ih journa lof education and development

16 Spr ing 2004

It’s My Job to Ask the Questions by Jeremy Harmer

Understanding Chinese Students by Melissa Lamb and Alison Ashburner

Beginnings in IH by Colin McMillan

Real Pro’s by Jayne Silva

CELTA and the Experienced Teacher by Keith Hawkins

Doing the Distance Delta by Richard Hargreaves

Motivation Among EFL Teachers by Simon Cox

Methodology for Beginners by David Tompkins

Something on Language Awareness by Alex Tilbury

Tests and Exams in IHWO by Mike Cattlin

Editorial

50 Years of IHBeginnings by Colin McMillan

Classroom MattersIt’s My Job to Ask the Questions? Reflections on an Ordinary Teaching Experience

by Jeremy HarmerLost in Translation: Understanding Chinese Students by Melissa Lamb and Alison Ashburner

Career Development MattersReal Pro’s: Developing Trainees’ Awareness of Professionalism on CELTA Courses

by Jayne SilvaCELTA and the Experienced Teacher by Keith HawkinsGoing the Distance by Richard Hargreaves. Why Do We Do It? Motivation Among EFL Teachers by Simon Cox

Language and TerminologyMethodology for Beginners: Sticking Labels on What You Already Know by David TompkinsSomething on Language Awareness by Alex Tilbury.

Tests and ExamsThe IHWO Placement Test and The EURO Exam for IH Schools by Mike Cattlin

In your Own WordsThe Game by Benita CruickshankWords by Andy Cox

IHWO NewsWhat’s going on in the IHWO

Book ReviewsCutting Edge Advanced reviewed by Will HuttonNew Headway Intermediate reviewed by David RiddellInside Out Elementary reviewed by Melissa LambNatural Grammar reviewed by David RiddellFocus on IELTS reviewed by Nancy WallaceAssessing Young Learners reviewed by Nancy WallaceTask Based Learning and Teaching reviewed by Amanda LloydHomework reviewed by Leslie Anne HendraEats, Shoots and Leaves & The Guide to Better English reviewed by Elena RoseJust Right reviewed by Alastair DouglasEnglish Pronunciation In Use reviewed by Andy Cox

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Contents

International House Journal of Education and Development • International House, 106 Piccadilly, London W1J 7NL, U.K. Tel: +44 (0)20 7518 6955 • e-mail: ihjournal@ihlondon.co.uk • Editors: Rachel Clark & Susanna Dammann • Subscriptions Manager: RuthMarriott • Editorial Board: Nigel Beanland, Steve Brent, Pippa Bumstead, Michael Carrier, Roger Hunt, Jeremy Page, Scott Thornbury

Subscriptions: Contact Ruth Marriott, Subscriptions Manager, IH Journal of Education and Development, International House, 106 Piccadilly, London W1J 7NL, U.K. Tel: +44 (0) 20 7518 6955 • e-mail: ihjournal@ihlondon.co.uk ISSN 1368-3292

journal of education and developmentIssue 16 • Spring 2004

Welcome to this new issue of the IH Journal, which is,for at least one among you: a ‘most importantsource of practical and theoretical input as it

contains the most recent, and therefore relevant, developmentand thought in EFL’. Thank you Carrick Cameron of IH Huelvafor those encouraging words. We hope all of you will findsomething in the contents of this number which is relevant andthat many of you will be stimulated to react to what you read,by developing your classroom activities as a result, or bywriting to let us know what you think, or both.

We are sad to say goodbye to Ruth Marriott, who added toher duties in IH London as an excellent administrator, by run-ning the subscriptions for the Journal and helping to develop adatabase which we hope will ensure that you all get yourcopies on time. (Please let us know if you don’t.) We wish herall the best in her new life up North. It’s also goodbye to the2003 purple cover and hello to the new blue for 2004 (wethought it would look rather good on your shelves next to thepurple – we hope you agree!).

We have once again had to squeeze, to get everything intothis issue, and once again have had to postpone publication ofone or two items for lack of space. One space-taker, andworth every column centimetre, we feel sure you will agree, isAlex Tilbury’s thought-provoking article on ‘LanguageAwareness’, provoked itself by his reaction to RodneyBlakeston’s piece in Journal 14.

Now that the 50th year celebrations are over (see the IHWOnews for Colin McMillan’s description of the amazing variety ofactivities that IH schools in Portugal undertook to mark thisoccasion) it is time for us once again to be looking ahead to thefuture. Despite continuing gloomy predictions based on theworld situation, expansion into Asia is booming (see AlisonAshburner and Melissa Lamb’s article on p. 8 for first handknowledge of and insight into teaching Chinese students). Inaddition, a shift in focus in Study Abroad schools across theworld, away from ‘traditional’ General English and towardsincreased provision of examination preparation courses such as

IELTS and up EAP and University Foundation Programmes isclearly answering market demands. Mike Cattlin’s article onp. 26 says more about an exciting innovation on the examina-tion front which is unique to IH.

Jeremy Harmer, as we noted in the last issue has joined theIH Board of Trustees, and we are grateful to him for allowingus to print, from the talk he gave at the 2003 DOSConference, his thoughts on classroom practice. It’s good toread what the more exalted figures in the world of ELT actu-ally get up to when back in the classroom, and good too, tobe reminded that ‘real’ writing can be a stimulating and effec-tive tool in the classroom. As people who, by definitionalmost, care about words and how they achieve their effects,perhaps we language teachers sometimes need to remem-ber to look again at the work of those who have used wordsoutstandingly in the past and to introduce it more often to ourstudents. We also experiment with words ourselves and tworesults of these experiments may be found in the new sectionin this issue – ‘In Your Own Words’ - writing connected insome way to teaching or language. We hope you will enjoyreading Benita Cruikshank and Andy Cox’s contributions andif you feel inspired by them, please send us your own piecesof writing.

We have, as a result of very hard work from Nigel Beanland(thanks Nigel), a huge review section this time, so the ‘BookSpecial’ section in which authors, teachers and trainers writeabout a chosen coursebook begun last issue, will continue inthe next one with articles about Cutting Edge. However, we areaware that most of our reviewers are based in London andwe’d like more of you to be involved: if you would like to do areview (and get a free book for yourself or your school) pleaseget in touch with him at nigel.beanland@ihlondon.co.uk .He’ll send you the book and you do the review. Simple!

There are (again!) too many contributors to mention them all,but we are immensely grateful to all those who have given ustheir time and energy, to make this your Journal; keep thearticles coming – and thank you!

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Susanna DammannCo-editor

Rachel ClarkCo-editor

Nigel BeanlandAdvertising

editor

Ruth MarriotSubscriptions

editor

Editorial IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

EDITORIAL

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Fifty Years of IH IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

FIFTY YEARS OF IH

Colin McMillan started an English language school in Lisbon in 1963. This school, originallycalled Central School of English, was one of the founder members of the IH worldorganisation.

I t was in 1959 that I heard the name Haycraft for the firsttime. At the time, I was taking a year out from university andliving in Seville, giving English classes to keep body and soul

together. One day, in the middle of a private class, probably toease the boredom of the course book, my student, Francisco,asked me if I’d heard about the goings on in Córdoba of theHaycrafts. The ‘goings on’, as far as I could discover,amounted simply to parties with dancing, which, in the repres-sive atmosphere of southern Spain in the 50s, and inFrancisco’s mind, had achieved the status of orgy. I tried toexplain this to Francisco and thought no more of the Haycraftsand their parties in Córdoba for the next few months.

In October of the following year I returned to London to takeup my Spanish course again, which meant joining the previousyear’s first year students. Among them was Josefa fromCordoba, some of whose family had attended John and Brita´sschool and had featured prominently in John’s book on life inCórdoba, Babel in Spain. Unfortunately, the particular refer-ences had not gone down at all well with Josefa and her fam-ily, who felt that John was certainly persona non grata. This,together with similar reactions by others in Cordoba, may wellhave influenced the press and the local authorities and led tothe ban to enter Spain put on John, which he only becameaware of, when he was prevented from entering Spain at theAlgeciras frontier in 1965. Whether Josefa had ever actuallymet John, I am uncertain, but she was, nevertheless, extreme-ly voluble in her criticism and dislike of him.

Another member of the eleven-strong second year Spanishcourse I had joined was a Gibraltarian called Sam Benady who,unlike the rest of us, was a smart dresser and seemed fairlyaffluent. We soon discovered that a small part of his affluencewas the result of working as a part-time English teacher for theAcademia Británica (in the future to be renamed InternationalLanguage Centre – International House), John and Brita’s newventure in Endell Street. Unlike Josefa, Sam had immenseadmiration for John and regaled us with accounts of the school,new teaching ideas, John and Brita’s life in Cordoba and theirplans for the future in London. It was unfortunate for us, in thissmall group of students, that Josefa was quite incapable of

accepting any differences of opinion, attitude, feeling or affec-tion from those she herself held, and carried on a vendetta withSam until the end of the course. On the one hand, this meantthat the rest of us were always on our guard to ensure that thetwo of them were kept as far apart as possible, particularly onsocial occasions, and on the other, we were always consciousof the person behind their differences. John was a kind ofbackdrop to our course for the next two years.

At some point in the year, Sam asked me to stand in for himone evening at Endell Street. I was, he said, quite an

experienced English teacher: I had progressed in my teachingin Seville from a Grammar Translation methodology that myFrench teacher at school would have been proud of, to aDirect Method approach, thanks to the Académia IFAR (Inglés,Francés Alemán Ruso) where I worked for a few months underthe tutelage of a Jorge Chimewelski. I had also flicked throughEssential English by Eckersley, the last word in English lan-guage teaching at the time and, therefore, felt thoroughly pre-pared to substitute Sam. Despite that, I climbed the four (orwas it five?) flights of stairs at Endell Street with a certain trep-idation, and had the distinct impression from the puzzled lookon the face of the blonde receptionist on the desk when I intro-duced myself (I’ve always assumed it was Brita but never hadthe courage to ask her) that Sam hadn’t bothered to tell any-one about the substitution!

Towards the end of that academic year, an excited Sam gaveus the news of the impending move of the school from EndellStreet to Shaftesbury Avenue and, knowing that I needed a jobover the summer months, told me that, as there was going tobe a bar in the new school, they were looking for someone torun it. I’d done quite a few holiday jobs and this didn’t strike meas too difficult. All I had to do, Sam told me, was give JohnHaycraft a ring and set the thing up. This I did quite promptly,only to be greeted by a bemused John Haycraft who told methat, in the first place he hadn’t even thought about a bar; sec-ondly, there was no bar in the new premises, but at the sametime it did seem quite a good idea and could I come over andtalk to him about it. This was to be my first meeting with some-one of whom I had formed three conflicting mental pictures asa result of the rather bizarre coincidences of the last year.Would he be Josefa’s devil in disguise, Francisco’sBacchanalian figure or Sam’s angel in action?

As it was, on this, as on all other occasions, I felt completelyat ease with John: he was friendly, open, enthusiastic andextremely humorous. He was also incredibly persuasive and bythe time we’d finished talking I had agreed, in trueentrepreneurial spirit, to take over a spacebetween two corridors (two small rooms infact), actually set a bar up from scratch, and

BeginningsColin McMillan

I managed to fix something up which looked vaguely bar-like with the help of a few second-hand chairs,

a saw and hammer and nailsfrom my father’s tool-kit.

IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004 Fifty Years of IH

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also provide lunches for groups of teenagers who would becoming over from Italy at the beginning of the summer!

I managed to fix something up which looked vaguely bar-likewith the help of a few second-hand chairs, a saw and hammerand nails from my father’s tool-kit. The kitchen area was a bitmore problematic as it didn’t have running water and therewere no cooking facilities. The solution to this was a borrowedPrimus stove and water from the toilets down the corridor.And we (a girl friend from University and I) were ready to go onday one of the new school in Shaftesbury Avenue.

But before that, the move had to be made from EndellStreet, a mile or so from Covent Garden, to Piccadilly Circus.All hands - teachers, reception staff, friends and barman -converged on the old school one Saturday morning and cre-ated a constant removal chain, carrying tables, chairs, desks,blackboards, wallcharts, books etc. down ShaftesburyAvenue to their new home at number 40, a feat that the vol-ume of traffic, and probably the law, would make impossibletoday.

That summer was an exhilarating experience. The newschool grew and teachers, receptionists and other staff felt theexcitement of growth and development, and being part of

something which was really quite fresh, vibrant and new. Thebar/restaurant managed to survive despite the rather basicfare we were able to provide (cold meats, boiled veg, instantcoffee) or perhaps because people from abroad had fewexpectations of anything special in a culinary sense when theywent to England at that time.

The increase in student numbers meant that more teacherswere needed so that I, too, quite soon spent the morningsserving instant coffee and peeling potatoes, and then, in theafternoons, took off the apron and became an English teacher.The summer also provided me with a most unexpected andprecious gift; it allowed me to get to know John quite well andbuild the foundation of a friendship which continued unbrokenuntil his death in’96.

I returned to University in October of ’61, allowing the bar todrift into other willing entrepreneurial hands (nobody paid meanything for it!), and kept in touch sporadically with develop-ments at 40 Shaftesbury Avenue until I’d finished my degree,at which point, in a conversation I was having with John,which had moved on to my own plans for the future, he said‘Why don’t you start a school in Lisbon?’ And that’s anotherstory.

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— 6 —

Classroom Matters IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

CLASSROOM MATTERS

Afew weeks ago I took some material into myIntermediate class that I had used many years ago, butwhich I had almost forgotten about. However, it

seemed like a good idea to resurrect it, and anyway, to be hon-est, at that time I didn’t have too many other ideas in my head.The material in question was a taped extract from PeterSchaffer’s play Equus.

In Equus, a psychiatrist (Dysart) is trying to work out why ateenager (Alan) has blinded a number of horses in a stable. Theplay centres round the whole concept of worship, sexual inse-curity, identity, and above all the value of imagination andbeauty. Peter Schaffer beautifully constructs a scenario inwhich the psychiatrist’s cure of the boy happens at a cost toboth the boy and, just as importantly to the doctor’s ownhopes and fears. Some of this I explained (in different words,of course,) to my students. I then told them that they weregoing to hear the first real conversation between the boy andthe doctor on a morning after the psychiatrists had heard theboy crying ‘Ek,’ ‘Ek’ in his sleep. They then listened to a tapeof which the following is a 50% extract:

Dysart: Hello. How are you this morning?

Pause.

Come on. Sit down.

Sorry if I gave you a start last night. I was collectingsome papers from my office, and I thought I’d lookin on you. Do you dream often?

Alan: Do YOU?

Dysart: It’s my job to ask the questions. Yours to answerthem.

Alan: Says who?

Dysart: Says me. Do you dream often?

Alan: Do you?

Dysart: Look – Alan.

Alan: I’ll answer if you answer.

Pause

Dysart: Very well. Only we have to speak the truth.

Alan (mocking): Very well.

Dysart: Do you dream often?

Alan: Yes. Do you?

Dysart: Yes. Do you have a special dream?

Alan: No. Do you?

Dysart: Yes. What was your dream about last night?

Alan: Can’t remember. What’s yours about?

Dysart: I said the truth.

Alan: That is the truth. What’s your about? The specialone.

Dysart: Carving up children. My turn.

Alan: What?

The students appeared to be (mostly) intrigued by the tape,which is spoken by two experienced actors. The nature of theconversation, the backwards-and-forwards questioning etc is,after all, quite interesting. Some understood more than others.Nobody got the ‘carving up children’ reference of course(carve and carve up don’t feature high on frequency lists), andthere were other features of language later in the extract whichpassed them by especially since, because Equus was writtenin the late 70s, there are anachronisms such as ‘bloody swiz’.

We talked about what we had heard and discussed some ofthe language use. The students listened to the tape again withapparent enthusiasm. When it was over we started workingthrough the script, in particular looking at which words werestressed in certain phrases. Did they hear THAT is the truth,That IS the truth or That is the TRUTH, for example (it was thesecond option). I had them practise saying things like ‘Do you?’with the kind of challenging knockback that the actor playingAlan had used. We spent a good deal of time doing this.

Finally (and to cut a rather long story short) I placed twochairs at the front and had pairs of students come up and actout the scene. I had written their names on pieces of paperand students had to take out the pieces so that the pairinghappened pretty much at random. I was especially worriedthat a particular student would be chosen because she wouldhave had difficult doing such a thing, and her accent was still,at intermediate level, pretty impenetrable. Luckily we ran out oftime before her name came out of the bag.

Iwent back to the staffroom at Anglia Polytechnic Universitywhere this lesson took place feeling pretty pleased with

myself. But not for long. Because once you start thinkingabout an experience you end up having toask questions about what was achieved,

It’s my job to ask the questions? Reflectionson an ordinary teaching experience.

Jeremy Harmer

Jeremy Harmer is a writer of methodology and coursebooks, including the brand newJust Right series from Marshall Cavendish. He is general editor of the Longman How ToSeries and hosts a TD website at www.eltforum.com. He is proud to be a trustee ofInternational House.

IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004 Classroom Matters

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why you did it, and who gained and lost the most. But let’s befrank: these aren’t life and death questions like invading acountry illegally or ruining a weapons inspector’s life. They’rejust the common currency of uncertainty that keeps us teach-ers on our toes, slightly edgy and at best, alive. At worst? Well,we won’t go there right now.

We could call this ‘Common Currency Reflection’, Isuppose, so here are some of my own reflections on mylesson:

11.. One of the reasons I felt happy about the lesson (at first)is because it was an old favourite and it was nice to meetup again. I think the extract is beautifully written, theatmosphere is satisfyingly tense, and I like messingaround with playscripts anyway. But whether that meansthat they liked it too, well that’s a bit of a different issue.How important is it, in other words, for teachers to dothings they like? Or, turning it round, does a teacher’senthusiasm guarantee good learning? It seems to methat there’s some fine dividing line between a teacher’snatural enthusiasm for what they themselves like and thelearner’s need for what they enjoy. It is undeniable thathappy teachers are more attractive than miserable ones,but if their preferences are too self-regarding it couldhave a negative impact on the class and on learning.

22.. How much did it matter that the material was (a) not verycontemporary, and (b) highly stylised? I should haveexplained, perhaps, that the extract ended with the boysinging a Double Diamond song from a TV commercial(note to younger IH teachers: Double Diamond was abottled beer back then!) It was quite fun watching themtry to sing something from the 70s, but hardly cuttingedge (note the lower case) language or methodology.And yes, the extract is stylised. But of course, that’swhat gives it power as a possible teaching extract. Therepeated questions, the short phrasing, the opportunityfor interesting intonation and pitch variation all occur pre-cisely because of the kind of writing it is. Plays are notreal life, of course, but the better ones are pretty muchlike the real thing, and sometimes sharper and moreeffective. Like this extract. You wouldn’t want to use thiskind of material exclusively, would you? But it may havea useful focusing function used judiciously.

33.. It seemed to me that drawing students’ attention to into-nation and stress – and then having them try to say thelines effectively – was a good way of not only raising theirconsciousness in terms of these topics, but also aninvolving way to have them say things ‘correctly’? Butwhat is the effect of that in the long run? Does this kindof activity help students to learn anything or do they for-get it instantly? Is there a connection between this kindof attention to detail and the students’ overall improve-ment in speaking, especially in areas of pronunciationsuch as this? Those are the big questions, of course, theones that get people arguing about Focus on Form vsFocus on FormS, and about the relative merit of trans-mission teaching vs experiential learning. And what of

the two or three students who didn’t seem able to saythings in the way I was encouraging them to? Their fault?Mine? Should they have had to try and imitate actorlyEnglishmen anyway? And yet… I think it was useful andamusing for at least some of them, and had I followed itup properly with exposure and practice of similar kindsof speaking, well, that might have really had an effect.

44.. Acting out is something I like doing, to be honest. Afterall, once an ego’s been cultivated it sort of takes on a lifeof its own. But my students, with a couple of exceptions,wouldn’t have passed any audition as they read theirscripts studiously and tried to remember what they hadbeen practising – or didn’t in the case of at least one pairwho weren’t that bothered.

Is acting out a ‘good thing’? I think it is, but the nexttime I do something like that we’ll need more rehearsaltime, and we’ll need time to get them, perhaps, to learnthe extract so that they have a chance to ‘act’ it ratherthan read it.

But even then, not all students take particular pleasure– or are especially good at – acting out. It’s a greatactivity for some, in other words, but not for everybody.

Those are the kind of questions that any ‘normal’ teachingexperience throws up and which expose what we see as

dichotomies between concepts such as teacher-led and stu-dent-centred, between learning and doing, between acquisi-tion and learning, between authentic and stylised input. Andthe questions don’t go away.

All of us who are experienced and have a care about whatwe do, are informed in our attempt to make sense of all this bytheory, but the theory is often contradictory. We are frequentlymoved too by fashionable trends and swayed by what, often,turns out to be a statement of the personal stylisticpreferences of an educator or methodologist. What I supposewe have to do, then, is to give serious attention to the advicewe are given (both theoretical and methodological) so thatwhen we reflect on lessons we have taught we can bring notjust our own prejudices to bear, but also the views andexperiences of countless others who inform and enrich ourprofessional lives.

All of us who are experiencedand have a care about what we do, are informed in ourattempt to make sense of all this by theory, but the

theory is often contradictory.

Confucius said, ‘Am I a learned man? No! A lowlypeasant once asked me a question of which I wasignorant. I thrashed the matter out by studying the

two sides of it and then told him all I knew about it.’ We cameto the UK last September having taught in China for five years.Five years and we thought we’d learned something aboutChinese culture, but we were stumped by the first question putto us: ‘Why are Chinese students so difficult to teach?’ Whatfollows is my attempt to thrash out the matter and hopefullycome up with some observations that may be of use to you.

First of all a few disclaimers (or perhaps statements of theobvious):

• We are all individuals

• China is vast.

• Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Singaporean or MalaysianChinese are a whole other article, though some notesfrom this article might strike a familiar chord if you teachthem.

• Chinese people are Asian, but incredibly different to theirJapanese and Korean neighbours.

Let’s say that Jo is a student from the mainland who sets offto London to study. If so he’s likely to be relatively well off,young, single and under a tremendous pressure to succeed.Success is a degree and a trouble free stay in Britain. Onreturn to the motherland, he will be crowned a hero andhopefully contribute to the ongoing success of the familybusiness or get a top job in a joint venture company.Expectations are high all round. Life has been one longcompetition to be top of the class. Thousands of like-mindedpioneers are part of this grand scheme to fulfil China’s manifestdestiny. And, most importantly, the whole family, including5000 years worth of ancestors, are with him from not just thatone small step onto the hallowed tarmac of Heathrow, butevery step of the way. He does not question the plan. He

merely asks himself not what his family can do for him but whathe can do for his family.

Of course, all of us have outside pressures, but ask yourselfwhen was the last time you flew to a country you knew very lit-tle about, knew even less of the language of, to study a sub-ject you had no particular interest in, because it was the rightthing to do?

Confucius said, ‘It is indeed harmful to set one’s mind uponutterly new and strange doctrines.’ Jo has been in London forabout a month now, daunted by the openness of society, lone-ly. It’s neither wise nor easy to make friends with foreigners.Besides, he isn’t here to socialise. He is here to study hard andget high grades and in order to do that he must have perfectEnglish. He likes the school, he has nothing against his class-mates, but he can’t quite get his head round his teacher or forthat matter the teaching. Why is it that he spends most of classplaying children’s games or having discussions with Spanishpeople about Posh and Becks? Why does his teacher keepasking him what he thinks he wants to learn? He doesn’t havetime for this, he knows how to cram and regurgitate what he’slearned, so why on earth is he still in pre-intermediate when heought to be on the IELTS course by now?

Chinese students have serious hopes, fears and questionsand at the same time we might say they have unrealistic goalsand an unbending doctrine. I have been guilty of not attempt-ing to understand these concerns and not dealing with theimplications of culture clash. In turn, I have set them andmyself unrealistic goals, been unbending in my doctrine andspent a good deal of the time asking ‘Why’ questions in thestaffroom. Here are a few:

• Why is it that my Chinese students always look bored inmy class?

• Why do Chinese students ask for more practice butcomplain when we do practical activities?

• Why do they never take notes in class or prepare forspeaking activities?

• Why didn’t he say anything in his tutorial?

• Why does he give me extra written work to markeveryday?

• Why do Chinese students finish pairwork before myItalian students have started it?

• Why does he always look at me for an answer?

• Why can’t I read him?

Answering questions like these involves taking a good look atthe cultural, social and educational baggage Chinese studentscarry with them. This isn’t easy to do even to yourself. So ifeven Jo doesn’t know, where do we start? One idea is to start

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Classroom Matters IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

Ali and Melissa taught college students in Hunan Province China for2 blissful years. Ali (pictured right) went on to teach in Qinghai, the Amdo-Tibetanregion of China, and Melissa (pictured left) spent a year with IH in Shanghai,followed by a year with the British Council in Beijing. Ali is now teaching Germanand Italian in a secondary school in Dorking and Melissa is a teacher at IH London.

Lost in Translation: Understanding Chinese Students

Alison Ashburner and Melissa Lamb

Confucius said, “It is indeedharmful to set one’s mind

upon utterly new and strange doctrines.”

with language, since it echoes its surroundings and acts as a(two-way) mirror of a society’s enlightenment, culture andmentality. Chinese characters, being originally pictographsand ideograms, are especially revealing.

(Before you read on, it might be interesting to try to draw apicture which represents the following words: education,teacher, teach, student, study.)

Education

This is literally still true in the more rural parts of China.When we took our students on teaching practice the cane

was the first piece of equipment they were given. After this weobserved a local English teacher to get an idea of how class-es were run. She drilled ‘What’s your name?’ ‘My name’s Jim’for 45 minutes whilst brandishing the cane wildly and beatingit against the desk. We were all petrified. At the end of theclass she asked two students to step up on the raised platformand demonstrate the dialogue.

Student A: ‘What’s your name?’

Student B:‘My name’s Li Song.’

Down went the cane onto the desk with a tremendous thudand the class corrected her: ‘My name’s Jim!’ This is anextreme example, but there are several valid points to consider.Chinese education is not about choice, opinion or developingthe analytical part of the brain. It is about being spoonfed rightanswers, memorising them and regurgitating them.

So Jo will find the approaches taken in our classroomsrather alien. He will need a lot of coaching if he is to becomea more autonomous learner and he will need to understandwhy it is important to take responsibility in this way. This isreflected in even the simplest of tasks like recording vocabu-lary. He will expect a list from the teacher, clearly presented onthe board that he can copy down at your signal. Additionally,everything requires a right or wrong answer, and the teacher isexpected to adjudicate on this. Once he has his answer or rulehe finds exceptions or other points of view extremely difficult todeal with. Most likely he will take the rule and use it doggedlywithout reflection.

Education in China is also extremely competitive. Those thatget to college are those that respond well to the pressure ofexams and know how to jump through the hoops. Jo may notrealise that over here the hoops have been moved. Grades arethe only feedback a child gets on his performance, so if Jodoesn’t get this form of feedback he is less likely to see thevalue of the course or the activity. In addition, by focussing onthe score or result, the process by which he gets there is deval-ued, hence the 30 second pairwork, the lack of planning andpreparing for activities and plagiarism. These are complexproblems but can work to your advantage by setting clear aimsfor a task and the process by which that task is to be achieved,evaluating preparation work, setting minimum talking times andgiving tasks whilst students do pairwork. Making sure that sssee the point of any classroom activity, coupled with lots oflearner training can help avoid potential pitfalls.

Teacher / to teach

There are a number of important notions to take on boardfrom this. Once again it reinforces the age and authority of

the teacher and with authority and age come responsibility, wis-dom, and the status of expert and consequently respect.When was the last time you saw an old man, dressed in com-bat trousers miming the word ‘dog’? Jo will expect his teacherto be relatively smart and fairly serious, a joke is ok but hewouldn’t want you to make a fool of yourself. He will also beexpecting you to have good subject knowledge and be able togive clear answers to his questions i.e. fill up his blank page. Hewill want the teacher to make demands of him by nominatinghim to speak in class and giving lots of written homework.Classrooms in China are generally serious places. Chinese peo-ple don’t use gestures or facial expressions as much as othernationalities - showing your emotions in public is not the donething. You may think Jo looks bored, but it’s just as likely thathe is concentrating hard or giving you face by taking you seri-ously. Quite refreshing really!

To study / student

Implicit in these pictograms is the notion that study is not soli-tary, and thus the student cannot achieve enlightenment

without the teacher, no matter how fertile his mind is. Chinesepeople I met found it remarkably difficult to believe I couldcommunicate in their language having only ever had two

IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004 Classroom Matters

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An old man lays his hand on a child, his other hand he carries a stick.

Down went the cane onto the desk with a

tremendous thud.

The teacher is an old man who stands on ramparts to show his authority.

The verb to teach has theeducation characterfollowed by the characterfor book which is a blankpen over an empty page.

Here we can see the old man/masteragain, laying his hands crosswise uponthe darkness that covers the mind of hisdisciple.

By adding a furthercharacter we have the wordstudent; the earth pro-ducing a plant which laysthe groundwork for growth.

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Classroom Matters IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

weeks of formal language training. My Chinese students justweren’t used to working things out by themselves.

Confucius said ‘He who is not in charge of it does not inter-fere in its business.’ Rarely, during my time in China, did stu-dents proffer comments or give feedback unelicited. Jo Li willnot expect to have to tell the expert how to run his class, orwhat content to include. Should you confound his expecta-tions by consulting the class, handing out needs analysis, orconducting tutorials, then you are unlikely to get a favourableor thoughtful response. The consulting process, be it one toone or as a class makes him feel at best uncomfortable or atworst like he has done something wrong. Confucious said ‘If aman demands much of himself and little from others he willcertainly keep away resentments.’ It is not that Jo doesn’thave an opinion, rather that he does not want to appear to crit-icize you (especially in front of other students) because he isonly a student. By saying nothing or expressing his apprecia-tion of your teaching skills he is trying to give you face and todevelop a better relationship with you.

There is a well-known Chinese joke that illustrates this (it isnecessary to know that, in Chinese idiom, placing a top hat onsomeone’s head means to flatter them):

Two students, on their first day of college, went to see theirtutor. The latter told them, ‘In this world, following the properpath will do you no good. It is better if you place top hatson other people’s heads.’

One of the students said: ‘You are right. Most people in thisworld like wearing top hats. You, however, are anexception.’

The tutor was very pleased at this comment.

Upon leaving, the student said to his classmate: ‘I’ve justgiven away my first top hat.’

So while Jo may have exceptionally high expectations for yourclasses he is not necessarily going to tell you what they are.One way around this is to approach the subject in as informal,indirect and depersonalised a way as possible.

In general, Chinese students are happier talking about theirown performance than about yours. In tutorials, he is likely tofocus on his weaknesses; this self-criticism or false modesty isboth a cultural norm in China and a face saving device.Analysing progress and strengths, however, is likely to be a newconcept for Jo and he will expect you to tell him what is wrongand what to do about it. A certain amount of learner training

can help, but in the early stages this will need a lot of teacheroverseeing and guidance. Left to himself, Jo will still be tryingto achieve perfect English by reading the dictionary and mem-orising articles. Keeping a section of his vocabulary notebookfor things he finds difficult in English is a good start. Encouragehim to note down problems he has in class (a grammar point/asound) and outside of class (keeping a conversationgoing/sounding polite). At first, check this regularly and discusswith him any action he can take. This is a relatively painlessway of coming up with goals and action points that are mea-surable, attainable, realistic and time-restricted. Later, reviewthe usefulness of doing this and then ask him to consider theextent to which you need to be involved in the process.

Practice

Enlightenment requires a teacher, but practice is somethingyou do by yourself. Chinese language practice is usually

written, repetitive exercises. Chinese children spend themajority of their primary school education sitting on their own,tracing characters, copying passages or reciting them. Theemphasis is on control and accuracy. Pairwork/groupworkand freer practice is difficult to adjust to because of this andthe belief that you can’t learn from a fellow student who isequally unenlightened. This belief is very deep rooted.Explaining your reasoning behind pairwork may help but youneed to be explicit about exactly what you want the studentsto practise during the task.

The tendency to recite or make speeches as opposed toconversing is also very ingrained. It is considered impolite tointerrupt someone when they speak and improper to ask toomany questions, particularly about feelings, family or opinions.Consequently, Jo may feel that his classmates are rude andintrusive and they may think that Jo is shy and introverted butin actual fact they are just reading from different scripts.Discussing cultural differences is something Chinese studentsreally enjoy and so taking this forward into a learning pointabout how these differences affect interaction can be helpful.Likewise, analysing dialogues and identifying turn-taking andlanguage used to give feedback, interrupt etc. is useful andnew to Chinese students.

We were hoping that by the end of this article you wouldbe able to answer some of the questions posed at the

beginning. While writing, however, it has become clear that itis difficult to find a simplistic answer to these questions or aneasy solution to the problems Chinese students have whenstudying abroad. Cliché and generalisation are difficult toavoid and what is left is only the subjective opinion of some-one who really feels that she can only make sense of 2% of theculture that she was immersed in for five years. However, theexperience of living and teaching in China was both fascinat-ing and enjoyable, and we particularly enjoyed the lessons welearned from our Chinese students.

A young bird (wings) learns to fly by itself.

By saying nothing or expressing his appreciation

of your teaching skills,the student is trying to

give you face and to develop a better

relationship with you.

What is professionalism? Most CELTA trainees thinkthat it simply relates to punctuality and dressingappropriately. The wider and more important issues

of liaising with colleagues, planning lessons thoroughly andindependently and keeping coherent records (in the CELTA 5document) never occur to most trainees unless trainers pointthem out.

I am sure that most CELTA trainers will agree that a lack ofprofessionalism can have a very negative effect on a trainees’performance and ultimately grade. Being defensive in TP feed-back and being over reliant on help from tutors are issueswhich can seriously hinder a trainee’s professional develop-ment. The CELTA course is vocational and as such shouldemphasize the value of professional behaviour for the outset.

I have found that simply telling trainees to ‘be professional’and giving verbal guidelines is completely ineffective. So lastyear I decided to assert myself by creating a set of WRITTENGUIDELINES for trainees to follow. My colleague, Claire Walsh,and I put our heads together and came up with the followingguidelines:

Professional Awareness

A professional trainee teacher…….

• arrives punctually for input and TP sessions and attends100% of the course.

• calls in to inform tutors of lateness or illness.

• is independent and doesn’t rely too heavily on help fromtutors.

• is prepared to experiment in the classroom and learn fromhis/ her mistakes.

• understands that the tutors’ role is to guide and supporttrainees but not to spoonfeed them or plan lessons forthem.

• is able to take on board tutors’ and colleagues’suggestions and put them into practice.

• is able to assess his/ her strengths and weaknessesobjectively.

• liaises carefully and regularly with his/ her TP groupmembers.

• takes notes and remains quiet when observing colleaguesand experienced teachers.

• does not use TP time for writing out future lesson plans.

• offers constructive criticism to colleagues during TPfeedback sessions and supports all TP group membersthroughout the course – trainees who work well in a teamcope better with the course than those who do not findtime to liaise properly with colleagues.

• understands that TP feedback is for assessing that day’sTP and not for discussing future lessons.

• PLANS AHEAD as much as possible. Tutors will beavailable to answer your questions between 11.30 and11.55 each day. Please bring questions about which youhave already tried to come up with the answer. It wouldbe preferable to discuss your queries about the followingday’s lessons and not about lessons the same day. This isbecause you will probably not have enough time to act onmy suggestions on the same day.

This document has proved very successful in actually helpingcourse participants to understand the concept of professional-ism in an ELT/ ESL context. There is no longer a specific gradein the CELTA criteria for ‘professionalism’ but this documenthelps trainees to realise that it is an essential and integral partof their conduct on the course and their subsequent develop-ment as a teacher.

I normally spend at least one hour on the first day of a CELTAgoing through each point so that the trainees are left in nodoubt about what is expected of them. If trainees fail to followthe guidelines during the course I find it useful to refer themback to the document during TP feedback or tutorials.

The main advantage of these guidelines is that they encour-age autonomy and help me to define my role as facilitator (andnot spoonfeeder!) more clearly than I was able to in the past.If we CELTA trainers want our trainees to bemore independent, we need to let them

IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004 Career Development Matters

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CAREER DEVELOPMENT MATTERS

Jayne has worked in France, Austria, Hong Kong, Latvia, Hungary and the UK. She has beenteaching for 15 years and training for 12. She particularly enjoys training new teachers andhas done extensive research into the Lexical Approach.

Real Pro’s: Developing Trainees’ Awareness of Professionalism on CELTA Courses

Jayne Silva

It is our duty to prepare trainees for the

realities of the workplace.

know this at the beginning of the course. It is, I feel, unfair towithhold a B grade from a trainee who is deemed too reliant ontutor help if this trainee has never been made aware that suchdependence is inappropriate.

Since issuing these guidelines, I am happy to report that themajority of my trainees have not talked to each other whileobserving colleagues and experienced teachers. Nor havethey been as reliant on me as they used to be. They haveshown respect for each other and for their tutors. Their recordkeeping and punctuality have also improved.

I never used to understand why some trainees couldn’t seethe value in liaising with their colleagues. Now I realise that theimportance of groupwork had not been emphasised enough atthe beginning of the course. Trainees have so much to worry

about (assignments, lesson planning etc) that professionalissues can be sidelined unless tutors give professionalism theimportance it deserves in teacher development.

Trainees with an awareness of professionalism on the CELTAcourse will go on to be professional in their future jobs. Ibelieve it is our duty to prepare trainees for the realities of theworkplace. They need to understand that a defensive, disor-ganised teacher who is reluctant to work independently will notfare well in a busy staffroom.

Giving our trainees an understanding of professionalism inan ELT/ ESL context during the CELTA course will providethem with a good basis on which to develop their teachingcareers in the real world.

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Career Development Matters IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

As an experienced teacher in the independent sector inthe UK, who is always looking for opportunities for self-development and with half an eye on how in the future

I might achieve my long-lasting aim of living and workingabroad, I found myself in the first half of 2003, actively lookingfor a CELTA course. This, of course, raised a number of eye-brows among my colleagues, but I was used to that; there arefew Science teachers who will admit to being linguists, artistsand musicians as well! School timetables being what they are,the most convenient CELTA course for me turned out to be theone run intensively during the summer holidays by InternationalHouse Lisbon, and so I persuaded my family that that waswhere we should spend our summer – they on the beach, I onthe course.

Coming to CELTA as an already experienced teacherIt is inevitably hard, as an experienced teacher, to lay yourselfopen to criticism by inexperienced teachers, and that was mymain worry – and, to judge by the questions asked during myinterview for a place on the course, the worry also of Paula deNagy, the course tutor. Many of those who do the CELTAcourse are having their first taste of teaching in any form, so atypically a significant proportion of time is spent on developingthe basic skills of teaching in the context of English as a for-eign language. I was hopeful, however, that my own experi-ence would have been gained over long enough and over abroad enough range of circumstances to make it easy for meto assimilate the lessons of the course; and yet I was a littleconcerned that I might be regarded as a dinosaur whoseteaching was hopelessly out of date. As things turned out, Ifound myself able to help the other trainees in some ways (les-son planning, stress management, presentation skills – thebasic aspects of teaching that probably never change) at the

same time as I was learning for myself those new skills I need-ed specifically for the teaching of EFL. No-one, tutor ortrainee, ever criticised my existing teaching skills.

Coming to CELTA as a teacher of another subjectOne of my worries before I arrived in Lisbon was that my tutorson the CELTA course might try to break down the skills andtechniques I had already developed in my career as a Scienceteacher. I knew I was successful in that role and that my skillswere soundly based. I could, though, if I were to need adefence, always claim that Science teaching is very differentfrom EFL teaching! In fact I was able to approach the coursevery positively, looking for new teaching techniques to apply inwhat was going to be a new teaching area for me, and I quick-ly lost any apprehension I had about the change of subject.More than that, I took away with me a list of things to try out inmy Science teaching on return to school.

Learning and transferring the lessons from CELTAAs the course progressed, it became clear that the skills andtechniques I was learning for the teaching of English could beuseful in my other areas of interest, too. The course tutorswere very demanding as far as the trainees’ keeping of notes,the course journal and the CELTA diary were concerned; but Ialso kept a section of my personal CELTA file for writing downthoughts about how I might make use, outside EFL teaching,of these new skills and techniques when I returned to schoolin September (‘week 5’ of the 4-week course, as it was alwaysreferred to). In effect I was using the CELTA course not only asmy gateway into EFL teaching, but also as a piece of generalprofessional development that would improve my teachingwhatever subject area I was working in. Some of the tech-niques and skills I learned in Lisbon have turned out to be veryinfluential in this way.

CELTA and the Experienced TeacherKeith Hawkins

Keith Hawkins is a second-career teacher, formerly having worked as a Chartered Engineerin industry and as an officer in the Royal Navy. He is currently Head of Physics and also Headof the Upper School at Oswestry School, Shropshire, UK. He speaks Portuguese and Frenchwith a smattering of Afrikaans and Norwegian, and his interests outside work are in music(playing folk guitar and singing), painting (pastel and watercolour) and watersports (kayakingand sailing). He is married with two daughters aged 10 and 12.

IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004 Career Development Matters

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Implementing the lessons from CELTA in my schoolOswestry School is a mid-sized day and boarding school inrural Shropshire. Boarders account for approximately onethird of the student numbers, and of these a high proportionare from overseas. Altogether the overseas students repre-sent about a dozen nationalities, although there is a large con-tingent of Cantonese and Mandarin-speaking Chinese amongthem. One of the problems associated with such a school asthis is that some of the overseas students are not able, for rea-sons of language, to pursue as broad a curriculum as theirEnglish counterparts. There is, for example, little point in send-ing Chinese students to study French, German or Latin whenthey are still struggling with English. The result is that somestudents find that they have gaps in their timetable and I, as asenior manager, had in past years identified the need for morefocused use to be made of what could otherwise be wastedtime during the school day. My personal involvement in theschool’s EFL teaching has therefore, immediately following myreturn from Lisbon, been to take responsibility for the work ofoverseas students in the times when they are otherwise unen-gaged.

The particular group of students with which I am workingconsists of 6 Chinese, 2 Russian and 1 Japanese in year 9(aged 14 or so) – ideal for splitting into groups of three with onenon-Chinese in each group to enforce the use of English as acommon language! My work with them has been focused onusing one teaching period a week to set up an activity that theywould then take with them to occupy a further three periodsbefore I would see them again. Naturally I have tried to basethis activity on whatever the students have been doing withtheir full-time EFL teacher, but I have had the luxury of beingable to be creative since I was not constrained by having acourse book to complete.

We have noted a significant improvement in the students’use of time as a result of this approach. A major problem wasthat at first they regarded the work I was setting as ‘extrahomework’ rather than work to be done during non-contactschool time, and therefore treated it with the usual contemptreserved for homework. Once that misunderstanding wasovercome, however, we reckon that we have increased thesestudents’ direct involvement in English study by up to 40%,and hopefully this will be reflected in their long-term progress.

Teaching outside EFLPerhaps the most fascinating aspect of the influence that theCELTA course has had on my work has been the way it haschanged my teaching outside EFL. I was highly impressed inLisbon by the use of the first 30 – 45 minutes of every day ofthe CELTA course for a general ‘question time’, when traineeswere expected to ask the lead tutor questions about anythingto do with the lessons of the course, with the teaching ofEnglish or with the English language itself. Long silencessometimes occurred while trainees (who had, of course,sometimes been working into the early hours the night beforeto keep up to date with written assignments, diary entries andlesson planning) struggled to think of things to ask. Yet alwayssomething emerged as a topic for discussion.

I introduced this practice as soon as the new term started inschool. Every group of students I teach in Physics now hasthe first half of one double lesson per week designated as‘question time’, when we sit in a horseshoe and students areallowed to ask anything they wish – though preferably aboutPhysics. These sessions have turned out to be a wonderfulway of getting students involved in their own learning, and alsoof improving the general communication between student andteacher. I knew I had done something worthwhile when, onemorning, I arrived at the Physics lab to find that the class hadalready set out the stools in the horseshoe ready for my arrival!

The subjects about which they have asked questions havebeen interesting, too. There has been a strong tendencytowards questions about the Universe, space and astronomy,in every age group… but almost nothing about the mundaneaspects of the subject that we have to teach in order to getthrough the exam syllabuses. There’s a lesson here, maybe,for the design of Physics courses. There has also, among 15-16 year old students only, been a flurry of questions aboutBiology, to answer which I have had to delve back into mymemories of teaching general Science. We have learned thatsilences are acceptable – I often just sit and wait for questionsto arise; and wait, and wait… As an EFL teacher, it has alsobeen an opportunity to observe how much or how little over-seas students take part in lessons, and my next priority willhave to be to find a way of getting EFL students more involvedin these ‘question times’.

The idea of ‘concept questioning’ took some getting usedto, during the CELTA course. Our tutors went to great lengthsto teach us how to devise and ask questions to check stu-dents’ understanding of points in English. How useful (I

I knew I had done somethingworthwhile when I arrived to find that the class had already set out the stools

in the horseshoe ready for my arrival!

It is somewhat paradoxical that overseas students are taught more about English grammar than

their English peers!

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Career Development Matters IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

thought at the time) this might be as a technique for checkingwhether my Physics students have understood what I havebeen teaching. So I tried it, and although the opportunities fordetailed checking of this kind during a Physics lesson are lim-ited, it works, and not just with EFL students!

I have also used in my Physics teaching the ‘receptive skillsprocedure’ taught to us during the CELTA course. Whereasbefore I would have simply set a piece of work based on a textfrom the students’ books, I now lead in to the text with somesort of discussion or thinking exercise. Sometimes I deliber-ately turn the ‘question time’ discussions around towards whatI know I am going to be setting as text-based work later in thelesson, as part of this lead-in. It is difficult, of course, to mea-sure the effect of changing this approach, but I feel that theopportunity – particularly for EFL students – to think aboutissues and ask questions about the subject matter beforedoing the work is helpful for them.

I have tried using CELTA techniques in teaching Portuguese toEnglish students, as an after-school voluntary activity. Since lan-guage learning – any language! - is such a fundamental ability of thehuman brain, the techniques have worked well. I look forward nowto the time when I may have an opportunity to look more closely atthe curricular teaching of languages at school, to see whetherCELTA techniques could be applied productively there.

It is one of my roles as a senior manager in the school tomonitor the progress of individual students, and this has ledme to consider (and, lately, to put into practice as an experi-ment) the use of EFL resources for native English speakerswhose command of the language is weak or who are havingspecific difficulty with one aspect of English – e.g. writing accu-

rately. One 16 year-old student is currently working throughparts of the HEADWAY Pre-Intermediate course in privatestudy (but tutored and monitored by me) with the aim ofimproving her written English and her reading comprehension.In the longer term I am also thinking about the use of EFLmaterial as a routine measure with, perhaps, 11 year-old nativeEnglish speakers as a way of improving the general level ofEnglish in the school, with possible spin-off benefits in manysubject areas. This idea has arisen following many commentsabout English students’ lack of knowledge about the structureof their language and about the correct use of grammar asthey get older and start to prepare for GCSE. It is somewhatparadoxical that overseas students are taught more aboutEnglish grammar than their English peers!

ConclusionDoing the CELTA course as an already-experienced teacherbrought its own challenges, but the experience was a goodone. The course not only gave me an invaluable grounding asa teacher of EFL but also provided a set of ideas and tech-niques that have been influential in my teaching outside EFL.As a piece of professional development it was of great value.Teaching is a fascinating profession, and one of its beauties isthe range of techniques that are there to be tried, whateversubject area you teach in! Through having a broad interestacross the work of my school – science, languages, curriculumand pastoral management – I have found many applicationsfor the lessons learned from the CELTA course. I would rec-ommend it to anyone; but beware! It is intensive and it couldbe career-changing.

Why the Distance DELTA?

After gaining several years of teaching experience, I felt thatI was ready to study for the Diploma. I did my Cert. in

TESOL with Trinity, and I had envisaged that I would continuemy professional training with a Trinity qualification. However,some of my colleagues suggested that a Cambridge qualifica-tion might carry more professional kudos, and I decided to‘jump ship’ on their recommendation.

The next decision, whether to do a part-time or full-timecourse, was largely made for me by the need to continue earn-ing at that time, which ruled out a full-time course, and left onefinal choice; whether to study the course locally two eveningsper week or to do the Distance DELTA. In the end the DistanceDELTA won the toss, because of the flexible nature of thecourse – apart from the 2 week Orientation Course (OC), theDistance DELTA offers you the freedom to study when it suitsyou (although by the end of the course it felt as if I was at itpretty much 24 hours a day anyway!). The final clincher for mewas finding an excellent local tutor.

OrientationThe two-week OC took place before the distance element ofthe course. Participants on the DELTA undertake the OC in dif-ferent centres around the world, and originally it looked as if Iwould have to travel to Thailand for a two-week ‘holiday’. In

the end, I was able to do the OC in New Zealand, because ourtrainer, Benita Cruickshank, was already here and available topilot the course in New Zealand.

This part of the course was a real eye-opener. We learned somuch in those two weeks! The OC helps you to get a feel forthe genre of the assignments that you have to research and

write on the DELTA course, which is especially useful for teach-ers like me who have been away from the academic world fora long time. We didn’t follow up very much of the pre-Orientation work we had done (in the form of reading andtasks) as I had expected, but Benita and her assistants wereabsolutely marvellous at steering us through the vast miasmaof new and confusing information, leaving us with a very clear

Going the DistanceRichard Hargreaves

The Distance DELTA offers you the freedom to study

when it suits you.

IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004 Career Development Matters

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idea of how to proceed. Consequently, when the OC finishedand we were cut loose into ‘free orbit’, we really felt that wewere up to running speed. During the OC we also receivedinduction to the website, which was to become our link withthe ‘support community’. I remember returning from the OCwith eyes wide-open and raring to go!

The loneliness of the long-distance learnerIt would certainly be difficult for a distance-learning course tomatch the levels of interaction that occur on face-to-facecourses, and despite the convenience and flexibility of study-ing times that the Distance DELTA offers you, this has certain-ly got to be the biggest drawback. I had always had reserva-tions about this element of the course. The creators of theDistance DELTA have, however, gone a long way to generatea feeling of community.

Firstly, participants are ‘grouped’ on the website, and someof the tasks in the course units require you to liaise with yourgroup co-members. In addition there is the website forum,where queries, suggestions, ideas and general ‘cries for help’can be posted. Once we got the hang of this, it proved to bevery useful and some good relationships were formed.

However, whilst the course tutors were generally veryresponsive, I was surprised to see that some people on thecourse did not participate at all in forum discussions. One rea-son for this may be due to something that came to light duringthe course; participants tended to feel nervous about ‘baringall’ in public, and possible ‘buddy schemes’ were discussedfor future courses. Another reason may simply have been dueto pressures of time. Personally, I felt that given that the web-site is the ‘lifeline’ of the course; it could have been promotedmore overtly during the OC as a means of formal, and informal,support.

Secondly, the process of uploading drafts and receivingfeedback from your course tutors (who change every 8 weeksor so) provides you with the opportunity to converse withsomeone and to refine your ideas, although I do have to saythat sometimes questions and answers became somewhat‘lost in translation’. Generally, the advice given was pertinentand easy to follow, although as above, I sometimes felt a bitshy about asking questions. The moral is; ‘Use the websiteand the tutors, that’s what they’re there for.’ I found that mylocal tutor, Anne Stubbings, also played a vital role in keepingme on track, which is especially admirable when you considerthat it is a voluntary role.

The website also contains an ever-growing mine of informa-tion; course materials (also available on the CD ROM suppliedon the OC), practice exams, model answers, reading lists (booksand journals, some of which are available in PDF format), weblinks database, participant and tutor profiles, and more.

The course materialThe Distance DELTA consists of 8 units, one a month. There isinput on each of the four main skill areas as well as grammar,lexis, and pronunciation. The course also covers methodology,learning styles and motivation, testing, course planning andabout a million other things that the ‘modern professionalteacher’ needs to know. So you’ve certainly got your work cut

out to get through the sheer volume of course material in thegiven time. Add to that the monthly assignments, the ongoing‘Extended Assignment’ and preparation for the dreaded exam,and it’s amazing that anyone actually gets through the course.

However, the course felt very well planned and was wellstaged, and the exam preparation elements were particularlygood. The DELTA is relentless; you finish one assignment andhave to start thinking about the next one before you havedrawn breath, but the Distance DELTA course certainly helpsyou to get through it in one piece. God knows how they man-age to fit it all in on the intensive courses!

One of the hardest parts of the course for me was the‘deconstructing’ of myself as a teacher, and the subsequentrebuilding. Going through this process is very stressful, andbrings me to what must be one of the biggest advantages thatthe Distance DELTA has to offer.

At the beginning of the course I felt that I was quite a goodteacher, but that I was getting a bit stale and that I neededsome new input, but once I started to realise what teaching isreally all about, I started to feel that I was actually not a verygood teacher at all. When you raise the benchmark, you realisethat you are falling way short of the mark, and it takes timebefore you realise that you are actually learning a lot and thatyou are improving as a teacher. The Distance DELTA gives youthe time for this process to evolve. This process is still contin-uing now, several months after the course has finished, but Idon’t think that I would have benefited in the same way if I haddone an 8 week intensive course.

Furthermore, you need time to think. There’s a lot of infor-mation to take in, which you have to absorb, reflect on andthen find some thin ‘slice’ that you are going to investigate andwork on. Once again, the Distance DELTA provides you withthe necessary time for all this to happen.

Final reflectionsThere’s no doubt that the DELTA is a tough course, but nowthat it is over I feel really glad that I undertook it. It was a greatlearning experience, and I feel sure that it will benefit me inmany ways in the future. I think that the course was very wellplanned and managed, and in response to Karen Adams, whosaid in 2001 (in the IH Journal) that ‘The key is in the creationof a real learning community’, I think that the course has large-ly succeeded in this respect. I should also mention at this pointmy single biggest secret weapon in getting through theDistance DELTA; my partner, Karen Wolff, who undertook thecourse with me, and who was the driving force in keeping megoing! Thank you, Karen, and thank you to everyone involvedin the course.

Richard Hargreaves recently completed the IH/British Council Distance DELTA course, thedistance training programme leading to the Cambridge DELTA qualification, whilst living inAuckland, New Zealand. He has just found out that he passed all components –congratulations.

I remember returning from the OC with eyes

wide-open and raring to go!

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Career Development Matters IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

I t’s good to see that Bill Murray has been nominated for anOscar for his portrayal of someone suffering from cultureshock in the film Lost in Translation. Of course, as any

TESOL-er knows, Bill had it easy – he didn’t have to get up atseven a.m. on a Sunday morning to teach a class of grumpyteenagers the joys of the present perfect continuous as hedeals with life in Tokyo.

As I entered my 10th year in ELT and searched around for thethings I felt needed researching for an MA (and although I knewthat second language acquisition had a million unansweredquestions I should really be thinking about) I couldn’t helpreturning to the issues which have concerned me throughoutthose 10 years. Over them, I’ve been humiliated, extorted andfrequently shaken up (sometimes literally) by my experiencesworking in foreign countries. That’s not to say that therehaven’t been many, many more good than bad times, but allthe same I kept coming back to the same thing … ‘Why do wedo it?’ By ‘we’ I mean those teachers who travel away fromtheir own countries to teach abroad. What did ‘we’ have incommon and what were the implications of these thoughtsand feelings for the future of ELT? This became the focus of myresearch.

It is worth pointing out the demographic of my research. Of120 respondents about 40% told me they had a Diploma or aMaster’s Degree and more than 70% had been teachingbetween 5 and 10 years. I would suggest that this is probablynot a particularly representative sample of the ELT world as awhole and that, if nothing else, I learned from my research thatonly certain kinds of people (perhaps we could call them themajor ‘stakeholders’ in ELT as a profession) answer stupidquestionnaires! In the future I’d like to know more about thepeople who didn’t answer.

To start with I needed to look at the idea of ‘motivation’. Theleading expert in the field of motivation in applied linguisticsdescribes it like this:

In a general sense, motivation can be defined as the dynamicallychanging cumulative arousal in a person that initiates, directs,coordinates, amplifies, terminates, and evaluates the cognitiveand motor processes whereby initial wishes and desires areselected, prioritized, operationalize and (successfully or unsuc-cessfully) acted out.1

Although it’s thought provoking and comprehensive, it doesn’treally help clarify the variables necessary for research. I need-ed to narrow it down, so I eventually ended up by thinking of itas a cyclical process that allows ‘motivation’, ‘satisfaction’and ‘morale’ to be seen as perspectives on the same ongoing,complex cycle – where ‘morale’ is concerned with an individ-ual’s expectations for the future, ‘motivation’ is an initial causalfactor for action and ‘satisfaction’ is:

A state of mind encompassing all those feelings determined by theextent to which the individual perceives her/his job-related needsto being met.2

The last of the three – satisfaction – seems to be the bestoption for investigation, as you don’t have to worry about ask-ing people about the past or the future, but ‘What do you thinkat the moment?’ As a point of comparison I searched aroundfor similar studies, but found very few relating to ELT. There aresome about ESL teachers, but most of them are working intheir own countries.

By far the largest body of previous research relates toschoolteachers. Dinham and Scott’s investigation into school-teachers’ sense of satisfaction in Australia, New Zealand andthe UK in 2000 is one of the largest and most recent surveys.3

Their ‘top 10’ of satisfiers shows that most teachers put issuessuch as ‘students’ achievements’, ‘relationships with students’and ‘personal growth’ at the top of the list. Factors such as‘status as a teacher’, ‘career opportunities’ and ‘salary’ comeat the bottom. Similar results are reported by research into ESLteachers4 and my own survey of 120 EFL teachers provided avery similar kind of spread. Overall, this seemed to suggest,teachers generally are interested in the ‘intrinsic’ rewards oftheir work rather than the ‘extrinsic’.

Williams and Burden describe the difference:

Very simply, when the only reason for performing an act is to gainsomething outside the activity itself … the motivation is likely to beextrinsic. When the experience of doing something generatesinterest and enjoyment the motivation is likely to be intrinsic. Ageneral guideline would be to ask: Would I do this even if noreward or punishment followed?5

So far, so good for the ELT industry’s sense of professionalintegrity! But it didn’t match my own everyday experience ofteachers moaning about their salaries – whatever they said inthe replies to my questionnaires. Perhaps I needed to examinethe definitions again. I’d assumed that the opposite of ‘satis-faction’ was ‘dissatisfaction’, but as Herzberg explained,

The opposite of job satisfaction is not job dissatisfaction but,rather, no job satisfaction; and similarly, the opposite of job dissat-isfaction is not job satisfaction, but no job dissatisfaction.6

This seemed to bear a closer relationship to what I saw in thestaff room. Sometimes pay and conditionscan be excellent, but we can feel a lack ofefficacy in what we do in the classroom;

Why Do We Do It: Motivation among EFL Teachers

Simon Cox

Simon is the DoS of Apollo Education and Training in Hanoi, Vietnam. This is adapted froma talk he gave at the IH DoS Conference in London in January 2004.

Overall, this seemed to suggest, teachers generally

are interested in the ‘intrinsic’ rewards of

their work.

IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004 Career Development Matters

— 17 —

conversely we sometimes get paid peanuts, but still love ourjobs because of the delight in seeing that our students aremaking progress and that we’re doing a good job.

So far I’d got some ideas about the way ELT teachers feltabout their work, but I also wanted some insight into ‘Why didthey start doing it in the first place?’ Over the years I’ve hearda thousand different stories from people about how they start-ed teaching. Often they describe a desire for travel and newexperiences, sometimes it’s a matter of adapting to specificsituations, or falling in love, or boredom, and sometimes it’s alack of any idea at all. I’ve even heard it described as an easi-er option than the French Foreign Legion! This is a marked dif-ference from the feedback from Dinham and Scott’s research.They report that ‘I always wanted to be a teacher’ is the num-ber 1 reason for the choice of career of schoolteachers and thesame is the case in many other research projects. Mostdescribe this motivating factor as ‘vocation’ - whatever thatmeans (The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary gives usthe choice of ‘a type of work or way of life that you believe isespecially suitable for you’ or ‘a belief that you have been cho-sen by God…’. In my research, only one out of 120 respon-dents said that they’d always wanted to be an ESOL teacher.This seemed to be a very important discovery. As I’ve alreadymentioned, ESOL teachers seem to have similar feelings ofsatisfaction (and dissatisfaction) as other kinds of teachers, butit seems that they didn’t start out by looking for them. Instead,they seem to have developed these thoughts and feeling overtime.

Which brings me to consider whether this central point then,that most ESOL teachers are in the job more or less by acci-dent, has implications for the question: ‘How do we get othersto do it?’

As a DOS, I feel that a central aspect of my job is to keepteachers happy. They need to be paid, respected, chal-

lenged … plus a million other factors that go into ‘motivation,satisfaction and morale’. A common approach to satisfying notonly teachers but also the growth of the whole school is ‘pro-fessional development’. In one of the most useful books thatdiscusses this issue we find

any occupation aspiring to the title of ‘profession’ will claim at leastsome of these qualities: a basis of scientific knowledge; a periodof rigorous study which is formally assessed; a sense of public ser-vice; high standards of professional conduct; and the ability to per-form some specified demanding and socially useful task in ademonstrably competent manner.7

I’ll leave it to the reader to decide how many of those qualitiesELT possesses as an occupation, as I move on to examiningthe idea of ‘profession’ further.

The notion of ‘profession’ in practice has been divided intotwo parts: professionalism and professionality. Ifprofessionalism, simply stated, is a matter of behaviour thenprofessionality is concerned with ways of thinking and can beseen as ‘restricted’ or ‘extended’. We have probably all metthose madly enthusiastic teachers who are always trying outnew approaches and methodologies that turn up in teachingjournals; this ‘restricted professionality’ is an example of tryingto develop the central experience of work (i.e. classroompractice), but there is also ‘extended professionality’ whichrelates to seeing ‘teaching’ outside the classroom and withinthe context of the world at large.

I would like to suggest that this idea of ‘extended profes-

sionality’ could and should be explored further by the TESOLcommunity. As IH schools, we all hold and take part in work-shops, seminars and TT and TD sessions on a regular basis.Most of them relate to professionality in the ‘restricted’ sense.In my experience, the ‘extended’ issues are left for after-workdiscussions over a beer in the bar. Perhaps we could do moreto bring these debates into our schools. It’s possible that theissues raised will help to define the notion of what it is to be aTESOL professional. Here’s a list of some ideas that could bediscussed, but there are many more. I’d be delighted to hearfrom anyone who’d like to add to the list, or who has alreadybrought a social context into his or her working life.

• What are the aims & objectives of the TESOLindustry/profession globally? What are the economic &political consequences of TESOL?

• What is the status of TESOL teachers worldwide? Howare they likely to be viewed by their students & the gen-eral population of the country they live in, as well asamong the worldwide TESOL population itself?

• As most of our students are adults, we should take intoaccount what could be called the ‘sexual dynamic’. Howdoes attraction between teachers and students affecttheir behaviour?

• Travelling around the world can create feelings of ‘cultureshock’ – a response to change that can cause frequentand severe changes in mood and behaviour in somepeople. It may be a necessary process in adapting to anew place, but can/should a school help someone dealwith it? After all, in other types of work ‘conditions’ thataffect productivity are major sources of concern.

References

1 Dornyei, Z. (2001), Teaching and Researching Motivation. PearsonEducation (Applied Linguistics in Action Series).2 Evans, L. (ed.) (1998). Teacher Morale, Job Satisfaction andMotivation. London: Paul Chapman Publishing.3 Dinham, S. and C. Scott (1998). ‘An International ComparativeStudy of Teacher satisfaction, motivation and health: Australia,England and New Zealand.’ Paper presented to the AmericanEducational Research Association. San Diego, April 19984 Pennington, M.C. (1991). ‘Work Satisfaction and the ESL profes-sion’, Language Culture and Curriculum 4(1): 59-86.5 Williams, M. and R.L. Burden (1997). Psychology for LanguageTeachers: A social constructivist approach. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.6 Herzberg, F. (1968). Work and the Nature of Man. Chicago:Staples Press.7 Wallace, M.J. (1991). Training Foreign Language Teachers - AReflective Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

I’ve even heard ELT described as an easier option than the

French Foreign Legion!

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Language and Terminology IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

LANGUAGE AND TERMINOLOGY

Methodology for Beginners: Sticking labels on what you already know

David Tompkins

Depending on your level of experience, you will probablyknow a fair amount of TEFL jargon (e.g. TTT, PPP,Jigsaw Listening, Mindmap etc.) that would bewilder

the outsider. Most of this jargon is fairly simple when explainedand nowhere near as complicated as it first seems. The sameis true of the major areas of thought in TEFL methodology.Some of the ‘labels’ given to these areas (likeDesuggestopedia) can make them seem specialised and lightyears away from our own day-to-day classroom practice. Thegood news is that you have probably already done mild formsof each methodological area without realising it. The purposeof this article is to ‘demystify’ some common terms used inmethodology and advise teachers who are intimidated bygrand-sounding names.

Ever used pictures, objects or mime (rather thantranslation) to get your message across?Of course you have. Especially if you’ve taught multilingualclasses or gone abroad with a limited knowledge of the locallanguage. You could say that you are doing the DirectMethod of teaching, which forbids translation. The aim of thismethod is to get learners to think in English over blindly trans-ferring words from one language to another. The DirectMethod is nothing new, but still widely used. Another morerecent method that tries to simulate the way we learn ourmother tongue is Asher’s Total Physical Response, in whichthe teacher and class perform actions or instructions together.The learners hear the language, react to it by physical action(e.g. fetching something, making an imaginary sandwich), butdon’t speak until they are ready to do so.

Ever drilled words or phrases?You did this because you believe that pronunciation and into-nation are important to a student wanting to get their messageacross. If you drilled a phrase a number of times or substitut-

ed words in the drill (e.g. I’ll be working/ studying/eating dinnerat 20.00), then you sound like an adherent of Audio-Lingualism. Used extensively by the U.S. government to trainoverseas operatives after the Second World War, it subordi-nated grammar for practical spoken phrases. The central ideais to form new habits in sentence and sound patterns overthose of your native language.

Ever played background music in the class?If you have, you probably thought that this would help yourstudents to relax or create a more pleasant classroom atmos-phere. According to Krashen, all learners possess an ‘affec-tive filter’ that determines how quickly they will acquire thelanguage being taught. If a student has negative feelings thentheir affective filter is raised, preventing successful learning.This massively influential theory is the basis of a lot of human-istic approaches, which try to make use of students’ lives andpersonal feelings. So the next time you ask your class to talkabout their experiences – you are actually being humanistic.

To lower the affective filter, we can try to make our classroomsas comfortable as possible and to tolerate mistakes. The impor-tance of physical surroundings and the use of music in particu-lar are vital parts of Lozanov’s Desuggestopedia method.Some of the ideas in this method, like reading in time with music,may seem a bit odd at first, but they are surprisingly effective!

Ever stuck posters on your classroom wall?For the same reasons as above. Perhaps you wanted tobrighten up the classroom or have verb tables on display at alltimes. This is another part of the Desuggestopediaapproach, which emphasises the importance of peripherallearning. In other words, the learner is surrounded by the tar-get language in their immediate environment.

Ever done an ‘Information-gap’ activity?Probably one of the first things you learnt to do on your CELTAwas to give instructions for a pair-work activity and have stu-dents ask each other questions to find out information theydon’t have. You’ve probably heard of the CommunicativeApproach and you use it because it’s fun and you want yourstudents to enjoy themselves. This approach centres heavilyon language functions, namely asking, complaining, givingadvice etc. Seeing your students interacting in role-plays is funfor the whole class (and also for you!). You do a great dealmore communicative activities than youperhaps realise – every textbook is awashwith them.

Most of the jargon is fairlysimple when explained

and nowhere near as complicated as

it first seems.

David Tompkins has been an EFL Teacher at a language school in North London for anumber of years and has worked abroad in Czech Republic, Slovakia, France and Spain. Hedid the full-time Diploma in the first half of 2003 and passé.

IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004 Language and Terminology

— 19 —

Ever used phonemic charts to correctpronunciation?Some teachers avoid them like the plague and see them as anunnecessary add-on to the teaching process. It’s understand-able if phonemic charts intimidate, but seize the bull by thehorns and learn it if you haven’t already. You won’t regret it inthe long run and you might avoid the feeling of embarrassmentwhen a student knows the chart better than you! One methodthat sees the phonemic chart as absolutely vital is CalebGattegno’s Silent Way. Rather than correct a student’s pro-nunciation by saying the right sound, the teacher will simplypoint to the sound on the chart that they want the student tosay. The central idea of the Silent Way is that the teacher saysas little as possible. They can also use coloured ‘Cuisenaire’rods to highlight intonation in sentences.

Ever worried that you’re doing too much Teacher Talking? The Grammar-Translation Approach is the old ‘chalk andtalk’ method that involves students studying the language,more or less without speaking it. Imagine French lessons inBritish schools in the 1970s and you’re pretty close to thegrammar-translation method. It is hard to find any modernTEFL school that believes in this approach, but a great manycountries still teach languages in the ‘traditional’ way.

Silent Way adherents worry about TTT incessantly, becausethey believe that students should be speaking more than theteacher (After all, they are the ones who need to use the lan-guage, not the teacher!). Maybe you’ve been told in an obser-vation that you talk too much. Of course, it isn’t good to havea teacher jabbering on so much that the learners can’t get aword in edgeways, but you shouldn’t underestimate the impor-tance of yourself as a resource for the class – especially ifyou’re teaching in a foreign country. You may be the only pointof contact for a number of people learning English with a nativespeaker. Forgive yourself the occasional monologue, as itmight be one of the most authentic listening activities yourlearners get.

Ever taught whole phrases to a class rather than single words? Another positive answer? There seems to be a growing fash-ion to do this more in TEFL as the Lexical Approach grows inpopularity. Michael Lewis has perfected the idea that languageis not just learnt by grammatical rules but by students acquir-ing ‘chunks’ of language (e.g. That should come in handy!).Although not strictly a method but a view of language, the ideathat we produce language in chunks rather than stickingwords together is certainly true when I think of my own pro-duction of foreign languages!

Ever put your students in a circle to speak whileyou’re on the outside?You seem like a Learner-centred type of teacher, or you maylike to call yourself a ‘facilitator’. Almost anything that takesthe attention off the teacher could be called learner-centredbecause it nurtures learner autonomy. If you’ve put the learn-ers in a circle and thrown a tape recorder in the middle thenyou’re doubtless aware of Community Language Learning(another humanistic approach), in which the learners decidewhat they want to say and when they want to record it. Themain idea behind this approach is that minimal teacher inter-ference and the fact that the learners can say and do what

they want builds confidence and all-important learner autono-my. All the same, I wonder how this method would work witha class of unruly teenagers!

Ever given your students a task to do with thegrammar point you want to teach hidden sneakilyinside?If you’ve used a coursebook printed after the mid-nineties youhave. This is because Task-Based Learning has grown mas-sively in popularity over the last decade. Even one of those‘Find someone who…’ exercises could be regarded as Task-based, because students are performing a task subcon-sciously using the target language (namely question forms).What constitutes a ‘Task’ is debatable, but Task-BasedLearning turns ‘Presentation Practice Production’ neatly on itshead.

And finally, how important are all these terms and phrases?I survived for a number of years with barely any formal knowl-edge of methodology. I knew what I was doing, I knew itwould work or amuse the class, but I only had a rough ideawhy I was doing it. Swotting up on methodology helped meto realise the purpose of various activities and, in turn, I felt Iwas able to justify or explain the reason for doing something‘new’ to my classes. My confidence increased and my stu-dents had more tolerance for activities outside of their educa-tional culture. To finish on a final ‘posh’ word, have no doubtthat you are a truly eclectic teacher. Namely you use differentmethods at different times. Don’t we all these days? Answerson a postcard (or an email) to the IH Journal…

References

Bowen, T. & Marks, J. (1994). Inside Teaching. MacmillanHeinemann.

Dellar, S. (1990). Lessons from the Learner. Longman.

Harmer, J. (2001). The Practice of English Language Teaching.Pearson.

Larsen-Freeman, D. (2000). Techniques and Principles inLanguage Teaching. Oxford University Press.

Richards, J. & Schmidt, R. (2002). Longman Dictionary ofLanguage Teaching & Applied Linguistics 2002. Longman.

It isn’t good to have a teacherjabbering on so much that

the learners can’t get a word in edgeways, but you shouldn’tunderestimate the importance

of yourself as a resource for the class.

Some time ago Michael Carrier visited the school whereI work, and he asked me if I could think of any bit ofmaterial which the World Organisation might usefully

develop to help educational managers with the in-service train-ing of newly-qualified teachers. My unhesitating reply was‘Something on language awareness’. Those of you who havemet Michael will readily understand how I found, within thespace of a few minutes, that I had agreed to author the mate-rial myself. A couple of years later, ‘something on languageawareness’ is the International House Language AwarenessCourse, or LAC for short. It comprises fourteen units, and canbe delivered in any International House school where there is amember of the senior staff with some experience of in-servicetraining and an interest in how language is described for teach-ing purposes. A fuller description of the course is in IHWONews below, on page 33.

What I’d like to do in this article is explore some issues relat-ing to the role of language awareness among language teach-ing professionals and, in the course of the discussion, countersome assertions made about ‘pedagogical grammar’ in anarticle which appeared in a recent edition of this journal(Rodney Blakeston, ‘How British education failed to teach usabout our own language’, IHJ 14 / Spring 2003). While writ-ing the LAC, I was inevitably faced with the question, ‘What doteachers need to know about language?’ – and obliged, forbetter or worse, to answer it. As the writing progressed, Iencountered a second and rather more disconcerting ques-tion, namely, ‘Do teachers need to know about the languageat all?’ Some discussion of these questions seems to me tobe worthwhile for its own sake, but I hope too that a statementof the tentative conclusions which I have reached will helpshed some light on the guiding principles behind the LAC, andso be of use to those trainers around the world who deliver thecourse. Let us take the second of my two questions first.

Do teachers need language awareness?

As the introduction to this article makes clear, my gut reac-tion to this question, like most people’s, is ‘Yes, of course

they do’. Students expect their teachers to ‘know grammar’,teachers feel inadequate if they don’t, and how can teacherswork effectively with the coursebooks which most of them arerequired to use, if they can’t get a handle on the traditionaldescriptions of language which those coursebooks, almostwithout exception, continue to propagate? These are com-pelling practical arguments, but they gloss over what is surelythe fundamental issue which we, as teaching professionals,ought to address, and which we can frame as another, rathermore exacting question: ‘Is language awareness an essentialattribute for a teacher who wishes to be an effective facilitatorof language acquisition?’ Put this way, the question begins tolook a little less one-sided.

There seems to be a pretty wide consensus nowadays thatthere are three essential conditions for language acquisition:exposure to plenty of language which is, with effort, compre-hensible to the student; motivation on the part of the student;and use of language in meaningful interaction. The EMUmodel owes its widespread acceptance, I think, to its appealto common sense, its simplicity, and its refreshing freedomfrom association with any ‘magic method’. Its usefulness as ayardstick against which we can measure the content of ourlessons – ‘if you do nothing else,’ the model suggests, ‘provideexposure, encourage motivation, and ensure use’ – has madeit, for many practitioners, powerfully reassuring. But on closerexamination, there is something decidedly un-reassuring aboutthe EMU model in what it omits, for it seems that instruction,conscious attention to the forms of the language itself, isdeemed somehow non-essential. Can this really be the case?Well, there is some evidence that, beyond a certain level ofproficiency, conscious attention to form is necessary if learnersare to avoid fossilisation of errors in their language; but in anycase I think the question unanswerable either way, as I knowof no way to prevent learners from attending consciously to thelanguage ‘code’ for themselves, regardless of what theirteachers might say or do.

A more fruitful line of enquiry might be this: accepting, for thesake of argument, that focus on form is not essential, might itnot still be the case that it is useful, that it helps? To return toour earlier question and to modify it yet again: ‘Is languageawareness a desirable attribute for a teacher who wishes to bea more effective facilitator of language acquisition?’

A well-established means of approaching this question is toplace it in the framework of the Krashen dichotomy betweenlearning and acquisition. At the risk of stating the obvious, Ithink it worth spending a few lines setting out my understand-ing of these terms, for reasons which I hope will become obvi-ous as this article progresses. In his recentarticle for this journal, Rodney Blakeston,though he does not define either term

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Language and Terminology IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

Something on Language Awareness: Should teachers learn or acquire it?

Alex Tilbury

Alex Tilbury is a CELTA trainer and Director of Studies at International House Katowice inPoland. He made an unsuccessful attempt to learn French as a teenager, and is now in theprocess of acquiring Polish.

Those of you who know Michael will readily

understand how I found, within the space of a

few minutes, that I had agreed to author the material myself.

IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004 Language and Terminology

— 21 —

explicitly, uses them such that they have the following senses.Acquisition is what happens when one is immersed in lan-guage ‘left, right and centre’, it is unconscious and effortless,it is the attainment of language proficiency ‘in fantastically pro-pitious circumstances’. Learning, by contrast, means gettingto grips with a language in an environment where that lan-guage is foreign, it takes place ‘after a gruelling day at work’,it involves effort, neon lights and Beefeater posters. I don’tbelieve I misrepresent Rodney, for an earlier article of his evi-dences a very similar set of assumptions (‘Language TeachersShould Learn Languages’, IHJ 12 / March 2002).

Now, this is certainly not the sense in which I understand theterms Iearning and acquisition, nor is it the sense in which Ibelieve most teachers understand them. Learning and acqui-sition, as originally conceived, do not merely denote differentpaths, one ‘easier’ than the other, to language mastery, or pro-ficiency, or competence, or whatever one chooses to call it;rather, to use a language effectively to any really significantdegree, only acquisition suffices. To acquire language is tointernalise it to such a degree that it may be put to use inencoding and decoding discourse spontaneously and withouteffort; it is to be able to use language ‘without thinking’. Theprocess of acquisition, moreover, does not require – is not evendirectly furthered by – ‘study’ or conscious attention to form.Everyone who speaks a first language – that is, nearly everyonein the world – acquires a language in childhood; English lan-guage teachers working in non-Anglophone environments, asRodney points out, acquire (‘pick up’) language; and Englishlanguage students commonly surprise their teachers and them-selves in uttering language that they have not been ‘taught’ orever given any conscious thought to, but which their brainshave seen fit to acquire nevertheless. Acquisition, rather like‘shit’, simply happens. Most teachers experience both phe-nomena in the classroom on a fairly regular basis.

Learning is at once a less common and a less remarkablephenomenon, involving the study of language and the con-scious application of rules and recall of lexis in the productionand comprehension of language, like having to remember howto move one’s feet every time one walks. The language –some would call it merely ‘language-like behaviour’ – of anindividual who has learned much but acquired little is typicallyhesitant and gives the impression of being constructed pieceby piece as we listen. Most teachers will have experienced theagonised and agonising output of students who, they protest,‘think too much’.

As should be clear from the above, acquisition and learningare not simply alternative routes to the same goal, but differfundamentally in their nature and importance. It is surely nec-essary for all those who wish or need to be proficient in a lan-guage to acquire it – not merely to learn it, but to acquire it.Learning is something which students do in the hope ofadvancing themselves further on the path to that goal. It isnot, as Rodney implies, an end in itself, but a means to an end.

The key question for language teachers then, is this: does,or can, language learning promote language acquisition? Can,for instance, the conscious learning of rules by students some-how contribute to the subconscious process of acquiringthose rules? Krashen, at least in his earlier work, insisted not.Language teachers tend to react negatively to this proposition,as it implies that much of what they do in the classroom is awaste of time. More recently, a consensus seems to havearisen that there is in fact an ‘interface’ of some kind betweenlearning and acquisition. Research into the question suggests

that the interface is a highly complex one, involving the inter-action of a variety of factors, such as the particular ‘languagepoint’ in question, the state of the student’s interlanguage,which ‘language points’ have already been acquired and, notleast, the aptitudes of the individual student. For the languageteacher who is interested in such questions, the pictureemerging from this research is one of breathtaking intricacyand endless fascination; but it is also, for those in search ofempirically-based prescriptions for classroom practice, utterlyfrustrating in the tentativeness and sometimes seemingly con-tradictory nature of its results. Pending the discovery of any-thing reasonably concrete about the learning / acquisitioninterface, most teachers, myself included, bolstered by anec-dotal evidence of learning ‘becoming’ acquisition, take it ontrust that there is such an interface, and proceed according tothe maxim that if you throw enough mud (—learning), some ofit must stick (—acquisition).

So, to return, at last, to the question of whether teachersneed to know about language, the answer would seem to beyes: because what teachers know, they can teach; what stu-dents are taught, they might learn; and what students learn,they might acquire.

What do teachers need to know about language?

Let us now turn to the other of our two questions. Havingestablished, albeit provisionally, that language awareness is

essential to language teachers, we can re-examine the ques-tion of what, exactly, do these teachers need to know aboutlanguage?

Again, Rodney Blakeston’s article provides a useful startingpoint. In the second half of his article, he argues that, as ourstudents are language learners, doggedly struggling to memo-rise words and rules and apply them in their speaking and writ-ing, ‘we have to make what would appear [to be] gross gen-eralisations’ in our treatment of grammar in the classroom.Those of us who are ‘loftily disdainful of modest pedagogicalgrammars’, he suggests, ‘have forgotten what it is like to be alanguage learner’, and if we teachers had to learn languagesourselves, ‘we would be much more respectful about pre-scriptive, simplified and canonical grammar…we would be cry-ing out for simple rules’. He also implies, in a manoeuvrewhich is presumably intended to foreclose debate, that thoseof us who are not studying a language ‘in a classroom, with ateacher’ – this rules out most of us, as Rodney will be aware –have no right to be so ‘loftily disdainful’ as we allegedly are.

What Rodney means by ‘modest pedagogical grammars’ is,again, never explicitly stated, but it is clear that what he isdefending is traditional coursebook grammar of the sort whichhas constituted the central strand of English language syl-labuses for decades: ‘the tenses…the ‘three’ conditionals…articles… modals etc.’ He pays lip-service to the notion that

Acquisition, rather like ‘shit’, simply happens.

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Language and Terminology IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

‘we should know as much as possible about a variety ofdescriptions of language and these should inform us educa-tionally’, but gives no indication as to how this process oughtto operate. True, we might, given his fury at ‘the neglect ofstate education’ in failing to equip native-speaker CELTAtrainees with ‘the basic taxonomy of the language’, take him tomean that ‘modest pedagogical grammars’ are indispensableto ‘rookie’ teachers until they are able to progress to some-thing more advanced; but given his claims about the needs oflearners, it is clearly implied that even the most experienced ofteachers would do better to leave ‘sexy’ or ‘exotic’ languagemodels well alone.

These arguments are, I believe, entirely mistaken. First, notehow the whole of Rodney’s argument rests on his idiosyncrat-ic use of the terms learning and acquisition as alternative, butequally valid, routes to language mastery: students, as peoplewho must ‘learn’ languages and have not the luxury of beingable merely to ‘acquire’ them, need ‘simplified’ rules. But if werestore the orthodox relation between learning and acquisitionas, no matter how complex their intertwining, essentially

sequential rather than parallel, the argument collapses, for ifwhat students are after is acquisition, and if learning is but ameans to acquisition, it surely matters how we present lan-guage to our students. If we believe learning promotes acqui-sition, then there is surely a significant danger that those ‘sim-ple rules’ which we ought to teach will be internalised. I can-not, of course, prove that this danger exists, but I do know thatthe following rules – both, of course, wrong – are well estab-lished in ‘canonical grammar’...

1. use the past progressive to talk about the longer of twoactions

2. use ‘will’ for the future tense

… and that it is difficult to find students in Poland, even atadvanced levels, who don’t…

1. over-use the progressive, using it to refer to any situationwhich ‘takes a long time’, like this: What did you do onholiday? *We were lying on the beach.

2. avoid / get confused by the use of ‘will’ to denote presenthabit or assumptive certainty.

Of course, if one believes, as Rodney seems to, that languagemastery can be attained through purely conscious means,then it might be that ‘simple rules’ can easily be unpicked and

/ or elaborated at higher levels. But if one believes, as I do,that the road to mastery involves unconscious acquisition oflanguage, then the effects of ‘modest pedagogical grammars’are potentially rather pernicious.

But let us leave aside this admittedly speculative talk abouthow languages are mastered. Another argument commonlyadvanced in favour of ‘modest pedagogical grammars’ is thatthey comprise ‘simple rules’; alternative descriptions of lan-guage are, by implication, deemed ‘too complicated’. Again, Ibelieve this notion to be false. Rodney suggests, for example,that it is a simplification (which a linguistics professor would‘snigger at’) to regard all verb forms in English as ‘tenses’, andbetter not to confuse teachers or their students by separatingout tense from aspect or voice. But what this means, in prac-tice, is that we have to teach students something like thirty twodistinct verb forms (or ‘tenses’, as Rodney would have them)and, in each case, pair it with a meaning or a range of mean-ings. If, on the other hand, one separates out present andpast tense, perfect and progressive aspect, and active andpassive voice, it is possible to show students how each ofthese elements has its own formal and semantic properties,and that they combine with each other to make the numerousverb forms of English in predictable ways. In other words, stu-dents are faced with the task of working with a handful of form/ meaning rules (in some cases rather abstract, to be sure),rather than a couple of dozen ‘tenses’ and their associatedmeanings. Different approaches may be appropriate with dif-ferent learners on different occasions, but the notion that thecanonical approach is somehow ‘simplified’ is nonsense: it ismore concrete, perhaps, but most assuredly not a simplifica-tion in terms of the sheer number of ‘bits and pieces’ which itrequires students to learn.

Another ‘simplification’ which Rodney alludes to is ‘the threeconditionals’. But this is an argument which, in his own terms,Rodney cannot lose, for the ‘three conditionals’ model is a per-fect example of how a ‘simplification’ is only necessitated by –and can only be defended alongside – other misguided ‘sim-plifications’ at earlier stages of the syllabus. Let us take, forexample, a sentence of the type which is usually described asa ‘first conditional’:

3. If we lose the vote tonight, the government will fall.

Defenders of canonical grammar would argue that, becausethe protasis here lacks ‘will’ even though it refers to the future,it is self-evident that conditional clauses will prove difficult forstudents to produce accurately, and that we ought to helpthem by drilling them in a small number of fixed conditionalstructures. Students cannot be expected to produce suchidiosyncratic structures for themselves, the argument runs,and neither can we be expected to teach our students all pos-sible conditional structures, so better to stick to three or four.As regards the fact that some conditionals do actually have‘will’ in the protasis…

4. If you’ll come this way, I’ll show you the bathroom.

… we may inform students about this, as an exception, at amuch later stage in their learning.

As a response to the ‘problem’ of conditional sentences thisseems plausible enough, but note that the problem is one ofthe ‘canonical brigade’s’ (to paraphrase Rodney) own making,for they will insist on telling students that ‘will’ is ‘the future’.

Acquisition and learning are not simply alternative routes to the same goal, but differ

fundamentally in their nature and importance.

IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004 Language and Terminology

— 23 —

Descriptive linguistics, however, suggests that present forms inEnglish may always have either present or future (i.e. non-past)time reference, and that ‘will’ is better analysed not as ‘thefuture’, but as just another modal verb with extrinsic andintrinsic meanings: it denotes either certainty, in an assumptiverather than a deductive sense…

5. That paper’ll be in the second drawer down.

…or intention / willingness…

6. I’ll open the window.

If we adopt this description of the semantics of ‘will’, the ‘prob-lem’ of the first conditional vanishes: extrinsic ‘will’ is simplyredundant, and therefore omitted, in the protasis of sentence(3.) precisely because it begins with ‘if’; while in sentence (4.),‘will’ occurs in the protasis because it has intrinsic meaningand is, therefore, not redundant. In short, teaching the ‘threeconditionals’ is only a necessary simplification if you findyou’ve already ‘simplified’ the teaching of ‘will’ – that is, taughtthe meaning of the most frequently-used modal verb in theEnglish language wrongly. Yes, we should be informed by thefindings of descriptive linguistics – so why aren’t the canonicalbrigade?

There is, as far as I am aware, no conditional structure inEnglish whose meaning cannot be derived consistently

from the elements which comprise it. In order to produce suchsentences (not just three of four types of them) accurately, stu-dents need to draw on their existing knowledge of the seman-tics of verb forms (especially tense) and a proper understand-ing of what modal verbs (including ‘will’) mean. As always theywill need prompting, correction, encouragement, to be sure –but it must make better sense to encourage students to puttheir existing knowledge to wider use, rather than spend timeteaching them a handful of superficially baffling new ‘things’.The issue is not how many conditionals should be taught, butwhether we can justify teaching conditional sentences as sep-arate constructs at all. If they had their own truly idiosyncraticproperties, we could; as they don’t, we can’t.

I am not, myself, as Rodney suggests some trainers are,‘disdainful of modest pedagogical grammars’; on the contrary,I am passionately concerned with what pedagogical grammar– related to, but distinct from, descriptive grammar – shouldbe. Not only do I find the question intrinsically interesting, Ialso believe that interest in it is a matter of professional duty.We surely ought to question, for example, the teaching of ‘will’as ‘the future’ when this is simply not the case and, despite itsbeing intended as a simplification, has deleterious and evermore acute effects on students’ English as they progressbeyond elementary levels. Now, the ‘intrinsic / extrinsic modalverb’ treatment of ‘will’ is, to be sure, more abstract than the‘future tense’ treatment. During the writing of the LAC itappeared, again and again, that there is a directly proportion-al relationship between the ‘accuracy’ of a rule and the level ofits ‘abstractness’.

concrete RULES abstract

innacurate accurate

The central question for authors of pedagogical grammar maybe framed thus: what should the balance be between the

accuracy of the rules we teach, and how abstract they are?The tendency to date has been to opt for the more concrete /inaccurate end of the spectrum; as is probably already clear, Ibelieve we could – and should – position ourselves further tothe right. This may seem, at first sight, a daunting prospect,but would it really be so difficult to teach ‘will’ alongside ‘may’,‘might’ and ‘can’t’ as a modal verb denoting a level of certain-ty and referring, as they all do, either to the present or to thefuture? In and of itself, the answer to this question is surely‘no’. Insights of this kind from descriptive linguistics are nottoo abstract to be of use to students: certainly they are nomore difficult to grasp than many of the precepts of canonicalgrammar, and there is in any case no reason to suppose thatabstract concepts cannot be grasped by students, or that theycannot be conveyed effectively with some careful planning bya competent teacher.

How, then, are we to explain the reluctance of many teach-ers and teacher trainers to deviate from the conventions ofcanonical grammar? – even the downright hostility which theidea sometimes provokes? First, it must be acknowledged

that for teachers who have spent years working within theframework of canonical grammar, the demands of the ‘revi-sionist’ camp can often seem threatening to professional self-esteem, or at the very least to require a change of mind-setwhich would be highly inconvenient from a practical point ofview: cherished lesson plans would have to be jettisoned,familiar coursebook materials radically adapted. Secondly,and contrary to what the dire warnings in Rodney’s articlemight lead us to think, canonical grammar is so deeplyentrenched in our profession, the inertia in language teachingis so massive – bolstered in coursebook syllabuses, CELTAcourses, grammar references, internal and external exams –that to attempt to teach a different sort of grammar, or even thesame sort of grammar with a different slant, would simplyrequire a great deal of work. Let us suppose, for example, thatwe choose to teach ‘will’ as ‘just another modal verb’, with allthe adaptation / rejection / supplementing of our coursebookmaterials that that would entail. Having started down thisroad, we would be required, similarly, to adapt any other partsof the coursebook which dealt with ‘will’, for example thoseparts focusing on conditional sentences. Add to all this thelikelihood that our students will have had previous teacherswho followed canonical grammar – meaning that our studentswill be resistant, consciously or unconsciously, to our ‘new’descriptions – and will have such teachers again in the future

The road to mastery involves unconscious

acquisition of language.

— 24 —

Language and Terminology IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

– meaning that any benefits we give our students may be nomore than ephemeral – and we might be forgiven for not mak-ing the attempt at all. A thoroughgoing adoption of some newgrammatical descriptions is a daunting prospect; canonicalgrammar, on the other hand, promises a quiet life and peaceof mind for teachers and students, not to mention publishers.But none of this, of course, alters the fact that much of the lat-ter is empirically and pedagogically indefensible.

At the beginning of this article I expressed my hope that mydiscussion of language awareness in language teaching

would help illuminate the principles which guided the writing ofthe LAC. The general outlines, if not the particulars, of myown views on what currently passes for pedagogical grammarshould by now be clear, but I should state at once that the LACdoes not aim to foment a revolution among impressionablenew teachers against canonical grammar. As I began work onthe course I was convinced (and became more so as the workprogressed) that there are serious shortcomings in canonicalgrammar of which teachers need at least to be aware, if theEnglish teaching profession is to be worthy of that name; but Iwas also convinced that teachers need a thorough under-standing of canonical grammar if they are to cope with theday-to-day reality of having to use published materials effec-tively and, should they so choose, adapt them. The LACtherefore sets out to do two things:

• to familiarise course participants with descriptions of lan-guage commonly found in coursebooks and other pub-lished materials (‘canonical grammar’);

• to enable course participants to critique such descriptions,both in terms of their descriptive accuracy, and their use-fulness to learners.

The first of these aims inevitably means that much of thecourse is preoccupied with the grammar of the verb phrase,reflecting the traditional bias of most coursebook syllabuses.The second aim of the course encourages trainees to critique,rather than blindly swallow, the descriptions of language pre-sented. In other words, the course aims not just to teach, butto teach about ‘coursebook grammar’. This dual aim is built into every unit, and is also manifest in the structure of the courseas a whole. At the unit level, trainees are familiarised with moreconventional ways of looking at language, and then invited tocritique them in relation to alternative descriptions; and I havetried to maintain a balanced view of the advantages and short-comings of both modes of description throughout. The unit ontense, for example, introduces the idea (proposed by Lewisand others) that the core semantic value of the past tense is‘remoteness’, and then invites trainees to discuss how plausi-ble they find this idea as a description of how verb forms work,and how practicable – or not – it would be to import it into theclassroom. At the level of the course as a whole, the openingunit aims to engender a healthy scepticism among traineesregarding where descriptive language ‘rules’ come from, andhow definitive we are justified in assuming them to be. Thenext ten units, mirroring the preoccupation of the currentgrammatical canon, focus on various dimensions of the verbform in English; the list of topics here is fairly conventional,though much of the content of each unit is not. The final threeunits of the course are dedicated to less traditional areas andanalyses of the language, with the intention of pointing up theinadequacies and blindspots of conventional verb phrasegrammar. Thus Unit 12 suggests that a superior analysis of

conditional sentences could be got using the ‘lexicalapproach’ of the more atomistic kind associated with DaveWillis; Unit 13 aims to acquaint trainees with the grammar –and, to a lesser extent, the vocabulary – of the much-neglect-ed noun phrase; and the final unit deals with the notion of lex-ical ‘chunking’ which lies at the core of the better-known ‘lex-ical approach’ inspired by Michael Lewis. This last unit may betaken as characteristic of the course as a whole, in that itexplores the benefits and shortcomings of both the traditional‘grammar plus vocabulary’ approach to language descriptionand of the lexical phrase hypothesis, but does not engage inthe – to my mind – rather barren debate about whether struc-ture or lexis is ‘primary’.

So the approach of the LAC is, I hope, best summed up asone of intellectual honesty: acknowledgement of the exigenciesof teaching in schools where resources may be lacking andteachers have little time to reflect on descriptions of languageand their application in the classroom, but also an openness tofresh perspectives and a determination to give rational consid-eration to the merits and demerits of any attempt, canonical orotherwise, to describe the language we teach.

To return to Rodney Blakeston’s article once more, it is, toput it mildly, disappointing, in an educational journal of all

places, to hear the view expressed that it would be a goodthing if ‘rookie’ teachers were insulated from ‘exotic tales ofmuch sexier language descriptions’ (Lewis? Willis? sexy?)which will ‘lure them astray’. Let us savour the folly of this fora moment. There would actually be meetings, at which somesinister clique from the upper hierarchy of International HouseTeacher Training would be heard to insist: ‘Hey, here’s a goodidea. Let’s stop encouraging our rookie teachers to think’.

Not only is the idea grotesque in principal, but it lacks anyjustification on practical grounds. If we leave aside the inac-curate suggestion that novice teachers ‘welcome’ alternativelanguage descriptions because they obviate the need to learn‘tenses’ and make them ‘readier to say to the students: “Er,there aren’t really rules here… you just have to sort of feelwhether it sounds right’’’ (a wilfully silly parody of the lexicalapproach), the only possible reason for confining more‘advanced’ linguistic knowledge to teachers with a good fewyears’ experience (not, of course, that they would actually doanything with this knowledge) is that novice teachers willsomehow get confused by it.

Again, not true. Most of us get exasperated from time totime by the more fantastic claims of the disciples of corpus lin-guistics or the acolytes of Michael Lewis, but to deprecatethem on the grounds that they damage teacher development

In other words, the course aims not just to teach,

but to teach about ‘coursebook grammar’.

IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004 Language and Terminology

— 25 —

is quite misguided. It must be borne in mind that languageawareness, unlike many teaching skills, is essentially a matterof declarative knowledge. Thus a novice teacher may struggleto carry off, say, a decent task-based lesson, but there is noreason to suppose that they should find a concept in languagedescription any more difficult to grasp than a teacher of sever-al years’ experience; they may even, if they have a particularaptitude for such things, find that they grasp the concept andare able to pursue its pedagogical implications more easily.And indeed, this is what we found when we ran the pilot ver-sion of the LAC materials in Poland. Although the course wasoriginally conceived as an aid for newly-qualified teachers, thetrainees actually ranged in experience from post-CELTA topost-DELTA, and there was little correlation between ateacher’s level of experience and their ability to understand andcompare the competing descriptions of language presented.More experienced teachers were, as one might expect, quick-er to spot the potential practical benefits of and problems withnovel descriptive ideas, while greener teachers, their minds notyet cluttered with the baggage of canonical grammar, stimu-lated much debate with an ability to ask some direct andsearching questions. Their grasp of canonical descriptions – ifnot their adherence to them – was, if anything, tightened ratherthan loosened by their awareness of alternative ones, precise-ly because the latter tend to define themselves in opposition tothe former. In terms of the impact of the course on thetrainees’ teaching, this will, it is to be hoped, become more evi-dent in the longer term; in the short term trainees tend to stick,for reasons of practicality and security, to more orthodox treat-ments of language, but the course does equip them better toprioritise exercises, anticipate potential problems with theirmaterials, and deal convincingly with student queries whichwould otherwise be highly disconcerting: ‘Oh yes, I see. Well,since you ask, in this particular sentence there are two “wills”because…’

Finally, and to return to Rodney’s article for one last time, aword about language awareness among native versus non-native speaker teachers. The first half of Rodney’s article pro-claims ‘the neglect of state education’ in failing to teachEnglish grammar to British children, leading to a situationwhere groups of CELTA trainees are typically a mix of ignorantnative-speakers alongside non-natives who are well-versed incanonical grammar. Why the state should expend resourceson teaching children the grammar of a language they alreadyspeak, other than for the convenience of our profession, isnever really made clear, for it is difficult to see how teachingchildren about the ‘second conditional’ would alleviate the veryreal problems with literacy – not language description –

suffered by increasing numbers of children in Britain. Thisissue aside, the ‘knowledge gap’ which Rodney mentions canbe a real headache on CELTA courses, and one effectivemeans of tackling it is to address both canonical and alterna-tive modes of language description during seminars. A ses-sion on the concept of the past tense having ‘remote’ mean-ing, for example, benefits native speakers by acquainting themwith the morphology of past tense forms and the hypotheticalmeaning of the past tense in certain contexts, while the notionof a ‘unified theory’ of past tense meaning engages the atten-tion of non-natives and provides them with a new and elegantperspective on how the English verb form works. Similarly, asession on lexical descriptions of language is far more likely tobe of interest and value to all trainees than one on, say, ‘thepresent perfect’. As with the case of teaching conditional sen-tences mentioned above, an otherwise manageable difficulty isexacerbated by the canonical brigade’s refusal to countenancethe validity of any description of language other than thatenshrined in canonical grammar.

In the course of this article I have made no secret of mymisgivings about canonical grammar. It must beacknowledged that many generations of students havebecome proficient in English over the years, either with thehelp of, or in spite of, canonical grammar. With the help of, orin spite of. I think it matters which. Alternative ideas aboutlanguage description ought not to be dismissed out of hand orlocked away in a secret room, but welcomed, rigorouslydebated by all members of our profession and, if they seemsuperior to those in the current canon, the canon changed,and the idea applied. The LAC, however modestly, attemptsto embody these principles.

Ideas about language description ought not to bedismissed out of hand or

locked away in a secret room,but welcomed and debated.

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I n this article I would like to outline the large Euro Exam pro-ject at IH Budapest, update the proposal concerningPlacement Testing in IHWO and make a proposal for an

IHWO examination suite. Anna Sikó, Director of IH Budapest,spoke about these ideas at the Directors’ Conference inCordoba last year; the Directors they were enthusiastic aboutadopting these proposals, but the support of the Educationalside of the organisation is equally vital. At the 2004 DoSConference I presented a session aimed at convincing partici-pants how these proposals could benefit DoSes and theirschools, and go some way towards providing a Unique SellingPoint for IHWO.

The Euro Exam project at IH BudapestThis project was the subject of an article by Adam Schreck inthe IHJ Issue 14. It is a suite of examinations which has beenmade more accessible to students than others on the market,particularly with regard to its cost. They are currently availableat B1, B2 and C1/2 levels and were accredited by theHungarian Ministry of Education Accreditation Board inNovember 2001, since when their popularity has soared; inDecember 2003, a total of 1908 candidates sat one or otherof the Euro Exam suite, an increase of almost 100% on thesame month in the previous year.

The advantages of the Euro Exams are several:

• They are standardised to Council of Europe levels. Thereis the Common European Framework of Reference forLanguages, there is the European Language Portfolio withits language passport; internationally, people want stan-dardised results of the ability to communicate based onthe ‘can do’ statements.

• They are ‘Where-are-you-now?’ tests which can showstudents where they are in relation to an internationallyrecognised (Council of Europe) scale, Proficiency Exams,‘designed to measure people’s ability in a languageregardless of any training they may have had in that lan-guage ….. not based on the content or objectives of lan-guage courses’ (Arthur Hughes in Testing for LanguageTeachers, CUP 1989).

• The exams use real English in real-life tasks, what manysee as the future of testing and reflecting the philosophyof International House and Communicative LanguageTeaching.

• They are aimed at achieving beneficial backwash – thetests can positively influence teaching.

• There are both General English and Professional/BusinessEnglish options available.

A proposal concerning Placement Testing in IHWOA logical next step for IHWO is to use the expertise at IHBudapest to create the long-awaited IH Placement Test. Thecrucial point here is that Placement Testing should not onlyplace students effectively but also sell the school effectively interms of its professionalism and corporate image. Many IHschools have effective, good-looking tests, but not all, and thisproposal aims to address this and provide a uniform systemwhich will tie in with the IH level system, and make sure that anIntermediate student in country X is as similar in level as pos-sible to an Intermediate in country Y.

We propose the test procedure should include:

• pre-test;

• a focus test at 3 levels;

• an oral component;

• results which place students in the 8 IH levels.

These tests are being put together at the time of writing and wehope to have them available to all schools by September – freeof charge within IHWO. Initially, their use will not be compulso-ry, but greatly encouraged. If they work well, they will be madecompulsory for all new IHWO schools in tandem with the IHlevel system; full implementation world-wide could then follow.

Younger Learner Placement Tests will follow on demand andsubject to the successful adoption of the above. Other IHschools are already looking into this as well.

A proposal for an IHWO examination suiteThere are two options available here:• To create 8 end-of-level tests (to match the 8 IHWO

levels), each test being about an hour in length plus an oralcomponent. This idea was very enthusiastically receivedby the DoSes at the January Conference.

— 26 —

Tests and Exams IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

TESTS AND EXAMS

The IHWO Placement Test and Level Tests and The Euro Exam for IH Schools

Mike Cattlin

Mike Cattlin is currently a Teacher Trainer with IH Budapest, having previously worked as aDirector of Studies in Poland and Indonesia, and as a Trainer in Poland, England, Spain,South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and Italy. He also works on the IH DistanceDiploma in Educational Management (ELT).

IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004 Tests and Exams

— 27 —

• The adoption of the IH Budapest Euro Exam suite (B1, B2and C1/2 levels). There would be costs involved, butmany advantages as well, as we will see below, not theleast of which is the possible expansion of the suite to thestatus of external examinations which all IH schools couldsell and administer in their own countries.

The advantages of the first option are, perhaps, self-evident,so I will focus here on the rationale for the second. Perhapsthe outstanding advantage lies in the results the studentswould receive; a candidate taking the B2 paper, for example,would receive feedback in the form of 5 or 6 marks (one eachfor Speaking, Listening, Reading, Writing, Grammar andVocabulary, plus Mediation (translation) if offered); this wouldgive a clear indication of a student’s strengths and weakness-es in relation to the internationally recognised B2 standards (forexample, a pass mark of between 60 and 65%). This has thefollowing, clear advantages:

• It provides the school with a solid rationale for the subse-quent placement of students – for example, it would beeasier to explain to a student why s/he had to repeat alevel or take extra classes in a specific skill; likewise, itwould be easier for a student to justify why they shouldjump two levels.

• It provides valuable feedback to the DoS / school onwhich skills are (not) being taught well across the institu-tion, or even from teacher to teacher.

• Progress would be more clearly and statistically visible toboth school and students.

• It helps to ensure uniform placement and levels through-out the IHWO, so that, for example, students going tostudy abroad have a clear level and a clear indication oftheir needs for themselves and the host school toaddress.

Other advantages include:

• There would be no need for the DoS or over-workedteachers to have to sit down and write tests.

• The test itself (orals excluded) does not need teachingstaff to invigilate.

• The exam could be optional for the students upon enrol-ment or by a specified date, but in either case, could be apowerful marketing tool. The exam gives an ‘added value’and offers the potential for ‘satisfaction plus’, if success-fully marketed.

• Because IH-type teaching is communicative by nature, itprepares students for such an examination.

• Also see the advantages listed in part one of this article.

DoSes in those countries where the increasingly popularEnglish Language Portfolio is widely accepted were particular-ly interested in the adoption of the Euro Exams.

It is possible for both of the above options to be providedand offered in tandem, the first throughout all IHWO schools,the second for those schools / students for whom the advan-tages detailed above are relevant.

For the piloting of the Euro Exams as an internal exam, a trialset will be available for use in May / June 2004; we would

need to know entry numbers three weeks before the examdate. In the future, they could be issued at set periods, forexample, late-May and late-November, and the marking ofeverything except the Orals could be done centrally inBudapest, at least during the trial period. At the moment, IHBudapest offers the Euro Exams as an external exam fourtimes a year; other countries are already considering it as anexternally accredited examination. In the long-term, they couldrival Cambridge with IH schools administering them.

Feedback from the educational side of the organisation as awhole is important in deciding whether to proceed and, if so,how to go about the logistics including the necessary training(IH Budapest does have courses available for familiarisingteachers and students with task types).

This is a consultative process; as with all changes, it needsmanaging and evaluating as a result of experimentation. Anycomments or questions you have can be addressed to me atmcattlin@yahoo.co.uk or mike.c@ih.hu or you can contactthe Euro Office directly at euro@ih.hu .

The exams use

real English in

real-life tasks.

I ’ll never forget my first day as a TEFL teacher. First of all, myjob wasn’t taking place where it was supposed to be.Fortunately I turned up hours early.The Nothing School of English was in Notting Hill Gate but

they were bussing parties of kids (I could see them imprisonedon huge coaches above me, staring down at me like silentgorillas, with monkeys screaming in between) to somewhereunknown. And ‘they’, my employers, seemed to have disap-peared anyway.

A blond, fey sort of girl of about 18 airily told me, ‘We’re allover in the Park – like last year.’

‘We are?’‘Don’t you know?’ Clearly I didn’t.‘Oh, great!’ I muttered darkly. Somewhere along the line I’d

been misled. I hoped I hadn’t been misled about getting paidat the end of the month.

I ’d just done one of those TEFL courses of which I’d under-stood absolutely nothing – except I liked the students - they

were sweet; but the network surrounding the whole activity of‘communicating’ with them left a blur in the mind. I had a bookand was determined to teach from it. Someone somewherewas going to get taught. I kept wondering where the peoplewho’d employed me for this task had gone. The Bahamas?Somehow we all got to a vast building which had been hiredfor us. It was nice: gardens all around on a sunny August day.

There were children from pram-size to Frankenstein hulk.Some were being tenderly delivered by gibbering nannies andmaids who looked terrified at leaving their charges in such azoo. One was an Arab princeling surrounded by an entourage,hair wet and flicked back, pallid face constantly patted,squeezed and kissed by agitated female attendants for whomhe clearly had no respect. Some skulked about in corners but,fortunately, didn’t seem hostile.

The bossy girl and I argued about what should happen next.A nondescript creature arrived with a rucksack on its back

and stood waiting for us to stop arguing.The bossy girl turned on him, ‘Yes?’‘Ergh. Sorry I’m late. This is supposed to be my day off.

They rang me this morning’. This was a teacher? One of us?

‘Oh’, the bossy girl was trying to disguise relief, I was sure.‘You weren’t here last year’, she added, pulling rank.

‘Ergh. No. I joined last Easter’, he said, unloading his ruck-sack and opening the top of it. Out came some white, linedcards. He gave them to her.

‘Ergh. These are the registers. Had to go and get them first.Sort the kids out, will you? I have to change in the toilets’. Irealised what he was wearing was his cycling gear.

The bossy girl clutched the registers in possessive handsand murmured, ‘He’s nice, isn’t he?’

I hadn’t noticed a spark of sexual energy myself but I agreeddutifully. I’d had enough of arguing. She definitely knew morethan I did.

‘New Zealand or Australia?’ I realised she was still specu-lating about the addition to our team. I shrugged.

Children howled around the room. The high ceilings creat-ed an echo effect with the bare boards as she debated thepoint.

‘We’d better organise them’, said the bossy girl.‘In what language?’ I asked. I’d heard a lot of Arabic and

Brazilian Portuguese, which sounded much the same to me. Ididn’t speak either.

The bossy girl gave me a mistrustful look. I’d clearly lostface with that one.

‘Latin? I did Latin at school.’ I suggested, trying to keep myend up. She turned away, ignoring me.

She shouted to get the kids’ attention. After several shouts– I loyally joined in – we got some sort of silence. Sixty pairsof eyes stared at us manically. I shivered.

‘Good morning’, she said cheerfully. Was it still morning? Ilooked covertly at my watch. Twenty past nine. We didn’t fin-ish till four. God!

‘I can’t hear you’. She exploited the situation. We’d had alot of that on my recent course. She put her hand to her ear.‘Good morning’, she shouted again.

I was amazed. A sort of murmur came in response. She didit again until she’d got them all screaming back. What power!Then she said to me, ‘Do you know a game?’

‘A game?’ I asked, startled. ‘What do you mean?’She blinked rapidly. ‘You know. Like “I Spy”?’‘Huh?’ We had one hundred and twenty assorted eyes fixed

on us and she wanted to play ‘I Spy’?The New Zealand cyclist returned looking quite respectable

in grey trousers and a saggy sweater. He addressed himselfto the mob:

‘Right, you lot, get into your classes.’ What classes?He and the bossy girl walked around the

room sorting bodies into clumps. They

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In your own words IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

IN YOUR OWN WORDS

The Game: Early Days in TEFLBenita Cruickshank

Benita has been a CELTA and DELTA trainer in IH London for 19 years and has worked in 22different countries around the world. She is also the co-author of ‘An A – Z of EnglishGrammar and Usage’ (Longman) with Professor Leech.

There were children from pram-size to

Frankenstein hulk

IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004 In your own words

— 29 —

ended up with an assorted job lot and came back to me.‘Take this lot to E’, I was told. The saggy sweater and the

bossy girl seemed to have exchanged personalities.‘Where’s that?’ I asked, dumb as ever.‘Through that door – by the toilets – through the library, at

the far end. Just keep going. You can’t miss it!’The job lot followed me, muttering to itself.We found the room. Quite a nice room, with glass doors

opening onto a shrubbery, kids’ books on the shelves, hastilyarranged, little chairs and desks.

The job lot sat down on the chairs and fiddled with finger-nails, hair and noses. It knew the drill, even if I didn’t.

I went outside the classroom door and stared around.Mysteriously there seemed to be groups in rooms and adultsin charge of them. I caught sight of Saggy Sweater picking upa box of bricks in a room full of very young children, includingthe Arab prince who was now screaming for attention and, forthe first time in his life, being ignored.

Saggy Sweater earned my respect by telling him to shut up.The little boy obeyed.

‘What’s your name?’ I whispered through the doorway.‘Tony’. He looked tired and poor, but not humourless.‘What am I supposed to do?’He grinned as if I’d made a joke. ‘Keep them quiet till 3.45

and then send them home’.‘Oh? That’s it?’ What did I do in the classroom? I was wor-

ried now, too afraid to ask. I was supposed to know! I had asudden inspiration. ‘Do they have lunch?’

‘Oh, yes. And a break. Stop at 10.45 for half-an-hour andthen stop at 12.30 for an hour and a half. You’ll hear thenoise’. I was relieved. That didn’t sound too bad.

‘OK’.Needless to say I got through the material I’d thought of ear-

lier in about ten minutes. It turned out that they had ‘the book’,or rather enough of them had the book, to share. This wasone of those ‘Learn English in Five Minutes a Day’ bookswhich started off with ‘This is a book’ and by lesson 10 was on‘These are green and red books’. The kids mopped that up ina few minutes. It seemed useless. You didn’t go round say-ing things like that in real life.

‘Can you count?’ I asked.‘Win…too…free…five…eleven’, they all intoned.‘No, no, no’, I sorted that out bossily. I could make bingo at

home and play that with them, I thought, wondering if theevening would ever come.

‘Can you spell your names?’ It hadn’t until then occurred tome that I didn’t know their names! That took a good half-an-hour of alphabet practice and by the end of it the job lot wassorting itself out into individuals. They seemed to vary from 6to 13 years old and were mainly from countries I knew nothingabout. But then I’d only been to Spain on package holidays.

There was uproar outside and I looked at my watch and itwas the break. Thank God. I might get some advice on whatto do next.

Not a bit of it. They (there suddenly seemed to be at leasthalf a dozen teachers milling around) were all engrossed intheir own concerns, priority being given to toilets, phone calls,coffee and cigarettes.

Eventually the hullabaloo settled down and we were barri-caded in our corner again. I opened the glass doors to free-dom – the park outside.

One of the boys got out a wad of money. Ah, I thought.Counting. Yes. They liked this and we spent an hour count-

ing each other’s money, buying imaginary things from eachother and working out the change. They all appeared to getmore pocket money at the age of 8 than I got paid in a month.I was rapidly revising my parents’ view that everyone in theworld was poor except the Americans. This lot were all rolling.

Lunchtime arrived. It wasn’t as much fun as I’d thought.Instead of doing something, the joy lay in not doing anything.I found the bossy girl under a tree.

‘You can take them all out’, she told me. ‘In the park. Tomuseums and shops and supermarkets.’

‘Oh. I didn’t know that. So I could teach them food andthen take them to the supermarket, for example’. She nodded,boredom spreading rapidly across her English rose features.Clearly I hadn’t thought of anything original.

I gradually put together a list of things I could do with themand life settled into a routine. The problem was Friday after-noons. I managed to get them through a couple of illustratedreaders they quite enjoyed (Jack and Jill and the Burglars typeof thing) but once they knew what to expect they got fed up.

‘You can take the books outside.’ I told them brightly. Therewas a mass exodus. Two or three of them ended up gropingabout in the bushes and found a ball. Then there was a quar-rel between brothers and sisters about who should have it, andthus was born ‘The Game’.

I, who had never played a game in my life apart from netball(and I starkly refused to play that, at an early age) and there-fore knew no correct ‘rules’ for any game, was about to inventa game.

They were divided into two teams of roughly equal size andage. The object was to get the ball between two books/coats/ cardigans/ lunch boxes/ anything that came to hand.That much was obvious.

‘You can throw it, kick it, whatever you like’, I said. ‘You canget it away from each other however you like, but no kicking,scratching or biting – or you lose the ball – and no complain-ing when you get home if you get hurt’.

Eyes lit up all around me. A lot of chatter went on amongthe different ethnic groups who then broke into English as theshared means of communication while they sorted out the‘rules’. A pushing, snorting, somersaulting pack tumbled andfell and screamed and yelled their way up and down ourstretch of grass. The best score was something like 13 – 11.Everyone ended up covered in bruises and panting fromexhaustion. The only real fights were between siblings andthey were separated by their peers who wanted to get on withthe game. We did this every Friday afternoon.

Thus was my first experience of teaching English as a for-eign language. I’ll never forget those kids. They never ‘toldon’ me and that terrible game. I did get paid – by the womanwho’d employed me in the first place. Where had she beenthe whole month? I didn’t care. I had a REAL job to go tosomewhere else!

There was uproar outside and I looked at my watch and

it was the break. Thank God. I might get some advice

on what to do next.

re dynamic, hilarious, tragic. They can cut youdown, leave you with a scar, a bruise, a smile ora frown. They can fill you with pleasure, hypno-tise you and knock you over with a feather plume

that swoons. There are antonyms, synonyms, complimentaryadjectives in predicative positions, words that weave togetherin blurring elisions. An idiomatic phrase, can truly amaze, andsentence stress? Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll give it a rest. ‘Coz words arenot really a grammatical system but culturally learnt throughlinguistic acquisition. But I’ll stop now, ‘coz it’s all too scary,when everyone starts getting vocabu-lary.

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In your own words IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

HEY, collude they, elude hiding themselves insecluded parts of the brain, elusive, corrosive,destructive, explosive. They conjure magicalimages. Inspiring, spiralling, spinning and wheel-

ing. They rush, have the power to hush small children, humblethe old and educate the scholarly. They gnaw at the bonechange their meaning with tone, they hone in and stone themoaner with expletives and adjectives that describe the fleet-ingness of our futile attempts to understand. But then words…

Words…Andy Cox

Andy started teaching English at the Callan School of English and decided he wanted to takeit further. He passed the CELTA course in November 2002 at IH London and has beenworking for us ever since teaching General English. He recently spent 3 months working inCatania, Sicily.

re not weapons but communicative syntax, lexi-cal shapes, they’re abstract. Ticks, dots, inkblots and blotches, smears and hotch potches ofhieroglyphic symbols. Punctuated with strategic

spaces, leaving us traces of thoughts and feelings historical,dogma and speeches rhetorical, rhythmical, lyrical, stories trueand false. They can be blue, but of course! But they’re not toblame, never spoken twice the same. Words… they’re juststraight lines and curves. Left hanging in the air or scratchedout on paper, scribbled on notes to be decoded later. But thenwords…

an be splashed with a tear, drenched in fear, war-bled and yodelled, sung in the shower mono-tonal. Snivelled sobs, grovelling yobs, screechedand demeaning, lauded by snobs. They can be

used to belittle, trailed by spittle, an aerial display of lace, landspitter-patter in your face. Used and abused, use them badlyyou lose. They come dripping and wrapped, saturated andspat out. Charged with emotion, they’re causing a commotionsomewhere. Words, just like these can be used in desperatepleas. But then words…

re being shortened and stretched, bellowed andfetched from dictionaries fat, and, yes, fancy that;the word ‘oligopoly’ does exist, it’s like a cartel,get the gist? Meanings unsure, kids inventing

more, swapping texts and sending vexed messages throughcyberspace, now there’s a new discovered phonetic grace,like; c u @ ur place + . ‘X’ means kiss but then we all knowthis. Hurling at word speed, dot, dot, dash, www, forwardslash. But then words…

IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004 IHWO News

— 31 —

IHWO NEWS

Michael CarrierExecutive Director, IHWO

IH Prize Winners!

In 2001 Cambridge ESOL introduced an annual prize of £500for candidates taking the Diploma in English Language

Teaching to Adults (DELTA), who have shown the best overallperformance across the three components: the Coursework,the Extended Assignment and the Written Examination. Two ofthe prizewinners since the prize was launched have been IHtrainees: Neil Anderson who took the DELTA course at IHBudapest in 2001 and last year Jenny Davey, who did thecourse at IH Lisbon where she had also done her Cert TEFLAand the Young Learners Course. Here’s what they had to say:

Neil Anderson‘ What I learnt from my excellent DELTA course at IH

Budapest is obvious, simple and yet easy to overlook in somany ways: to value the student above the lesson plan.’

Jenny Davey ‘Doing the DELTA more than lived up to

my expectations. The trainers at IHLisbon were committed and inspiring andI enjoyed the impetus to read widely, toexperiment and to be ambitious in the

classroom. The practical element of thecourse meant that I could feel very directly

the benefits I was gaining from it whenworking with my learners, who seemed to

appreciate their central role in my ownlearning. My colleagues both at my school and on the

course were also an important part of the learning process.’

Congratulations to both – and here’s looking forward to thenext lot of results and the announcement, perhaps of anotherIH winner!

Jenny Davey, 2003 Cambridge

ESOL DELTA Prize Winner

The IH community continues to grow and expand world-wide. In the last six months we have affiliated newschools in Bratislava, Bangkok, Dubai, Toronto, Jeddah

and Al-Jouf. We are expanding into new countries with newapplications - or rather, returning to countries once part of theIH network such as Lebanon and Algeria.

On the educational front we have produced new resourcesfor busy teachers in the form of a 25-hour course in English forMarketing. The most requested speciality for many schools,English for Marketing is a popular product for many corporateclients. In order to assist schools in preparing a specialised,tailor-made course for their clients, we have commissioned anexperienced trainer and DOS, Jeremy Day, to produce acourse that can be run 'off-the-shelf', or can be customised to

produce a localised version for a particular company. To assist in the promotion of our Study Abroad schools, we

have produced a colourful and attractive CDROM catalogue ofthe schools, which students (or agents) can search to find thelanguage and the location that they want, along with detailsand photos of the schools and cities where IH is located. Youcan order a copy from head office or view it online atwww.ihworld.com/studyabroad.

One the main developments for 2004 is the introduction of aVirtual Learning Environment (VLE) for IH schools to use inonline teaching and training. We are currently piloting systemsand devising sample course materials, and there will bedemonstrations of this exciting new technology available for allIH staff to access by the summer - more in the next issue!

— 32 —

IHWO News IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

At an IH Portugal directors’ meeting atthe beginning of 2003, we decidedthat our way of celebrating the 50/40

(the very seeds of IH sown in Cordoba in 1953and the opening of the first IH school inPortugal in 1963) would be to select a reallyworthwhile cause and organise a series of fundraising events to enable us to present a largecheque to the organisation of our choice at aparty, which would more or less coincide withthe anniversary of the opening of the firstschool in Portugal, and, by extension the startof John and Brita’s school in Cordoba.

We agreed that FENACERCI (the PortugueseFederation of Cooperatives for the Educationof Mentally Disabled Children) should be theobject of our fund-raising. Over about 25years, with minimal Government funding it hasdeveloped a chain of over 50 Cooperatives (many in townswhere there are IH schools) providing opportunities foreducation and work experience for a huge number of disabledchildren.

Our initial plan was extremely ambitious and included

Feb-March: An Art Competition on the theme ‘Children’

April: A Sponsored Spell

May: A Sponsored Walk

June: A Summer Fete

Between the schools we raised 20,000 euros which we werevery proud of; FENACERCI were absolutely delighted and sentout a press release which referred to IH in glowing terms.Unfortunately only one national newspaper found it sufficientlynewsworthy to carry an article.

We learned a lot: a most important lesson was not to‘over-intend’: better to put on a couple of events with

time to plan properly, than to cancel or postpone at the lastminute. Even more important – even the most generousdonors can suffer from donation fatigue after the second orthird appeal for contributions to the same cause.

Sponsorship (patrocnio in Portuguese) was generally reallyonly understood in the Nike/Beckham sense; as a result weneeded more time than we anticipated to get our idea across.

The event that generated the most enthusiasm was theSponsored Spell. It was probably also the least headache toorganise and contributed the largest proportion of the 20,000euros.

Socially, and possibly from a marketing angle, the SponsoredWalk was the most successful. All the participants wore IH 50th

T-shirts and large numbers of people walking together on aSunday morning in May caused a bit of a stir. Everybodyinvolved was determined to make it an annual event so we arepreparing for the 2004 walk with at least double the number ofparticipants.

Colin Macmillan, Director IH Lisbon For details of how your school could organise one of theseevents, to raise its market profile locally AND help a goodcause, contact Colin at IH Lisbon.

IH Educators’ Conference

The first weekend in March IH London hosted the annual IHEducators’ Conference; there was a record turn-out, (and

some disappointments – next year book early!) with a videolink organised to the adjoining room to 106 Piccadilly’s famousC2 for the plenary sessions; and a star line-up including ScottThornbury, Tessa Woodward and many other famous names.

It was a triumph for the organiser George Pickering and heis already planning the next one. The Journal will be printingversions of many of the talks in issue 17 so if you missed itdon’t despair – you will be able to catch up with much of thecontent if not the atmosphere. In the meantime, if you are inLondon or near, why not join the Professional DevelopmentCentre (details on www.ihlondon.com).

Celebrating 50/40 Years of IH In Portugal

Check Point on the IH Portugal Sponsored Walk

The Directors of IH Portugal schools with the Director of FENACERCIand a fat cheque.

IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004 IHWO News

— 33 —

LAC Units:

Describing Language (an introductory unit).Tense.Auxiliaries & Operators.Modal Verbs I (extrinsic meanings).Modal Verbs II (intrinsic meanings).Will & Would.Future Forms.

Forms with Have (perfect aspect).Forms with Be I (progressive aspect).Forms with Be II (passive voice).The Verb Form.Conditional Sentences.The Noun Phrase.Language as Lexis.

Unit ContentAt the core of each unit is a ninety-minute input session. Thecourse is primarily concerned with deepening trainees’ knowl-edge of the language itself, but each session has as its finalstage an extended, guided discussion on the possible implica-tions of what trainees have learned for syllabus design and forways in which language is presented in the classroom.

Homework Tasks.Between sessions, trainees are encouraged to carry out tasks

chosen from a homework menu. Suggestions for reading arealso provided.

Course DeliveryBecause the homework tasks have a vital role in helpingtrainees consolidate and expand upon their understanding ofthe sometimes quite involved or abstract concepts presentedin sessions, it is intended that the course will be delivered on apart-time – say, weekly – basis. It should also be noted thatthe sessions ‘build’ on one another – that is, each assumes atleast a basic familiarity with concepts presented in those pre-ceding it. For this reason, trainees will need to attend all ses-sions if they are to reap the full benefit from the course.

Materials & AccreditationAll course materials are on a CD-rom (Resource Bank 5) whichwas sent to IH schools over the summer of 2003. For eachsession there are detailed explanatory and procedural notesfor the trainer, with occasional suggestions for alternative oradditional activities, and typically a dozen or so photocopiableworksheets. Individual trainers are of course free to adapt,supplement and edit the materials as they see fit. At presentthe course is not centrally accredited, so it is up to individualschools to define requirements for successful completion ofthe course and issue certificates.

For further information, contact IHWO.

Gozo is a tiny mythical island with a history stretchingback to well before Stonehenge, whose hills arescattered with the limestone churches which give it

the distinctive character for which it is known. With a climatewhose average temperature in winter is around 14 degreesand whose summers are tempered by the sea breezes,Gozo is a holiday dream – so it’s startling to find it is alsohome to a language school. A rather unusual languageschool and a visitor there finds herself asking a few ques-tions:

Is it the only IH school which is most convenientlyreached by helicopter?

Is it the only IH school whose facilities include a pooland sun deck, a bar, a games room, a fitness room anda sauna? (If you look very carefully at the photo, you cansee the IH logo sign by the gate into the school, behind thebougainvillea.)

Is it the only IH school situated on a cliff commandingmagnificent views of the Mediterranean and thecountryside?

Is it the only IH school whose social programme includeswalking, cycling, boating, sailing and fishing expeditionsas well as poetry evenings and an opera season?

IH schools are so varied that the answer is probably not – butif you want ALL of these things then IH Malta Gozo is the placefor you!

IH Malta, Gozo

An Overview of the IH Language Awareness Course (LAC).By Alex Tilbury DOS IH Katowice

the IH Gozo pool

— 34 —

Book Reviews IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

BOOK REVIEWS

Cutting Edge – AdvancedSarah Cunningham and Peter Moor

Longman, 2003.

The cover of the latest edition tothe best-selling Cutting Edge

series is illustrated with the picture ofa cliff at either sunset or sunrise. Is itan allusion to the daunting nature oflearning English at an advanced level,with unknown word heaped uponsubtle distinction, seemingly endless-ly? Alternatively, does a sunset pointto completion, task accomplished?No matter, how well does this book

strike a balance between providing advanced learners with anopportunity to put into practice what they know and movingthem on with fresh challenges?

Firstly, what strikes me about the course is the sheer abun-dance of material. In this respect, it mirrors the labyrinthinenature of a website as you click from enticing link to enticinglink. Divided into ten substantial modules, the core material issupported by an ample ‘Language Summary’ and ‘GrammarPractice’ section, along with a booklet inserted into the backcover (The Phrase Builder), packed with yet more exercises.This is not to mention the enormous amount of photocopiablematerial in the ‘Resources Bank’ in the Teacher’s Book.Embedded within each module are frequent links leading stu-dents to explanation and practice. There is undoubtedly nolack of material in this book and the frequent cross-referencingdoes encourage a more interactive experience and serves tobreak down the demarcation between class time and home-work, leading to both a more integrated experience andgreater learner autonomy. In particular, the ‘Patterns to Notice’feature raises student awareness of crucial highly generative,yet neglected language areas, such as the use of noun phras-es (page 73). Similarly, the ‘Grammar Extension’ element clear-ly has the extremely valid intention of moving the learners onfrom what they know into more challenging waters.

In terms of providing a thorough advanced language syl-labus, Cutting Edge Advanced is admirable. However, I wouldsuggest that this very thoroughness as far as language is con-cerned can detract from the course. The very meatiness of themodules can make getting through them heavy going, espe-cially as ways to break them down into more manageablechunks are not always obvious. More importantly, this takes itstoll on the task as students often suffer from topic fatigue bythe time they reach the tasks. This is a pity as the tasks them-selves are frequently engaging. However, before the learnershave a chance to engage with the task they are compelled bythe nature of the book to wade through far too many exercis-es that focus on individual forms and which favour analyticallearners

Overall, while Cutting Edge Advanced is without doubt aneffective course, more could have been done to give its mod-ules more texture. Specifically, I would cite first the lack of cov-

erage of non-western viewpoints and the poor representationof non-Europeans. On this note, a more prominent role for thevoice of the non-Native speaker would benefit the book.Second, the flatness of many of the modules seems to stemfrom a combination of lacklustre illustrations and layout com-bined with the frequent failure of the units to take learners ona critical journey, in that they are often doing the same descrip-tive and therefore cognitively undemanding activities with thesame theme throughout the module. The rutted and worn cliffson the cover, full of cracks and crevices, promise a refreshingbumpiness that the book does not entirely deliver.

Will Hutton

New Headway Intermediate – New EditionLiz and John Soars

Oxford University Press, 2003.

Some things in life are re-assur-ing to have around you. And if

you’re a teacher, it’s re-assuring tohave Headway somewhere near-by. It’s something we can rely onand trust as a source of qualitymaterial. Now, we have the newNew Headway Intermediate, andas with New Headway and oldHeadway the latest edition pro-vides the busy teacher with a rich

source of quality lesson material.The format is re-assuringly familiar, and for both teacher and

student the book is easy to use. Topic titles are often original– ‘Get Happy’, ‘I Just Love It’, and ‘Just Imagine’; all make youwant to turn to the relevant pages and find out more. Andwhen you do, you find interesting texts – I mean, how couldanyone not want to read an article called ‘The Clown Doctor’,or ‘How Not to Behave Badly Abroad’?

As well as varied and interesting topics and texts, the lan-guage sections are clear and interesting (and I really like theContents page which highlights in a different colour the lan-guage focus of each unit, whether it’s ‘Grammar’,‘Vocabulary’or ‘Everyday English’).

There is an excellent bank of Writing activities at the back ofthe book, each with a clear language focus. This could cer-tainly be appropriate for student self-study as well as for class-room use.

As well as the Workbook, we also have a Teacher’sResource Book, with many excellent communicative practiceactivities relating to the corresponding units in the StudentBook.

This new edition of Headway is, indeed, re-assuring. It hasbeen up-dated and refreshed and is very easy-to-use. But aswell as being teacher-friendly (easy for both experienced andless experienced teachers to use), it is learner-friendly, and is avery welcome addition to the series.

David Riddell

IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004 Book Reviews

— 35 —

Inside Out ElementarySue Kay & Vaughan Jones

Macmillan, 2003.

When I first got my hands on a copy of Inside OutElementary Student’s Book, I couldn’t believe my luck.

One week into a course with strong elementary students, weneeded something more challenging and inspiring. Beingfamiliar with the other course-books in the Inside Out series Ithought that this could be just what they needed.

I wasn’t disappointed. Inside Out Elementary has the glossycover, real photos, up-to-date topics that appeal to studentsand teachers alike. Layout is clear, easy to follow and theorganisation of material logical. Whilst you could follow theorder of the book as it’s set out, each unit, indeed each sec-tion of a unit, can stand alone. I found this flexibility and theexploitability of the texts and activities very appealing.

It was also good to know that however we approached aunit the students went home with a very concrete record ofwork done, in terms of grammar, lexis and pronunciation.These are integrated skilfully into each unit by means of realis-tic texts, which encourage noticing of target language. Close-up grammar sections encourage the learner to organise andincorporate language in bite-size portions. By including thelanguage reference in the unit these sections seem less liketest and help highlight form and use. Lexis is presented aspart of a system, with activities to consider and practice collo-cation, connotation and register.

The learner can further benefit from the high degree of expo-sure to target language which the syllabus provides as it pro-gresses. Not only this, but there are repeated opportunities topractise language in a meaningful way. This is particularly evi-dent in the well thought out review sections, which, unlikeother course-books, are not merely tests of students’ learning.They contain texts, tasks and activities that give the learner thechance to manipulate structures and re-activate and extendlanguage from previous units.

A distinctive feature of this series (and Inside Out Elementaryis no exception) is the highly personalised speaking tasks. Notonly did my students enjoy talking about themselves and find-ing out about others, but they found it incredibly rewarding thatat this level they could talk for two to three minutes on a giventopic. More adventurous students can take risks with lan-guage and those less confident or not quite sure what to saycan use the prompts and/or sentence headers to structuretheir ideas. As a student it’s a great way to exchange not onlyinformation about each other, ideas or opinions, but alsophrases and vocabulary that you’ve picked up outside ofclass. As a teacher it is a golden opportunity to listen to justhow much language elementary students can produce, todiagnose problem areas and work on this output in feedbackor later classes.

My group of strong elementary learners found the materialschallenging and consequently motivating. Had they beenweaker they might have run into difficulties. There is a lot on apage, even though the presentation is clear, and this may bedaunting to some students. The texts may seem long from astudent’s perspective: this is not insurmountable but requirescareful planning in pre-reading stages of a class.

Another concern I had was that at first glance there didn’tseem to be much situational language, which has a very high

surrender value for Elementary students. On closer inspectionit was there, shopping scenarios, cafes, hotel bookings etc.However, I felt this really could be more explicit. I also thoughtthat there could be more writing in the Student’s Book. TheWorkbook does include an integrated writing syllabus but I feelthat writing shouldn’t be tucked away like this. Naturally, theextent to which you focus on writing is dependent on your stu-dents’ needs, but I feel it’s important that writing is seen as anintegral part of learning a language and including a variety ofwriting tasks in a course-book helps convey this message.

Despite these reservations I have to say that Inside OutElementary is an impressive coursebook. It is interesting andaccessible if you are a student, solid and reliable if you are anewly qualified teacher and refreshing and exploitable if youare more experienced. It stands out amongst from other ele-mentary books because it is both intellectually challenging andemotionally involving.

Melissa Lamb

Natural GrammarScott Thornbury

Oxford University Press, 2004.

The words ‘grammar’ and‘natural’ do not necessari-

ly go together as obviously as‘fish’ and ‘chips’, but ScottThornbury shows in this newbook that grammar can - andshould - be seen as naturallanguage. As Scott says, thebook is ‘about grammar, but itis organised around words’.

This immediately makes the subject of ‘grammar’ more rele-vant, more interesting, and perhaps more ‘natural’.

The book deals in alphabetical order with one hundred ‘keywords of English and how they work’, ranging from ‘a / an’ to‘you’, with ‘good’, ‘my’, ‘up’ and many more in between.Each double page spread follows a similar pattern - a blue boxwith basic grammatical information; grammar patterns (thebook focuses strongly on patterns); collocations; set phrases;and several exercises (‘with a view to helping fix these in thememory’ and to ‘apply the grammar patterns to build natural-sounding language’). The presentation is clear and consistent,and the book itself is attractive both in terms of size andcolour; and in the way the word ‘Natural’ is written in muchlarger font than the word ‘grammar’! Priorities are thus clearlyestablished!

If we use ‘place’ as an example, the blue box tells us that itcan be a countable noun or a verb; grammar patterns include‘a/an (+ adjective) + place + to-infinitive’; collocations include‘take your place’; set phrases include ‘to be all over the place’;and four different exercises follow for practice. The exercisesinclude matching example sentences to definitions; adding theword ‘place’ in the appropriate position in given sentences;completing collocations; and choosing the right verb for sen-tences already including ‘place’. This provides the learner withlots of consolidation of what they have read about, and theopportunity, indeed, to ‘fix it in the memory’ and ‘build naturalsounding language’.

The book also has a grammar index, a glossary, and a key,

Book Reviews IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

— 36 —

making the book ideal for self-study for students (andteachers!). It could also be exploited for classroom use,though if it is, teachers may want to provide more variety andcontext for the practice tasks. In either case, the book is aimedat students from intermediate to advanced, and it is ideal forthese levels.

The idea of writing a ‘grammar’ book dealing with key wordsrather than verb forms is one that will be warmly welcomed byteachers and one from which students will benefit. There isdefinitely a need for such a book and I for one will be using itat the earliest opportunity.

David Riddell

Focus on IELTSSue O’Connell

Longman, 2002.

Focus on IELTS is an integratednew coursebook for students

preparing to take the InternationalEnglish Language Testing Systemexam for university entrance orprofessional purposes. Any addi-tion to IELTS teaching resources iswelcome (especially with therevised format of the exam) butFocus on IELTS is a particularbonus to the bookshelves for vari-

ous reasons, perhaps reflecting the author’s experience as ateacher and examiner.

For me, there are several features which distinguish this fromother IELTS coursebooks. Firstly, the format is much moreteacher-friendly; the 20 units are topic-based rather than skills-based. This makes it much easier to plan a cohesive lessonwhich hangs on a theme or framework rather than randomlypractising skills which reflect the format of the exam. Similarly,each unit begins with a box, which outlines the aims and theskills practised and how these relate to the exam, making itexplicit to teacher and student alike. The teacher’s book isadequate, not so comprehensive, but easy to follow with sim-ple answers boxed for quick reference. Some sections aretricky to find too but the layout is logical, it just takes a bit ofnavigating.

Another advantage is the content: it’s not just the unusualtopics, but the range of them - from communication systemsto natural hazards to time management; also good are theactivities with language facts, and the lead-ins which lendthemselves conveniently to quizzes, discussion and lighteractivities to ease into the lesson.

Other key features include a practice test, error hit list andtask approach tips. The practice test is useful for reference andalso because the Cambridge PracticeTests For IELTS series isnot photocopiable or may be already known to students whoare working independently as well as taking classes. Thus thepractice test could function as a mock exam at the end of thecourse. The ‘error hit list’ and ‘spot the error’ exercises are a‘hit’ because they focus on common errors (based on theLongman Learner’s corpus) and help students to identify theirtypical mistakes. Also, because there is often not time on

IELTS courses to devote to grammar per se, it is practical tohave remedial grammar exercises, which can lend themselvesto fun activities like a grammar auction or to self-study. Thetask approach tips brief students as to how to tackle questionsand generally give useful advice on strategies, thus saving theteacher from coming up with these and allowing students totake more responsibility for their learning.

To sum up, Focus on IELTS is a flexible resource. It lendsitself effectively to both group and individual study, an impor-tant asset for an exam coursebook as students can beencouraged to learn outside the classroom. On the IELTS nine-band score, I‘ll give it an 8 – of its kind, I haven’t seen better.

Nancy Wallace

Assessing Young LearnersSophie Ioannou-Georgiou and Pavlos Pavlou

Oxford University Press, 2003.

Testing, testing, one, twothree... but this book does a

whole lot more than test orcheck your students know theirnumbers or colours. AssessingYoung Learners is intended forteachers of students aged 6 –12, who are anxious to integratechild-friendly assessment intothe curriculum.

As one of the Alan Maley series it was bound to be a usefulresource for teachers, but by dealing with the thorny area ofassessing young learners it is particularly welcome, for mostteachers, regardless of how they feel about testing, areinvolved in some way in assessing their childrens’ work.Perhaps this is why this was easily the most popular book forYoung Learner teachers on my training courses last year totuck under their arm to take back to their various countries.So what does this book offer? Firstly, it provides suggestionsfor activities to test the four skills at low levels. For example,non-intimidating and motivating type activities, such as classsurveys and pairwork information exchanges, test speaking.These are categorised according to age, level and time theytake. The teachers’ notes are practical and allow for less thanideal conditions, so there are suggested follow-up activitiesand forms to encourage students to assess their own perfor-mances so they feel part of the assessment process.

Similarly, there is one section dedicated to ‘self-assess-ment’. This helps students to reflect on their progress, forexample by putting an animal on a cline to measure their suc-cess or building up a ‘picture of achievement.’ Additionally, itencourages them to express their feelings and attitudes toEnglish classes or tasks by assigning smiley (or miserable!)faces, from which teachers can learn a lot.

‘Learning how to learn’ is another section, with such strate-gies as using a dictionary, guessing meaning from context andpredicting content. These are invaluable skills in the languagelearning process and yet sadly lacking in the classroom, sodrawing attention to them as activity ideas may promote goodstudy habits and help children become independent learners.

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The language portfolio activities are also useful since lan-guage portfolios (a collection of samples of a child’s work col-lected over a period of time) are now used in state schools inmany countries around the world. The guidelines and ideas onusing portfolios will help teachers keep up to date with currentpractices and their assessment, while including the younglearners in the process.

However, best of all are the photocopiable worksheets.These will undoubtedly appeal to children as eye-catching, butequally to teachers as time-saving but professionally- present-ed materials, which also help them organise their record-keep-ing and reporting.

So, overall... my feelings about this book:Nancy Wallace

Task-based Language Learning and TeachingRod Ellis

Oxford University Press, 2003

The preface to Task-basedLanguage Learning and Teaching

clearly states that this is ‘a book abouttask-based research and teaching’(italics in original) rather than a bookwhich outlines ways of implementing atask-based approach. However, as abook which advertises itself on theback cover as showing ‘how researchand task-based teaching can mutual-ly inform each other’, it fails to give

due emphasis to the classroom, and, perhaps more impor-tantly, fails to include a wider sense of the social conditions inwhich English is learned.

Task-based Language Learning and Teaching certainly doesprovide a comprehensive overview of research in the field sofar, and underlines the (vast) amount of further research stillneeded. Perhaps the most interesting studies for teachers aredescribed in Chapter 4, ‘Tasks, production, and languageacquisition’, where we learn that different types of task pro-duce different effects on complexity, fluency and accuracy. Toencourage complexity of language, teachers should set uptasks in which learners share information and in which the out-come is open. To promote fluency, tasks which have familiartopics and have a clear structure and outcome should beused. For accuracy, task implementation is more importantthan choice of a particular task, as the key factor is that learn-ers have time while doing the task to consider their languagechoices. Chapter 8, ‘The methodology of task-based teach-ing’, is also classroom-friendly, providing a helpful frameworkin terms of lesson design (pre-task, during task and post-taskphases). Usefully, Ellis goes beyond the traditional idea of thesmall group task to a broader sense of ‘participatory structure’which includes individual student activity or teacher-classactivity as alternatives to group work. However, the bookwould be strengthened by the inclusion of teacher and studentperspectives. An example of a task-based lesson, evaluatedby both teacher and class participants, would have groundedthe theory, and provided further issues for researchers toinvestigate.

Ellis admits that he writes very much from a cognitive per-spective, assuming that the individual mind processes andstores input, which can then be transformed into output.Chapter 6, ‘Sociocultural SLA and tasks’, acknowledges theVygotskian perspective that learning is essentially social, cre-ated through interaction, but the book as a whole fails to incor-porate a wider sense of society. In the final chapter, ‘Evaluatingtask-based pedagogy’, Ellis summarises the criticisms levelledat task-based learning (TBL), including the important argumentthat TBL may be seen as an Anglo-American methodology,inappropriate in other cultural contexts. The book would havebeen stronger if it had begun with such criticisms, and showedspecific ways in which TBL can address them. For instance,Ellis does argue that TBL focuses on ‘discoursive practicesthat encourage the learner to actively engage in shaping andcontrolling the discourse’ and ‘social practices that are centredon allowing and resolving social trouble’ (p. 252). By includingexamples of tasks that focus on broader political issues of lan-guage and power, e.g. a task which asks learners to discusswhether a native speaker or a non-native speaker makes abetter teacher of English, Ellis could have placed TBL within abroader socio-political framework and made it more accessi-ble to teachers outside the ivory towers.

Amanda Lloyd

HomeworkLesley Painter

Oxford University Press, 2003.

Homework, a recent addition toOUP’s excellent Resource Books

for Teachers series, addresses anarea that one might not, on firstthought, consider central to teaching— yet outside the classroom studentsreview, consolidate and extend whatthey have learned, experiment withtheir new language and gain experi-ence and confidence. For these rea-sons, homework is beneficial to both

teachers and students. However, students often feel negativeabout homework, deeming it boring and time-consuming, andthis may be because teachers sometimes assign homeworkwithout much forethought or consideration of student inter-ests. Painter addresses this at the outset, devoting the first twoof eight sections to teacher attitude and approach as well asstudent motivation and involvement, all of which are linked.

Ideally, homework should be fun, novel (e.g. assignmentsdelivered by e-mail), personalised, relevant and useful. It doesnot have to be purely teacher-generated and corrected, butcan involve student input, collaboration, peer-teaching andpeer-correction. The author supplies three questionnaires thatcover student needs, preferences and learner styles in regardto homework. From the information thus gathered, teacherswill find it easier to choose and develop homework suitable forany given class.

The book is well and clearly organised. Sections 3 to 8 focuson Lexis, Writing, Language, Communication, Pronunciationand Receptive Skills. Each activity is prefaced by ‘Level,’

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Book Reviews IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

‘Time’ (required in class as preparation, and as homework),and ‘Aims.’ Following this are the stages — Preparation,Procedure, Variations, Follow-up and, sometimes, Comments(tips). Here is a sampler of tasks:

Lexis:• finding collocations on a theme (from TV, Internet,magazines).• finding examples outside class of lexical items such asidioms, multiword verbs or compound nouns.

Writing:• taking notes on the weirdest story of the day (news) and pre-senting next day.• writing an almanac entry on what happened on a particularday (research on Internet, at library).

Language:• creating your own gapfill using target language, to be

corrected by teacher and handed to different students forcompletion at home.

• colour-coding a text (present tenses in red, simple past inblue).

• interviewing someone outside the class on given points.

Communication:• creating a role for yourself (form supplied) to be acted out

in a party context next day.

• make a taped journal at home.

Pronunciation:• writing your own minimal pairs list.

• collecting examples of schwa.

Receptive Skills:• solving a puzzle dictated by the teacher.

• collecting examples of English in your town orneighbourhood (signs, ads).

Such a list does not do justice to the book, as it gives no ideaof how the task is set up, carried out or followed up and noidea of variety. In fact, there are almost 90 homework activities,not including the ones that deal with needs, interests andlearner styles in the first two sections of the book, entitled‘Getting Started’ and ‘Focus on Homework’.

Homework will be an asset to any teacher who wishes toconsider new approaches to homework, provide a variety ofmotivating homework assignments and encourageindependent learning.

Leslie Anne Hendra

The Guide To Better Englishby Philip Gooden

Peter Collin Publishing.

Eats, Shoots & Leavesby Lynne TrussProfile Books.

These two pocket-sized books form part of that bundle ofuseful volumes to stuff into your rucksack, as you head off,

armed with your CELTA, to conquer the world and become thebest ELT teacher your students have ever had. Unlike theinvaluable Teaching Grammar by Jim Scrivener reviewed in thelast issue of the Journal, which also falls into that category,these are not specifically designed to help you become a bet-ter teacher of English: they are designed to help you becomea better USER of English. But a better user is also likely, sure-ly, to become a better teacher. If you cannot put together astructurally sound and semantically coherent sentence whichconforms to the basic rules of English grammar, punctuationand syntax, at the very best you will feel less than confidentwhen writing reports likely to be read by your DOS; at the veryleast, your credibility is likely to suffer – certainly with your moreadvanced students, whose knowledge of the finer reaches ofEnglish grammar is likely to be much more intimate than yours,given the recent parlous - as some see it - state of the Englisheducation system. And advanced students are the future: asthe market changes, more and more of us are going to berequired to teach English for Academic Purposes where clari-ty of thought and of expression is primary; or English forSpecial Purposes to people who require your expertise to helpthem express themselves effectively in specialist areas such asoil-drilling or compliance law where the same thing applies.

So either or both of these books should find a place on yourbookshelf or in your backpack. The first is, as its title indicates,a guide; it does not dictate, neither does it rant. It suggests,sometimes over-tentatively perhaps, that such and such ausage is thought to be ‘incorrect’ or ‘unusual’: ‘…it’s notuncommon to find them [“a” and “lot”] written as one, proba-bly because pronunciation runs them together’. (Sorry, it maybe not uncommon, but surely it is also just plain WRONG?)Sometimes its opinion is arguable: ‘Moral is pronounced withthe stress on the first syllable; morale rhymes with “pal” ’.Morale rhymes with snarl – doesn’t it? Or maybe I’m forgettingmy Yorkshire. Most of the time however, it provides reliable,clearly explained guidance to knotty points such as frequentlyconfused words like lay and lie, special and especial, censorand censure and so on. It tells you clearly when its is its andnot it’s. (I know Murphy does this too but do we want toencourage Murphy?) It includes a nice (in both senses givenhere: ‘pleasant’ and ‘precise’) paragraph on the differencebetween, and meanings of, irony and sarcasm and two ondefining and descriptive clauses (disguised as items on the dif-ference between ‘who’/’who’ and ‘which’/’which’). Sometimestrenchant, often helpful, advice is what it has to offer. Read it,inwardly digest it, and your prose may not sparkle, but at leastit will be clear.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves deals exclusively with the contentiousmatter of punctuation. Punctuation, as Lynne Truss points out,quoting from ‘the style book of a national newspaper’ is: ‘a

IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004 Book Reviews

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courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story with-out stumbling’. The problem is that opinions differ on exactlyhow that courtesy should be extended. It is a well-known factthat the editors of the IH Journal always agree about every-thing; but they have been known to conduct slightly tense dis-cussions on precisely where a comma should be placed. Thisdissension has ancient and well-documented antecedents:‘grown men have knock-down fights over the comma in edito-rial offices’ of such august publications as the New Yorker. Thecomma is particularly contentious because, above all othermarks, as Truss explains, it

…draws our attention to the mixed origins of modern punctuationand its consequent mingling of two quite distinct functions:

1. To illuminate the grammar of a sentence

2. To point up … such literary qualities as rhythm, direction, pitch,tone and flow.’

In other words, as she elegantly puts it: ‘On the page punctu-ation performs its grammatical function, but in the mind of thereader it does more than that. It tells the reader how to humthe tune.’ And to those of us constantly telling students to ‘lis-ten to the music of the language’, the ability to pick out andhum the tune is essential. That said, it is true, as MelaniePhilips points out in a recent edition of the EL Gazette if youcan’t do the grammar, you won’t be able to do the punctua-tion and Truss assumes a knowledge of structures perhapsonly to be found among the over-forties these days; you doneed to know what a sentence is before you know where toput a full stop.

Nonetheless, this book is full of wise suggestions and usefuladvice (especially a wonderful passage on exactly why oneshouldn’t attempt to join two sentences with a comma, as in ‘Ihate bad punctuation, it really annoys me’, unless one isSamuel Beckett) and it has a rare distinction: it reduced thisreviewer, eating alone with it in nice, refined, well-behavedIndian restaurant (see Gooden if you want to know why thereis no comma between well-behaved and Indian) to complete-ly helpless giggles. The waiters were a little concerned. So ifyou have to choose between these two thoroughly useful andpractical books, go for the one that will also double up as alight reading: it might even replace Bill Bryson in your rucksack– and his marvellous Mother Tongue: the English Language isone of the books Truss acknowledges as a source and inspi-ration. You could add that one, I suppose, and then you reallywould be equipped to go off and become the best Englishteacher your students will ever have.

Elena Rose

JUST RIGHTJeremy Harmer

Marshall Cavendish, 2004.

When I was asked to write a review of a new intermediatecourse book, my immediate reaction was ‘I wonder

what the angle is going to be?’ In an overcrowded marketmany new course books are written with a twist to help themstand out from the crowd. This could be a new approach toteaching, to learning or to language. In doing so these newbooks often have good intentions and some have innovations

that work well and become standard practice but often theyare ill thought out, unworkable in the classroom and eventual-ly the new idea disappears. I opened Just Right with a twingeof anticipation and started to look for the angle.

What I found is a very conventional, almost traditional bookthat does not rely on gimmicks to sell itself. It is divided into 14themed units, the units being further divided so that each hasa sections on the four skills as well as a section dealing withgrammar, functions, vocabulary and pronunciation, the activi-ties linked to the themes. I addition there is a separate bookletwith the tape scripts and a grammar reference. The themes willbe familiar to experienced teachers and include such tried andtested favourites such as travel, music sport and home.

I found the layout of the pages to be somewhat text heavyand I did feel that there was a lack of photographs to enliventhe book, line drawings being mainly used to illustrate thetexts. However, this will help to prevent the book from ageingprematurely, unlike so many others that are firmly fixed in timeby the styles and fashions of their photographs.

The skills activities are generally good, providing interestingmaterial and I was pleased to see that writing gets a full roleand is not just the afterthought it appears to be in so manyother coursebooks. I particularly liked the activities on cohe-sion and coherence as well as paragraph writing. This makesa change from writing being simply about different genres.

I also felt that for once pronunciation is given proper promi-nence in the course and again it is broadened to include sen-tence stress, word stress, intonation, consonant pairs, pitchand links to spelling. But why no weak forms? This is a ratherstrange omission in an otherwise comprehensive look at thisimportant area.

Although I am not a trendy modernist in my approach toteaching, I have, however, embraced a more lexical approachand consequently I feel that the book’s view of vocabulary is alittle too traditional for my liking. It does look at ‘language inchunks’ as well as words in isolation and once the thoroughlook at functional language is taken into account, the book canbe considered to be more lexical than it at first appears andafter all, what’s in a name?

So far so good. It is at this point however, that I have todeclare that not all the book is to my taste. I was not entirelyconvinced of the approach to grammar, which is also a littletoo traditional for my liking. Test teach test is the preferredmethod for many of the grammar presentations, with the stu-dents looking at the grammar reference for the ‘teach’ part. Ihave not had the opportunity to see the teacher’s book so Icannot comment on the thought processes behind this, but Itend to favour a more guided discovery method with closerlinks to the activities that have gone before. This approachdoes have the benefit of encouraging student autonomy,which is to be applauded, especially at this level. This encour-agement of learner independence is also extended through themany, excellent mini-sections on dictionary work.

Just a couple of further quibbles. The grammar reference isvery thorough, but I was surprised not to find a table of irregu-lar verbs, or a phonemic chart, especially in view of the pro-nunciation and dictionary work.

Overall this is a solid book with much to recommend it. It willnot cause a revolution in language teaching, but if you favoura more conventional approach, this could be the book for you.

Alastair Douglas

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Book Reviews IH Journal • Issue 16, Spring 2004

English Pronunciation in UseMark Hancock

Cambridge University Press, 2003.

I ’ve found myself increasingly teach-ing Asian students whose grammar,

reading and writing far outstrip theirlistening and speaking abilities. It wasbecoming obvious that drilling andknowing the schwa simply wasn’tenough. I knew I’d have to work a lit-tle more of that dreaded pronunciationinto the lessons.

This clearly and logically laid outbook appeared as the answer to my

needs. The language is functional, useful and up to date andusing the test takes all the diagnostics out of your hands. Justfollow the instructions on pages 5-8 and you’re away. Althoughtargeted at intermediate students, the many and varied exer-cises are easily adapted for use in the classroom at all levels.This is equally true of the user-friendly explanations, picturesand examples in every unit. The sixty units are split into threesections, A to C, they cover the saying and spelling ofphonemes (A), syllables, word stress and sentence stress (B)and pronunciation in conversation (C). A further section (D)contains, amongst other things, an introduction to the phone-mic chart; complete with exercises to help you learn it, a diag-nostic test, a guide for speakers of specific languages, andsound pairs students find difficult. Students are advised thathaving equipment to record themselves would be useful. Imust say I think it’s essential if they are using the book alone.

I found the students responded well to the exercises, espe-cially once they had been ‘diagnosed’ via the test and theirparticular problems whittled down to individual sounds. It doesseem a waste though that the test should do no more for astudent working alone that simply find his strong or weak ‘sec-tions’. I felt that directions to specific exercises following theincorrect answer of each question in the test could easily havebeen incorporated, like in the final exercises of each unit.

However, if this is a tiny chink in the formidable armour ofMark Hancock’s work it is adequately made up for with theafore mentioned ‘Guide for speakers of specific languages.’One of the most useful features of this book is that it usesresearch from Learner English (Michael Swan and BernardSmith, 2001) to provide an invaluable timesaver for studentsstudying the book alone and a useful guide for teachers usingthe book in the classroom. It basically offers recommendationsof which units could be left out in section A and which ‘soundpairs’ to focus on in section D, given a student’s L1.

The book comes with a set of four cassettes or CDs, (whichdoesn’t alter the price of £19.95) one for each section of thebook. Overall, the voices were authentic and for isolated lan-guage it was as natural as can be expected. I was a little dubi-ous of the sections that provide American pronunciation. Idoubted the necessity, but also the accents, which seemed tovary from an New York Italian-American to a Texan drawl.Similarly, having stated that the accent used for the Britishmodel would be a southern English one it suggests ‘Alaska’sounds the same as ‘I’ll ask her’ – which sounds very Northernto me.

These are tiny criticisms however of a book which I know I’mprobably going to use in just about every lesson I teach for agood long while.

Andy Cox

1 0 6 P i c c a d i l l y L o n d o n W 1 J 7 N LTe l e p h o n e + 4 4 ( 0 ) 2 0 7 5 1 8 6 9 5 5 / 6 9 3 0 F a x + 4 4 ( 0 ) 2 0 7 5 1 8 6 9 2 1E - m a i l i h j o u r n a l @ i h l o n d o n . c o . u k w w w. i h j o u r n a l . c o m w w w. i h l o n d o n . c o m