All purpose "ignore newspapers" reponse

OK OK OK I know I said I wasn't going to write any more pieces about newspapers, but like a fly to XXXXX I'm drawn back by the rancid stench of 'Journalism'. But this folks, this really is the last time. This is going to be my masterpiece, all encompassing retort to all language articles appearing in the press. Below is a list of rules and if I've sent this piece to you then that means the article you tweeted probably has one of the problems listed below. 

Rule 1: the article in question is almost certainly wrong

It might not be 100% wrong but there is wrongness in it! The shocking surprising headline of someone learning a language in a few hours, waking up speaking a foreign language or commenting on the decline of English is almost certainly being misreported by non-experts. This is not surprising as they get most everything else wrong as well from health articles to science and pretty much everything else. Even if it's not wrong, it's probably not completely right, with misrepresentation and fudge rife. 

Rule 2: If the article isn't written by a linguist of some kind ignore it.

If a scientist, a politician, or a journalist attempt to tell you that language is going to the dogs, or that the way people are using words is wrong, feel free to take no notice. Even if it is written by a linguist (or language 'expert') view it suspiciously. The guardian is not an academic journal claims and made there require zero evidence and they will provide no links to anything asserted in the article. So when you see the quarterly article stating something like, "I'm an editor of a famous journal and here are some language mistakes everyone is making" written in reasonable tones about how split infinitives are ugly or wrong and who/whom misused please remember they are almost always wrong, -or partially wrong. The best bet is to find out for yourself, from a reputable source. 

Rule 3: If it seems to be good to be true...

...it probably is. Great breakthroughs are rare, but articles about them are not. "New theory" or "new breakthrough/cure" stories abound, but should be regarded with suspicion, like the story the "human language came from bird song" or that "English is really a Scandinavian Language" or that you can learn a language in 22 hours. These theories might be true, but if they are, why has no one suggested them before? This doesn't instantly disqualify a theory, and paradigms are overturned, but "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and rather than believing the Daily Mail, I'll wait for the peer reviewed article in a reputable journal before making up my mind, thanks.

  

Rule 4 Muphry's law

This rule is named after murphy's law but with a misspelling and it posists that anyone launching an attack on another person's language use will inevitable have problems with language use in their article.  as I noted him doing this in an earlier article. A good example of this is sceptic James Randy, as i noted here.

a note on knowledge

interesting post and discussion over at the secret DOS' page; Knowledge versus skills. Seems like quite a ruckus was caused. Interestingly I was reading the fabulously well-written "why don't students like school" by author Daniel Willingham. I recommend it. I happen across this quote which seems pertinent:

there is no doubt that having students memorise lists of dry facts is not enriching. It is also true (though less often appreciated) that trying to teach students skills such as analysis or synthesis in the absence of factual knowledge is impossible. Research from cognitive science has shown that the sorts of skills that teachers want for students-such as the ability to analyse or think critically-require extensive factual knowledge. (2009:25)

I've also been reading the excellent "thinking about language teaching" by Swan (buy a copy right now!) in which he notes:

Language learners already know, in general, how to negotiate meaning. They have been doing it all their lives. What they do not know is, what words are used to do it in a foreign language They need lexical items, not skills. (2012:10)

 Grabe makes a similar point:

One needs only to pick up a newspaper in an unknown language to verify that background knowledge and prediction are severely constrained by the need to know vocabulary and structure.” (1991: 380)

 Something to think about.

The least worst solution

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."
Churchill

Scott Thornbury usually comes off quite well on EBEFL. He writes (somewhat) criticially about things like learning styles, reading skills and NLP. However there is one quote of his which bothers me. When writing about the image problem TEFL suffers from in "the unbearable lightness of EFL" he divides the world into the bare foot, 'sandals and candles' type of EFLer and the more academic type. He rejects both and offers us a "third way".

When Clemente wrote to ELTJ to criticise his article he shot back with another article in which he wrote, "the fact is that ELT is at risk of being hi-jacked by men in white coats". But who just who are these 'men in white coats'?

Thornbury is propagating the "mad scientist" myth common to much pseudo-science writing. Rather than a person we have a uniformed symbol of something sinister. Shadowy, sinister  'experts' are putting mind control drugs in vaccines. Fluoride will give you cancer (if you believe this kind of thing, this is probably the wrong blog for you.) but Thornbury doesn't ever explain why EFL researchers would necessarily be male, nor why applied linguists would need white coats.  

Historically and unfortunately there has always been an odd artificial divide between the TEFL world and the applied linguistics world. There is a notion that researchers are off writing books and know nothing about the hard-realities of classroom life, the 'chalk-face', of ELT when they come out with their high-faulting theories on language acquisition. This couldn't be further from the truth.

the vast majority of lecturers and researchers started life as teachers and most continue to teach. My dissertation tutor Julie Norton worked in France teaching business English and Japan. another of my tutors, Glenn Fulcher, taught in Greece for years. Sure these people went on to publish and become lecturers but PHDs don't cause amnesia, -do they?

but there is, it seems, not only antipathy towards researchers but also at times an  antipathy towards research. A large number of teachers not only seem to distrust research, but consider personal experience to be far superior. Now, in the absence of evidence then experience is perhaps our only guide, but is it right to spurn research in favour of experience?

Evidence comes in varying degrees of reliability and so it needs to be looked at carefully. a study of 5 students over 1 week is going to yield less useful results than a study of 400 students over years. However if we think "the only thing that matters is experience" then we find ourselves with a number of problems.

If you accept this argument then you basically give up the right to discuss anything. Or rather, discussing anything becomes pointless because the teacher with the most experience will de facto but the 'rightest', regardless of his/her opinion. If another person's equally long experience differs to yours then who is right? . This isn't education, or critical thinking, it's just demanding acquiescence.

The "I have more experience than you" card, is basically a variant of the argument from authority. As such, all teachers would have to demur to older, more experienced teachers, regardless of how crap they might be. It is not an unfair position, in my opinion, that if someone has been teaching crap lessons for 30 years, this should count against, rather than in favour of them. Of course, we wouldn't know the lessons were crap because the experienced teacher would say that "in their experience" the lessons were great, and that would be the end of that.

Experience absolutely should not be discounted and it is often a vital tool in checking the validity of an idea. For example, I learnt a foreign language pretty fluently, as an adult, without ever knowing what kind of learning style I had, and this experience made me sceptical of the claims being made about learning styles (though it doesn't mean I was right, mind!) But this idea that experience is a reliable measure of something is a deeply flawed concept that can easily be shown to be wrong. At this moment in time we know there are teachers, good teachers, all over the world teaching using different and contradictory methods who are convinced, by what they see every day, that their chosen method really is working. Their 'experience' is telling them that their method is effective. Often though, these approaches contradict each other, textbook -no textbook, grammar -no grammar, correction, -no correction, simply put they can't all be right. 

At this point we may be tempted to turn to relativistic platitudes. We often hear that "it all depends on context" and to an extent that's true. Things we do in a kid's classroom will differ to an EAP setting. But this also opens us up to an uncritical free-for-all and we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that all of our students are humans, using the same biological material (their ears, their eyes, their brains) to try to learn. Some things will work everywhere and others will work nowhere. Research can show us this and call me an old cynic but when I get sick and am admitted to hospital, I'll take 'tried and tested' medicine from men (or women) in white coats, than something the local witch doctor knows, from his long-experience, is super effective.

Tim Harford, writing about Ben Goldacre's recent push for evidence-based teaching, notes:

“Trust me, I’m a doctor” was never an excuse for not collecting evidence. And “trust me, I’m a teacher” is not an excuse today. But being a teacher is a superb vantage point for building an evidence-based education system. It is an opportunity that teachers need to seize

I would hate to think the antipathy towards research and the caricaturing of researchers is an attempt to jealously cling to authoritative power. Evidence, like democracy, might not be a panacea but it's better than the other options.

The council of woo

‘The Council’ likes to promote itself as a rigorous and serious organisation, doing very serious testing and accreditation, but it can be quite partial to the odd bit of ‘woo’.  For example in order to get a CELTA trainees have to be well versed in “learning styles”. This predilection for a bit of magical thinking is most evident on its web page. 

Their article on NLP is littered with embarrassing factoids about my favourite TEFL pseudo-science. The article starts by telling us that NLP has “its roots in psychology and neurology” which is slightly misleading as its creators were studying maths and linguistics at the time. It has nothing to do with neurology and has been soundly rejected by psychology which classes it as a pseudo-science. Not to fear though, ever the great shape-shifter NLP has found a good home in management and education –two rich breeding grounds for ‘woo’.

Writer Steve Darn goes on to tell us that NLP is “about the way the brain works” (which it most certainly isn’t) and that it can help to train the brain (which it can’t because it doesn’t work). Next he tells us it “is related to 'left / right brain' functions” (also known as the “left brain right brain myth) and that it shares something with….yes you guessed it “learning styles, multiple intelligence and other areas of research”! BINGO!

Hang on a sec though; let’s look at that last sentence again. “Learning styles, multiple intelligence and other areas of research”…one of these three is not the same; one of these three is different. Ah yes, research. Because research is where you have a theory and then you test it, which is the opposite of what learning styles and multiple intelligences do. They tend to subscribe to the “have a theory and then sell loads of books” method.

Darn then notes “NLP and related subjects have their sceptics, particularly in terms of general classroom applicability and how NLP is commercially marketed as a method of self-improvement.” and as a creepy method of mind control?

"NLP has been labelled a 'quasi science' and criticised on the grounds of lack of empirical studies” That's the spirit Steve, -don't spoil it now...

“but there are sound reasons why NLP is compatible with current classroom practice”

Boooooooooo! This is what I like to call “the reverse Harmer”. You list as load of criticism and details why something is has been rejected by science and then with a wave of your hand you dismiss all those problems. Fantastic! Perhaps we can try this when we teach?

“Well this essay has numerous grammar problems, it's half plagiarised, it's not related to the topic and is 100 words too short. –but don’t worry about that stuff, this essay is compatible with an A grade."

I could go on and on about NLP but to be honest I can’t be bothered. The true believers will just retire to their familiar “well I know it works, I saw it with my eyes.” If you're at all curious, don't believe me, I advise you to go and check the literature. See if you can find any credible sources recommending NLP be taken seriously for anything.

If you can then you’ve done more than I managed in months of research. In short NLP either works and our knowledge of how the human brain works and how human languages evolved is wrong, or (and the safe money is here) teachers are signing up for expensive courses and wasting students' (valuable) time with something which has the same credibility as Ouija boards and tarot cards.

BALEAP 2013

Had a great time here, very nervous but I think it went OK.

If you were interested in learning more about the things I was talking about then here check out these links. Most of the presentation was taken from from these posts:

Teacher beliefs

Learning styles 

study skills

skimming scanning, prediction and guessing

linkers

Live by the sword...

Ranting about the lack of precision in language is one thing and quite a popular thing too, but being able to weed out all the imprecision in your own speech is another. I love "the skeptics guide to the universe" and James Randi, with his million dollar prize. I'm trying to listen to their entire back catalogue of podcasts (over 8 years worth) and enjoying it greatly.

The only thing that bothers me is that at times they can be quite prescriptive about language use. This doesn't seem fitting for sceptics, -but at the same time, its hardly surprising for me to see scientists muscle in on linguists' territory.

Anyway, episode 181 features a section with James Randi complaining about imprecision in language use; redundant' phrases like "unfortunate tragedy", "rich millionaires" and a "deadly fatality". Fine, go ahead and complain about this stuff, but if you are going to complain Randi, then in the very next breath, don't say something like this:

[interviewees] begin every single response with the phrase "well..."

Hold on, every single? As a oppose to what? Surely if you want to remove redundancy this should be "every response". Randi has shown here that it's a lot easier to pick at things you don't like than to actually remove all of the supposed imperfections from your speech. If you're going to criticize language use you'd better make sure yours is perfect. Five seconds before he makes this 'blunder' Randi says:

I understand that this is only an expression but it's a careless one.

And here's another expression "live by the sword, die by the sword."

Lessons in the bleeding obvious

I'm not allowed to go to IATEFL. :(

Big department, quite a few people speaking and so sadly I will be manning the fort.

So don't be surprised if the tone of this post is tinged with bitterness, jealousy and impotent rage.


anywho...

The "appeal to the masses" fallacy, also called the argument from popularity states that just because something is popular or widely used we should consider it valid, after all, everyone can't be wrong, can they?

In order to become popular you usually need to appeal to a lot of people which means being accessible and bland enough to not really offend anyone. All of which brings me to one of my most hated things, Study Skills. Now this may seem to have nothing to down with TEFL but anyone working in Universities, particularly teaching EAP or in-sessional classes has probably come across at least some study skills work. There is even a new book out targeting international postgraduates.

I'm currently reading the insanely popular study skills handbook by Stella Cottrell. A lot of teachers love this book and it's piled high in our university bookshop. They've even recently released a Chinese language version (presumably to squeeze a few more drops from the UK's current cash cow). The book has excellent reviews on Amazon (4.5 stars from over 100 reviews) is in its third edition, has sold over 500,000 copies. I hate this book. 

Allow me to explain:

It's very very long

350 pages long to be precise. So before you can start reading your course books or writing your essays, you need to get through 350 words learning how to read your coursebooks and how to write your essays. As reviewer ABZ notes on Amazon:

I think this book is rather pointless, You would be better studying your work in the time it takes you to read it

Of course, it's a handbook so you don't need to read it all, but some of it really seems excessive, such as...

In order to read, first make sure you have eyes...

Although no doubt containing some useful information, it's also crammed full of incredibly obvious things written about in great detail. For £12 you too can learn such useful life lessons as:

IT enables you to store large files of information on CD or a memory stick
Abbreviations save time
If you have too much [information] you will need to leave some out
You need to research less, read less, note less, and write less for a 1,500 word essay than for a 3,000 word essay.

and my favourite

An essay is a piece of writing which is written to a set of writing conventions

There is even a six point guide to "searching on the web" including "type your chosen keyword into the search field" and "press the enter key".  In the words of one Amazon reviewer:

It is filled with common sense extensively padded out by hollow psychobabble gibberish about personal development. Essentially, making good notes is good, revising is good; you don't need this patronising text to realise this and be a good student.

The almost endless self-assessment tick boxes are also hugely irritating. You tick the boxes and then what? Whenever we did this kind of development in school; you tick these boxes "I'm good at X" and "I need to work on X" then your teacher reads it and says "oh, you need to work X" and you say "yes", then this is all filed into your PDP folder until next year when you have to do it all again.

Accuracy

For someone who has written a book on critical thinking Cottrell drops some huge clangers. She encourages readers to find their learner style, she promotes the thoroughly discredited left brain/right brain myth encouraging students to use their "whole brain" (as if they had a choice) when studying, she promotes NLP (88), she claims drinking 8 glasses of water helps study and she repeats the myth that Einstein wasn't good in school. Maybe these are only small things but shouldn't an educator get these kinds of things right? This is the third edition after all. As one academic writes about the importance of evaluating evidence "check the source of your information" (Cottrell 2008:280)

One size fits all

Another worry I have with the book is the idea that doing X is a good way to study and only that will bring success, other approaches don't work or should be avoided. An example of this is the section on reading (118) that advises students to read "with a relaxed upright posture" and "with the light from behind, sufficient to light the page but without glare". another section advises "good note taking strategy" for three pages. Can't students decide for themselves when and where to read and how to take notes? Is there really a right way to do this? We seem happy to make allowances for supposed "right-brain logical visual"  learners, can't we also make room for "reading all your course books in bed" learners, like me?

Concern with the periphery

It's hard to be too critical of study skills, and it feels a bit mean. I'm sure there's a lot that's good in this book and in teaching people to learn but there is a limit to this and there is a danger with taking it too far. Like strategies and reading skills, learning skills are compensatory strategies not a replacement for language teaching. In the same way that you can't scan and skim your way to understanding a text, if you don't have enough language all the skills in the world won't help you.

In an excellent article called "we do need methods" Swan talks about the "expanding periphery" of TEFL noting:

It seems clear that there is a real and substantial swing towards a concern with matters that are ancillary or peripheral to language teaching itself. These include learner characteristics and perceptions, societal needs, cultural contexts and personal development. (2012:169)

He goes on to suggest that a balance needs to be struck between ancillary concerns and the things they are ancillary to, namely, teaching. In the same way that teaching a man to fish will be more useful than giving him a fish, learner training and study skills can be useful, but there must be a balance between skills and language. What we don't want is the fisherman spending three months in fishing college learning fishing skills from "the fishing handbook" and subsequently starving to death.

Enjoy IATEFL! 

Good for who?

When I first started teaching I used to use an activity from "pronunciation games". You might have used it yourself  The handout has a series of forked paths, each one ending with the name of a capital city. You choose a difficult pronunciation for your learners  in my case R/L for Japanese students, and assign one for sound for "turn left" and the other for "turn right". You then write a series of minimal pairs on the board and have one student read them trying to direct their partner to a pre-decided capital city. The mispronunciations would usually result in students going to the wrong city and (supposedly) highlight the perils of mispronunciation. I distinctly remember saying something like "you might say you like eating 'lice' which is really disgusting!"

I feel quite embarrassed when I think about this for two reasons. Firstly, I'm pretty sure that anyone hearing a Japanese students say "I like eating lice" would have no problem  understanding what they were going for, but more importantly, because what I failed to notice at the time was that this activity had the effect of making precisely none of my students any better at pronouncing /r/ sounds. Despite no improvement, students enjoyed the activity and I thought it was great. This got me thinking recently; are the things we do in the classroom for the sake of the students, or for the sake the teacher?

Take the "reading skill trilogy" I've criticised before. Prediction, skimming and scanning and guessing from context, as I've noted, arguably have some very serious problems. Yet they are good for filling up reading lessons and the "aims" columns of observed lesson plans. These 'skills' may have limited use for students but are very useful for teachers. A teacher planning a reading course now has something to teach. We can do "prediction" on Monday, "skimming" on Tuesday, "guessing on Wednesday" and so on.

Another example of this phenomena I think is some of the language we use. For my external DELTA lesson I wrote about teaching cause and effect. In order to teach this lesson I had to find out which language items would be the most useful so I created a corpus of about 5 million words from various academic texts. I then checked off the usually course book lists of "cause and effect language" and what I found was quite surprising.

Textbooks and websites often have long lists of cause and effect language, such as:

lead to

due to

cause

owing to

as a result of

stem from

can give rise to

as a consequence of

Interestingly the corpus data showed that while some of these phrases were used frequently, others were barely used at all. Now corpus examination like this is not without problems. However there were some very telling findings. Whereas the word 'effect' appeared 691 and 'leads to' 368, in 5 million words, 'owing to' was only used three times. Other words like 'cause' were common appearing 189 times but 'stem from' didn't appear once. For teachers and textbooks writers there seems to be a philosophy of "more is more". The more terms we present to students, the more we may feel we are teaching them, (giving them value for money) when in actual fact, focusing on more commonly used phrase and making sure students have a strong grasp on those, could arguably be  better strategy. After all, isn't presenting two phrases, seemingly as equals when one is hundreds of times more common, a tad misleading?

The same argument could be made about cohesion phrases like 'in addition' and 'moreover'. In fact the argument has been made, convincingly by Crewe (1990). Throwing a big list of phrases at students might seem like a good idea, but as with cause and effect language 'less' is probably more. There are two reasons for this:

firstly, students are often lead to believe that these phrases are synonymous:

Words meaning 'and' and, too, as well (as), either, also, in addition (to), besides, furthermore, moreover, both... and..., not only... but also...

(Eastwood 2002:324)

Call me picky but 'moreover' doesn't mean 'and'. Moreover means that the second point I'm making may be even more important that the first. Would 'and' convey the same meaning here?

She had noticed that there was a man sitting in the second row of the stalls to her right who was observing her, rather than watching the play. Moreover, he seemed to be smiling at her as if he recognised her (BBC)

Presenting these phrases as being 'equal' will (and does) lead to confusion and misuse. Here is an example (content altered) from a student essay:

Also, for example, if a Chinese man is dieting, then he has a real need to eat healthy food for a period. Moreover, it can be suggested that consumers can feel happiness when they are in process of consumption (student essay)

the use of 'moreover' here is plainly wrong and that there are almost four of these cohesion phrases in two sentences is worrying. The linking phrases are sprinkled on like hundreds and thousands (US sprinkles). Any one who has worked in EAP will recognise this kind of writing.

And Secondly, this approach may also lead students to being overburdened with language which they probably don't need.  Corpus research (Hinkel 2004:323) indicates that the commonest linkers in formal academic writing are:

1. however
2. thus 
3. therefore 
4. then 
5. so

It is surely better that they can use five commonly appearing phrases well, than 10 or 15 phrases badly. It is also surely better that they are more familiar with more common phrases. It may be nice for a teacher to present students with a huge list of exotic linkers, like some kind of extravagant badge of erudition but how useful is this for students. In the case of language learning Less may well be more.

Council news

Private Eye this month reports that the British Council in Nigeria has found itself in rather hot water. Awuese Oku, won a court case meaning the council were required to pay her £21,000 in damages.

Except they didn't.

Deputy director Amir Ramzan could now go to prison for ignoring the courts' decision. The court has also threatened to close the Abuja offices and "seize one of its vehicles in lieu of payment" (private eye)

The Eye reports court papers noting that "the defendants would not have done what they did in their home country". Good to see the council continuing "to build mutually beneficial cultural and educational relationships between the United Kingdom and other countries"