened to, we feel excluded and resentful. Sometimes we might say things you don’t want to hear, but better out than in, as just about everybody’s great aunt used to say.

7. ‘I’m sorry, I was wrong’

Number of times a manager has said this to me: two or three (it was the same guy, and in my pre-teaching days). Number of times a manager probably ought to have said this to me, but didn’t: well, let’s just say, a lot. Apologising isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. We don’t expect you to get it right all the time just because you’re on a higher pay grade. If you balls up and it affects your teachers, say you’re sorry and try your best to put it right. You’ll get a lot more respect than if you refuse to take responsibility.

8. ‘Thank you’

Yes, we’re paid to do this. But the effects of uttering a simple Thank you are disproportionate to the time it’ll take you. (See also: Well done.)

9. ‘I’m with you’

We need to know that you’ve got our backs – which is not to say that if we’re caught at 2pm on a sunny Tuesday wearing only Superted underpants, waving an empty Bacardi bottle and spraying racist graffiti on the school walls, you should be beside us in court testifying to our good character. But, to use a particularly unpleasant bit of management speak, we need to be singing from the same hymn sheet. At the very least, we need you to believe that your teachers, your students and education per se are valuable things worth standing up for. And if the poop hits the fan, to be bold enough to actually do so.

10. ‘Hahahahahaha!’

OK, so written down that just makes you look a bit unhinged. But having a sense of humour is so important. Teaching is unpredictable, and the Days of Weird can either become a drama or an anecdote for next year. Yes, there are times when absolute seriousness is required, but they’re few and far between; laughing at the silliness of the world, other people and yourself is good medicine.

11. ‘I got you a Snickers'

Not really. But yes please.

The pleasure of books: how Spot the dog inspired a family reading project

Last year I got a bit of a shock when I tried reading Who’s There, Spot? – one of those lift-the-flap books – with a class of seven year-olds in Borneo: they went mad, surging towards the book with grabbing hands as though they had never seen paper thus configured. I was delighted by their enthusiasm until it dawned on me how seldom they must be read to, and then I felt pretty sad (not to mention fearful for poor old Spot, who I’m sure would have cowered under the same flap for the rest of the lesson had he been able to).

A wearying selection of moral tales
and not much else

And then I started to notice other things. There’s no bookshop or newsagent at Kuching airport. There’s no fiction section in the state library. ‘Bedtime’ and ‘story’ do not collocate here, and school storytelling exists only to communicate moral values. In short, nobody reads for the love of reading. People read to pass a test, or follow a recipe, or find out whether the copper wire thief in the next town has been arrested yet.

Given that the main purpose of my job here in Borneo is to improve primary teaching and learning, and that there is a proven link between reading for pleasure and overall academic achievement, what to do? Of course I think kids should read. Books were one of the greatest pleasures of my childhood, and they remain so in adulthood. But is it (a) possible and (b) ethical to attempt to impose the culture of recreational reading so prevalent in England on pupils here? Or, conversely, is it (a) patronising and (b) irresponsible not to?

Although it’s a bit of a minefield, I’ve decided next month to launch a pilot project in one of my schools to encourage family reading. As a starting point, I’m using a LearnEnglishFamily (LEF) tool designed by the British Council which, whilst appearing clear and comprehensive on the whole, leaves me with a number of reservations.

First, there just aren’t enough affordable, engaging books for children here. Libraries in the five schools I work with are chronically understocked and range from averagely uninspiring to hideously dull. What are we going to use the get the kids’ interest? Imported books are available in the city, but at prices beyond the reach of most families; the annual second-hand book fair is not until August; and making our own books, in any significant quantities anyway, could turn out to be just as costly and time-consuming as ordering a stack from Amazon.

Little wonder the kids don't bother with the 'library'

Second, I have no idea how we’re going to get the parents into the school, except perhaps with the promise of curry puffs, whose efficacy as bait has been proven time and again. Optional briefings on other academic matters are poorly attended and a lot of parents, I suspect, might be intimidated because of their own (real or perceived) lack of skills. What I really need is to find a passionate teacher-advocate from the same kampung (see footnote) to act as project co-ordinator, but this is likely to be tricky since a lot of the teachers don’t seem to read for pleasure either.

Thirdly it seems, though I may be wrong, that the only real success story with this tool to date has been in a Tamil school in Kuala Lumpur, a very different kettle of fish to Borneo, and it’s not exactly clear why it worked so well there but not at the other nine schools in peninsular Malaysia where it was trialled. I’d guess that parental literacy levels in both English and L1, as well as other social and political factors, had a lot to do with it, but without any serious inquiry into why just this one school ran with it so enthusiastically I don’t know how to replicate their success.

Anyway. I just posted this by way of introduction as I’ll no doubt come back and blog about the project later, when it has either become the second LEF success story or failed so spectacularly that I am deported. Whether you have any experience of this sort of thing or not (family reading projects, not being deported from Malaysia) I’d love, as always, to hear your thoughts and advice.

Note: Kampung roughly translates as village, but not quite. A kampung is a place, but also an extended kinship network with a clearly defined hierarchy.