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?
:-)
