Image credit: Chris Montgomery via Unsplash

Language plays a central role in legal settings. The way linguistic diversity is conceptualized and accommodated can affect access to justice in a myriad ways and there is a plethora of linguistic scholarship to show that. Yet a growing concern among researchers working in this area is that this scholarship may not always reach the right audiences to have as much of a real-world impact as it could or should have.

But how do we make our research more accessible to those who are in a position to improve the design and implementation of law, procedure, and policy? For myself and collaborators like Dr Alexandra Grey, and members of our Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network, our recent efforts have been multi-pronged, involving everything from preparing individual submissions to relevant government inquiries and reviews, through publishing and guest editing in legal journals, to presenting at law conferences.

However, as pioneering law and language scholar Diana Eades recently observed, effecting change in this area is like water dropping on stone: it is a long-term process.

Therefore, it is just as important to reach future lawyers and law- and policy-makers. As a teacher based in a law faculty, 2020 created a unique opportunity for me to work on integrating linguistics research into my law teaching.

In this post, I report back on the way in which I integrated my research expertise – in linguistics and beyond – into my teaching. I first provide some background on the teaching context, and explain what I did to integrate linguistics (and other) scholarship into my teaching during the changes that occurred as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, I will share the feedback I received about the learning materials I developed and critically reflect on possible next steps.

Ethics Law and Justice in 2020

Since beginning as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in 2019, I’ve had the opportunity to teach in a core subject, Ethics Law and Justice (ELJ), which provides (usually) first-year law students with the opportunity to learn about lawyers’ professional practice rules, reflect on ethical legal practice, and on access to justice in legal settings. My Fellowship research project involves exploring the beliefs and practices of a particular group of practitioners – migration agents – and specifically how they and their clients navigate access to justice through their interactions. More broadly, my research is interested in linguistic diversity as a factor for access to justice. As a core subject, all law students must complete ELJ, creating an excellent opportunity for me to reach a large number of potential future legal practitioners at an early stage in their study.

In March 2020, in response to the global spread of Covid-19, UTS made the decision to shift classes online. For ELJ, we shifted to using Blackboard, Zoom and Microsoft Teams, with individual teachers being responsible for the particular timing, structure and medium for their individual seminar groups. A significant change was the way we divided up delivery of the subject content. Each teacher became responsible for preparing a pre-recorded lecture, in the form of an audio-narrated Powerpoint presentation, for one or two weeks of the semester’s material, that would be accessible for the whole ELJ cohort to watch, rather than each individual teacher preparing and presenting the entire semester’s content individually for their groups. The teachers could then focus more energy into designing and conducting the interactive learning components of their individual seminars, and students could watch lecture-type content before (or after!) their live seminar.

Integrating research into law teaching

For me, this meant that I had the opportunity to update the learning materials to reach the whole cohort of over 300 students. I was responsible for the part of the subject exploring social and cultural factors that can affect access to justice, with pre-existing material mentioning refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, Indigenous people, and disability. There was also a little content on language considerations, with some discussion questions about whether students had ever communicated using an interpreter before, and the Local Court Bench Book’s section on interpreters was included as a reading resource.

While still covering the same topics as usual, I redesigned the lecture content to integrate a range of new considerations and explanations, beyond what had been provided previously. These incorporated my and others’ scholarship from my various areas of research interest, including studies on asylum seekers and refugees, language and cultural concerns in legal settings. Some of this research I also added as additional readings, choosing blog posts rather than traditional research outputs to maximize accessibility and engagement for students. Similarly, I added a video resource (Aboriginal Interpreter Service), along with an explanation and instructions, to provide another engaging source that exemplified in practice some of the relevant linguistic and cultural concerns.

Where to next?

Autumn 2020 provided an opportunity for me to integrate my research experience and expertise into my teaching, and the feedback I received overall show promise. Personally, I believe that making these changes also motivated me as a teacher: not only could I share knowledge and do my best to present this in accessible ways for students, I was also able to demonstrate my passion and enthusiasm for these areas.

Most importantly, I was able to raise awareness about language and communication among the next generation of lawyers.

However, like some of my colleagues, I suspect that the remaining challenge is mainly one of delivery rather than content, especially in the context of remote learning. In future, the key way I’d like to refine my approach is to do more to integrate innovative learning technologies. While I am confident and passionate about the content, it is equally important to reflect carefully on how I share my knowledge, and ensure that it is accessible, relatable and engaging. In fact, when teaching topics that are all about optimal communication and equal participation, I’d go so far as to say that this is absolutely essential!

During the NSW school closures in 2020, Amelia Baggerman and Bonnie James undertook a TESOL practicum as part of their Applied Linguistics and TESOL degree at Macquarie University. The practicum is convened by Agnes Bodis. During the practicum, the majority of time is spent in a placement at a language teaching institution. Trainee teachers conduct observations, materials preparation, and supervised teaching practice. The unit design is underpinned by reflective teaching practice and aims to enhance the capacity of taking informed actions in teaching and engaging in the process of continuous learning.

Learn more about the Graduate Certificate of TESOL and the Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University by clicking on the links.

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Amelia Baggerman and Bonnie James

The pandemic turned out to be a learning opportunity (Image credit: Tonik, at Unsplash)

COVID lockdowns all over the world have undeniably affected the way we learn and teach. Teacher training courses have adapted various methods to continue their practices and also prepare student teachers for the changed teaching conditions (Bodis, Reed & Kharchenko, 2020; Pinar, Derin & Enisa, 2020).

The two of us had enrolled in the online stream of the Graduate Certificate of TESOL through Macquarie University the year before the COVID pandemic hit and were committed to finishing it in June 2020. However, due to COVID, our practicum at the Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institute was delayed until the second half of the year.

“How else would our practicum be affected?”, we wondered. Could we still use classroom techniques like pair work, and would we learn everything we needed to?

We need not have worried because completing the Graduate Certificate of TESOL during a pandemic turned out to be quite an enriching experience; perhaps even more valuable than what we were expecting.

Virtual classrooms enhanced our learning experience

Prior to COVID, there was something undeniably isolating about catching up on recorded lectures alone at home. For us, it came as a great relief to hear that our remaining classes would be on Zoom during the pandemic.

Zoom transformed the traditional lectures into small interactive sessions with our professors and fellow students which led to more memorable and in-depth learning. The rapport in the classroom was alive and dynamic, unlike in traditional lectures where professors are physically removed from the audience and mostly provide a unilateral dialogue. On Zoom, we could see our professors and fellow students face to face and interact with them in what seemed to be a more natural medium of communication.

The virtual classroom had an impact on how memorable the sessions were. Our lecturers also encouraged us to form study groups on Zoom. From these study groups and the active interactions with our professors grew colleagueship and an ongoing professional network across different cities in Australia. This ongoing support gave us the confidence that we would not continue our professional development alone upon graduation because we would have a whole community behind us for support.

An unusual practicum experience

Our practicum experience was anything but usual. We commenced our practicum near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, during a time of uncertainty and fear in the community, so much so that a single clearing of the throat would turn heads. One of us remembers swallowing water down the wrong hole whilst watching the mentor teacher. I hadn’t known my mentor teacher for very long and I didn’t feel we had built much of a relationship yet, so I simply tightened my muscles to force the cough down and as tears built up in my eyes, I hoped no one would notice but I thought, if they did, at least I wasn’t coughing! Tears were less of a concern than a clearing of the throat!

During the pandemic, we not only learned to practice teaching, we learned how to handle a pandemic in a learning environment for adults. Upon entry and exit of the classroom, everyone had to sanitise their hands. We had to ask everyone if they were well and if anyone showed any possible cold and flu symptom and at times advise them to get a COVID-19 test.

How do you square pair work and social distancing?

While we were both eager to try out different pair/group work activities that we had learnt about, facilitating said pair/group work turned out to be quite the challenge as social distancing had to be strictly enforced. This meant that the desks were arranged in rows with a minimum of 1.5 square metres between them. Students were allowed to swivel their chairs around to face their partner/s but were supposed to keep to their own desks. This forced us to think creatively, and I (Amelia) was relieved to discover that board games were still an option, even if it meant printing out several A3 copies so that everyone could see. Quizlet and Kahoot games were also an excellent option, as they allowed the students to engage with the material, and each other, without moving at all.

Experiencing the holistic role of teachers

During a time of political ambiguity many decisions had to be made including whether to keep adult institutions such as TAFE open or closed and for how long. It was our head teachers who stepped in to make these important, swift and unprecedented decisions in the best interests of their staff and students; something from which we have learned and will forever admire.

We were reminded of our holistic role as teachers and the significance of this. We were not there to simply teach English. We were there to assist our students in various ways to cope in English-speaking communities, jobs and then, a pandemic. We had a responsibility to ensure that our students understand their responsibilities in response to COVID-19 and the daily updates regarding the pandemic. Some students thought the situation was worse than it was, whereas others were convinced it was less serious than it was. The challenges lay in assessing the readability of the information at hand and then adapting it so that it could be understood by our students without missing important details.

Teaching is a calling

Face-to-Face teaching has returned to many universities and colleges now in Australia. The technical and pedagogical skills we and our lecturers have acquired are staying with us.

Studying and completing our teaching practicum during the pandemic certainly brought about many challenges, but it also made for a particularly enriching and memorable learning experience. Had it not been for Zoom classes, the two of us would not even have met, much less formed the friendship we have today. We discovered that, despite widespread fear in the community and amidst hand sanitisers and socially distanced desks, meaningful learning can very much still take place.

Most importantly, however, we discovered firsthand that the influence of a teacher extends far beyond the four walls of the classroom and into the community at large. This brings with it great responsibility, and great privilege.

References

Bodis, A., Reed, M., & Kharchenko, Y. (2020). Microteaching in isolation: fostering autonomy and learner engagement through VoiceThread. International Journal of TESOL Studies, 2(3), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.46451/ijts.2020.09.14
Ersin, P., Derin, A., & Enisa M. (2020). Boosting preservice teachers’ competence and online teaching readiness through e-practicum during the COVID-19 outbreak. International Journal of TESOL Studies, 2(2), 112-124. https://doi.org/10.46451/ijts.2020.09.09
Piller, I. (2020). Does every Australian have an equal chance to know about COVID-19 restrictions? Language on the move (01 September 2020): https://languageonthemove.com/does-every-australian-have-an-equal-chance-to-know-about-covid-19-restrictions/
Zhou, N. (2020). Australian Universities Plan to ramp up in-person learning in early 2021, The Guardian Australia (20 January 2021) https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jan/20/australian-universities-plan-to-ramp-up-in-person-learning-in-early-2021

Bioblurbs

Amelia Baggerman has always been passionate about travelling, foreign languages and cultures; interests which dovetailed nicely into an ESOL teaching career. After some volunteer teaching in Indonesia and some private tutoring in both Germany and Colombia, she was convinced that teaching foreigners to speak English was the perfect career for her. She completed her CELTA in 2016 and then spent the next few years teaching in private ELICOS centres, before deciding that it was really something she wanted to pursue. This led her to completing a Graduate Certificate of TESOL through Macquarie University in 2020 and now she has very happily settled into her new role teaching at TAFE in Sydney. She looks forward to seeing her students every day and considers it an honour to be entrusted with their education.

Bonnie James commenced her journey in teaching by being a volunteer language tutor whilst studying law at the University of Newcastle. After graduating and working in the legal field with a combined degree in Laws (Honours) / Diploma of Legal Practice and a Bachelor of Arts, she realised that law probably wasn’t the career for her. Once again, she set out to volunteer but this time she volunteered at her local TAFE in the English language department where she found inspirational mentors. This led to Bonnie achieving a 120 hour TESOL Certificate which allowed her to become an online English Foreign Language teacher for primary school students predominantly based in China. To expand her professional opportunities, she completed the Graduate Certificate of TESOL through Macquarie University this year and commenced teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). Bonnie is thankful for all of the wonderful mentors she had including the teachers at TAFE and professors at Macquarie University who made her dream to become an ESOL teacher possible.  linkedin.com/in/bonnie-james-3a31a41a5

So, what has changed? For starters, the learners have changed, and so have we. Digital technologies have spread out vertically and horizontally in all fields of knowledge and fundamentally altered the nature of communication.

Thanks to the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) wave, gamification has been widely accepted and applied in schools and universities. The introduction of game-based elements into non-game scenarios, such as classrooms, has helped teachers to motivate learners and boost the engagement of students in real-time during classes (Skøien, 2018).

Figure 1

One popular game-based learning platform – or game-based student response system (GSRS) – is Kahoot!. Kahoot! went from being a research project back in 2006 to being used in classrooms in over 180 countries. According to its developer (Wang, 2015, p.218), like other games, it has the potential to increase the academic achievement, motivation and classroom dynamics among K-12 and tertiary students.

Nevertheless, Kahoot! has not been widely used in second language (L2) learning contexts. Where it is used, the main targets are still motivation and classroom dynamics. To gain a better understanding of the potential of Kahoot! in L2 teaching, I conducted a social semiotic, multimodal analysis, using tools from Systemics Functional Linguistics (Djonov, Knox and Zhao, 2015).

From the point of view of its design, Kahoot! provides L2 students with limited learning opportunities regarding reading and writing skills.

The analysis of the website structure (Figure 1) suggests that there is a dominance of vertical relations in the platform. This means that the website provides the first user (teacher) some freedom to choose among four options (quiz, survey, discussion and jumble), but this freedom in navigation is not transferred to the second users (students). Once a kahoot quiz starts (Kahoot!’s games are called ‘kahoots’), learners have to complete it and do not have the chance to go back and examine their answers before submitting them. It is a game; and you either make it to the first place or not.

In a more detailed examination of two webpages of a kahoot quiz, a question and its alternatives (see Figure 2), it can be seen that the overall layout of them shows a rather static design, which may reflect the institutional values of Kahoot!’s creator(s): the game is teacher-centred. In addition, there is interdependency among the webpages of a kahoot quiz (see green arrow), and even though it seems that their relations are horizontal, the above-mentioned lack of freedom of navigation signals its vertical design. Furthermore, the absence of a writing component when answering questions diminishes the possibilities smartphones can provide.

Figure 2

Kahoot! has proven to be an amazing motivation booster in many classrooms. However, its design favors the completion of the “game” over any reflection of the content and this, in an ESL/EFL context, plays against the opportunities L2 learners need, such as going at their own pace, reviewing their answers, and writing practice. In this context, as elsewhere, “it remains unclear whether Kahoot! leads to greater learning outcomes than traditional methods” (Licorish, Owen, Daniel, & George, 2018, p.5).

New teaching and learning technologies are exploding around us. It is our responsibility as teachers to choose the best among them, not based on their popularity but their effectiveness; modify the way we could possibly use them if needed; and keep in mind that technology is always subsidiary to learners and learning.

References

Djonov, E., Knox, J. S., & Zhao, S. (2015). Interpreting Websites in Educational Contexts: A Social-Semiotic, Multimodal Approach. In International Handbook of Interpretation in Educational Research (pp. 315-345). Springer, Dordrecht.
Licorish, S., Owen, A., Daniel, H., & George, E. (2018). Students’ perception of Kahoot!’s influence on teaching and learning. Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning, 13(1), 1-23.
Skøien, J. (2018). User Engagement in Game-based Student Response Systems: A Case Study on Kahoot! Retrieved from https://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/handle/11250/2562794
Wang, A. (2015). The wear out effect of a game-based student response system. Computers & Education, 82(C), 217-227.

Native and non-native teachers at Lord Harris’ School, Royapett, Madras, 1865 (Source: British Library)

For some time now, a debate has been raging in TESOL about the relative merits of native and non-native speakers as English language teachers. While many people in the field are critical of the continued dominance of native speakers as “ideal” teachers, proposals for change have largely been ineffectual.

True, job ads asking for “native speakers” are now widely considered discriminatory and the relative strengths of both groups are spruiked at conferences. However, none of this has much changed the fact that institutions, students and parents, by and large, continue to prefer TESOL teachers who they consider to be native speakers; that such teachers are oftentimes paid more and hired into more secure employment; and that teachers considered non-native are regularly subject to micro-aggressions such as having their expertise called into question.

Is there a more effective way to overcome native speaker hegemony other than to educate people about the native speaker fallacy?

Absolutely. It has been done before. The following object lesson of native speaker subordination comes from an unlikely source, namely the British Empire and specifically the East India Company.

Persian – India’s power code

To understand this case study, a bit of historical context is required: when the British brought the Indian subcontinent under colonial control, they displaced an existing state, the Mughal Empire. The Mughals’ state language was Persian. In the 18^th century, when the British rapidly expanded and consolidated their possessions on the subcontinent, Persian had been India’s written language, its power code and its lingua franca for over three centuries. In other words, Persian was the Moghuls’ “technology of governance” (Fisher, 2012, pp. 328f.).

Officer of the East India Company being coached in Persian by a private tutor (Source: Massey & Massey, 1968, p. 473)

In order to rule India, it was therefore essential to know Persian. And Indians knew Persian. Britons did not.

As the East India Company tightened its grip on India, it approached this problem gradually by first replacing Indian speakers of Persian with British speakers of Persian and, further down the track, replacing Persian with English as the language of the state. It is the first step in this process that concerns us here: how did the East India Company go about replacing Indians with Britons as privileged knowers of Persian?

Establishing a Persian language teaching industry

Initially, British colonial officials who wanted to learn Persian (or any other Indian language) were largely left to their own devices and such language study was a matter of private enterprise. Many hired Indian language teachers as private tutors.

Gradually, Persian language learning became more formalized and dedicated language training institutes were established. The most important of these were Fort William College in Calcutta, and, back home in Britain, Haileybury Imperial Service College and Addiscombe Military Seminary. These institutes all opened in the first decade of the 19^th century.

Since the 18^th century, Persian-speaking Indian elites had increasingly shifted from working for the Mughal Empire and its ever smaller and more fragmented successor states to accepting employment from the British. For many of them this meant becoming language teachers.

In India, teaching was a highly respected profession and Indian teachers of Persian initially assumed a high-status position vis-à-vis their British students. They were in a bull market, or so it must have seemed: Persian language teaching became ever more widespread and profitable, not only in the colony, but also in Britain, where middle-class families clamoured for an education that would ensure their sons’ future in lucrative colonial positions. Just how profitable the teaching of Indian languages was can be seen from the autobiography of one such language teacher, Lutfullah:

I regularly held the profession of a teacher of the Persian, Hindustani, Arabic, and Marathi languages to the new comers from England, from time to time, and place to place, as their duty obliged and caprice induced them to go. Upwards of one hundred pupils studied with me during the above period, and none of my scholars returned unlaureled from the Government examination committees. I have a book of most flattering certificates in my possession, and I may say that I was better off than many by following this profession. (Lutfullah, 1858, p. 139)

Haileybury College (Source: Wikipedia)

In the colonial logic of the assumed inferiority of the colonized, high-status Indian language teachers with a good income soon became the targets of envy and efforts to undermine them got underway. Returned colonial officials, in particular, wanted teaching positions for themselves rather than see them occupied by Indians. Given their clout and connections, many of them managed to be recruited into Persian language teaching positions in the new imperial training institutes. That their language competence was sometimes almost non-existent did not matter.

The Professor of Oriental Literature at Addiscombe, for instance, was one John Shakespear, who not only drew a professorial salary but supplemented his income by publishing numerous textbooks and teaching aids. His most successful textbook was one of the earliest grammars of Urdu, A Grammar of the Hindustani Language. First published in 1813, it was reprinted and re-issued in new editions for almost half a century. The above-mentioned Lutfullah met Shakespear during his visit to England in 1844 and describes his encounter as follows:

[I] had the honour of being introduced to three men of learning, viz., John Shakespear, the author of the Hindustani Dictionary […]. Knowing the first-named gentleman to be the author of a book in our language, I addressed to him a very complimentary long sentence in my own language. But, alas! I found that he could not understand me, nor could he utter a word in that language in which he had composed several very useful books. (Lutfullah, 1858, p. 389)

Subordinating native speakers

The above example can leave no doubt that the linguistic qualifications of Indians were superior to those of British language teachers. Even so, the former were excluded almost entirely from the enterprise of Persian language teaching, well before that enterprise was abandoned entirely in favour of making Indians learn English.

Addiscombe Military Seminary, c. 1859 (Source: Wikipedia)

The subordination of native speaker teachers was achieved in two ways, namely through arguments related to teacher identity and through a reorganization of language teaching.

The arguments related to teacher identity basically stated that Muslim men were unfit to teach Christian boys and young men. The board of Haileybury College, for instance, decided in 1816 that “the linguistic advantages of having a ‘native speaker’ teach British students was outweighed by the alleged disruption these Muslim Indian men had on the students’ moral education” (Fisher, 2012, p. 344). As in other language training institutions, Indian teachers were replaced with British teachers.

Reorganization of language teaching meant that Indian ways of language teaching (through the study of literature) were devalued in favour of British ways of language teaching (through the study of grammars and dictionaries). While the former approach requires a high level of language competence of the teacher, the latter does not.

Furthermore, Indian teachers were reframed as specialists in pronunciation, and pronunciation as a language skill was marginalized. Instead of hiring them into teacher roles, Indian teachers were offered positions as drill masters and teaching assistants of British teachers. The latter were fashioned as experts both in methods of language teaching and in the grammar skills that were now considered the essential test of language competence.

By the 1840s, all Indian language teachers had been removed from imperial language training institutes and the newly established university chairs in Persian, Arabic and other oriental languages all went to Britons. Any Indian language teachers who remained in Britain were relegated to the private tutoring market, which was shrinking, too, as a knowledge of Persian and other Indian languages became increasingly irrelevant to pursuing a career in the colonies.

Fort William College (Source: Navrang India)

Who is to be master?

As is obvious from this brief account, the battle between Indians and Britons over who was a better teacher of Indian languages was fought on linguistic terrain only on the surface. Some of the British 19^th century superstars of oriental language teaching such as John Shakespear obviously had serious linguistic deficits. That did not keep them from becoming privileged knowers of colonial languages. A holistic knowledge of the language, cultural competence and conversational fluency were all devalued in favour of a focus on methods and a narrow understanding of language proficiency as grammatical mastery.

Ironically, once Persian was out of the way as the power code of India and the global English language teaching enterprise got underway, the rules of the game were re-written yet again. What we consider desirable linguistic competence today is to a significant degree shaped by the strengths and weaknesses of the new privileged language knowers, native speakers of English.

References

Eastwick, E. B. (Ed.) (1858). Autobiography of Lutfullah, a Mohamedan Gentleman; and the transactions with his fellow-creatures; interspersed with remarks on the habits, customs, and character of the people with whom he had to deal. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
Fisher, M. H. (2012). Teaching Persian as an Imperial Language in India and in England during the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries. In B. Spooner & W. L. Hanaway (Eds.), Literacy in the Persianate world : writing and the social order (pp. 328-358). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Massey, R., & Massey, J. (1968). Lutfullah in London, 1844. History Today, 18(7), 473-479.

PASCH Schools: Partners for the future

Last week I was privileged to attend the 3^rd Conference of School Principals of PASCH Schools in Southeast Asia. A ‘PASCH school’ is a regular secondary school with a particular emphasis on the learning and teaching of German as an additional language. PASCH schools constitute a global network of more than 1,700 schools. ‘PASCH’ stands for ‘Schools – Partners of the Future.’ Funded by the German government, the PASCH network was initiated in 2008 in order to offer opportunities to youths from around the globe to learn German and to develop a positive relationship with modern Germany. PASCH supports professional development training for teachers, provides language learning resources for schools, offers scholarships for students to study in Germany, and numerous other virtual and non-virtual exchange and collaboration opportunities, including global student newspapers.

Attended by representatives of various national ministries of education, school principals, German language teachers, industry representatives and former students from across Southeast Asia and Australasia, the conference provided an excellent opportunity to gain an understanding of the state of the art of language education in the region.

Most language teaching efforts across the region are, unsurprisingly, devoted to English. However, there is a clear sense that English is no longer enough. To begin with, the countries of the region are characterized by enormous linguistic diversity and mother tongue education in addition to instruction in the national language is increasingly incorporated into curricula.

Second, with the greater regional integration that the introduction of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015 promises neighbouring languages are gaining in importance. While as yet weakly integrated in most curricula, their role is set to expand.

Finally, there are other international languages such as Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese or Spanish. Offering the latter in the curriculum is often a niche effort of schools who are trying to differentiate themselves from other schools and who are attempting to provide their students with an additional edge. That teaching international languages other than English is intended to create a small elite group of cultural mediators is best illustrated with the example of Singapore. There, the opportunity to study a third foreign language is offered to students who achieve in the top ten percent in the primary school leaving certificate. Only these top academic achievers are able to pursue a third language in high school by attending a Ministry of Education Language Centre (MOELC) in addition to their regular studies. The languages on offer include Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, French, German, Japanese, Malay and Spanish.

While German may seem like a relatively irrelevant language to pursue in Southeast Asia, this is in fact not true for students at PASCH schools. These highly motivated students do so with two main goals in mind: to pursue tertiary education at a university in Germany and/or to pursue employment with a German company. Speakers at the conference included a number of students who had achieved their goal and who spoke about their experiences of learning German in school, participating in exchange programs, studying at a German university and working in a role where their German skills are advantageous.

In addition to achieving personal aims, fostering German skills among a small group of cultural mediators also benefits the wider society, as speakers from various national ministries of education stressed. These benefits are related particularly to knowledge transfer. Interesting examples include partnerships with German companies to deliver an innovative automotive engineering program in a Malaysian college or partnerships between Singaporean polytechnics and German small-to-medium enterprises to deliver a dual vocational training program. In fact, attending industry representatives stressed the importance of combining language skills with strong academic and vocational skills for success in the global workplace.

Finally, a number of school representatives argued that a focus on German had improved overall language education in their school. A teacher from an Australian high school, for instance, mentioned that – in the context of Australia’s notorious ‘monolingual mindset’ – his school’s focus on German has had positive effects on language learning more generally. As students in the German immersion program have discovered the value of learning German, their desire to learn another language has also increased and the school has unexpectedly seen enrolments in its Japanese language program rise, too.

In Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, the positive side-effects of a school’s focus on German are different and relate to improved teacher quality. Speakers from these countries explained that teacher quality – both in terms of proficiency and pedagogy – was a concern. This affects predominantly English language teachers, as English is the most widely taught language. Participating in the professional development opportunities offered by the PASCH school program has helped to disseminate pedagogy training across languages and thus has resulted in improving the professionalism of English language teachers, too.

Despite their diverse backgrounds all speakers stressed that the problems facing humanity today are global problems and that the world needs to move beyond competition to become an international learning community. Linguistic diversity will inevitably mediate the success of our partnerships for the future.

Should ‘helping with English’ be part of the brief of humanitarian aid workers? (Source: helpage.org)

Over a few years of involvement in the aid sector in Asia, I became aware that aid workers turn their noses up at ‘English work’. Managers for my Australian government volunteering program encouraged us not to be sucked in to being human dictionaries while on NGO postings. In China, where I was, there was a bristling critique because USA’s Peace Corps volunteers were “only” sent to teach English: ‘How linguistically imperialist!’, we thought.

However, our local colleagues at NGOs and so called ‘development-sector’ government agencies often made requests of us native English speakers: to talk English with them, proofread and draft reports, apply for grants, translate the organisation’s website, help with overseas university applications and tutor their friends’ children. This sparked complaints like ‘I feel like I’m here mostly to translate’ and ‘I’m doing proofreading and admin tasks which I don’t see as capacity building’.

It sure is frustrating to move overseas and find you are expected to provide little but ‘white face time’ in your job. But is English language aid underrated?

Discounting ‘English work’ doesn’t happen because aid workers are haughty. These people have professional training in fields like environmental science or public health and believe they were hired to contribute in those areas. Moreover, many native English speakers recognize that they have no professional language teaching experience. Most aid workers are conscientious global citizens, wary of being language imperialists. But these ‘good reasons’ are misconceived, I argue.

Wrong Skills

Without teacher training, you are a less-than-ideal candidate to teach, no question. But in the regions I’m talking about, learners seldom get to select from a smorgasbord of English-speaking trained teachers and native English-speaking non-teachers. Even the Peace Corps receive some teacher training and teach in impoverished areas where TESOL staff-members are otherwise in short supply. Moreover, when learning a new language, important learning is done beyond the classroom and after childhood: for instance, between aid workers and their adult colleagues. Psychologist Vygotsky showed peer group learning with ‘more knowledgeable others’ was a productive part of language acquisition, with no teacher needed. Modelling grammatical and pragmatically-appropriate language provides useful input for learners. In short, helping colleagues with their English tasks or even just conversing can be valuable for their language learning and is within any English speaker’s ability. 

Imperialism?

In many countries, people see access to a native English speaker as a boon. Why not give communities what they think would assist their upward mobility? The contribution to informal, out-of-classroom English learning these native speakers provide is something their colleagues and communities may find even more valuable than the specific aid project, especially as the expense, scarcity and systemic preference given to children’s classes make formal language learning inaccessible to many adolescents and adults who want it.

As Kamwangamalu (2013, p. 328) notes of Africa – and I’ve found this in China, too – ‘stakeholders reject their own indigenous languages […] because they consider them insignificant and of no practical value in the linguistic marketplace.’ In this, local stakeholders are not wrong; English is indisputably of greatest value in many markets. Many (including me) would say this is evidence of linguistic hegemony and non-native English speakers are complicit in their own linguistic domination by prioritising English, embracing the coloniser’s model of the world. Even so, is it an incoming English speaker’s place to decide to attack hegemony by refusing to help people proofread?

Often, English is the language of power and funding, particularly for international aid, and non-elites may well perceive English as a resource monopolized by elites to preserve their status. For instance, Ghanaians ‘expressed the view that using the vernacular as an instructional medium was a subtle strategy employed by the elite to perpetuate communities’ marginalization from mainstream society’ (Mfum-Mensah 2005, p. 80).

Whether or not we oppose English’s dominance ideologically, it is beneficial to proofread co-workers’ donor reports, make templates for the office and attend events to speak for the organisation or those it assists, in English. The more co-worker inclusion in these activities, the better. That oft-encountered request to help a friend-of-a-friend with a personal English task should likewise be accepted, because language competencies can function as collective resources. Indeed, many linguists now advocate studying ‘actual linguistic, communicative, semiotic resources’ rather than ‘languages’ (Blommaert, 2010, p. 102). English resources can benefit networks rather than merely individuals. In expanding the networks around English resources, inequality and elitism is reduced.   

Both national politics and international development are ‘Fields’ (Bourdieu 1991). English is both economically and symbolically valuable in these Fields. Native English speakers – especially professionals doing aid volunteering – have an ability to use professional-register English at less expense (a Bourdieuian ‘Habitus’).  So it’s efficient for them to do tasks requiring professional English. Importantly, this is not short term efficiency at the expense of long term efficiency; helping out with English tasks now doesn’t preclude co-workers’ language acquisition in the longer term. Rather, it can play a part in their improvement so the ‘cost’ of professional English for colleagues will decrease over time. English-speaking aid workers, in doing ‘English work’, can improve their hosts’ access to material support and their ability to be heard in international forums.

The benefit of mobility of individuals, of organisations and across community networks is hard to weigh against the detriment of linguistic imperialism, but this weighing up should not be shirked, and nor should the ‘English work’ involved.

References

Blommaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, Polity.

Kamwangamalu, N. M. (2013). Effects of policy on English-medium instruction in Africa. World Englishes, 32 (3), 325-337 DOI: 10.1111/weng.12034

Mfum-Mensah, O. (2005). The impact of colonial and postcolonial Ghanian language policies on vernacular use in two northern Ghanaian communities. Comparative Education 41 (1), 71-85.

The Omidvar brothers on the road: amazing feats of discovery and language learning?

In his most recent round of interviews with the magazine Særzæmin-e Mæn (“My Country”), Issa Omidvar, one of the two adventurous Iranian brothers who undertook a 10-year motorbike journey across the world (1954-1964), shares details of how he and his brother learned English and Spanish, the two languages they needed most for their long journey. Before they left Iran in 1954 they barely knew any foreign languages, so they took some English courses and managed to learn the language in less than three months.

After they set foot on Mexican soil, they learned Spanish, a language they did not know even a single word of. Issa Omidvar claims that, in two weeks, they were both fluent in Spanish and had no difficulty communicating with Mexicans, who went out of their way to welcome them to their country. He goes on to relate that after a month, they were even able to deliver lectures in Spanish for their enthusiastic hosts:

روزی که قدم به مکزیک گذاشتیم زبانشان را نمی دانستیم. اما در عرض پانزده روز توانستیم به زبانشان صحبت کنیم. ما حتی بعد از یک ماه توانستیم به اسپانیایی کنفرانس بدهیم.

[The day we set foot on Mexican soil we didn’t know their language. But within 15 days we could speak their language. We were even able to hold talks in Spanish after a month.]

Issa Omidvar does not share any details about their language learning methods and his account of the brothers’ language learning feats is certainly impressive. But is it really true?

We know for a fact that most language learners take much more than ‘two weeks’ to achieve even a modest level of conversational fluency. Yet, we should not dismiss Issa’s account as an exaggeration. Therefore, we need to ask ourselves as language educators faced with students who usually take years to achieve substantial proficiency, what can we learn from the Omidvar brothers’ account?

The situation described by Issa Omidvar seems to include crucial components of successful language learning: they were young and talented and they had a communicative need:

چون هم جوان و مستعد بودیم و هم واقعا احتیاج داشتیم.

[The reason is that we were both young and talented and we were really in need of the language.]

Reading carefully between the lines, one would be able to establish how imperative their ‘need’ must have been. They made documentaries on the road and held impromptu screenings in universities, halls and arts centers. They needed to know the language of the locals in order to charge an entrance fee and thus finance the next leg of their trip!

Examples of the kind of language learning described by Issa Omidvar can easily be found today. The Fluentin3Months website, for example, whose “language hacking tips” are provided by an alleged polyglot, promotes a more or less similar language learning experience. The first and foremost question that readers have when they arrive on the website is how is it really possible to achieve fluency in three months (or actually much less)? The website features interviews with people who claim to have reached conversational fluency in a language in three months or less, “thanks to a combination of passion for the language, full time immersion, and a general good knack for learning it.”

What this ‘knack’ entails is not usually revealed unless you buy one of their language learning packages. At the same time, one must not lose sight of the fact that this type of language learning, however effective it is claimed to be, is not for those who want to get an A in their language class, nor is it for those who want to learn a language to take an academic test, to write perfectly, to pass a class, or to use grammar appropriately.

If you need a language to use it in academic or professional contexts at any level of complexity, it seems unlikely that there is a way around learning a language the hard way.

In English language teaching ads English seems always fun, easy and accessible to everyone

Taiwanese people’s motivation for learning English is a desire to communicate and a major obstacle to the mastery of spoken English has been the lack of opportunities to speak. As noted in my previous post, the purpose of buxiban is to assist students to pass standardized tests rather than to speak proficiently. Although effective for test-taking, these traditional grammar-translation and teacher-centered methods do not produce fluent speakers. This is a common complaint from teachers and students alike. Students are continually frustrated by the fact that they have been studying English for many years, but can’t carry a basic conversation or communicate with a foreigner.

This realization has popularized teaching methods such as Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and English-Only immersion methods. As a result, there is a huge English language teaching market in Taiwan comprised of literally thousands of language schools geared towards teaching English for communication. The methods employed in private language schools emphasize active participation in the learning process and include a variety of teaching aids and materials, handouts, activities, and games to assist learners in increasing their English speaking proficiency. Moreover, the use of native English-speaking teachers and small class sizes are other factors in the success of private language schools. Learners learn to use the language as a tool of communication rather than viewing it as one more subject to be memorized and regurgitated.

Although there is often a notable improvement in a student’s speaking ability there are socio-economic aspects of language learning that render these innovative communicative and English-immersion methodologies problematic, such as the linguistic environment outside the school and the almighty TaiBi (Taiwan Dollar).

In order to illustrate my point, I will use a TV commercial by Jordan Language School. The dynamic commercial presents Jordan Language School as an English language learner’s utopia: Taiwanese students are taught by Caucasian foreigners, multi-media computer programs are utilized, and parents participate with their children in the learning process. The main theme of the commercial is that Jordan’s English Language School uses a scientific teaching method that integrates classroom lessons with multimedia and Internet English teaching. The commercial ends with their slogan, 喬登數位美語，輕鬆快樂無比 ‘Jordan’s Digital American English, absolutely relaxing and fun.’

Slogans such as this one come to define the ideal English language teaching method independent of context.

This commercial promotes English teaching as a practical skill and it suggests that English can be learned easily if the ideal teaching method is used: interactive immersion classroom teaching with an enagaging Caucasian teacher combined with computer technology. After school, children can learn English with their parents at home via online English learning or with language-learning devices such as smartphones.

Commercials such as this one suggest that English teaching and learning is always autonomous and never affected by social, cultural and economic conditions outside the classroom. Nothing could be further from the truth – in Taiwan as elsewhere.

The reality is that disadvantaged children often have limited access to the Internet and cannot afford to study in private language schools.

Private language schools are also privileged as regards method because students tend to be grouped by ability levels in private schools. By contrast, teachers in public schools are usually faced with students of varying levels of English ability. Dealing with a diversity of needs is an elementary school is an English teacher’s greatest challenge in Taiwan.

Methods used in private language schools encourage parents to spend money for additional English study, so their children will not fall behind in their regular elementary school English classes. This creates an injustice whereby wealthy families are able to allocate significant amounts of money to their children’s English education, while poor families are unable to do the same for their children. In other words, it is only wealthy families who can afford to send their children to English language schools and/or send them abroad to immerse themselves in real life communication situations in an English-speaking country. The end result is that English language learning to high levels of proficiency has become the exclusive privilege of the wealthy.

English is often touted as a way to lift poor people out of poverty but the exact opposite is true: English is an important instrument of social stratification in contemporary Taiwanese society (as elsewhere?) where the rich get richer because they can afford to learn the kind of English that opens doors while the poor get poorer because they can’t.

Carrie Chen’s successful chalk-and-talk method

In my previous post, I discussed the celebrity status of star teachers in Taiwan. Although their good looks and personality do play a key role in a star teacher’s popularity, this is only part of the story. These star teachers also possess the knowledge, skills and abilities to teach students in a way that helps them reach their goals. Interestingly, they usually do not employ the much-lauded Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach when they teach nor do they follow the monolingual English-Only Immersion Method. These teachers prefer to use more traditional and local approaches, such as grammar-translation and/or teacher-centered methods. This is due to the fact that the purpose of language teaching in cram schools is different.

In the case of star teachers, they are teaching in buxiban that are focused on assisting students with standardized exam preparation. The star teachers know that more traditional approaches to teaching are the best methods for helping students to pass standardized tests. Clearly, good teaching is context-dependent. It is impossible to separate English teaching methodology from the contexts in which it operates.

I will use the example of a highly successful star teacher, Carrie Chen, to demonstrate how a star teacher teaches their students. Let’s take for example Carrie’s approach to teaching English vocabulary.  Armed with only a blackboard and chalk, Carrie relies on her confidence, enthusiasm and teaching skills to motivate her students.

She begins her class (in the video 05:20) by saying the supposedly longest word in the dictionary, ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.’ She then writes it down quickly on the board to demonstrate her vocabulary expertise. This way she contends that English becomes fun and easy if students study with her saying and they won’t forget the content she teaches them.

Carrie employs a highly traditional and nowadays unconventional method of English teaching, i.e. no teaching aids and teacher centered. She uses Mandarin Chinese as the medium of instruction and the main focus of teaching is employing techniques (association, cognates, comparison …) to help students memorize English vocabulary. Using a combination of her witty humor, off-color jokes and personal anecdotes to make English vocabulary memorable rather than just being a bunch of syllables and sounds strung together.

For example, she makes fun of foreigners who do not know how to pronounce ‘謝謝 – xie xie (thank you)’ and ‘不謝 – bu xie (you are welcome)” in Mandarin Chinese correctly, instead they might say ‘shit shit (xie xie)’ and ‘bullshit (bu xie)’ to Taiwanese people. An off-color joke she used in the video described above is her strategy to memorize the word ‘phenomenon:’ she explains that ‘phe’ means a female elephant or a fat girl. If a girl is fat, ‘no’ ‘men’ are interested in being ‘on’ her. Hence an easy way to memorize the spelling of ‘phenomeon’ as ‘phe no men on.’

During a speech at a National Taiwan University, Carrie listed some keys to being a successful buxiban English teacher including: a smart and neat appearance, good command of English, and devotion and enthusiasm. She continues by emphasizing the need for encouraging students and remaining positive at all the times and incorporating humor and active learning techniques to motivate and sustain students interest.

The test-oriented method used in buxiban is not exotic or fancy. The secret lies in the way the star teachers conducts the class. The celebrity status of star teachers and their popularity does seem to be skin deep. Without their looks these teachers would not be able to pull in the students into the buxiban. Still, it is interesting to note, that although a lot of their popularity is premised on their good looks and charisma, many of these teachers do in fact know how to teach English very well. If they don’t teach well, their looks will not be enough to keep them their job and star status.

The quality of their teaching methods is reflected in the high scores their students achieve on the standardized tests given for admission into high schools or universities.