Is this the end? Disruption in ELT

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 Kassteen has been talking up disruption and suggesting ways that organisations can deal with this in terms of marketing, recruitment and delivery .

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?

Does reading (and learning a language) require two brains?

I love it when a coincidence of listening and reading suddenly starts you thinking; when things kind of come together and actually wake your interest and amaze you (you =me, obviously) all over again with their timeless mystery. What am I talking about? Well a coincidence last week really heightened my interest in an ‘old’ topic.

To explain….I was listening the other day (by chance) to a programme called Open Book, and one of the interviewees was a woman called Natalie Phillips (see picture below), a cognitive psychologist who has recently done some research in which subjects were sent through MRI brain scanners whilst reading extracts from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. My curiosity was aroused because in this 200^th anniversary year for Austen’s Pride and Prejudice I have re-read that novel and have enjoyed thinking (for the first time in ages) about the world Jane Austen portrays.

But it was what Phillips says happened in that MRI scanner that really got me going. If I understand it correctly, it goes like this: when her subjects were reading Mansfield Park for pleasure the scanner showed a rush of blood to a certain part of the brain. But when, later, they were shown an extract from the novel which they were asked to analyse (= study/concentrate on), the blood flow increased dramatically – and went to a different part of the same brains. In other words, reading for pleasure and concentrated reading seem (in her research) to be different processes. That’s what I heard her say on the radio – and that is what is also reported here and here.

And this line of thinking coincided, for me, on the same day, with reading David R Hill’s survey review of graded readers in the ELT Journal (Hill, D 2013).  Before you read it I need to say that personally I am a huge fan of extensive reading using ‘graded readers’, and have always advocated their use because the more students of a foreign language read in that language, the better they get. (I should disclose that I am hosting the Extensive Reading Foundation awards at IATEL 2013 in Liverpool, so you can see that I mean what I say!).

Anyway.

And like many other methodologists and reading enthusiasts I have always advocated reading for pleasure (aka extensive reading) and trumpeted its superiority over reading for study (aka intensive reading). But in a startling passage of  his review, Hill writes:

…….there is tacit support for reading for pleasure and most enthusiasts use this argument to promote ER (extensive reading). I have come to believe this is unfortunate for five reasons. One, most students find reading in a foreign language difficult and not at all pleasurable, certainly at first. Two, students can obtain pleasure more easily in many other ways (mostly related to a screen). Three, aspiring students (and parents) expect to work and not to have fun while they are at school. Four, when entertainment is the foremost reason for reading, publishers, teachers, and students have no focus for selecting titles. Finally, and most important, promoting ER as reading for pleasure almost guarantees its status as an optional extra on a par with a keep-fit class.

I think that ER has to be justified on the grounds that it aids learning and I am attracted to the proposition that it helps to establish patterns in the brain and promote automaticity. Until there is research evidence to prove the case, I suggest that the strongest argument in support of ER is that it is the readiest means by which students can obtain the information about culture and history that they need for a deep level of communication. (88)

So, two brains? No of course not. But two different processes (as Phillips’ research seems to suggest). Acquisition vs learning anyone? That would certainly make us all think again. And IF there really ARE two different processes going on, then is that ‘learning mode’ actually better for us when we read and/or study? Better than, say absorbing language for and through pleasure? That perhaps is the question Scott Thornbury was asking some years ago in a talk called ‘No pain, no gain’, a threnody that has been picked up in a somewhat ramshackle way (it seems to me) by Jim Scrivener and Adrian Underhill. In passing I think they may be mixing cause and effect, and I wish there was more reading/research behind their claims, but still…..

Mention of Scott Thornbury reminds me that in the same edition of the ELT Journal he reviewed my book Essential Teacher Knowledge. I am (genuinely) flattered that the book was even worthy of his attention and he has a lot to say with which I readily agree (and wince about!). But in the course of his review (Thornbury 2013) he writes:

He (= me!) devotes the bulk of his overview to reviewing a theory (specifically Krashen’s Input Hypothesis) that, however influential it was in its time now feels somewhat superannuated. (131)

Well yes. And no. Because the discussion about the different processes of the brain, and the way that different activities stimulate different parts of it – something that Stephen Krashen talked about and which, though he may have got it wrong in many people’s eyes, still seems to me to be an ongoing and engaging issue – is brought into sharp focus yet again (in at least one part of my brain) by what I saw and heard last week.

Superannuated? Probably. I am, anyway, even if the arguments aren’t!!

What do you think?

References

Hill, D R (2013)  Survey review: Graded readers. ELT Journal 67/1

Thornbury, S (2013) Review of Essential Teacher Knowledge. ELT Journal 67/1

Is there any connection between music practice and language practice?

In a couple of days (as I write this) I will be doing a (brand new) talk for the Director of Studies conference of the International House World Organisation in London. It is called ‘Does Music practice tell us anything about practising language?’ and that’s a title I have submitted too for the 2013 IATEFL conference.

To be a good musician you have to practise because ‘practice makes perfect’. Or does it? Or rather, what kind of music practice is good practice? The video is what violinist, violist and music teacher Christina Everson said when I asked her that question a couple of months ago.

Her answer was typical of the many people I have videoed in preparing the session. Inter alia, they talk of practising often and intensively for only a short time rather than playing for hours. They emphasise that practising = problem solving (e.g. concentrating on the bits that cause you trouble) rather than playing straight through and solidifying bad habits and that (as Christina says) you have to really listen to yourself (= monitor yourself) as you work.

Is learning a language like this? Well yes and no I guess! You are unlikely to become a proficient language user without practice, and you are unlikely to be able to conquer the fear of using a foreign language if you have not tried to use words and phrases before (even if only in your head). If fluency, for example, has a lot to do with deploying lexical chunks ‘automatically’ then just like the musician who practises so that that in performance they can concentrate on how to ‘feel’ the music rather than panicking about the notes, then you have to learn the chunks, practise them, concentrate (in Chrissie’s words) on them. Don’t you?

Which brings me, of course, to Stephen Krashen (see picture above) and his acquisition vs learning duality. In his A-Z of ELT blog Scott Thornbury doubted whether this discussion was (or even should be ) still current – e.g. the discussion about whether ‘concentrated-on’ language could ever become part of the acquired store, and whether or not monitoring one’s output was a good thing, or whether it just interferes with communication.

Yet this IS the big question, it seems to me. The good music practiser solves problems but then goes on to play through a piece, to perform it. Does that whole-piece practice work in the same way as short bursts of problem-solving?

For those who are interested in following up this debate I highly recommend (for the second time on this blog) a book by the linguist and cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus called Guitar Zero about his experience of learning to play guitar.

But for the moment (and that’s what my talk will be about), I am left with the following questions:

1 How should students practise language in class? In short problem-solving bursts or in long communicative flows?

2 Is homework done better in short frequent bursts or in less frequent longer chunks?

3 What kind of ‘concentration’ is appropriate for language learners?

4 What does appropriate correction look like? Is ‘reformulation’ even remotely useful? Or are what Wong and Waring (2009) call ‘pursuit’ questions and ‘problematizing’ student  responses the way forward?

5 What does good repetition look like?

Reference:

Wong, J & Waring, Z (2009) ‘Very good’ as a teacher response. ELT Journal 63/3