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Teachers and Corpora

Do you use corpora?

If you think you don’t use corpora in your planning and teaching, think again! Because we teachers actually do use corpora all the time, perhaps unknowingly, for example whenever we google a word or an expression, looking for examples of its use, or when we go through texts online to find the one with the required linguistic elements for our class.

What is a corpus?

Corpus (plural corpora), the Latin word for body, has come to mean, in corpus linguistics, a “collection of electronic, naturally-occurring texts (written or spoken) which are selected to be representative of a particular language or language variety” (McEnery et al, 2006, p. 5). Corpora usually include millions, if not billions of words, not only as used by native speakers but also by L2 speakers. They can provide evidence of language use in different genres and registers and reveal patterns in language.

Accessing all these becomes feasible with the use of corpus software tools. For example, have a look at the three figures below, which illustrate how I used Sketch Engine to produce frequency lists for the word teacher (figures 1 and 2) and to create a concordance for the same word, based on data from the British National Corpus (BNC).

Figure 1. Visualisation of a frequency list for ‘teacher’ generated by Sketch Engine
Figure 2. Different view of the same search of a frequency list for  ᾽teacher᾽ generated by Sketch Engine.
Figure 3. List of concordance lines for the lemma ᾽teacher´ generated by Sketch Engine. 
KWIC stands for keyword in context

Frequency of linguistic items can inform curricular decisions about the order these items should be taught in, materials to be used, as well as test development. Concordances, i.e. all the instances of a linguistic item listed in their immediate context, are not to be confused with collocations, ie.the way individual lexical items are used together regularly. Collocations can be traced in concordance lines, along with other information on language use in context which can be utilised in teaching.

Why is it a good idea to use corpora?

So, corpora can provide a wealth of information about authentic language use of different registers and genres, and corpus software tools can help explore them. But why should teachers use corpora? Most importantly, why should learners use them?

Teachers can use corpora to enhance their research skills and develop their language awareness to inform their teaching. Quite often teachers need to adapt or supplement published materials which cover to a limited extent desirable linguistic features, or in which natural speech instances are not presented, or need to be presented using a different approach (Walsh, 2010). Teachers can source instances of natural language from corpora to provide tailor-made activities to cater to specific learners’ needs considering level, context, system and skill. They can modify corpora or use them as is to demonstrate a language pattern in context or ask learners to notice features of a function or compare data from native and L2 corpora for error correction. Imagination is the limit. 

The use of language corpora as a resource holds significant benefits for the learners on many levels as well. Cheng (2010) states that it “has been shown to contribute to the acquisition of both implicit and explicit knowledge” (p.320). It can support exploratory and discovery learning, which is motivating for the learners and as they engage more actively probably retain knowledge for longer. Autonomous learning is encouraged and since learners acquire or practice essential learning skills such as noticing, making inferences, and reflecting, they can transfer all these to other fields of study (Gilquin & Granger, 2010).

The cognitive, pedagogical, and motivational benefits of the use of corpora in language learning in the form of Data-Driven Learning (DDL) have been discussed repeatedly in presentations in conferences of local and national TESOL associations, and the annual IATEFL conferences over the years. ELT Blogs often feature corpora and there is even a dedicated FB group promoting the use of corpora in language teaching. Why is it then that teachers are reluctant to apply DDL and mostly view the use of corpora as a tool limited to lexicographers, academics, researchers, material developers and test designers? 

Challenges associated with using corpora

McCarthy and O’Keeffe (2010) point out that teachers’ attitudes towards DDL are not favourable as “it turns the traditional order within the classroom upon its head. The corpus becomes the centre of knowledge, the students take on the role of questioner and the teacher is challenged to hand over control and facilitate learning” (p. 7). Attitudes aside, teachers’ limited time and workload, lack of computer skills and training on how to access and use corpora are major issues. There is also the cost to access corpora since many of them are not freely available. To that, schools will need to add the cost of the investment in computers, training of teachers and students, and software tools. And with empirical data on the effectiveness of language learning still limited it is not even a guaranteed investment for them to make (Gilquin & Granger, 2010)! Apart from teachers’ attitudes and logistics, learners’ attitudes towards DDL are an additional reason why interest in DDL is still limited. There are challenges for the learners, especially when little training is given, or they do not have appropriate proficiency level and technological knowledge (Soruç & Tekin, 2017). 

To address the challenges learners experience, time and effort need to be invvested in training in using corpus tools, reading and interpreting corpus results, and interpreting quantitative results may be needed (Sripicharn, 2010). The step preceding this, though, should be the training of the teachers. Corpus linguistics is more common nowadays in initial language teacher education but besides basic knowledge, development of skills is required in a way that would promote active engagement with corpora. 

Conclusion

Should we then abandon the use of corpora in non-academic teaching contexts? In my humble opinion, no. It is a tool that could contribute very positively not only to language learning but to teacher development and most importantly to learner autonomy in a way very fitting to today’s COVID-19 pandemic online teaching and learning challenges. Forced into a world which requires learners to be technologically adept and more independent provides the perfect opportunity to explore the world of DDL especially when more corpora can freely be accessed nowadays, and a quick online search produces results for corpus software tools that are not just free but also user friendly. 

A few corpus resources

For those interested in exploring corpora and their use further, some indicative sources follow:

General reads in corpus linguistics 

Corpora 

  • British National Corpus (BNC)
  • Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
  • The International corpus of learner English (ICLE) (via CQPWeb)
  • Longman Learner Corpus (via CQPWeb)
  • Cambridge Learner Corpus (not freely available)

Classroom resources based on corpora 

Corpus software tools

References

Cheng, W. (2010). What can a corpus tell us about language teaching? In A. O’Keeffe & M. McCarthy(Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics (pp. 319-332). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203856949.ch23

Gilquin, G., & Granger, S. (2010). How can data-driven learning be used in language teaching? In A. O’Keeffe & M. McCarthy (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics (pp. 359-370). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203856949.ch26

McCarthy, M., & O’Keeffe, A. (2010). Historical perspective. What are corpora and how have they evolved? In A. O’Keeffe & M. McCarthy (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics (pp. 319-332). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203856949.ch1

McEnery, T., Xiao, R., & Tono,Y. (2006). Corpus-based language studies: An advanced resource book. Taylor & Francis. 

Soruç, A., & Tekin, B. (2017). Vocabulary Learning through Data-driven Learning in an English as a Second Language Setting. Educational sciences: theory & practice, 17(6), 1811–1832. https://doi.org/10.12738/estp.2017.6.0305

Sripicharn, P. (2010). How can we prepare learners for using language corpora? In A. O’Keeffe & M. McCarthy (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics (pp. 371-384). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203856949.ch27

Walsh, S. (2010). What features of spoken and written corpora can be exploited in creating language teaching materials and syllabuses? In A. O’Keeffe & M. McCarthy (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of corpus linguistics (pp. 333-344). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203856949.ch24

Elisavet Kostaki - Psoma
Elisavet Kostaki – Psoma

Elisavet has been involved in various aspects of TESOL for more than two decades: as a teacher, an examiner, a mentor and a teacher trainer. For the last two years she has also worked on various CELTA courses as an approved tutor. It is our pleasure to welcome her to ACE TEFL!

Speaking your mind?

Speaking in an exam

[image from playbill.com)

“I don’t mind talking to you or my classmates in English; in fact, I quite enjoy it. But it’s different when I have to have a conversation with a stranger whose job is to look for mistakes in what I say and how I say it – the examiner is not there to support me, but to judge me. And they’re not interested in talking to me,  they just want to do their job, pass or fail me, and then go home!”

This is how a learner preparing for a public exam described his attitude to the speaking test. And he’s actually quite right. His words capture two salient characteristics of speaking tests, which both teachers and learners need to remember:

  • A speaking test is not a normal communicative interaction. The main purpose is neither to exchange information, nor to exchange opinions, nor to express feelings. The main purpose is for the learner to demonstrate what they know and what they can do in English and for the examiner to judge the learner’s performance.
  • The examiner’s job is, indeed, to make decisions about the learner’s level based on the evidence the learner provides. In most EFL examination contexts, the examiner is actually discouraged from speaking naturally and participating naturally in a conversation with the learner; instead, they are asked to follow a script in the interests of standardization and fairness.

An unnatural situation

The ensuing unnaturalness of the situation is not an accident, but rather an inherent necessity, one of the necessary evils, it seems, of exams. Speaking examiners, who are mostly teachers themselves, learn to check their teaching personality at the examination room door and put on the hat of the impartial, but occasionally robotic, examiner. In a similar way, learners may also have to learn that it is in their best interest to adopt a speaking style for the examination room which may be very different from what is the norm in natural conversation.

Research into natural conversation (for example, Leech 2000, Quaglio and Biber 2006, Miller 2006) has shown that it displays characteristics like the following:

  • at least half of the utterances are fragments, incomplete clauses and parenthetics
  • more than 60% of the complete clauses used have a very simple subject – verb – object structure
  • more than 70% of the verbs are in the present tense
  • there are quite a few structures (including non-defining relative clauses, participial clauses and infinitive clauses) which are extremely rare
  • lexical density and  lexical diversity are both very low, which means that a limited number of words are used, rare words are avoided and many of the words are repeated again and again
  • cohesive devices are limited to very simple conjunctions like and and but, with only occasional use of conjuncts.

And yet, to prove that they have reached an advanced level, learners taking a speaking exam are expected to demonstrate that they can construct full, grammatical sentences, that they can use a broad range of grammatical structures, that they have an appropriate range of vocabulary at their disposal and that they can employ a variety of cohesive devices to help them connect their ideas and signal what logical relationships obtain between different ideas. In other words, the kind of speaking performance that will earn learners good marks in a speaking test seems to display none of the characteristics of natural conversation; worse still, speaking tests seem to require that learners should use a register that is more typical of written than of spoken English. 

What should we teach them, then?

That doesn’t necessarily mean that teachers should be teaching learners how to speak unnaturally. In my view, we should instead make sure that learners understand what the requirements of the exam are and make clear when we are practising  exam skills rather than practising the language. Rather than pretending that what learners have to do in the exam is simply “be themselves” and interact the way they would in “real life” (which, unsurprisingly, is a shorthand term in the ELT world for “life outside the classroom”), I think we should clarify that an exam is most certainly not a normal communicative context, that it has its own rules and its own conventions, that it is, at the end of the day, a spoken genre different  from almost all the others, which learners can master, given the right guidance.

Sheldon or Penny?

Such guidance would include explicit references to the assessment criteria used in the exam and activities focusing on evaluating spoken performance in relation to those criteria. This, however, could be introduced as a game: listening to normal conversations and deciding whether they would be  good enough for an exam as well as listening to less normal conversations and deciding whether those would be good enough for an exam. Which of the two characters, for example, in the video below would you say interacts normally? And which one demonstrates a good range of structures and vocabulary that examiners would appreciate?

Learners in the know

Once learners realise that they need to play a role in the examination room, for which they need to develop a different manner of speaking, one that shows off their language knowledge and skills, it will be possible to continue teaching them real English as well as preparing them for the exam without feeling as though we were all taking part in an absurd performance of an absurd play.  All we have to do is keep the two separated: this is real life, that is exam survival!

References

Leech, G. 2000. Grammars of spoken English: new outcomes of corpus‐oriented research. Language Learning 50 (4):675‐724
Quagluio P. and D. Biber 2006. The Grammar of Conversation. In B.Aarts and A. McMahon (Eds.) The Handbook of English Linguistics. Oxford:  Blackwell.

Whose understanding are you really checking?

We know for a fact that no matter how clearly we present language in the classroom, we should always ask questions to check the learners have understood the important aspects of this language, e.g. meaning, use, and form, and perhaps further clarify potential confusion or misunderstanding, if we get evidence that they haven’t understood – or move on to something else if they have!

One of the most common ways to check the learners’ understanding effectively is through CCQs – short for Concept Checking Questions. Inexperienced teachers tend to find CCQs quite difficult to come up with; their judgement as to when a CCQ is good or not is shrouded by a cloud of uncertainty.

The reason for this may have to do with the fact that CCQs are closely connected to a teacher’s ability to analyse language for teaching. In fact, CCQs mirror a number of things:

  • a teacher’s knowledge of the language, and their own understanding of it
  • the background studying they’ve done on a specific structure, word, etc
  • how well they have prepared for the teaching of a specific structure
  • their ability to decode and simplify this inherent or acquired knowledge to help students understand.

Let’s look at two examples and put this hypothesis to the test.

Scenario 1:

A taecher introduces the passive voice to a group of pre-intermediate learners. The language is found in a coursebook text about great works of art. The marker sentence is ‘The Mona Lisa was painted by Da Vinci.’ So, after having presented the meaning, form, etc, the teacher proceeds to ask the CCQs they have prepared to check the learners’ understanding. One of the CCQs is:

Teacher: “Do we know who did the action?”

Students: “Yes!”

Teacher: “Do we need to know?”

Students: “Yes!”

Teacher: “Really? Do we need to know that Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa?”

Students: “Yes, it’s important!”

Teacher: “No, when we use the passive, we don’t need to know who did the action.”

The obvious consequence is utter confusion, to say the least. The reason is that the teacher thought (s)he knew the use of the passive voice without paying attention to the context. It is true that one of the uses of the passive voice is when the doer is unimportant/obvious. However, this is not the case for this specific marker sentence, in which the opposite is true: the passive is used here in order to place special emphasis on the agent of the action! The problem with the concept question selected is that the teacher was overconfident: they thought they knew the rules and did not bother to check.

Scenario 2:

Again, introducing the passive voice to a group of pre-intermediate students, the teacher contrasts the same sentence formed in the active and in the passive voice to present the differences in relation to form.

The marker sentences are:

  1. The Mona Lisa was painted by Da Vinci
  2. Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa.

After having presented the difference, the teacher asks the following questions to check the learners have understood:

Teacher: “So, what happens to the subject of an active voice sentence when we turn it into the passive?”

Students: *silence*

Teacher: “Is sentence 1 an agentless passive voice construction or not?”

Students: *silence*

In this case, the teacher was perfectly aware of the differences in form, the terminology to describe it, etc. They had done their background studying. The major problem though is that the metalanguage they used to check understanding was not accessible to the learners. In other words, the teacher had not been prepared appropriately to teach the language.

Conclusion

So, when we analyse language for teaching, we need to bear in mind that knowing the rules – or thinking that we know the rules – is not enough.

Analysing language for teaching purposes also involves being aware of the audience and how you can get through to them; our CCQs reflect not only our ability to check the learners’ understanding, but also our ability to anticipate confusion, our ability to empathise with the students, and our willingness to help them understand.

A, B, C, DELTA

What is the DELTA?

The DELTA is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, so it’s what follows ABC. It’s also the name of the modular Cambridge Diploma in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, which makes sense, as that’s a qualification that defintely goes beyond the ABC of language teaching methodology! However, the name of the Cambridge DELTA has nothing to do with the Greek alphabet – not everything was invented by the Greeks! DELTA used to be an acronym for Diploma in English Language Teaching to Adults, but as the scheme evolved over the years, it naturally became more context-sensitive and is no longer limited to teaching adults; the brand name, though, was retained, so the names of the two popular Cambridge qualifications for English language teachers, CELTA and DELTA, continue to rhyme!

Who is the DELTA for?

As an advanced, Level 7 qualification, the DELTA is not intended for those with little or no previous experience or training in ELT methodology. It is, indeed, a qualification for experienced teachers, who are already familiar with the principles of ELT methodology and have a high level of language awareness.

The DELTA is, therefore, in many cases a requirement for more senior (and better paid!) ELT-related positions internationally, such as EAP Tutor or Director of Studies. It can also be an important step to becoming a teacher trainer – in fact, a DELTA (or an equivalent qualification) is a Cambridge requirement  for those who wish to train as a CELTA tutor.

What does the DELTA consist of?

For the majority of teachers who decide to begin their DELTA journey to professional development, the first step is DELTA Module 1. Module 1 is assessed by external examination and the syllabus covers all of the background knowledge an experiences teacher should have: a detailed knowledge of grammar, phonology, lexis and discourse, a very good understanding of the four skills, familiarity with language acquisition theories and language teaching approaches and methods, a good grasp of assessment and testing principles and practice, as well as the ability to analyse and evaluate teaching materials, techniques and resources. Module 1 then provides the background that you need to design and teach different kinds of lessons as well as plan and implement a professional development plan as a teacher, which is what Module 2 is about. Finally, Module 3 gives you the chance to focus on an area of specialism, such as teaching exam classes or teaching academic English, and design a whole course, thus extending your knowledge of teaching and learning principles and putting everything you’ve learnt in Modules 1 and 2 into practice.

How can I start my DELTA journey?

Module 1 is, as I explained above, an exam-based qualification. You don’t actually have to attend a preparation course – theoretically, anyone can take the exam, whether they have attended a course or not, and if they pass it they will be awarded the DELTA Module 1 certificate. In practice, though, most people choose to follow a course to prepare for their DELTA exam and personally I think it’s necessary, not only because you need to ensure that you have covered the exam syllabus, but also because you need to understand how the exam works and what kind of information you are expected to provide in answer to each of the exam questions.

The problem, however, is that anyone and everyone can claim to offer a Module 1 preparation course, whether or not they have the background, knowledge and experience required. So if you’re thinking of doing a Module 1 course, I would suggest that you spend some time researching and evaluating the options you have.

What should I consider before choosing a course?

Having designed and taught DELTA Module 1 courses ever since the modular DELTA was first offered, more than ten years ago, and having heard from a lot of colleagues with both positive and negative experience of DELTA Module 1 courses, I would suggest that you consider the following before you make a decision about which course to enrol on:

  • How many hours is the course and how many of those are contact hours between tutors and participants?
    Check exactly what the course provider means when they say, for example, that the course is 100 hours; do they mean 100 hours of contact or of self-study? I have found that 50 contact hours and another 50 directed study hours is the absolute minimum,
  • What is the course schedule? Does it clearly cover all areas of the DELTA syllabus? Does it contain an exam taking skills component?
    Ask to see a sample course schedule or timetable before you enrol. Make sure that the syllabus is covered comprehensively and that input is included on areas such as language acquisition theories, error analysis, approaches and methods, assessment, materials evaluation, skills development. Check also that the course includes a heavy language analysis component covering all areas of grammar, phonology, lexis and discourse. And finally, check that exam taking skills are also covered and that at least one DELTA mock exam is included.
  • Who are the tutors? Are they qualified? How familiar are they with the DELTA? 
    These are obvious questions, but often we assume that because someone has the nerve to offer a DELTA course, they must be qualified; unfortunately, that is not always the case. So do check that the tutors are Cambridge-approved DELTA tutors and that they have experience of teaching Module 1.
  • What materials and resources does the course use?
    Most DELTA Module 1 courses are offered online these days. But ‘online’ can mean very different things: from a Moodle-based course with limited contact between participants and tutors to a live online course taught on a platform like Zoom or Blackboard, where you can interact with other participants and with the tutors on a regular basis.
  • How much does the course cost?
    A DELTA Module 1 course doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. There are courses out there with a very limited number of contact hours that cost 1000 Euro or more! The question to ask yourself here is “does that look like good value for money?” But don’t forget to do your research before you make a decision!

Do your lessons have to taste bland?

What does PARSNIP stand for?

It’s an acronym for the following topics:

(no) Politics, Alcohol, Religion, Sex, Narcotics, –Isms, Pork.

Imagine real life without being able to enjoy any of the things mentioned above or not even being able to read and talk about them freely. Imagine you’re only allowed to read and talk about Marie Curie, the weather, netball, a new species of spider found in the Amazon, and some unknown, ‘innovative’ founder of some obscure NGO.

An Orwellian nightmare to some, a dream come true to others.

Whether you think the situation I’ve just described is an Orwellian nightmare or a dream, indeed, PARSNIP is a major part of our ELT lives. PARSNIP is the (in)famous acronym of topics to be avoided in coursebooks for the obvious reason that publishing companies have to penetrate a lot of markets at the same time. So, since they wish to keep their sales high – both a logical and legitimate objective, of course – they need to make sure that there is absolutely no risk of causing offence to anyone, in other words they need to produce content that is ‘safe’ everywhere. That’s how students end up talking about a very limited, and usually rather boring, range of mundane topics.

Does it mean that being exposed to and reading about Marie Curie or Mother Theresa is to be frowned upon? Of course not. On the contrary, it can be interesting and even fun occasionally. It does become rather problematic and unrealistic though, when it’s the only content you’re being exposed to in the class.

Is there a logic behind PARSNIP?

The answer is simple: yes, there is. Avoiding topics which can offend certain students is a wise choice in a lot of cases. For example, when you are not really familiar with your students’ likes, preferences, personalities, beliefs, cultures, identities, etc, it’s always a good idea to play it safe by following the coursebook; even when they’re bland, course books can at least provide a ‘safe space’ for everyone in the class, including the teacher: anodyne texts, a coherent flow of lessons, useful exercises, etc.

I am not a proponent of doing away with coursebooks. However, the majority of coursebooks – just as any other product/service intended for mass consumption, most TV programmes being another example of that – systematically fail to deal with topics which are inherently more serious, profound and go beyond the obtuse concepts of ‘good’ vs ‘evil’, ‘offensive’ vs ‘inoffensive’, ‘right’ vs ‘wrong’.

What can we do about it then?

Inherently non-trivial interesting topics, such as current affairs articles, opinion articles or talk shows, make input and language more memorable and, arguably, they make learning more likely to take place. So, there is a case for designing or selecting materials that do not come straight out of a coursebook: materials that are inspired by the real world, no matter how bleak, saturnine, controversial, or silly the latter might sometimes be.

However, we have to be very careful when doing so. Some of the things we always need to remember when selecting and designing such materials for classroom use are the following:

  • The need for the teacher to be fully aware of the learners’ preferences, boundaries, level of tolerance, culture, and interests. Preferably, you need to have had a number of lessons with the learners first so that a level of rapport and mutual trust and respect has been established.
  • The teaching context, i.e. the language teaching organisation you are working for, so that you do not bring yourself in a difficult, potentially irreversible position.
  • The expectations of the sponsors of your students, e.g. parents, a company paying for their employees’ business English lessons, etc.

Can it actually work?

Yes, it can. I am sure most of you reading this post have designed at least one lesson like the ones I’m alluding to at some point in your teaching career.

Those of you who haven’t done so and are wondering what this type of lesson would look like, I’ll give you an example of one I designed and taught with a group of young adult students a few months ago. But, first, a few things about the background of the learners in that group:

They had been preparing for the IELTS exam and had been having online lessons using Zoom. All of them were uni students and some of them had to work for a living at the same time. During our lessons, they did not hesitate to speak their mind: most of them were open, talkative and friendly, but did not seem to appreciate the coursebook topics very much. I felt they would be able to deal with something more topical and, as we had known each other quite well and there was very good rapport and trust, I decided to risk a more sensitive topic. After all, the environment was safe enough to accommodate all different ‘voices’ and mindsets.

So, when I stumbled upon an interesting article about the #metoo movement, which had been getting a lot of exposure and still is a real hot potato, I made a lesson out of it: I supplemented the materials with a short YouTube video, designed a couple of listening and reading activities, and added a few questions for discussion. Believe me, these particular learners loved it. Some very interesting discussions took place – they also helped me to view things in a slightly different perspective, too.

Below, you can download the materials for the lesson – check them out, as they may still be relevant. If you think your advanced students might appreciate it, feel free to use the material. And if you do, I’d love to read about how your students responded in the comments below!

PresentationDownload
Reading textDownload

Shall we throw grammar out with the bath water?

Do we need grammar?

My first thought when somebody asks the question do we need grammar? is “of course we do, what are you talking about?” Still, bitter experience has taught me that easy answers are not necessarily, or even usually, correct, especially when the question itself is ambiguous, so I then go on to consider the question more carefully. 

If the question is taken to mean “do we need to teach grammar explicitly,” then the jury seems to have been out for at least a few decades; far from coming up with a simple, direct answer, psycholinguistic research seems to be simultaneously supporting both that we need grammar and that we don’t need it (see, for example, Ellis 2015). Nevertheless, there will always be those for whom, in the words of Henry Widdowson (1985, p. 161) “the delusion of simple answers will always be available as an attractive alternative to thought.” Thus, the dogmatic certainty of some, even today, that we should (at last!) do away with grammar can only compare to the certainty of others, more than a hundred years ago, that explicit study of grammar rules is the only way in which we can learn a foreign language. It seems to me that they are both wrong, not (just) because the truth is usually in the “middle ground” between two extremes, but because the question itself is problematic.

Reframing the question

A question like “do we need grammar?” is actually not just problematic, but quite meaningless if we haven’t defined what we mean by grammar, who ‘we’ refers to and what “we” might need grammar for. Thus, the answers I might give to the question would be very different in each of the following cases:

  • whether  ‘we’ refers to language learners or language teachers
  • whether by ‘grammar’ we mean explicit, declarative knowledge or implicit, procedural knowledge of the grammar rules
  • whether we ‘need’ grammar for interaction in basic everyday communication contexts or in order to write an article, a short story or a poem or in order to teach the language

Do teachers need grammar?

As a language teacher educator, I think I can understand why I am inclined to defend grammar: I am thinking of language teachers rather than learners, and the need for them to possess declarative, not just procedural, knowledge of grammar, so that they can compose fully accurate models of language for their students and so that  they can make informed decisions about how much (or how little!) grammar instruction their students need and what form this grammar instruction should take depending on the type of learners, their level and their learning purpose. In other words, what I am inclined to claim is that foreign language teachers need detailed, explicit knowledge of grammar even if they choose not to teach grammar explicitly in all cases. 

Why do teachers need grammar?

In fact, knowledge of grammar (and yes, I mean declarative knowledge of the grammar rules) is a prerequisite for teaching the language even if the teacher has chosen not to teach grammar explicitly. To be precise, if they have chosen not to teach grammar explicitly, it may be even more imperative that the teacher should know their grammar. Here is why:

  • They can select what kind of language to include in the models they provide, so that the models do not confuse the learners and make clear and obvious the meaning and use of the structures they exemplify.
  • They can select appropriate contexts for the structures in focus, that is contexts which naturally invite the use of the structure and which make the meaning and use very clear without the need to resort to explanation.
  • They can devise appropriate, i.e. clear and simple, checking questions to ensure  that the learners have understood the forms and meanings in focus even if no explicit presentation of the rules is provided.
  • They can anticipate what problems the learners might have and devise appropriate tasks and activities to help learners overcome these problems.
  • They can plan what to say if learners should ask the question most teachers dread: “why do we say it like that?”

Dismissing grammar and grammar teaching altogether on the grounds that explicit study of the grammar rules is not useful or not appropriate in a particular context makes little sense. At best, it’s based on a logical leap: explicit grammar teaching can be ineffective, therefore let’s not teach grammar at all; or worse, let’s not even bother to find out what grammar and grammar teaching involves. Beheading  the patient may be a radical cure for headache, but let’s not forget it inevitably results in the patient’s death. 

References
Ellis, N. (2015). Implicit AND Explicit Language Learning .Their dynamic interface and complexity. In P. Rebuschat (ed.), Implicit and Explicit Learning of Languages (pp. 3- 23). Michigan: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Widdowson, H. G. (1985). Against dogma: a reply to Michael Swan. ELT Journal 39, 1985, pp. 158-161

Are you a Haydn or a Beethoven?

One of my pet subjects to discuss with colleagues is how our knowledge of other areas than methodology can inform our teaching. In my case, music – the sonata in particular – is one of these other areas which has deeply informed my teaching; so, I thought of expanding on this idea in the hope that some of you might find it relatable.

The sonata in the style of Haydn.

Years ago, I studied music theory. One of my favourite subjects was History of Music, during which we studied the evolution of certain forms of composition – the sonata being the ultimate form of all.

Of course the term sonata is a rather vague term in itself. For example, a symphony is a sonata for an orchestra; a trio is a sonata for three instruments; a quartet for four instruments, and so on. Its different names depend on the number of instruments the piece of music has been originally composed for.

Regardless of the name though, a sonata consists of a set of specific movements, put in a specific order. If we listen for example to Haydn’s Sonata in C major, H. XVI, 35, we’ll notice that there are three distinct movements:

  1. 1st movement: an allegro con brio (playful and cheerful), during which we can hear the main theme and its standard variations
  2. 2nd movement: an adagio (in a slow tempo), during which the main theme is transposed into a different yet relevant key to create the illusion of an alternative theme – also, the tempo is much slower and the dynamic much more gentle and calm
  3. 3rd movement: again, an Allegro (cheerful), during which the composer returns to the original key and theme using several other technical clichés, which I won’t bore you with, to put back all of the pieces of the puzzle together in a majestic finale!

Sounds familiar so far?

By now, you might already have seen the parallel I’m attempting to draw between a structured English language lesson and the sonata. To be more specific:

  1. the way in which we teachers usually start with a lively warm-up activity (allegro con brio) to set the mood as well as the context
  2. then, we go on to the adagio movement of the lesson, during which the pace might occasionally be a bit slower, the class is a bit calmer and quieter to allow the learners to process, practise and internalise different aspects of the language systems or skills, hopefully without forgetting the overall theme and direction of the lesson
  3. finally, the way in which we usually finish the lesson with a final, heroic allegro: a triumphant, communicative activity involving the whole class trying to put all of the pieces of the puzzle back together.

Did this parallel help?

Thanks to this knowledge of the structure of the sonata, I was able to get my head round the standard, linear lesson planning framework quite fast. I was also aware of several ways in which I could modify activities without losing sight of the ‘main theme’, i.e. the main aim. In other words, I could supplement my lesson with some standard, prescribed variations.

However, there came a point when I suddenly felt that this seemingly straightforward approach to lesson planning became stringent; it got rather repetitive and boring both for the ‘composer’ and the ‘audience’. The traditional, Haydnesque sonata structure had become “a shop device by which a bad composer may persuade himself and the innocent reader of textbooks that he is a good one.” (Newman, 1958:51)

I had reached a plateau and wasn’t able to move forward – to the point of risking becoming a Poundland singer-songwriter. And my ‘audience’ could feel that.

Beethoven to the rescue!

Still, this parallel between music and teaching helped me once again. This time it was Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas: I remembered how the grand maestro completely altered, or sometimes even abandoned those archaic standards and rules of form which restricted his creativity to the detriment of the final outcome. He would shift the order of the movements; he would add or even leave movements out; sometimes, he would only include the main theme followed by a range of variations. In fact, his last and most enjoyable piano sonata consisted of two movements only!

This helped me reconsider my planning abilities: the second ‘slow’ adagio movement could now be modified and replace the first one; then, a series of variations could follow leading up to a crescendo-finale, or there could even be an alternation of adagios and allegros. Or, I could leave whole movements out! I had come to the realisation that as long as the composer respects his audience’s expectations and is able to help them keep track of the main theme, then the sky is the limit.

So, if all lessons become as predictable a procedure as the archaic form of the traditional sonata, the outcome may ultimately be a yawning audience, or even worse: an empty stage. ‘Papa’ Haydn we should study; Beethoven we should aspire to become.

A final note

Wendell Kretschmar, a music teacher in Thomas Mann’s book Dr. Faustus, while playing Beethoven’s last sonata on the piano (the one consisting of two movements only) and delivering a lecture on it, exclaimed:

“A third movement? […] A return after this parting – impossible! It had happened that the sonata had come, in the second, enormous movement, to an end, an end without any return. And when he said ‘the sonata’, he meant not only this one in C minor, but the sonata in general, as a species, as a traditional art-form.”

Mann, T. P. Doctor Faustus

Even though I do not whole-heartedly agree with my beloved Wendell Kretschmar, I do see the point he is trying to make. The one thing I haven’t mastered yet is improvisation – I’ve never been a huge jazz scholar… Perhaps, the time has come for a bit of John Coltrane!

References

Mann, T. P. (1949). Doctor Faustus. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. London: Secker & Warburg
Newman, E. (1958). More Essays from the World of Music: Essays from the London Sunday Times, selected by Felix Aprahamian. London: John Calder; New York: Coward-McCann, Inc.

Respect and Inquiry in Teacher Education

‘I see myself as a transmitter of knowledge,’ a teacher trainer told me a few years ago. Her job, as she saw it, was to convey to her trainees what she herself had learnt mainly by reading about language and language teaching methodology and by attending courses, seminars and conferences. Intuitively, I’m sure many trainers would agree, to a certain extent at least. There does seem to be a body of knowledge that is relevant to our profession and that can be transmitted to teachers-in-training. One might mention, for example, the following areas of “received” or public knowledge that is theoretically transmittable and arguably useful to foreign language teachers:

  • knowledge of the subject matter to be taught, i.e. language
  • knowledge of second language acquisition research
  • knowledge of methods and techniques that have been developed specifically for teaching foreign languages

However, even though it seems intuitively obvious that a language teacher should know about such things, the type and amount of knowledge they require has been a matter of debate for at least the last twenty years. Bartels (2005, p. 411), for example, concludes after reviewing relevant research that “well-formed KAL [Knowledge About Language] does not seem to be necessary to be a superior language teacher”. Freeman and Johnson (1998, p. 412), similarly warn that knowledge of second language acquisition research may be “of limited use and applicability to  practicing teachers”. In addition, Freeman (2016, p. 161) points out that a reliance on knowledge of methods and techniques in teacher education represents a simplistic view of teacher education, while Kumaravadivelu (1994, p. 29) emphasizes the need for practitioners themselves to “generate location-specific, classroom-oriented innovative practices” in the post-method condition.

In fact, whatever “received knowledge” there is to transmit could only form part of the content of a teacher education programme. In Jourdenais’s (2009, p.652) view, this would represent the  “public theories” component, i.e. the “theories articulated in published literature and research”. However, a more important dimension of teacher education is teachers’ private theories, which are not necessarily based on received wisdom, but rather on the teachers’ own beliefs, experiences and actions. The divide between what teachers learn on teacher training courses and what they actually do in the classroom may actually have everything to do with the fact that the received (and transmitted) knowledge of “public theories” remains disconnected from teachers’ private theories, formed through practice and developed through reflection on practice.

As a trainer, then, my job is not (merely) to transmit such received knowledge, but rather, as Hedgcock (2002, p. 309) puts it, to enable teachers to question, critique and challenge public theories so that they can “construct their own operational theories of classroom practice”. Far from being a linear process of knowledge transmission, teacher learning seems to be a process of internalisation in the Vygotskian sense, whereby the focus of attention is “on the character and quality of the activities they [teachers and learners] are engaged in together, the resources they are using to engage in those activities, and what is being accomplished by engaging in those activities” (Johnson 2009, p. 62).

This is quite a humbling realisation for a teacher trainer. Privileged access to a body of received knowledge which you can use to design teacher training programmes and sessions seems a relatively easy and secure route to becoming a teacher trainer; acknowledging, however, that your work actually involves helping teachers reshape and transform their thinking in ways that cannot be predicted and in contexts which you may not be fully familiar with forces you to realise that collaborative critical enquiry is the basis of teacher education (indeed, it seems to be the basis of all educational activity): there can be no superior, privileged positions in this collaborative endeavour; there can only be mutual respect and a willingness to question public theories in the light of your own and your trainees’ situated practice.

This is not to say that there aren’t things that the trainer “knows” and the trainees do not yet “know” or that there is no room for “received knowledge” in a teacher education programme. What I am suggesting is that neither the nature nor the usefulness and applicability of such knowledge is ever a given: the body of received knowledge itself is constantly growing and, perhaps more importantly, both the trainers’ and the trainee teachers’ personal theories should also be constantly developing, based on reflection and critical inquiry, i.e. the persistent questioning and critique of the  experiences, behaviours and actions of both trainers and trainees. What there is no room for is the kind of trainers who see themselves as sages in possession of all knowledge. Because knowledge is a process, not an object to be acquired; and it cannot be possessed, it can only be questioned!

References
Bartels, N. (2005) Applied linguistics and language teacher education: what we know. In Bartels, N (ed) Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education. Boston: Springer.
Freeman, D (2016). Educating Second Language Teachers. The Same Things Done Differently. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Freeman, D. & Johnson, K. (1998). Reconceptualizing the knowledge-base of language teacher education. TESOL Quarterly 32, 397–417.
Hedgcock, J. (2002). Toward a socioliterate approach to second language teacher education. Modern Language Journal 86, 299–317.
Johnson, K. E. (2009). Second Language Teacher Education. A Sociocultural Perspective. New York: Routledge
Jourdenais, R. (2009). Language teacher education. In M. H. Long, & C. J. Doughty (Eds.), The handbook of language teaching. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Kumaravadivelu, B. (1994). The postmethod condition: (e)merging strategies for second/foreign language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 28, 27–48.

Guess who’s back!

You haven’t heard from us for a few months, but please don’t assume we’ve given up teaching or training teachers. On the contrary, George and I have been busy putting into practice a dream we’ve had for a long time: to start a new centre for teacher development, where we can do more than just offer ready-made, run-of-the-mill courses. We ’ve worked really hard to make this dream come true and we’re happy to say we’re now ready!

The name of our new baby is ACE TEFL, or the Athens Centre for Teachers of English as a Foreign Language, and we truly want it to live up to its name: a centre where teachers can feel good, exchange ideas, help one another grow, share experiences, learn more about teaching and learning, develop professionally as teachers and trainers, and, of course, have a good time.

We’re located right at the heart of Athens and we’ ve been busy making our premises the place we’ve always wanted to work in: not just a professional working and learning environment, but also a place that is cozy and full of character. Naturally, we’re equipping our centre with cutting edge resources, a library with over five hundred books and periodicals, bright and spacious seminar rooms, comfortable meeting spaces, and all the amenities you would expect to find in a modern training centre.

But even more important, we want our centre to be a place where teachers feel safe, respected and valued. After all those years of working for others, George and I are now free to give priority to the needs and wants of the teachers we work with and show them the respect they deserve. One of the many ways we can show them this respect is by ensuring that they fall in love with the place in which they will be spending a lot of their time during the day and enjoy every single comfort available.

As for our services, you can have a look at the types of courses, seminars, workshops and other stuff we offer here. Do feel free to drop us an email and we’ll be happy to give you more details on whatever interests you.

P.S. Do keep an eye out for our centre-warming party date as soon as the COVID-19 restrictions are lifted! For the initiated, I am sure you are well aware of the parties George and I can throw! For the uninitiated, you are more than welcome to check it out for yourselves! If you’re not sure, well… ask around and I’m sure you’ll be convinced to join us!