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.

Paul Graham is almost always brilliant and I highly recommend his book Hackers and Painters.

Here’s a great essay (and taxonomy!) on how to disagree. The web enables a global conversation, and disagreement will be an important part of that conversation. Of all the forum threads I’ve participated in, I’ve learned the most from the threads that were intense debates, and Graham’s essay shows how to make those debates as productive as possible.

This would also be a nice resource for intermediate to advanced classes.

Very interesting and richly sourced article on language teaching and gaming by Graham Stanley and Kyle Mawer in TESL-EJ.  The use of “walkthroughs” is explained and examples outlined. Good stuff.

Here’s Einstein’s theory of relativity explained in words of four letters or less.

It’s brilliant. If I had any lower level English for technology students, I’d be all over this. Of course, short words are don’t necessarily mean that they are learned earlier, but still…if you look at the lexis it does look graded.

Not sure how I’d exploit it, but it’s rich with opportunity.

Hat tip to Signal vs Noise.

Interesting post by Robert Cringely on the challenges facing educators. (One of many) money quote:

…we’ve reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.I came to this conclusion recently while attending Brainstorm 2008, a delightful conference for computer people in K-12 schools throughout Wisconsin. They didn’t hold breakout sessions on technology battles or tactics, but the idea was in the air. These people were under siege.

Interesting discussion at Ken Carrol’s blog. Money quote in the comments:

So what does it take to learn language? Among other things: learner buy-in and commitment; daily, meaningful written and spoken target-language communication in real-life situations; access to target language media for authentic consumption. Can technology help us improve the way we do any of these things?

Oh I love this.

Exploratree is a free web-based “thinking tool” for idea generation, planning, and many other types of cognitive activity that are fundamental to any kind of project. You select from a menu of frameworks that structure the thinking process, which are similar in concept to regular BE frameworks actually. Or, you can develop your own framework.

What’s neat is that you can easily see how you can use the different frameworks to work on specific language objectives, especially structures and functions.

• the Futures Wheel framework helps your students “Think through the consequences and impacts of an event. What are the knock-on effects?” and could be useful for practicing the conditionals. You’d set it up to by using a real business situation of the student or group, then work through the Future wheel framework using conditionals.
• The Reverse Planning framework is to “work backwards from an imagined perfect future to a feasible and possible present”. You’d set this up as if the group were actually in, say, 2010, and their plans had succeeded, and they relate the imagined “history” of 2008-10 that got them there, using past tenses and storytelling techniques.
• The Compare and Contrast framework should be pretty much self-explanatory for BE teachers.

Can’t wait to try this with some clients.

Hat tip to soulsoup.

Every year the New York Times puts out the “Year in Ideas” list: a list of short articles about new trends and ideas for the year; this time there are 70 articles. They are both interesting enough and short enough that they would be appropriate for most levels, and there is enough variety of topics that personalization is possible.

Downside: you have to register. Worth it though.

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 might be back from near-6-month blogging sabbatical. I’m not 100% sure, but…maybe.

Abject apologies for not approving the 2 legit comments (out of about 700 spam - I’ve got to get a captcha set up or something).

Actually, I haven’t read any blogs either. To be honest, it has been a nice break, although I’m sure I’m irredeemably behind the times now.