Yummy

It’s the end of the month of Ramadan very shortly, which means that many, in fact, most of my students are approaching the festival of Eid ul-Fitr, the ending of the fast, at least a day of family, prayer, and, of course, eating. At the moment most of my students are from a southern Asian background, so there is a lot of talk of samosa, biryani and pakora in class, not to mention various astonoishingly unhealthy sweets (jalebi is a personal favourite, but being deep fried batter soaked in sugar syrup, is about as far from healthy as it’s possible to be). Times of celebration in ESOL classes, whether it is Eid, Christmas, Nowruz, Vaisakhi, or simply the end of the academic year, are usually times of great sharing of food, although I do always say “bring enough for one person. Small plates!” This is, without exception, ignored, and instead, I always find myself juggling a plate covered in food from several continents. Turn away for a moment and the plate is, magically, refilled. I like food, of course, and I’m a fairly adventurous eater, but more important than this is the gesture of offering and sharing food. By accepting that wobbly paper plate piled high with food, you are partaking in some ancient ritual of respect and bonding which has been going on since time immemorial. That’s my excuse, anyway, and I’m sticking to it.

ESOL parties are a well known phenonomen, of course, and to hear ESOL teachers talk about them, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this is why we do the job. This is, of course, not true, but it reflects something quite unique to ESOL (and I really mean ESOL, language taught in an immigrant setting). ESOL represents something of a cultural intersection. This intersection is not a tidy suburban crossroads of “host culture” and “immigrant culture,” but rather a twisting multilane junction¹, where any given class brings together multiple takes on multiple cultures, and is often a two-way learning process for teacher and students. My knowledge of Islamic customs, for example, is pretty decent, my understanding of central and southern Asian politics is passable, and I have a very rough working knowledge of Polish history. I know a colleague who delights in learning elements of students’ languages and using it with them (a trick I have never had the confidence, ironically, to pull off). Indeed, my white-British-maleness provides something of a bland cultural backdrop for the rich variety of the cultures of the students I’ve met over the years. This is not to do down my own culture and traditions, of course, and I will equally share my own stories and traditions, but they are culturally well known.

ESOL classes are so so much more than just about language. It suits the mainstream educational model of FE and elsewhere to consider the class as a targeting environment – the students are there to learn English and nothing else. Every lesson should be beholden to the single-minded pursuit of learning the language. Time spent talking, sharing stories, traditions and indeed food does not sit well with “purposeful.” That’s not to say being purposeful is wrong, far from it, but that the sharing time, which may more wandering and responsive can be as valuable and important. Every second in the classroom counts, absolutely, but it doesn’t always have to be in a single-minded, honed focus. Such a focussed, knowledge-first approach to learning skirts the notion that language can be learned as an objectively defined, unchanging phenomenon divorced from human experience. There are grammatical rules and lexical meanings and that is language, the end. Don’t split infinitives. Never begin a simple sentence with a conjunction. Always use the Oxford comma. The present perfect is a tense used to describe past events with present results². “Dog” means “dog³.” But ESOL teaching and learning goes far beyond these things because language is bound up with our cultures. Everything we say or write focusses our traditions, experiences and values into a single moment, right down to the full stop at the end of this sentence.

ESOL isn’t just about learning language. It is a process of sharing human experiences through language. Sometimes the language takes the wheel – lessons hang on grammar or vocabulary, say, or functions, or language skills, and the culture comes alongside that. At other times the culture is in charge, the traditions and experiences of the students and the teacher are the emphasis, and from that sharing comes language. And that is why the food is such a big thing. Food is an expression of who we are and sharing food is one of the universals of human experience.

But, yeah, it does also taste good.

1. The most famous example of this is, of course, junction 6 of the M6 motorway, known as spaghetti junction, but my personal favourite bit of road intersection madness is the Magic Roundabout in Swindon, where I was born. I’m told by my family who live there that this works beautifully and makes all sorts of sense when you’re using it. ↩︎
2. It isn’t a tense, strictly speaking, and it can be used in a whole bunch of ways, including a completed future event, as in “I’ll call you when I’ve eaten.” But you knew that, right? ↩︎
3. Whether you thought “canine” or “follow” or “dog days of summer” or made the leap to unsavoury vehicle-based sexual practices is, of course, entirely down to you. ↩︎

AI

Technology has been a part of my teaching since I first started, Dave’s ESL Cafe and the Internet TESL Journal were both part of my formative experiences as a teacher, then playing with Hot Potatoes in the early 00s, moving onto Moodle, gaining a Level 3 in Educational Use of ICT (yes, really) and then onto the great burgeoning mobile/touchscreen/multimedia madness of the last 15 or so years. I was they guy you asked for help with tech stuff for years, I have (mostly dormant) accounts for almost all the main social media sites, and I reckon I got at least two jobs off the back of that technological mentoring and networking. My relationship with tech has soured a little, and I’ve become a little more measured in my response to new technologies (class quiz tools like Kahoot! And Quizziz, for example, are great, but I really couldn’t get excited about them), and definitely cynical about edtech businesses. The 2005 version of me hated people like 2024 me, asking difficult questions like “How is this better than what I already do?” and just not being excited by this week’s shiny new thing because “it’s just cool!”

So I was all ready to be cynical about the growing use of AI as a teaching and learning tool, to pick it apart and dismiss it as a fad and a distraction from the real business. However, I tried to put it aside, and aimed for pragmatism, rather than either cynicism or idealism. I’m aiming for “What can this do for me?” which lies somewhere vetween the two extremes of “It’s just a fad” and “Look at the pretty new thing!”. At this stage, I’ve only made a few preliminary investigations, so my stance may change, but let’s see how that goes. My experience so far is based on the widely known ChatGPT, Merlin AI app on a phone, and most recently Teachermatic.

Resources, for the most part, have been a cautious success. AI’s ability, for example, to create a cloze in seconds is dead handy, and simple “detail” type comprehension tasks for a reading text looks like it could be a winner. I like this because I like to roll with the flow, syllabus wise, and bring in texts and activities which come up in discussion or in the news, or whatever. The ability to knock out an activity based on a “surprise” text is really quite handy. Ditto grammar exercises. Teachermatic is (obviously, perhaps) better than a more general AI, but all the things I tried did a reasonably decent job of it. I’ll be interested to see how some of the other features in Teachermatic roll out – how it handles ESOL style flashcards, for example, could be interesting. I also used ChatGPT to model me a pros and cons style article for a lesson last year and it was tolerable. It leaned towards a bullet point report/essay style, and lacked any kind of stylistic merit, but as a model for a simple structure it was excellent. So it’s a win for the resources.

I was interested to see that Teachermatic has some managerial functions, like report writing, writing an email to students, that kind of thing. The report thing made me smile – back in one of my first jobs in c.2001 we used to compile student reports from a series of “copy, paste and personalise” statements, which was much the same thing, just manual. I despaired a little at the “write me an email” stuff. If you can’t produce a few lines of vaguely human writing in a few minutes you really want to consider whether or not you care about the person or people you are writing to, and perhaps sign up to a basic literacy course. (The less said about other writers using it the better.)

Course and lesson planning are a slightly different matter. The course outlines I’ve seen suggest for ESOL have been OK, and if I’m honest, I might use them to knock out a quick scheme of work because it shuts people up and I don’t have to follow it. Lesson plans have, so far, been a bit more worrying. Grammar and vocab lessons are variations of Presentation-Practice-Production, where “presentation” is simply “tell the students the rules”. Skills practice was a bit better, but still nothing much to write home about, tending toward a rough product approach to productive skills (listen/read an example, explore the issues, say/write your own) and reading/listening a safe but unexciting pre-task/gist/detail/follow up structure. Some of the classroom tasks were very clearly “shared language” – “tell the students to reflect on their learning” – good luck with beginner ESOL. In short, AI tends to give you the kind of lesson you might find from a vaguely competent CELTA trainee. It also suggests, in line with current mainstream learning theory, a knowledge-first approach to grammar and vocab learning – here are the rules, now practice them. Whether this fits with what we know about ELT and ESOL is something I remain somewhat more sceptical about, however.

But let’s leave that aside, because, as every AI edutech sales rep will tell you, these are just outlines and you can adapt them. Because, quoth AI Sales Rep, AI will save you TIME! Think of the reduced workload!

This is where things start to fall apart a little. I agree, generally, that the resource creation tools can probably save time and effort. No more, it has to be said, than using, say, a course book or pre-printed workbook of some sort, but it does allow for some flexibility to what you want to do. The lesson planning not so much. The generic mundanity of what gets produced means that the lessons need more than a little effort to fit in with the students and the context, not to mention find appropriate resources (or develop them with AI, of course). Directions like “explain the use of present perfect” are pointless on their own, and take time to render usable. I don’t have inclination (or time) to investigate whether the extra time needed to make the lesson plan usable for your students is more or less than the time needed to plan the whole thing from scratch, when you can consider explanations etc. as you go along. My hunch says its a negligible difference, at least for an experienced teacher. Perhaps a well-trained but inexperienced teacher might find the prompts useful – the structures seemed hackneyed but easily manageable, so as long as they could develop their explanation / instruction giving techniques. Perhaps, as well, if we learn to refine our prompts for the AI we might end up with better lesson plans, but by the time I’ve worked out the prompts, have I really saved myself time?

Now, I don’t think this is going to take over the universe and render us tools of the matrix, but I think there are some interesting philosophical questions. There is an issue with AI being used by students to create assignments and essays for assessment. This is something which I worry about but, at the same time, I don’t know enough to be able to tell. I’ve seen pieces from students which have definitely made me suspect a little AI tinkering, and have helped a colleague identify that a student had indeed used ChatGPT for an English GCSE homework task. (You put the question prompt in and the results tended to produce simialr phrases and structures.) But we can all agree this is wrong. So why, then, is it OK for us to produce course plans, lesson plans, resources, reports and emails, the things we use to interact with students, using AI? It certainly seems somewhat hypocritical to come down hard on students knocking out essays and assignments with AI when you’ve just used it to write an email to them, or a report about them.

The other question I have is the workload question. You see, I like creating lessons and resources. I find that experience one of the two most interesting parts of the job (the other being, of course, in the classroom with students). I don’t want shortcuts for those, thanks, and have had access to shortcuts for lesson plans and resources for years anyway via assorted online and paper based resources. If we are talking reduced workload, I want my workload reducing elsewhere. I want fewer performance management jobs – fewer requests for data about students when that data is already online and could easily be gathered through AI, for example. Essentially, I want AI to do all the stuff which isn’t planning and teaching. Maybe work is afoot to come up with a brilliant AI solution to everything which isn’t planning and teaching. God I hope it is. Then you can come back to me and actually tell me AI is going to reduce workload. The businesses selling their AI product know full well that the people paying for their product are mostly ex-teachers in management roles, and resources are a cheap sell. Effective audit and reporting tools for education are going to be hard and expensive to develop. Something which cobbles together a worksheet, however quickly, seems rather easier.

Is this the future? If it’s AI generated lesson plans and teaching materials, nothing more, then meh. Whatever. We’ve had lesson plans and teaching materials written for us for decades. There is literally nothing new there. If the plan is to replace teachers with simple educational technicians, parroting out lessons with minimal skill or effort, then we could have done that in 1970 using a course book, so I don’t think that’s a concern. Fine, do stuff for me, but don’t pretend that it’s better or different. It’s not going to save me much time, if any, and only on aspects of the job I enjoy. Come back later when the AI has done my registers, marked exams, completed trackers, written ILPs with targets for students, signed them off, and produced a report for my manager. Then we can talk about time saved.

Planning Processes

I woke up having anxiety thoughts about lessons going back to work this week, after a couple of weeks off sick, thinking about what the lessons were going to be. And, perhaps as some sort of procrastination, this got me thinking about what people don’t understand about approaches like participatory ESOL and dogme ELT.

The big thing I used to get about this is that it doesn’t involve planning. “You just walk in, Sam, and make it up as you go along.” Even I’ve joked, quite recently, that I was “winging it with principles.” This is, of course, utterly utterly wrong. The implication behind this kind of comment is that the teacher involved can’t be bothered to plan, which is both rude and inaccurate.

If you read anything, for example, on critical and participatory ESOL, you will find that there is in fact an awful lot of thinking and planning going on behind the lesson, not just philosophically but also pragmatically. One thing I found in my research, for example, is that the element of teacher control, or at least of leadership, remains a constant. Learning doesn’t just happen by everyone sitting round in a circle and talking. (Well, it does, sometimes, but this isn’t something you can rely on). Dogme ELT has not only spawned a movement of people sharing, er, lesson ideas, but entire books on “unplugged” and emergent language. Planning happens, and needs to happen. It might be looser in places where a traditional “input” lesson might be quite restrictive, but in fact often in order to create the learning opportunities which arise in a lesson of this sort requires a fair degree of restriction in other ways – prompts, activities, focus of discussion and so on.

What people have misunderstood, and probably will always misunderstand, is that these are examples of a process curriculum. Your usual lesson/course starts with learning outcomes / objectives / intentions / aims / whatever faddy phrase you like for “stuff I want students to learn” and follows from there. This is how I was taught to do it, it’s how I’ve taught people to do it, it’s how books tell you to do it, it’s how it is done. You start with the thing you want the other people to learn. Obvious, really.

Sure. OK. But what if you flip that around? My research project was essentially founded on the observation that students take away from lessons things which you did not set out to cover. The language which popped back up in subsequent lessons was not the tense structure that you covered in the last lesson, but rather the phrases and words you hadn’t expected. So what happens if you work back from the assumption that students at best only partially progress towards your learning aim for that lesson, but make weird jumps and connections in other ways that perhaps you weren’t expecting, but which came up as an aside or a conversation. What happens if you get rid of the learning outcome, and simply create affordances – communicative conditions in which learning opportunities arise?

This kind of approach takes, you’d be surprised to hear, a lot of thinking and planning. The planning is not trying to second guess which language might come up, although sometimes it might be obvious, but rather trying to create those conditions. This takes thought and planning. In fact, the only box you don’t fill in on the lesson plan, if you like, is the one at the top which says “by the end of the lesson, students will…” Everything else is thought about, thought through, and considered. Even assessment strategies, checking that students are engaging and reflecting on the emergent language, for example. And if you work somewhere which is punitively obsessed with learning outcomes, i.e. any FE college in the country, you simply keep them open enough (students will read… will discuss… will listen to… – the old AECC competencies are surprisingly useful on this point) that anyone looking at it will be happy. (And let’s face it there are few enough ESOL experts in quality teams or indeed at ofsted that the chances of anyone taking a careful specialist look at it are minimal.)

In short, there is planning and thinking. Arguably more so than the “decide outcome > find resource > deliver resource” model, for but only because my experience means I could wander into a classroom with a handout and an “aim” and then “cover” the language with little or no pre-planning. It wouldn’t be a great lesson, unless, of course, I let things wander off the “aims” a bit, but it would cover the language. (Whether the students would be able to subsequently be able to use the language is an entirely different question.) But before you get all “why reinvent the wheel” about resources, the amount of planning and thinking time is very similar whether I am doing an emergent language lesson using a handful of picture prompts, or whether I am doing a directed “input” lesson using presentations, printouts and all the bells and whistles.

A process model is nothing new, by the way. Stenhouse named it in 1975, which makes it as old as I am. Most ELT course planning books deign to give it a chapter (Nunan, for example, or Nation & Macalister more recently) and then rush on saying “yeah yeah yeah, anyway…” But it is messy. You don’t know exactly what is coming out the other side, necessarily, but that’s part of the fun. Capturing it is important, to show that something useful has happened, for the sake of the students. Sometimes revisiting language is necessary, explicitly and directed, but those lessons are based on what came up in a previous lesson, not some scheme of work you drew up in August.

Planning is important, whatever approach you use, but to accuse users of a process model of laziness, or at least to gently imply it with comments about “winging it” is just plain insulting. As with most insults, it’s usually as a result of ignorance or narrowmindedness, or, more usually, both. Whether this has gone any further to undoing that ignorance, I don’t know. Filling in lesson plan forms, of course, is a nonsense, but that, dear reader, is a whole other discussion, but right at the moment, I have lessons to plan.

New Baby, New Bathwater: A New Curriculum for ESOL?

I’ve been writing this blog for years now, with varying degrees of frequency, and teaching ESOL for longer still. In fact, I made the shift from EFL to ESOL in 2004ish, which means I’ve been teaching ESOL for almost 20 years of a 24 year teaching career. Cripes. That’s a long long time.

By weird coincidence, I completed my first teaching qualification, the Trinity Cert TESOL, back in 1999, roughly the same time as the Moser Report was published, recommending a dedicated adult literacy and numeracy programme, along with Breaking the Language Barriers, which recommended a separate ESOL curriculum. Skills for Life, in fact, all fell into place around a year later, meaning not only that my only experience of ESOL is in the form of Skills for Life and after, but also that the current ESOL curriculum is coming up to 24 years old. Let that number sink in, and reflect on the fact that the underlying syllabus,, levels, curriculum model and even the exams which our students do, are based on a document which is almost a quarter of century old. ¹

But hooray! Finally, after all this time, somebody has been thinking about ESOL at the department for education and they are planning to do some sort of update. The folks at the Bell Foundation have been tasked with writing up some recommendations which should bring the curriculum kicking and screaming into a post-covid, multi-modal, meme-tastic, second quarter of the 21st century. The document has been published, and they are looking for responses to the document as part of that consultation – you can find it here.

Me being me, of course, I wanted to think through my responses, so I thought what better place to do that than in a big public forum! Now, most of this will make little or no sense unless you read the document. Happily for you it’s at the bottom of this post!

I’ve written it section by section, and would gladly stand corrected, but this, essentially, is what I plan to put in the consultation.

Section 4: 

“Independent ESOL standards… aligned to evidence based second language learning principles” – depends very much on which principles are intended here: the implication is that this is a sequence of acquisition such as those cited in Schellekens, 2011, from Lightbown & Spada, Krashen, Ellis, and others. These are descriptive sequences, and no current language learning syllabus suggests following these as they are impractical for adults (Krashen & Terrell’s “natural order,” for instance, has failed to be much more than a curiosity, and could hardly be counted as modern). Adults need to have access to other structures. Often, as well, a “natural order” includes stages where individuals use “inaccurate” forms, such as the acquisition of irregular past tense verbs and it would be a disservice to teach to these stages as students expect accuracy from their language models. It also ignores the reality of students’ lives in which they are exposed to a much wider range of language than these sequences would suggest. There would also be a pedagogical concern. Even assuming that we can have a diagnostic tool with which to assess where a student on that trajectory (costly in both time and effort), we are then presented with a need to balance the needs of a diverse range of learners – if student A is not currently ready for form X, but students B, C, D, and E are, do we choose not to teach that form? Or do we use heavy handed, workload intense, divisive and likely ineffective differentiation “No, I’m sorry, student A, you are currently not allowed to study this yet.” This, of course, would be in a class size of 15+ students. 

Point 3: on listening skills. This makes some rather grand assumptions about learners’ listening abilities, especially the statement that “many never [develop listening skills] to a functional degree. That said, however, I do agree that listening should be a distinct element on the curriculum, rather than tied to speaking. 

Point 4. Vocabulary. I do agree that vocabulary is lacking in the core curriculum, but the suggested wordlist presents a dangerous standard: the potential for negative washback from exams is enormous, with teachers becoming deeply conservative over which vocabulary items are taught, and exam boards having too much control over this. The impact of this would be negative and limiting for students. If the vocabulary were not assessed in exams except indirectly (for example “appropriate vocabulary for a task”) this might work, but this still seems needlessly prescriptive. A better suggestion would be guidance on developing vocabulary learning skills and strategies appropriate for different levels. 

Point 5: Literacy Skills. This section is wrong (IMHO…). Students cannot and must not be denied literacy learning until higher levels of language have been achieved. The source for this is drawn from children learning to read and write, and ignores the very different contexts of language learning in adults. Adults need literacy skills at all levels, for living, working and indeed studying. To deny them this is discriminatory and unrealistic, much as it is with the notion of following a “natural order” of acquisition. Instead, more research and guidance is needed on alternative models for developing literacy with low level ESOL learners.  

Point 6. Reading: On this I do agree, and the excessive importance granted to text type, purpose and features should be removed, especially from assessment. 

Section 4.

I disagree with several sections here. The first issue is the claim that “The ESOL core curriculum currently focuses almost exclusively on language for survival, e.g., home and family, shopping, the use of public services and health care.” – this is patently false. The core curriculum materials have this focus, but the use of these is becoming more and more rare. Any implied topics in the core curriculum document are only hinted at in some of the contextualised components and graphics, but nowhere else. The review presents a very narrow view of ESOL and it doesn’t chime with my experience of teaching ESOL. 

Another general concern here is the large focus on current government priorities. One of the causes of the swift dating of the current CC is the change in government.Ofsted too are prone to fads and changes – the current “knowledge-based” curriculum focus, for example, can be seen in the EIF, but this could and likely will change. There should be no explicit links to government or Ofsted in the curriculum in case the new CC becomes dated in line with future government priorities. 

Point 1: Themes and topics for the syllabus often remain with the teacher, and/or negotiated with the students, and almost always involve work and employability in some way. To forefront these in a curriculum document sends a clear message that the primary purpose of ESOL is for students to gain work. While it remains an important consideration for many learners, even most, it is often alongside other areas of importance and value. 

Point 2: the idea of focussed provision for learners with prior experience and qualifications is a good one, but would need to be thought through carefully. A large city FE college, for example, might be able to provide focused classes differentiated by level, but it would be difficult for smaller providers to find enough students at a similar level to ioffer this kind of provision. If it were to exist, it would need to be offered, and funded, alongside regular ESOL qualifications. 

Point 3: as with Point 2, some form of bridging qualification or content for students progressing to study would be excellent, but again would be a challenge for a smaller provider for the reasoins outlined above. 

Point 4: Agreed: education needs to happen not with ESOL providers but with employers, colleges and universities to ensure better parity with GCSE & FS. 

Point 5: Ofsted already do this, but do it badly because ESOL is often inspected by non-specialists who fail to understand the complexity of ESOL. If any changes should be made to ofsted, it should be that ESOL is inspected by, or in partnership with, an ESOL specialist. Most employers, if asked, would only really say that they wanted their employees to have better English, which is already happening. 

Section 5.

I agree with all of these points. Far better parity of qualifications is needed for ESOL learners to progress, but the onus should also be on working with employers and educating organisations (colleges, universities, etc.) to ensure that they recognise existing or future qualifications, rather than forcing, say, Level 2 ESOL students to sit GCSE or worse Level 1 FS. 

Section 6.

FS English will always be more attractive to many ESOL students not because of any issue with the curriculum, but simply due to the lack of recognition of existing qualifications and more obviously funding. If there is funding parity between ESOL and Functional Skills, then the only issue would be the parity of recognition. Again, the solution to this has two elements: ESOL providers and teachers should of course be maximising opportunities for ESOL learning and signposting ESOL students to appropriate courses. However, more work could be done to develop awareness of the value of ESOL qualifications in vocational subjects, HEIs and, of course, employers. ESOL learners and their teachers are not the only answer to this two way problem, but the review fails to make recommendations outside of this. Any ESOL strategy needs to include training and awareness raising of employers. 

Section 7. 

The implication in the beginning of this section is that teachers are sadly not being successful because of the curriculum: “While ESOL teachers support their learners to the best of their ability, an out-of-date ESOL core curriculum and exams have affected the quality of teaching, assessment and subject specific knowledge and skills. This means that there is work to do to upskill the teaching workforce.” The AECC is not the problem with teaching, the problem is the reduction in ESOL numbers making ESOL teaching posts harder to come by. This makes it less attractive to new teachers, and the lower demand for teaching role reduces the need for subject specialist training. In West Yorkshire alone, for example, a region which has a massive demand for ESOL, there is just FE college offering one ESOL subject specialist training course. (Where universities offer TESOL qualifications,  these are international in focus). A new curriculum is not going to improve this. 

This section is also disappointingly dismissive of the efforts of teachers, and the entire section lists no evidence for the claims made. It’s deeply disingenuous to argue for “evidence based” practice and then not cite evidence for a supposed claim. Even a meta-analysis of ESOL inspection reports could at least begin to provide some grounding of this, although given the rarity of specialist ESOL inspectors, such evidence would be unlikely to prove anything. 

Point 1. Assessment literacy in ESOL is vital, although I would suggest that you be careful what you wish for. Effective knowledge of assessment will likely lead to criticisms of curriculum structures, exam board offerings, and more. That said, one of the issues with the current core curriculum process is the obsession not simply with assessment but with evidencing that assessment. There was never any guidance in the initial documents as to effective teaching and learning methods, never mind assessment. 

Point 2. Again, be careful what you wish for. A highly trained and well informed workforce is no bad thing, but given that there is plenty of research which argues against “best practice” in ESOL, then this could easily lead to questioning, for example, the demands of Ofsted and the knowledge-based “grammar mcnuggets” curriculum. More generally, as well, it is important that any teacher development emphasis exploration and reflective practice, rather than the rote training of specific methods, however “evidence based” they are. Overall, however, I would applaud a research-literate, trained and experienced workforce, but perhaps not for the reasons the DfE or the authors of this review might want. 

Point 3. If this is an issue in ESOL, then it would be nice to know what the evidence base for the claim that this is needed. Is there significant evidence that stretch and challenge is insufficient in the ESOL teaching community? Such a comment implies a rather savage dismissal of the efforts of teachers and offers no support. 

Point 4. And who will train the ESOL teachers in these subjects? When will this content be brought into the curriculum? How? This also assumes that this isn’t happening; a better recommendation would be to investigate current practice to identify what is working well, and is popular with students, as well as to identify gaps. 

Section 9. A “cost-benefit analysis” of ESOL provision is a somewhat depressing concept, but every government and government department I have had experience of only really recognises £££ so fine. 

Section 10. I agree with this section entirely, except for the weary “informed by research evidence” which throughout this document seems to emphasise “yes research, but not that research.”

General Comments

Running throughout the recommendations and reporting are references to “evidence-based” and “research-informed” practice. However, the notion of the evidence base throughout this is very much “my evidence, not yours”; cherry picking from some fairly well worn writers on ELT and a book on teaching children to read. It not only ignores large swathes of research being done at the moment, but also some fairly well established research into ESOL (rather than simply second language acquisition) such as the Effective Practice Project from 2007 which argues against one size fits all in favour of a flexible and agile approach to teaching. 

In fact, the biggest issue with the old Skills for Life Curriculum is not so much the datedness of the sequencing, but rather the refusal to consider a revision to the curriculum process. There is no evidence, for example, that ESOL students understand or “own” SMART targets, or that diagnostics in the current format are unlikely to “diagnose” anything of value or use to students or teachers. (Again, be careful what you wish for with educating teachers in assessment, with notions of validity and reliability being more or less absent in every formal assessment, up to and including final exams.)

There is no suggestion of alternative curriculum models which might more accurately reflect the learning processes, such as task-based language teaching, dogme ELT and participatory ESOL. Indeed, the fact that the report is roughly concurrent with the publication of EFA’s Participatory ESOL: Taking Stock report, and ignoring their well known and widely documented work entirely seems more than a little insulting. There is little in the recommendations by way of significant curriculum improvements, only of syllabus changes. I would call for an overhaul of the entire curriculum process, from initial assessment to final exam, and push for something genuinely innovative, like the recent Welsh strategy for ESOL.  

So there you go. I hope you enjoyed that, and as I said, here is the document on which I was commenting.

tbf-esol-qualifications-and-curriculum-review-final-Download

The Box That Everyone Ignores: an observed lesson reflection

I had my first lesson observation in my new job this afternoon, as you do, and there’s a box on the lesson plan form called “self evaluation”. Seeing as it’s been a while since I did a lesson observation reflective post, however, I thought this might be a fun place to do it.

A little context, then. I teach a very lovely class on a Friday afternoon, which is a non-accredited speaking skills class. I was given a choice over which class to be observed with, and I went for this group partly because I thought it would be interesting to get an external, non-ESOL, mainstream vocational view of the process I’ve been exploring these last few years. Also, the other group was a group of teenagers, first thing on a Monday morning, a time of the week when they need a little bit of encouragement to do challenging and complex things like listen, write or engage. I jest, of course. They can be pretty good once they get going, but that was a risk I wasn’t really prepared to take.

The students are all broadly in the E3 spectrum, althought covering all extremes of that spectrum – from “just passed E2” to “about to take their first Level 1 exam.” The lessons, being speaking skills, are usually pretty loose – I develop some prompts and let the lesson grow from those prompts. They do need some prodding as a group; although they are quite a small group, it can be easy for the three strongest and most confident students to dominate, simply through dint of the others saying less, so I do have to do a bit of work to get the group to all engage in the speaking. To provide that structure this week I went in with a variation of the problem tree. In the previous lesson, we had discussed a range of issues, and I had hoped that last lesson they might have picked up an area to focus on, but none of it really got the group going, so I knew that before we could go any further, we had to get focussed on a topic or theme which we could then break down and problematise a bit.

I make a point with this group of having a social chat to start the lesson – news, changes, stories, what’s been happening and so on. This is partly because it takes ten minutes or so to get everyone logged in and settled, but also partly because of a comment I recalled from listening to the EFA Participatory ESOL podcast the other week, about how important that social turn is. I think it was Becky Winstanley talking about how we feel like its really boring to always be asking “good weekend?” or whatever, but actually it’s relaxing and familiar and as such is quite comfortable for students. It’s also very natural, I think, when you see someone regularly, to ask “how was the week/weekend/holiday?” The subsequent conversation time can be surprising productive as well – this week, for example, gave us “pruning vines” which is one of those language items of very little general relevance but profoundly relevant for the student in question. (And yes, she is successfully growing grapevines in a small Yorkshire garden.)

For the main thrust of the lesson, however, my first prompt was a simple image of a very glossy looking Bradford city centre. I then asked them to say whether they agreed with the statement “Everything in Bradford is perfect.” I was, at that point, fairly open as to what could happen next. In my imaginary lesson, you know, the one you plan but doesn’t happen, I had hoped there would be a massive consensus on a specific issue with Bradford. In fact, as it happened, the conversation led to a “positives and negatives” structure. At this stage, I wondered for a while whether this discussion would be generative enough, but this was not to be. It did get a bit of a discussion going, however, but took a lot of prompting and encouraging on my part for this to engage the whole class. The only issue that really animated everyone in the group was the issue of litter and rubbish in the area, so I have to admit to pushing the discussion in that direction quite without subtlety. This was my call, but i checked it with the group generally, and so started the problem tree.

Now, my observer (and their observer – quis custodiet ipsos custodes?) wanted to meet and chat to two of the students, and I’d had a couple of late arrivals, so I sent my observers off into a breakout room with two students and spent ten minutes bringing my late arrivals up to speed, and generally catching up with them.

Having observed many lessons in my time, I know full well that any lesson “went so well after you left.” This was not, I have to say, the case here. It didn’t go downhill, as such, but it did take some time to get the students’ heads back in the game, and as a result, the subsequent problem tree felt a little flat, like all the energy had been sucked out of it. The discussion was productive both in terms of engagement and discussion, and in terms of interesting emergent language (too much/not enough/plenty, and a surprising tangent on a or an) but really the focus had been lost by the mid lesson pause. On reflection, I should have perhaps built it in more carefully and done that at a different stage, but having focussed on a specific topic, it seemed like the least impactful place to put it.

The observed bit, on the other hand, wasn’t bad. I think that this specific group generally like things a bit lighter in theme – certainly they have responded better in the past to more friviolous and less serious themes, and the lighter conversations (like “how was your week?”) have often been more productive. This is an interesting question which has been a bit of an issue for me when doing more “critical” lessons – whether I am imposing my socio-political stance on the students with this sort of thing, when in fact the students are quite keen on discussing gardening and families. That’s not to say they don’t care but rather that sometimes it’s nice just to chat about nothing much too.

I will be curious to know what the observer has made of the lesson, and whether I’ll be picked up on for not having SMART learning outcomes, or for having tightly structured assessments, or carefully monitored progress trackers, or whatever else might pass as proxies for having learned. I’d like to think not, and I’m optimistic that I won’t be. My observer seemed like a good sort when we met, and quite open minded, so I am hopeful that my action points will be negotiated and practical. If I was giving myself action points, I think I would probably say that I needed to step back a little, and fear the silence a little less, so that quieter students might feel more able to join in. I might also have used breakout rooms – I tend not to as they are a small group, but actually, I wonder if discussing and reporting back might have been more productive. I also had an unhelpful tree icon to illustrate the problem tree metaphor, which confused some of the students!

Who knows, of course. I might be hauled over the coals for the lack of traditional structure, or for the lack of focussed progress tracking, or for not sharing learning outcomes at the start of the lesson, but I really really hope not. I’ve not had a productive or useful formal lesson observation since about 2016, so let’s hope this breaks the pattern.

Positionality

Now there’s a word to get the backs up of the evidence-based practice brigade, isn’t it? I mean, to carry out a piece of research and actuallly acknowledge that you, yourself, doing the research, may have an angle, an interest, a stance, a position, as it were, in regard to the research is fundamentally in opposition to the notion that research should be carried out at a scientific arms length from the researcher.

Some research can be carried out at a distance from the researcher. Research into microbes, for example, into brain functions, into the movements of astronomical bodies, or into neuromuscular fatigue can all be done at a suitable distance from the person doing the research.

But¹ when it comes to something social like education this is much much more difficult. Some elements of education are perhaps independently measurable, like what happens in the brain during instruction and activity, and how the brain works in terms of things like the learning styles “meshing” with instructional style. When you look at a whole classroom, however, and the huge range of variables in place between the teacher, the context and the students in the room, then you cannot help but place your own position onto the thing being researched, and when said research is focussed on your own practice, your own classroom² and the students you are teaching³.

Whatever, because anyway, my research was into the events in the class I was teaching, and the things that happened in that class. The demands of academic practice, founded as they are in positivistic research philosophy (even when they say they’re not…) have meant so I have spent far too many words and mental shenanigans on explaining that the research is necessarily subjective and should be read as such, and no, of course you can’t go around making grand statements about it, and I never said you should, but there’s some interesting things and some interesting ideas, and you might like to try them out or something. The upshot of that frankly ludicrous sentence is that who and what I am, and my beliefs and values are a part of it. How big a part, I don’t know, but they are a part.

There was a moment recently when this became really apparent to me. I was writing about iddah in my thesis. This is the waiting period observed by a Muslim widow when her husband dies, and carries with it clearly defined practices. This really highlighted my position in the research as a white British male atheist, raised in a broadly Christian tradition, living in a country which is decreasingly Christian in belief but which remains largely Christian in cultural practices⁴. So if I were to mention, say, Christmas or Easter in my text, I wouldn’t feel obliged to explain it or find some sort of reference to back up the term. Ramadan and Eid might be different, but again, I would probably just say what they are without linking to some external reference. I noticed, as well, as I wrote those, I italicised Ramadan and Eid, but not Christmas or Easter. That was an interesting thing too. Iddah is perhaps less widely known as a practice, of course, and would need some explaining for anyone who is not Muslim. Certainly I’d not heard of it until fairly recently (and this article is especially heartbreaking when you think about why it needed to be written). But my need to explain it while not explaining terms like Christmas or Ramadan (both of which appear in the research) really highlighted for me to acknowledge more carefully who I am in the research but also the background and cultures of anyone who might foolishly decide to read the research. I don’t think I will go back in and write an explanation or footnote for Christmas, mind you, and I think that iddah requires explanation. This is in part because aspects of it are pertinent to the research, but also because I think that learning more about it is part of the learning that I have been going through as a student of language learning and of language learners.

As a writer of a thesis, as a researcher and as a teacher, I am entrenched in my culture. There’s nothing wrong with this, though. I am the product of my culture, and I have no wish to deny that. There are some good aspects to that culture and there are some bad aspects, and the former should be celebrated and the latter decried. Of course, I should criticise the negatives, of course I shouldn’t (mustn’t?) enact those negatives, and the same goes for all aspects of all cultures worldwide But none of these can be denied or exluded from who I am, and crucially for now, what this means for statements I make in my research. I have prejuduce, I have opinions, I have values, I have beliefs. They all come out as I work and I have to acknowledge them.

Now, to a certain type of person this probably comes over as “woke”. Certainly, I can’t leave a blog post like this without that word coming up. Thing is, if you think “woke” is bad, you’ve really got to ask yourself what you think “woke” means, and what it means for you to be criticising it. Yes, from one end of the woke/anti-woke continuum I am probably dreadfully woke. For those people, I am some ghastly leftie-woke practitioner researcher who writes random blog posts on positionality and goes around teaching English to “bloody immigrants.” For someone at the other end of the spectrum I am probably chock full of narrow-minded prejudices about class and race and gender, conscious and unconscious. And they’re both “right” in their assumptions about me when viewed from their own positions. Whether I agree with them is down to me, and who I am.

Which probably makes me woke, and that’s just fine.

1. I realise, of course, that I have just started this paragraph with a conjunction, thus placing me at the receiving end of opprobrium from the prescriptivist “standard English” gang. They can, of course, go f-ck themselves, on account of a) it being a perfectly acceptable and consciously applied rhetorical device; and b) I know what opprobrium means and how to use it. ↩︎
2. Two things. “classroom” here is shorthand for “the professional practices of a teacher” not a specific room. Also I’ve previously heard criticism of teachers using posessive pronouns to describe “their” learners and “their” classrooms. Climb down off it, for crying out loud. Possessive pronouns indicate things apart from ownership and controls. If I talk about “my family” for example, or “my parents” I don’t assume either consciously or unconsciously, that I own either of those things. The use of “my” indicates a mutual responsibility. So just stop with the reductive amateur linguistics to score pretend moral points. ↩︎
3. God, do I really have to go into the whole “teaching/learning as a dichotomy” bollocks? Do I? ↩︎
4. Essentially, I don’t believe in God, but I like Easter eggs and Christmas pudding, and have no issues with the hypocrisy of this because I don’t care. ↩︎

Language and Power and Writing a F**king Thesis.

Academic language is a bitch, a bugger and a pain in the arse. Now there’s a sentence to start a blog poist when you haven’t published anything in months but there you go. I’m afraid I need a place to offload a little about language, in particular language being used in a thesis. Now, I am sure that there are plentiful academic references to both support and refute what I am about to say, but I currently have neither time nor incliniation to find them, as interesting as it might be.

So anyway, one of the reasons for the absence of blog posting is that most of my non-work mental energy has been expended in the prudiction of a thesis, arguing, roughly, that the pre-determined syllabus for ESOL is unworkable and dishonest, that the Skills for Life learner journey version is hardly any better, and that maybe an emergent syllabus based on dogme and participatory pedagogy is the way out of this very dull “chuck a worksheet at ’em” model of curriculum design.

But I am writing a thesis. And with a thesis comes linguistic expectations: one engineers the writing you are doing in order to fit the expectations of any potential readers, in this case, fellow researchers in the field of language eductation. There is a reason for this as well – I want what I say to be read and taken seriously, which therefore behooves me to attempt to “fit in” – this is, after all, the key role of any set of non-descritpive language rules- to be accepted into a specific language community, whether it be a specific set of street slang (for which, yes, there are grammatical and lexical rules) or lofty academic jargon.

I am, however, a bit prone to push. Give me restrictions and requirements, and I will puish against them, more or less out of instinct. Give me a lesson plan, and I will rage at how it’s holding me back. Give me a pre-written text book and I will reject it. Give me a curriculum process and I will carefully unpick the flawed reasoning underlyiung said process. Thus it is with academic writing; I want, on a deep cellular level, to purposely avoid writing in the lofty style required by academia.

This isn’t entirely unreasonable. I’ve had the distinct absence of pleasure at having to read some academic texts which are, frankly, unreadable. Appropriate in style and manner, of course, but god they are opaque and, well, just boring. I mean, christ, if youve got something important you want to say, say it clearly and effectively, not tangled up by stupid adherence to dumbass lingustic “rules.”

For example. Oh my, so many examples.

Take passive voice, hated by Microsoft Word, c.2002, and while I would never argue for its proscription, it really grates, badly, when a researcher is describing something that they did themselves and then sticks it in passive voice. I just re-read my own sentence, and found this “The transcriptions were reviewed and the initial codes drawn up, linked to the research questions.” Gah! I mean, what’s wrong with “I” if “I” did it? I’ve since updated the text to “I reviewed the transctipts and drew up initial codes” – neater, clearer and fundamentally more honest. Some of this, I suspect, is a kind of ontological insecurity carried by researchers in the social sciences because we still all sort of believe in our bellies that hard sciences, and the scientific method we all recall from GCSE science is the only way to do research. It’s not, and we spend thousands of words justifying our methodologies, so come on, bloody embrace the first person. (And nobody would be halfwitted enough to talk about themselves in the third person, would they?) (FWIW passive voice has an excellent value as a means of highlighting the object of the verb as the focus of a sentence, or when the agent is unknown, clear from the context, or simply not important.)

My personal bugbear, however, is “data”. A respected and rather lovely professor told me once that “data” should be plural. The argument for this is that data is a latin word, and in Latin it is the plural of “datum” and therfore takes the plural verb. Thus we should say “the data are…” not the “the data is…”. This is, of course, utter tosh. The simple answer to this is that we are not speaking or writing in Latin, we are using English, and in English, in most people’s understanding of the word, treats data with a singular verb form.
Where people go wrong with this, however, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of why data takes a singular verb form in English. Data’s nearest lexical neighbour is information, a noun which also takes a singular verb form. The reason that this takes a singular verb form is the same reason that “water” takes a singular verb form – it is uncountable. This is a completely different fundamental category of noun, requiring a quantifier to render it either singular or plural. Data, then, is not a plural verb, and neither is singular, but uncountable, and behaves as such in grammar. To pretend that we say “datum” which we then pluralise as “data” is as daft as pretending we regularly use words like “aquaria” or “stadia” and indeed that when an octopus meets another they are considered “octopodes” (Gr. Even more so, in fact, because data is conceptualised differently to “stadium” and “octopus”.

That, at least, is my argument. And thus it remains just that – an opinion. It is an opinion, however, that sits on top of a much more profound discussion than just wordplay. You see, when banning or disregarding my research because I chose to split an infinitive, use the first person or treat data as an uncountable noun is a form of discrimination. Let me take that a little further. Would it ever be appropriate to dismiss the findings of a speaker at an academic conference for having a strong Birmingham accent? Of course it wouldn’t, and even more so if that person were using English as a second language. Mind you, regional accents are weird: people will defend to the death their own regional accent but condemn you to linguistic hell if you drop a “t”.

Conversely, my criticism of “unreadable” academic writing above is equally biased, and therein lies the problem. Language use is a fundamentally personal set of decisions, based within an extremely wide range of mutual intelligibility. The imposition of a particular usage on another person, whether in the name of “standards” (as per Ofsted) or in order to grant acceptance into a particular community is an act based in power imbalance. The hypocrisy of “critical” academics insisiting on prescriptive nonsense like “data as plural” is quite astonishing really. Even my own gut feeling that there probably should be some sort of simple clarity in academic writing is itself suspect.

In a way, I suppose, you can’t win. Language change in any community of users is a slow and gradual process. But radical change is possible in some cases. such as we have seen in the growing acceptability over the last few years of “they” as a gender neutral singular pronoun (a usage which has existed and been widely used for hundreds of years, so climb down off that high horse). Academics, like many of us, are rarely known for their desire to rock the boat too much, even the good ones. After all, there are jobs to do, mouths to feed, and roofs to put over heads. But it’s a thought, isn’t it? All academics and teachers, especially those who position themselves somewhere in the critical-interpretivist or post-human tradition, need to think really carefully before marking a student down for linguistic decisions that are purely objective.

#NATECLA23

I love going to the NATECLA national conference. My first one was 14 years ago, I think, and I’ve managed to go to most of them ever since. When I first went I felt very green and inexperienced in ESOL, not to mention in possession of almost a full head of hair and only the occasional fleck of grey in my beard, but these days it always feels like a chance to meet up with, even briefly, old friends and colleagues, and generally feel part of something a bit bigger.

This year was no different. Of late I’ve not been able to do the full residential weekend, which is a shame, but even the Saturday is a pleasure to attend.

I attended by doing a workshop, and I like to take the chance to stay on I’ve done a few workshops in my time (I still have all the handouts and presentations on my Google drive) including one memorable year stepping in at the last minute to help run a workshop, having just knackered up my bike gears on the way there. I remember feeling very self conscious standing trying to look professional with my hands covered in oil stains.

This year was a bit of a sequel: the practical follow up to my more theoretical and reflective (i.e. ranty) workshop last year. Everyone was very complimentary about it afterwards, which even now still feels like folk just being polite: imposter syndrome is hard to shake, even after years of teaching, training and workshop leading! But I hope everyone liked it, or got something out of it, or just enjoyed listening to me say nasty things about the tedious performance management crap of Big FE Colleges.

Thing is, though is that out of all of the post 16 sector in the UK, there really isn’t another organisation, formal or informal, which collects together a real community in the way that this does. It’s not limited to those of us who dabble online, or just colleges, but rather it always feels like it represents the whole breadth of the ESOL sector: colleges, training providers, charities and voluntary services, awarding bodies, independent consultants, freelancers, academics, policy wonks, the works. But mostly it’s just teachers wanting to know and to talk about their work. And I don’t think there’s anything else that quite achieves that.

We need to talk about course books.

When I started teaching in a private language school, one of the big rituals of each year was choosing your course book. You’d have a look at previous ones, check out the catalogue and thesample copies, and then order a bunch in, paid for by the students themselves, built into the course fees. Over time I developed some favourites. I always liked Landmark from OUP for not being too fussy, and quite solid. Cutting Edge Intermediate i also liked, because it was new back then. But none will ever compare with the mighty Headway Pre-Intermediate, the original one with the yellow cover, my first ever text book. I learned how to explain most of my grammar out of the back of Headway (and later New Headway). They certainly stopped me from having to worry about sequencing language items in the syllabus, or indeed about choosing content, so that I could just get on and do my thing in the classroom. Using course books has had a huge impact on me in terms of how I develop activities in class, and indeed how I develop materials. I will hold my hands up right now and say that I owe a lot to having had the chance to work from course books in the early part of my career.

These days, however, I barely touch the things. Primarily, I think, this is because my teaching context has shifted dramatically, from teaching the privileged and wealthy in private EFL schools to teaching the far more linguistically, socially and educationally diverse students in public sector ESOL in the U.K. When I first made this shift, I used to lament the amount of “wasted” time on selecting or developing resources, when there were perfectly good resources already out there, although I think there was some justification for this: I met some ESOL teachers at that time (c.2004) who would go out of their way to avoid using anything “EFL”, whether it be course books, “recipe” books or photocopiables because they were “too EFL” whatever that meant. This mindset is dying, although is not entirely dead: not so long ago did an observation alongside an external consultant and when I said that the materials were not really appropriate (and eminently adaptable to make more so) she prononced sniffily that they were “too EFL.”

In the last fifteen years or so, my practice has changed. I have shifted my stance to a pragmatic middle ground, picking and choosing what I want from what is out there, in particular resources or activities available online for free. However, what I won’t do is use a coursebook as it is intended to be used: as syllabus, resource and record of learning. And here’s why.

There are the “universal” complaints about global coursebooks. There’s the pinned down, controlled and controlling syllabus. Then there’s the way they date terribly (anyone remember “Guy and Suzy” from a pop band in New Headway Intermediate, or perhaps the badly disguised Posh’n’Becks? Totally, as my children would say, cringe). Then there’s the general blandness of the content – just so much meh. But all of these pale into insignificance when compared to the major problem with global coursebooks in ESOL- relevance.

Global EFL coursebooks are often culturally, socially, and ethically wrong for migrant students to the U.K. precisely because of their intention to appeal to as broad a range of people as possible. You might have a few pages of fairly neutral and recontextualisable stuff in the book, maybe a couple of token safe “issues” like the environment, but then you’ll still have something about wealthy white people on holiday or in an office. I’m really sorry but this sort of thing leaves me cold. How am I supposed to take some glossy magaziney piece about a New York TV presenter, or whatever and make it relevant to the students in front of me? I just had a little look at a more recent book and oh my goodness the middle class privilege apparent in that sample chapter: “a weekend break in Prague” “renting a karaoke booth” “my end-of-year trip to Disneyland”? Or how about renting holiday lets in Vietnam, hotel information or perhaps a short reading on “Young Europeans flock to Argentina for job opportunities.” in this series? There would be so much adapting or repurposing – so much so that I might as well just start from scratch. The course book editors, writers and publishers know where the money is, of course, and I’ll tell you now, it’s not in a community centre in West Yorkshire. Ultimately, and somewhat ironically, the more global course books aim to be global, the less relevant they have become to my local teaching context, even though it typically features students from at least three continents.

When you say things like this the producers of these books will wring their hands and point out their own socially liberal beliefs. They may simply argue that the contextual stuff is irrelevant as “it’s just a vehicle for learning English.” Perhaps they might prefer to argue that politics and criticism has no place in the ELT classroom (PMSL). Really, guys, though, it’s fine, honestly: we all have a living to make, and yours is by making internationally sellable product for large corporations, something which millions of people around the world do all the time in all sorts of industries. I’m just saying I won’t be buying a class set, the teacher’s book, and all the rest because the content is not apprpriate for the students I teach. Soz.

Materials development and selection these days is a deeply eclectic affair. If I use anything preprepared, it’s likely to be something selected from sites like the British Council’s Teaching English or ESOL Nexus. It might be something from SkillsWorkshop, or something taken from one of the big collections of photocopiables. I often adapt authentic texts, because that fits the ESOL context best of all – our students are surrounded by real language all the time, after all, and it makes sense to equip them with the skills to cope with this. And then, from time to time, I might even choose something from a course book. It’s likely to be one I already know, because, let’s be honest, it’s ten times easier to hunt something up online than it is to rummage round a bookshelf, especially when there’s a high probability it won’t fit in some way.

Ultimately, I think, this goes back to how I approach lesson resources. Even when I used to follow a course book, I used to get frustrated when I had an idea of how a lesson should work but the materials didn’t quite fit, and out of this came the notio8 that materials should fit the lesson, and not the other way round. It seems wrong to me to rethink the lesson so that it fits a particular resource. Sure, there’s a lot of people saying “don’t reinvent the wheel” when it comes to resources but it’s my wheel, and I want it to roll my way, and not along the steel rails of some distant course book writer.

(Controversially) Teachable Moments

Things went a bit pear shaped this week. Thursday morning I went into class ready to a nice, predictable “reflect on last year, discuss thoughts about this year” task (using an hourglass as a metaphor) and discovered that more than one student had had a couple of really rough experiences last year so very quickly reverted to a mundane reading task which I’d used with another group earlier in the week on the theme of motivation and why goals fail. This was with the intention of following this up on Friday morning with a bit of a discussion about resolutions, and thence to engage students in a bit of negotiation about what we were going to do in the coming term, and even, if they wanted to, set themselves some targets. After all, I’m OK with target setting if it’s something someone thinks will help them to focus – it’s standing over students and saying “You must have targets and they must be SMART because it’s the rules” which I object to. However, any discussion of this is a moot point, because it didn’t happen. We might do something about it next week, but given my antipathy to target setting, and the fact we’d just been reading about why goals and targets fail, I doubt it.

The plan, insofar as there was detail, was to start with students thinking about what challenges and hopes they had for the year ahead. I calculated how I was going to support those students who might struggle with this emotionally (by keeping the focus fairly light for those students) and had arranged to get students to write their challenges on post its, work in (socially distanced) pairs to compare and ctaegorise their challenges & hopes, to be followed by a whole group sharing and advice giving activity, and some small group presentations, perhaps. From this, I imagined that there would be plenty of opportunities for teachable moments arising, so I fully expected it to expand into the whole lesson.

But life, being life, managed to not let this happen. For one, we had a really poor turnout, due to illnesses (not covid) and other challenges, and as a result I was down to six students. Now, the challenges/hopes lesson was really planned for a much larger majority in the lesson, as there was still going to be a part where we honed down which topics or themes we were going to focus on for the term, and I wanted there to be a more community / democratic focus to that task as I hoped it would stimulate content for future lessons. There had been a nicely productive chat for the first 15 minutes or so, but I could sense this was fading away to a natural conclusion, and I was hunting out the resources for a grammar lesson looking at future forms, based broadly on one I did online last year, and therefore not needing handouts printing (meaning I could move into smoothly, rather than having to leave the room).

And then one of the students (let’s call her A) asked an interesting question loosely linked to the conversation they had all been having. I’ll have to paraphrase briefly as the thrust of the question took some time, but the question was this:

“Why won’t the UK rejoin the EU?”

Old news, perhaps, and a question overshadowed by covid the last couple of years, but a valid one, given the background of the student in question. More importantly, indeed, most importantly, every other student in the class had an opinion. There were grumbles about prices increasing and shortages of certain products, but also a debate emerging over the benefits and drawbacks relating to EU membership, with some students citing reasons for leaving with which they agreed.

Talk about an opportunity. This was a theme about which everyone had an opinion or at least a hunch of a feeling, and about which it was really really simple to draw up a quick table on the board, put the students into two groups of 3 (for maximum opportunity for discussion) to come up with a list of pros and cons of rejoining the EU.

Who needs starters and plenaries, aims and objectives, powerpoints and lesson plans when the world hands you something like this on a nicely polished plate?

Except, and this is a good except, it went even further off. In one group a small side debate arose on the theme of benefits fraud, which hooked in the other group, and which then rose up to dominate the whole class until:

“All Muslims do benefit fraud.”

That sound you heard last Friday at about 10.30 was my jaw hitting the floor. It was a shocking moment, perhaps even more so when you consider that the speaker in question was herself Muslim. The subsequent silence was, as you can imagine, more than slightly awkward.

But again, gloriously, wonderfully teachable. I felt that this was definitely one of those moments where I needed to step in before some sort of row broke out, so we tried to clarify carefully what the student was trying to say. In an attempt to do this, another student added “I think all Asians commit benefit fraud.” Now, as it turns out, the general thrust of this comment was basically “it’s not just Muslims,” and so it was clearly a misguided attempt to mollify the students in the room: although the speaker in this case was not Muslim, she was Asian. At this point, the one non-Asian and non-Muslim student in the room was maintaining a very careful silence!

So where to go with this? There were two points here: the social expectations around equality and respect, and the question of how to actually say what you are trying to say. As a starting point I wrote up “avoid making generalisations” and used both students’ sentences as a means of eliciting/presenting a more appropriate way of saying it – I think we settled on “Based on my experience, many of the people in my area are committing benefit fraud.” What was really nice about this was that during the discussion which followed those language elements started to crop up – “based on my experience…” “I’ve often found that…” “some people often…” This is a Level 2 group, and I admit there’s not a lot here which is Level 2 complexity of structure, based on simple lexical or structural criteria. However, if you look up from grubbing around simple grammar and denotative meaning, and start to consider more complex socio-lingusitic elements, about recognising the power in the words you use and using language to offset that power, this is definitely Level 2. This is alluded to in the ESOL Core Curriculum (at various points on pages 19-22 here, since you ask), by the way, but rarely picked up in assessments and exams, and certainly when I reflect on my own teaching experiecnes, not something I often explicitly teach.

This wasn’t the end of it, of course! The discussion ranged in that lesson from this to various other social issues – fraud in general, child abuse, refugees, the situation in Palestine (as you can probably imagine, this was an especially passionate part of the discussion), corruption and bribery, and a whole host of other things. In fact the original discussion about EU membership fell very much by the wayside, and we only really used it towards the end to bring the conversation back online when it was beginning to drift away.

So what did we learn from all this? First up, I really enjoyed pretty much giving up the general control over the thrust of the lesson, and the feedback from the students was very much that they enjoyed the chance just to speak. They did say that they wanted more error correction, which I think would be a good way to close off a lesson like this – collecting spoken errors and feeding them back for a whole group correction exercise, for example, but I think this could be quite challengiung when you as a teacher are involved in the discussion directly. It’s easier with more structured small group discussions, however, and I would definitely do that. The vocabulary developed was amazing – “cash-in-hand” “loophole” “catch redhanded” “businesses exploit desperate people” and so on, and as I always find in this kind of free-ranging lesson, much richer than I would ever be able to “teach” and also much more valuable.

For myself, I have sometimes found with lessons like this that it can become a bit of a lecture, where I hold forth on a topic in response to a student question, and so I made a specific effort to throw discussion questions straight back to the group rather than respond directly. Even language focussed questions I tried much harder to get the group to address the question, rather than answer the question myself. In general, I think this worked well for this lesson as it drew on the collective knowledge and increased opportunities for students to talk. This did mean a shift, slightly, in the power balance of the classroom – thinking about that last blog post, there remained a sense of “Me Teacher, You Student” but it was much less about me delivering input and more about filling gaps, re-cconstructing language in line with what students were trying to say. The lesson was negiotiated, in that sense, rather than imposed.

Given the strength of opinion, I think I might follow the lesson up with a more generative task around challenges for the new year, and get the students to consider global, national, and regional concerns as well as considering their own personal concerns for the year ahead, and use these ideas a themes for future lessons. I also want to start bringing in more effective “capture” strategies which capture this emergent language and form it up for the students. This is for two reasons – most importantly for the students and for subsequent lessons where revisiting the language will be possible. The second is more for my own research into how this kind of emergent language can form the syllabus, and how it does this,. At the moment the interactive white board is proving invaluable for this – I filled three screens’ worth and was able to export this into a pdf for students, but this definitely needs something for the students. From next week I am going to get the students to start keeping a learning diary of sorts to complete each week to reflect on what they have learned and how they are percieiving the lessons.

What also really has me thinking is that I need another research question – not just about pereceptions of the syllabus emerging, but also who is responsible for what in that curriculum. However, that, I think is a question for another day.