From Arts and Letters Daily, here’s a fascinating article from The New Yorker about the EFL teacher Li Yang and his school Crazy English in China. It’s an amazing story:

He has built an empire out of his country’s deepening devotion to a language it once derided as the tongue of barbarians and capitalists. His philosophy, captured by one of his many slogans, is flamboyantly patriotic: “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!”…Li, who is thirty-eight, has made his name on an E.S.L. technique that one Chinese newspaper called English as a Shouted Language. Shouting, Li argues, is the way to unleash your “international muscles.” Shouting is the foreign-language secret that just might change your life.

His boot camp, mass psychology approach has lead to accusations of demagoguery, racism, and “huckster nationalism”, and even worse it would appear that he doesn’t use the communicative approach. But instead of dismissing his approach out of hand, I think it’s actually worth thinking about, because the Crazy English phenomenon touches on many interesting questions for language teachers.

Teacher as motivator
In China, Li Yang is the “Elvis of English, perhaps the world’s only language teacher known to bring students to tears of excitement”. Chinese newspapers describe him as a “demagogue,” and his classes “like cult meetings” and asked if he was “one of those cults where the leaders insist on being treated like deities.”

Li’s cosmology ties the ability to speak English to personal strength, and personal strength to national power….To his fans, Li is less a language teacher than a testament to the promise of self-transformation. In the two decades since he began teaching, at age nineteen, he has appeared before millions of Chinese adults and children. He routinely teaches in arenas, to classes of ten thousand people or more. Some fans travel for days to see him. The most ardent spring for a “diamond degree” ticket, which includes bonus small-group sessions with Li. The list price for those seats is two hundred and fifty dollars a day—more than a full month’s wages for the average Chinese worker. His students throng him for autographs. On occasion, they send love letters.

Students repeat “English is a piece of cake. I can totally conquer English. I will use English. I will learn English. I will live in English. I am no longer a slave to English. I am its master. I believe English will become my faithful servant and lifelong friend. . . .”

In his intensive courses, students run together at dawn and walk on burning coals after class.

Limits of traditional classroom approaches

He mocks China’s rigid classroom rules…He strives to be as unprofessorial as possible. On book covers, he wears a suit and tie, with his cuffs rolled up to the elbow, like a bond trader. It affirms his image as the anti-intellectual who has wrested English from the grip of test proctors and college-admissions committees.

Role of the affective filter

Li’s real power, though, derives from a genuinely inspiring axiom, one that he embodies: the gap between the English-speaking world and the non-English-speaking world is so profound that any act of hard work or sacrifice is worth the effort. He pleads with students “to love losing face.” In a video for middle- and high-school students, he said, “You have to make a lot of mistakes. You have to be laughed at by a lot of people. But that doesn’t matter, because your future is totally different from other people’s futures.”

ELF and the status of the native speaker

Li professes little love for the West. His populist image benefits from the fact that he didn’t learn his skills as a rich student overseas; this makes him a more plausible model for ordinary citizens. In his writings and his speeches, Li often invokes the West as a cautionary tale of a superpower gone awry. “America, England, Japan—they don’t want China to be big and powerful!” a passage on the Crazy English home page declares. “What they want most is for China’s youth to have long hair, wear bizarre clothes, drink soda, listen to Western music, have no fighting spirit, love pleasure and comfort! The more China’s youth degenerates, the happier they are!” Recently, he used a language lesson on his blog to describe American eating habits and highlighted a new vocabulary term: “morbid obesity.”

ELF, ESP and English language instrumentalism

His philosophy, captured by one of his many slogans, is flamboyantly patriotic: “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!”…A vast national appetite has elevated English to something more than a language: it is not simply a tool but a defining measure of life’s potential. China today is divided by class, opportunity, and power, but one of its few unifying beliefs—something shared by waiters, politicians, intellectuals, tycoons—is the power of English….English has become an ideology, a force strong enough to remake your résumé, attract a spouse, or catapult you out of a village.

What an amazing phenomenon - humans are endlessly fascinating.

Is it superficial and gimmicky? Yes.

Does much of it elicit the “yuck” response? To me, yes.

Do many students learn more English than they would have in a traditional classroom? My guess: absolutely.

And that’s what makes it interesting.

Extremely interesting article.

Fortunately I was able to attend the BESIG conference in Berlin in November - there were many very useful workshops and presentations, and it was great to be able to finally meet many of the folks I’m in contact with online.

Probably the most interesting session for me was David Graddol’s plenary talk on the future of business English. He made some intriguing points:

• according to his research, 74% of business conversations take place among non-native speakers
• as a result, there is a growing recognition that “intelligibility” is as important as accuracy
• employers are now less interested in exam scores and more interested in what the employee can do with English
• the number of people learning will English will peak globally at around 2 billion in the year 2010
• after 2010, the number of English learners will start to drop off, because national curriculums are starting English much earlier in primary school, and then moving into content classes (i.e. history class, but the language of instruction is English). Thus learners are reaching an advanced level (say, C1) by the time they enter university.

Much of this will be familiar to anyone who has read Graddol’s latest research, English Next, which was commissioned by the British Council. You can download the .pdf here.

Karen Richardson has a nice write-up of the conference for One Stop English.

I was also a speaker, and gave a presentation on “Web 2.0 as a Business English catalyst”. Lots of excellent questions after the talk. I spent some time pointing out how the new approaches to the web (”web 2.0″) correspond strongly with the principles of social constructivist learning theory, and how this relates to teaching business English. I then gave the audience a sneak peak of the English360 platform and showed how we have pulled those new approaches into a collaborative, web-based teaching tool.

(photo below) Here I was doing a brief overview to be sure everyone in the audience was on the same page regarding “social constructivist” approaches. It was interesting that many in the mostly European audience were unfamiliar with the “sage on stage” vs “guide on side” terms…maybe these terms are more common in the US?

(Photo below) Here I was showing the relationships between different approaches. The inner circle is the more traditional “teacher lecturer” model, which focuses on what happens cognitively in the brain (mostly remember and reproduce). The second, larger circle represents the communicative approach with a social constructivist foundation: the focus moves from the individual to the group, which works together on tasks involving info exchange. A key point is that the second circle doesn’t negate the first, it expands it…people can and do learn through “passively” absorbing a lecture (I also discussed this here, maybe a bit too aggressively!). But, then working with that new knowledge with others, to produce a result, will usually solidify that learning.

But much of this is classroom based. The third circle represents how web 2.0 approaches can pull this classroom-based activity into the real world, which is, after all, the whole point.

You can get the slides here off the BESIG site (I’m J4, way at the bottom, and -warning- it’s a heavy file download.)

I have to think about this more, since it’s too easy to make a superficial judgement. Anyway it’s a neat story. And if, like me, you suffer from perfectionism, good advice in general:

A ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of the work they produced. All those on the right would be graded solely on their works’ quality.

His procedure was simple: On the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group; 50 pound of pots rated an A, 40 pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an A.

At grading time, the works with the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of clay.

From Penelope Trunk.

We’ve posted on Project Follow-Through before, and here’s another reference, from the linguist John McWhorter, on bilingual education and the Norse.
Via Arts and Letter Daily.

There’s a lot to love about dogme and dogme-influenced classroom approaches. With individual students, we tie dogme principles to performance support, which leads to an emergent syllabus, and that’s it..with the right teacher that’s the most powerful BE environment that we have found.

That said, Sandy’s send up of dogme is too funny. If you’ve spent any time on the dogme Yahoo group this will crack you up. (Warning: may be offensive to some.)

Regarding the post below, 20 minutes later I ran across this, on the Eide Neurolearning Blog. Check out #1.

Also and incidentally, via Boing Boing, a nice clock for your whiteboard.

And a nice idea for a BE reading class or two.

I always feel silly using emoticons when in chat and email, but this post by BJ Fogg explains why I still do it, regardless. BJ Fogg is the author of Persuasive Technology and an expert on how interfaces can influence behavior. His new project YackPack looks like an extremely cool tool, in addition to being a Good Thing, and it’ll be interesting to see how it fares.

And regarding the power of emotion, Fogg states

We humans are wired to be emotional, and we broadcast these emotions naturally — facial expressions, body movements, and voice inflections. When we know someone’s emotional state, we can interact with them more effectively at home or at work. We can make better decisions about what to say and do. For example, if my neighbor’s face shows tension and her voice is stressed, I know it’s a bad time to ask a favor. Emotions have practical value.

So regardless of which role we occupy with our learners, a key competency for teachers is emotional intelligence. Coupled with what Malcolm Gladwell calls thin-slicing, emotional intelligence allows teachers to make split-second decisions regarding correction, classroom management, and learner motivation that can make the difference between effective learning and tuned-out students.

In fact, let me propose this as a foundation principle for teaching:

The single most important component in your teaching is your emotional connection with your students.

I’ve thought this through for a few minutes and this seems a solid proposition, as long as we maintain the implicit “all other things being equal” clause. In other words, although there are hundreds of variables to address, the most critical single variable in teaching success would be this emotional connection: recognizing and understanding our students’ emotions, and using this communicative connection to direct our classroom decisions (like this).

Thoughts?

Sorry for disappearing but Wilma wreaked havoc with downtown Miami…some parts still don’t have power.

When I finally got back onto Bloglines I had over 3500 unread posts to catch up on (…sigh…). So, where to start? Well, the ESL folder of course, and, alphabetically, Autono Blogger came up first, which is a great way to start, since he’s been on a roll recently, with some great stuff on the nature of teacher authority, classroom management, and a teacher’s role in a learner-centered classroom. I was reading along with pleasure, scrolling down the posts, when…No! It can’t be! It’s spreading! The viral “violence in the classroom” hyperbole is still propagating!

If you’re not familiar with Violence-in-the-Classroom Hyperbole (VICH) syndrome, anyone infected will grotesquely stretch the word “violence” to describe what our educational institutions do everyday to students. Following the highly contagious patient zero, who stated that “any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence”, VICH sufferers believe that “standardized testing and being forced to submit to institutionally defined learning objectives without [the students’] informed consent, that is violence”.

The main symptom of VICH is a loss of perspective, and is manifested by an obsessive fixation on university students in Australia, Canada, Japan, and the US. Instead of recognizing that these students have won the lottery of life, with opportunities and wealth beyond the wildest dreams of 99% of humanity, VICH sufferers bemoan the “organized child abuse” of “compulsory training in subordination” which leads students to behave like “domesticated livestock”.

The VICH syndrome is dehabilitating for a number of reasons. First, by (mis)using the word “violence” when referring to non-violent behaviour, those infected desensitize others to the word and more importantly the meaning of violence. The tragic paradox of the VICH syndrome is apparent here, because although the infected may be the first to condemn violence against the young, they are the first to equate violence with, say, the TOEIC, thus depreciating the word and those who truly suffer from what the word means. Secondly, due to this misuse of language, those infected lose credibility as change agents (and again the paradox: they are therefore less able to improve the very thing they are criticizing). Thus, late-stage VICH sufferers are reduced to a state of impassioned impotence.*

I am however a bit worried, since, in terms of VICH syndrome, I’m definitely in the high-risk population:
+ I’m a true believer in the need to change the way we educate
+ I agree with much of what VICH sufferers complain about
+ I majored in philosophy at university, fervently discussed Fanon (a Freire fellow-traveller), and wore black clothes and rimless glasses while passionately arguing the failures of the capitalist-industrialist complex.**

So I’m definitely in danger of VICH infection. But, fortunately, I was inoculated in my youth. You see, I went to a public school in Salina, Kansas, where I was subjected to the “Six Lessons” that according to chronic VICH sufferer John Taylor Gatto*** lead to “moral and intellectual paralysis”: I had a classroom, classes were announced using bells, the teacher was in charge of classroom and curriculum, I got a report card, and I was supervised. Oh the horror. I guess I’ve repressed memories of the violence I was subjected to, because 30 years later it seems to me that, far from being a victim, I was blessed with a wonderful education. I suppose though that VICH sufferers would counter that my warm memories are proof of the brainwashing I experienced.

* Apologies for linking to myself twice in the same paragraph.

** Actually as I wrote this I realized that I’m still doing all that.

*** Gatto is a study in contrasts. Although a long-term VICH sufferer, he left the System to teach at the Albany Free School, which rocks. And he is an amazing wordsmith. Check this out on the tyranny of bells (one of the Six Lessons):

The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

Man…I wish I could write like that! “The secret logic of schooltime …that inoculates each undertaking with indifference.” Whoa! In fact it’s so good you could almost fail to notice that it’s absolute bullshit.

If we had a “post of the month” award, Autono Blogger would win hands down for questioning his approaches when faced with inconvenient facts. The whole post is a must-read, but here are the lines that grabbed me:

It’s whether I’m too attached to my teaching philosophy that I might be overlooking evidence that it isn’t working….would I be so enamoured of my belief that learners construct their own knowledge that I would doggedly pursue my chosen course regardless?

It’s wonderful how Autono Blogger questions the learner autonomy/authentic material/teacher-as-facilitator paradigm that we all revel in (and if you browse through the English360 site you’ll see that I’m deep in the autonomy camp as well). But what happens when the actual results get in the way? In my experience, most of us ignore reality and cling to the group buzz associated with exciting concepts and shared enlightenment. Who suffers from that? Our students, of course.

I was taking a really interesting online course earlier this year and a funny thing happened. Here’s the story: The course format was great - community-focused, forums, a wiki, both synchronous and asynchronous activities - and I learned a lot from some really bright people. Of course a dominant theme was the poverty of the “sage-on-a-stage” teacher-as-authority model in favor of the more enlightened constructivist teacher-as-facilitator model.

About the third week in we had a synchronous e-learning activity held on a webconferencing application, where about 20 of us from around the world signed in and saw a great presentation by an expert on education and RSS/blogging. He spoke for about 30 minutes as we watched his powerpoint slides roll by, then had several minutes for questions. The next morning the course forum was abuzz with praise for how much we all learned from this activity, until one guy (bless him) said “Hey - how could we have possibly learned anything? That was an archtypical teacher-centered sage-on-the-stage event…we didn’t learn anything! We just had a control-based hierarchical power structure re-inforced, that’s all”.

Forum silence. Then some forum muttering about “clinging to old ideas”. Then slowly the party got back to speed as the community antibodies ejected the intruder.

At the excellent EuroCALL conference in August we attended about a dozen 30-minute presentations every day; some had a few minutes for questions, many didn’t. I learned a lot there as well, and I didn’t construct a thing - just sat there passively and had knowledge poured down my throat. And of course the topic of many of the presentations, either implicitly or explicitly, was that that very teaching mode doesn’t work (as they used it to teach the session).

And if you want a truly frightening example of educator groupthink, check out Project Follow Through.

Anyway, back to the ESL classroom and how to do the best we can by our students. Here are a few quick thoughts on Autono Blogger’s points:

+ We need to maintain the eclectic approach. What “learner-centered” truly means is that as teachers (or trajectory managers) we recognize the individuality of each student’s learning style and needs, identify what will work with each learner, and within our limited resources provide that, whether or not it fits in with current philosophies (easy for me, as my groups max out at about 6 students!).

+ We need to differentiate between our approach and classroom management. We can be in control of the classroom and at the same time focus on learner autonomy. We should demand autonomy and be rigorous with helping learners achieve it. Sometimes teachers think that “giving up control” means abdicating from getting things done in the classroom. Telling learners that they’re in charge doesn’t mean they get to slack off - quite the contrary.

+ Action research rules! Discliplined action research prevents teacher groupthink. All teachers should be action researchers.