Teaching English in Difficult Circumstances: A New Research Agenda - Richard Smith
Most English teaching around the world goes on in large classes with limited resources. Paradoxically, though, this kind of context remains under-considered in ‘mainstream’ ELT discourse. On the basis of historical review, an agenda and procedures for future research in this area are proposed and exemplified, and the Teaching English in Large Classes (TELC) teacher education/development/research network (www.warwick.ac.uk/go/telc) is introduced.
The video of the talk is below, and underneath it ('View documents') you can access the powerpoint slides and handout. All feedback welcome!
18 March 2010
1 year 50 weeks
Thank you to all who attended my talk. For those who couldn't get a handout, I've uploaded them here (click on 'View documents' above), along with the session powerpoints (I didn't show all of these during the actual talk).
Unfortunately there wasn't enough time for questions or discussion at the end, so if you'd like to discuss any of the issues I raised in the talk, please post your comments or questions here or send them to me directly at: R.C.Smith@warwick.ac.uk
I'll try to summarize some of the feedback I received from participants I talked to after the session over the next week or so.
Richard
18 March 2010
1 year 50 weeks
In slides at the beginning of the talk I referred to 'BANA' contexts and 'TESEP' contexts and started using the abbreviation 'TiDC'. Someone informed me at the end that they hadn't understood these, so I'd like to explain them here. 'TiDC' stands for 'Teaching in Difficult Circumstances'. 'BANA' and 'TESEP' come from Adrian Holliday's (1994) book _Appropriate Methodology and Social Context_ (CUP). Alan Maley (in the article I cited at the beginning of the talk) gives a good summary, I think, and - out of laziness, since I have it to hand - I'd like to borrow his interpretation to clarify why I was using 'BANA' and 'TESEP':
'[S]cholars such as Adrian Holliday (1994) have drawn attention to the mismatch between methodologies devised in so called BANA contexts, which are then misapplied in quite different TESEP contexts. (For those readers not familiar with these acronyms, they represent British, Australasian and North American and Tertiary, Secondary and Primary, respectively. BANA contexts presuppose small classes of usually multilingual groups of students, taught by highly trained native speaker teachers, in well resourced and pleasant environments, and in an intensive mode. Teachers are relatively free to plan their own curriculum and to teach it as they prefer. TESEP contexts are constrained by their institutional setting, so that teachers are highly influenced by the syllabus, the textbook, the examination. Classes are usually large, monolingual and taught by a relatively untrained teacher who shares the students' mother tongue and whose command of English is uncertain. They are often poorly resourced, and classes take place only a few times a week.)'
(Maley 1999)
8 April 2010
2 years 5 weeks
One of the factors is money. A large amount of the ELT edubusiness is by definition driven by cash. If you are rich then your needs, prejudices, your contexts will have influence (a lot of the discussion in Graddol's the future of english and english next was driven by financial considerations and issues around possible loss of business and influence in ELT and cultural products more broadly and, in addition to this, it is interesting that these are British Council sponsored publications).
High-stakes testing, washback, impact, innovation theory (see lots of Alderson and Wall articles on this and Henrichsen 1986) and associated literature read alongside Freirean analyses of education is also enlightening here. IATEFL is conflicted here often seen to be propagating fad theories that have little or no evidence base of any kind but do have strong marketing drives behind them (multiple intelligence, CLIL, Learning styles, Brain gym, dogme etc).
Be very interested to see if you get any big name responses to your ideas since a lot of what you are saying is reflexive and not relevant soley to low resource or other 'non-standard' settings.
Cheers Dominic
18 March 2010
1 year 50 weeks
Dominic,
Thanks very much for this response. One thing I didn't have time to address in the presentation (it's in my slides, but I skipped over this, partly due to time limitations and partly because I'm not completely sure about it) is the idea that at least some of what the British Council does / has done in the past may be relevant to the concerns of teachers of English in difficult circumstances but hasn't got enough exposure / isn't documented enough. There were some very good presentations I went to at the conference by BC people - Alison Barrett working in India and Alan MacKenzie based in Thailand - which showed a lot of respect for local contexts and for the idea of working with teachers in an 'appropriate' way in those contexts. Historically I think that's a kind of 'tradition' in UK ELT to set alongside the 'edubusiness' aspects, but it doesn't get very much attention e.g. at IATEFL relative to the numbers of teachers those efforts (in India, Thailand etc.) are reaching - Alison's talk about BC work with teachers in India was up against Scott Thornbury, who inevitably drew the IATEFL crowds.
In this (Scott Thornbury) connection, 'dogme', mentioned by you as a fad theory with little evidence base but a strong marketing drive was one of the things I was going to mention as a 'BANA export', but - as with CLIL (see my reply to Amos below) - I think I took it off the slides at the last minute due to uncertainty.
Scott Thornbury's conference abstract seemed to suggest that he was going to argue against the idea that dogme is a method (as I said, I couldn't attend his presentation). And, while - as with CLIL - I don't know much about it, I think I know it was developed in conscious opposition to 'edubusiness' materials, technologies etc. On the surface, maybe dogme should have 'something to say' to teachers working in under-resourced circumstances since it involves working with the resources that _are_ available (people). However, Alan Maley's article in _Humanizing Language Teaching_ that I began my presentation with ('Who needs a health farm when they're starving?') puts it quite well in its final lines, I think - 'Resource poor environments can be made to work. But they can work better with more resources. The current enthusiasm among some BANA professional for vows of abstinence [here he's clearly referring to 'dogme'] ... are oddly ironical. Hence my title!' (Maley 1999).
In other words (in my interpretation) dogme should be viewed a situated response to a perceived problem of 'over-resourcing'. I think it's begun to be 'packaged up', though (in the form of Scott Thornbury's recent book) and I expect we'll next be seeing it 'exported' beyond the contexts it was developed in/for. I don't think we're quite there yet (that's why I hesitated to put it on my slide) but there will surely be some ironies to come if it starts to be promoted for under-resourced contexts (was I the only one to find 'dogme' being awarded an 'Oscar-equivalent' at the recent ELToNS ceremony quite ironic, by the way, or am I being mean?)
For anyone interested, Alan Maley's short article is excellent, and available here:
http://www.hltmag.co.uk/nov01/martnov014.rtf
8 April 2010
2 years 5 weeks
Sorry, I remember in 2007 or 2008 when I gave a short talk to BESIG around the issue of fairtrade as it might relate to inappropriate educational technologies being sold to non-BANA countries. The idea was that we might mark educational products as fairtrade products if they were appropriate to the setting they were exported to and they had been chosen by the grassroots users on the basis of informed consent rather than imposed from above.
Polite reception but no more interest. Maybe because the idea was uninteresting and untenable maybe because there was no money in it.
Cheers Dominic
18 March 2010
1 year 50 weeks
Maybe ideas like Fairtrade get popular and adopted in the mainstream when enough 'consumers' vote with their wallets (Ministries of Education, I think, have a particular responsibility as major consumers of 'centre' (e.g. UK, US) ELT expertise - often they don't seem to look locally enough for expertise in curriculum development, testing, teacher training etc.)
Having said that, Fairtrade products come _from_ e.g. African contexts _to_ e.g. Britain so is the parallel valid? Maybe what's needed is something more like 'country of origin' labels - an encouragement to Ministries, schools etc. to nurture and sustain local producers.
12 March 2009
2 years 4 weeks
Dear Richard,
Thanks for a stimulating and thought provoking presentation at IATEFL. I thought your presentation linked with a number of points that I have been thinking about and thought I’d make a few points while I still remembered.
1. I would add CLIL/Immersion education/Bilingual education to the list of methodologies that BANA is trying to impose on other contexts. It is clear to me from the reading that I have done for the ELTJ debate that this methodology is being promoted as the panacea for language learning and subject learning as well.
2. I am not sure that the TESEP/BANA opposition is valid anymore. (I know that Alan Waters did a presentation about oppositions in Applied Linguistics – I couldn’t go to it but he told me a bit about it; I wonder whether this is another one of his false opposites that I understand he was talking about). Another way, maybe, of saying this, is that TESEP is a misnomer (unless there is something I don’t remember about Adrian Holliday’s initial formulation of this). This arises from my reading of CLIL and also from my own experience of CLT. The point is that in many countries, TESEP education can cope quite well with the BANA methodologies that are being imported. For example, a German primary school can very easily adopt these methodologies (and I saw an example of fantastic CLIL in a primary school in Germany at the conference). I myself was able to implement CLT methodologies successfully in classrooms of 35-40 students in secondary schools in Israel. I think now that a better way of presenting all these contexts is a cline, with the real opposites at the two extremes being TiDC and BANA EFL, with maybe TESEP in the middle. Or maybe a better way of modelling this would be two lines: one being a classroom size line, and the intersecting line being educational context. You would then have four quadrants: q1 would be a large class in a TiDC context; q2 would be a large class in an 'easy' context, say, secondary school in Israel; q3 would be a small class in a TiDC context; q4 would be a small class in an 'easy' context - maybe the classic private EFL BANA situation.
3. One important idea for me in your presentation was the importance of looking not at an ideal lesson presented by a ‘model’ teacher, but at unsuccessful lessons, and working on an understanding of why these lessons weren’t working. This was in fact one of the points I wanted to make in my ELTJ debate presentation – that when we want to understand CLIL we need to look at the contexts where it isn’t working, and we need to understand why it isn’t working.
Don’t know whether any of this is of any value or whether I am stating the obvious but did want to ‘share’ it with you!
Best -
Amos
18 March 2010
1 year 50 weeks
Amos,
Thank you very much for your incisive comments. I had wondered about adding CLIL to the list of exported methodologies (‘panaceas’) but took it off at the last minute, realizing I didn’t know enough about it. My sense is that a lot of the push for it seems to be coming from Europe, with UK ELT playing catch up, perhaps, and then re-exporting beyond Europe - but this is just a 'feeling'. So your comments on the TESEP/BANA divide and how they relate to European schools / universities are very welcome and interesting.
I believe that Adrian Holliday himself now sees the BANA/TESEP distinction as an over-crude one (perhaps I read this in his latest book, or it may have been through conversations with him) – and, yes, Teaching in Difficult/Unfavourable Circumstances is really what I was intending to focus on in the presentation, not ‘TESEP’ in general.
By the way, I think I'll add a reply to my initial comment in this thread so as to define what 'BANA' and 'TESEP' refer to - since I don't think I made this clear enough to all participants.
I'd say the 'BANA' / 'TESEP' distinction was a useful one at the time Adrian's 'Appropriate Methodology and Social Context' book came out (1994) - and I used it just to set the scene in my presentation - but I agree it's an over-simplified distinction. There's no doubt in my mind, though, that 'Teaching in Difficult Circumstances' has been neglected as a focus of 'mainstream ELT' concern and that's what I was really trying to highlight, so thanks for the BANA - TESEP - TiDC continuum idea - that's useful.
About the need to focus research on what 'unsuccessful' teachers do, I don't think I was making that point so strongly as you suggest (though I agree with the sentiments you express). There was a passage from Michael West's _Teaching English in Difficult Circumstances_ that I cited approvingly in opposition to the strange phenomenon of someone from a BANA context (Jeremy Harmer, to be precise) going out to demonstrate to people how to teach in large classes:
‘The place of the explorer of this problem is not at
the front of the class showing what he can do,
but at the back of the class, a big class, in a bad
classroom on a hot and steamy day, watching
what a not-too-competent teacher can best
achieve’ If he can do it under these
circumstances, others can’. (West 1960: 5)
But what I'd prefer to stress (and I think did stress towards the end of my talk) is the need for the 'explorer of the problem' to be someone _from_ that context (unlike West), ideally perhaps the practitioner him/herself, and for there to be a focus on what constitutes 'good practice' from participants' perspectives, as opposed to ideas coming in from outside.
2 April 2009
2 years 4 weeks
Dear Richard and Amos,
I agree with both of you that Adrian Holliday's BANA/TESEP distinction is not all embracing but what distinction has ever been? Amos' example of CLT in a German 'TESEP' classroom in a way helps reinforce my feeling that none of the 'methods' of ELT are entirely bad or good. But I can't resist the further suspicion that a German classroom of 35-40 with other facilities that a large part of English classrooms in the world do not have is nearer to Holliday's BANA context than it will be to the large (or should I say larger) part of TESEP classroom around the world. Maybe there is a need to establish a continuum along Holliday's TESEP to make a difference between what I will (for want of a better expression) call a 'low' TESEP context (like the German example) and a 'high' TESEP context like the one in which I work. My colleague - working in temperatures of over 45 degrees celsius, with more than 200 teenagers from more than 50 L1 backgrounds, in a classroom with only chalk and a half broken blackboard and no coursebooks, in a context where there is societal pressure for achievement in school as the only means to success in life - is more likely to see a 35-40 classroom as BANA-like.
That aside anyway, I think the issue is less the BANA/TESEP distinction as it is the immense under-consideration of what indeed seems to be the reality of a greater part of the ELT classroom context around the world. And there is some reason to suspect that this is a deliberate neglect motivated by a continuous attempt to colonise the non 'BANA' and non 'BANA-like' world with prescribed pedagogies. Otherwise how do we explain that for so many years 'BANA' and 'BANA-like' country universities receive students from extremely different and difficult contexts, yet the ELT course content/literature is still largely driven by research in contexts that are alien to the realities of these students?
Richards presentation is indeed an eye opener for researchers to look beyond the traditional and now minority context (not sure!) into a wider context that is both real and legitimate. Thank you Richard for breaking the doors open.
Harry
17 June 2010
1 year 48 weeks
I was ecstatic when I ran across this presentation and discussion. The NGO I work with has a cross-cultural
programs which places young people in post-colonial countries to learn,
develop relationships and serve with the local partner organizations. It is not uncommon for these volunteers to be requested as an English teaching aide, and once they arrive they are given their own classroom. Through my studies I developed an
interest in how these native-speaker volunteers and local English teachers
in developing countries interact (or don't interact!) and did some research on what the placements were like. (What is the educational culture like? How many of the schools really use corporal punishment, how many classes really have more than 60 pupils? What kind of training do the local English teachers think would benefit the volunteers?)
On the topic of research difficulties here is one example from Nepal: I found someone to
interview the local English teacher the volunteer had worked with over the past
year. I thought I had accounted for everything, and would get this "local voice" but the interview had to be canceled. The Maoist rebels planned strikes, and all my foresight and effort were for nothing. (Thankfully, my interview was not the only reason that someone had traveled from China to Nepal.)
I am in the process of developing an orientation course that in some way helps make the presence of these volunteers as valuable as possible. I am glad to have run across these thoughts.
While I understand that a Dogme approach to ELT has its origin in "over-resourced" teaching situations, does Dogme really have nothing to say about how to make under-resourced teaching situations more student centered?
Natasha