English Raven

English Raven interviewed by TEFL.net on Ideas and Creativity

 

The delightful Tara Benwell from TEFL.net recently grilled me (in the nicest possible way, of course) on the topic of Ideas and Creativity for their latest TEFL Guest interview.

 

You can check out the whole interview here.

 

Actually, this was a real pleasure for me. Ideas and creativity -- what an exciting topic to discuss! And given that Tara herself is one of my heros in the ELT world, that just made the whole experience that much more enjoyable.

 

 

=D

 

 

                                                        

 

Banter about coursebook blanks from Brazil!

  

If you've visited this blog relatively recently, you've probably seen me bang on about coursebooks and this (rather crazy or unnecessary?) idea of making commercial coursebooks with deliberate blank sections included in the unit format.

One of the ideas I brainstormed was a variety of blank page or section inclusions - highlighted in pink - that looked like this (applied to a unit of my own coursebook series Boost!):

   

Well, the fabulous Henrick Oprea agreed to set up a live video chat with his teachers at Atlantic Idiomas in Brazil, and we had a really interesting discussion about this whole notion of blank sections in coursebooks. Watch the interview below:

Please forgive the echo involved with my mic and it's transmission through Henrick's computer, but the parts where the teachers are talking are absolutely the highlights and the sound comes through there nice and cleanly.

Fascinating comments and impressions from a really awesome group of teachers - not to mention an actual learner at CPE level! I can't thank them enough, and I really hope to get together with them again sometime soon and chat about something else related to teaching and learning.

And what do YOU think of this whole notion of deliberate blank sections in coursebooks?

  

:-)

   

 

Another example of enjoying the silence, plus applying the "baduk" philosophy to ELT!

   

If you read and enjoyed my recent post Silent Periods can also be good for teachers, I've got some good news for you!

The very talented Darren Elliott from the lives of teachers recently put this idea into practice with his own class of adult learners in Japan, and he's posted about it in a great report titled a class with no teacher.

A great read, and definitely worth checking out. Darren's account is set to become more interesting than mine, as he is going further than I did and actually collecting feedback and comments from his learners about the experience.

One thing that struck me about both my and Darren's experiences is that they occured in Korea and Japan respectively - two contexts that feature monolingual and monocultural groups of students. Based on the comments on both of our posts, some teachers expressed doubts about using the silent treatment with students from Asia who share the same mother language, but Darren and I are either proving the exception to the rule or perhaps touching on an over-generalisation about learners from these (and potentially other) contexts.

What this issue does remind me of is something Dr. Andrew Finch once mentioned in an interview at an ELT conference in Seoul. He talked of the need to understand that, in places like Korea, where students are bombarded with Grammar-McNugget style English from very young ages, there is less of a need to teach students more language and much more of a need to facilitate chances to use it.

I think Dr. Finch is absolutely right, and in my opinion the experience of the silent teacher I shared with Darren has a lot more to do with taking the padlock off the door leading to a overstuffed storeroom than anything else.

I've included that interview with Dr. Finch below - there are also some fascinating comments from him about the game baduk ("go") and how it could relate to thinking about ELT in so-called 'rote-learning' contexts, plus the whole idea of dealing with students who have been effectively "trained to fail." You'll also pick up some diamonds here about making highly localised, student-centred coursebook material.

  

  

Fascinating stuff.

One of the highlights of my time in ELT was having Dr. Finch give me a job in his own department at Kyungpook University in Daegu, where I got to have conversations like this with him over a casual coffee. I was a lucky fellow indeed!

:-)

 

Three question interview with Ken Wilson

   

I stumbled upon the following Oxford University Press YouTube interview with Ken Wilson recently, and found his responses to three core questions very interesting.

1. What's your favourite ELT book?
2. What or who has had the biggest impact on ELT in the last 25 years?
3. What do you wish you'd known when you started out in ELT?

Take a look for yourself at Ken's responses:

  

I'm glad Ken mentioned drama in ELT, because personally I think I could go out on a pretty stable and hard to fall from limb and say that drama is possibly THE most under-utilised and under-appreciated application for dynamic, student-centred, effective and entertaining foreign language learning experiences.

He also talks about how ELT has started to take itself much more seriously, especially in terms of teacher training. Personally I think that is one of the many branches that has sprung out of ELT's move into politics and mainstream public education policies worldwide (with so many countries adopting EFL as a mandatory element in their public school curriculums from increasingly younger ages) and big business in general (corporatisation of publishers, testing bodies and teacher training providers in particular).

Ken's point about published ELT materials hits a nail very squarely on the head: these days the coursebooks need to look sensational to get teachers and students through the door, but the content also needs to sophisticated and of high quality to get them to return for second helpings. However you happen to feel about publishers and coursebook materials in general (including perhaps the need to scrap them entirely!), there is no escaping this essential truth.

I also really like Ken's final response, about the "trip" of being a teacher going through the nervous beginning stages to ending up on a plateau of self-assurance, then seeing certain things you thought you knew or defined you as a good teacher start to crumble around you. I subscribe to a similar view of things with the benefit of hindsight, and alluded to some of these issues in my recent post What's good for the goslings can be good for a gander.

   

You might like to share some of your own thoughts about Ken's responses, or even provide some of your own to those three core questions:

1. What's your favourite ELT book?
2. What or who has had the biggest impact on ELT in the last 25 years?
3. What do you wish you'd known when you started out in ELT?

  

:-)

  

 

Some great TEFL interviews coming to English Raven soon!

I have managed to convince (through all sorts of very creative coercive techniques, like saying "please?") several great people to do interviews for the English Raven blog. Here's a sneak preview for you (with the people here listed in the order their interviews will appear on the blog):

  

1. Andrew Wright, an elder statesman of ELT and the man who collocates with pictures, games and stories/storytelling in our field;

2. Barbara (Hoskins) Sakamoto, my favourite lady on Twitter - but most other people probably know her as one of the talented geniuses behind the Let's Go superstar series for young learners;

3. Dean Stafford, an old colleague and a veteran teacher of young learners in Korea, tells us about his experience and challenges teaching in the public elementary school sector there;

4. Egbert van Keulen, one of the founding partners at the Myngle online language learning sensation, gives us some insights into online language teaching options with Myngle;

5. Les Kirkham, the new Associates' Representative with IATEFL, talks about what IATEFL is doing to become a more global association for teachers (an interview which is the direct result of a certain island owner in Second Life taking mild offense to my post here cheekily proposing that IATEFL might be better named EATEFL...).

 

The first two interviews there have been completed and are now in the editing stage, while the three following that are ongoing and happening as I type (I'm actually pausing at stages during this very posting to cast new questions at all three of them! ~ risks of multi-tasking?).

And the future? Well, a really cool dude in ELT (Lindsay Clandfield) has agreed to do an interview at some stage for the blog (I'm hoping he'll pass on the antidote to his Six Things hypnotic state that has me paranoid about any listing that falls between the numbers 5 and 7).

I'm also rather hopeful of snaffling Ken Wilson, Alex Case, Sean Banville, Larry Ferlazzo, Sherry Terrell, Burcu Akyol, Sara Hannam, Marisa Constantinides (if she agrees not to spank me... too much) Cotter Hue - as the start of a rather lengthy wishlist, anyway (and once I can get them to forgive me for putting their names on the list to start with without asking them first...).

I'm even more open to volunteers! If you're involved in TEFL in some way, don't hesitate to put your hand up for an interview with the Raven (and bear in mind I like interviewing anyone in the TEFL world, irrespective of experience, publications or dubious status as someone Jeremy Harmer or Scott Thornbury would deign to talk directly to in Twitter - "teachers at the chalkface" especially welcome to apply!).

   

:-D