Scott Thornbury - What's the latest method?

it's great to be here and to talk with people from what was it how many countries reproduce 1834 not all of which I've ever visited but you're on my list one of you one of the pleasures I get from my job and there are many pleasures not least is the traveling as exhausting as it can be but I I have a hobby and I used my traveling around all these wonderful countries talking to wonderful teachers around the world to indulge my hobby and those of you who know me know that my hobby is looking for old books not just any old books but all books about teaching or books about language old grammars all course books old dictionaries old phrase books so wherever I go I spend a little bit of time if I can I kind of play truant from the conference and I go off and I look for the the book shops or the bookshop where I might find some treasure and actually I was only two weeks ago I was at the better learning conference in Kiev and I discovered that in Kiev there's one of the largest secondhand book markets I've ever seen anywhere I was like oh my god this is a kook this is amazing and I'd bought a ton of books none of which I've yet had a chance to really sift through but this is a bookshop in Malta I was in Malta the letter is the lovely old Mediterranean town of the mass of history and I knew that somewhere in Valletta there would be a secondhand bookshop and somewhere in that secondhand bookshop there would be a book that I didn't have and sure enough after a lot of wandering around the back streets of valletta I found this place which is hardly even a books table anymore it's mainly a tourist shop but they do have a few old books and I found this book which you can tell from the covers pre-design early nothing in terms of design and its basic and its approach and its basic and its design and its undated but I'm assuming it probably can the 30s or 40s and there is interesting history behind the methodology behind this book in the history up behind the book I haven't got time to go into it now but just to give you a flavor of the book itself in its methodology this was what I did these were some of the delights that I found in my hotel room when I took it back and had a look at it forget authenticity can you think of a context which somebody would say your fingers on my knife purpose when you go to the Tokyo Patrick you'll find maybe in the subway this is something that people excuse me your fingers on my nose it actually gets better [Music] I mean I could understand it hurt in a gym or something maybe and I've been in suits why suits so anyway one of the one of the pleasures then of course of finding these old boxes is finding material like this and realizing how far we have come since whenever this was published and written and it's a it is salutary to think how far we've come but what I'm gonna argue today is that we think we've come a long way but in fact we're going around in circles and as funny as this looks there is probably some sensitive and somebody probably did learn English by saying you'll excuse me your hand is on my nose so that's what I want to look at today and these are some of the books that I've collected and I have got shelves and shells the shells of them and I have no idea what I'm going to do with them eventually but I do go through them periodically looking for particular things and as I say they are both amusing but they're also solitary and informative and I think it's part of this sort of I think we forget we we forget how long people have been learning second languages and particularly English but not really English and I have a number of books in French if you see or in French at least and other languages and I I usually I have a serious purpose for using these which I think I hope will come apparent during the course of this talk and the talk is called what is the best method and that's a question that I'm often asked when I travel around people come up to me thinking that I have somehow I'm bringing some kind of news that hasn't reached the the distant southern an Asia or wherever I'm visiting and in fact it's a question that baffles me because there's all sorts of implications behind the question what is the best method as if there is one and if the one that's best for there is going to be the best for here and so on and so on it's also confused by the fact that the word method doesn't translate clothes I mean this I found this when I first went to Argentina and anybody from a Hudson Tina ah good so they asked me you know what could you talk about your method and I didn't understand what they meant but I haven't designed a method I know but you've written a method because a method or correct me if I'm wrong it says is synonymous with course books so having written a course book you are in fact the author of a method a method of teaching English and so there is a sort of conflation there between this notion on the one hand of course book on the other hand of method so you get it here in a book I found in Barcelona it's a method of English the new British method but it in fact basically that means it's just another course book it's not that innovative nevertheless I think that confusion is an interesting one and I want I'll return to it and this has just happens to be a picture from that same book the new British method and the if you can't read that the question is why do you always recommend this method because it's both practical and pleasant and and that's interesting in itself the adjectives that collocate with the word method Pleasant is not one your normal if this is a pleasant method actually if you go back some of these are I mean there's a book here called interesting English and that would never sell nowadays interesting English it has to be awesome English if it's gonna be there's a title for you publishers by the way awesome I'm sure somebody's thought of it interesting you which doesn't wash and then other ones like I am learning English this is actually this is from Romania I am learning English the second book in the series is called I'm still learning English so so what are the adjectives that collocate with method and that's interesting if you go into a corpus and look at the adjectives that immediately precede method and a general corpus of English you'll find unsurprisingly perhaps that they are often very positive and there are connotation so you get a new method is the most common in fact new method as the most common adjective the collocation method but scientific follows best effective simply see these are very positive adjectives we think of method as being scientific systematic new modern and generally good good fewer method is good few there's a very positive association with that we're not talking necessary about language teaching methods with all sorts of different kinds of methods and notice that direct method actually figures in that list so what I want to do then I want to initially explore this notion of method why has it got out of fashion supposedly it has so I want to look at method the word method in our own field and contrast it with approach and I want to look at this notion of being beyond methods or post method and then the notion come back to ism of method or elmatador the book the course book which is the method which is the course book so I want to look at that and I did a very very quick summary it's the end of the day so this is about as theoretical as we all get I think in the 1990s or even earlier people were talking about the death of method in fact tick alright wrote a paper I think called the death of methods and probably wrote a publicly there was no best method why and HH stern here and has in a very important book identified that the there was a definite shift in thinking away from the idea of a single method and I don't know that your memory goes back as far as mine but in the 1960s and 1970s there was a proliferation of methods to fill the vacuum that have been created by the end of audio lingual ISM essentially which had been the prevailing method of the of the mid century and then of course Chomsky came along and sort of undercut the whole theoretical basis of audio lingual ISM but nobody knew what to put in its place and so there was this proliferation of methods which coincided with of humanistic and progress language teachings that you've got the silent where you've got suggest to Peter you've got all those sort of things that people talk about write about read about but I don't think anybody ever does very little correct me if I'm wrong Herbert they were I'm think it'll pockets of suggester pedia and places like Bulgaria but but but there was a feeling that Stern identifies here is that we're gone beyond methods that that no single method is going to satisfy all particular context and similarly the idea of method itself has got negative negative connotations for many people because it sounds too top-down too prescriptive this is what you must do and there was this a resistance away from the idea of a top-down method and the ID and words substitute words came forth like the community we don't talk about the communicative method what do we talk about the communicative approach the approach is felt to be a little bit more friendly than the idea of method and then of course kumara medieval who came along and 1994 wrote a very important paper where he identified what he called the post method condition which again we had moved beyond individual methods off-the-shelf methods if you like and now he taught according to a set of principles or parameters as he called them which I cut across all methodologies if you like and and this became a very popular concept because it sort of chimed with what was going on and after all you think about the 1990s and thereafter English language teaching had proliferated on he was big before them but with absolutely global massive by the turn of the 21st century but happening in so many different contexts for so many different purposes and the feeling was that notes one-size-fits-all and so hence the notion of the postman but then subsequently more recently still an academic intent and Iran challenged the idea of the post method method if you like saying well actually teachers don't have the luxury of being able to choose to be post method of of designing their own courses out of particular principles and parameters because in the context that he was looking at which his native Iran teachers are teaching 30 hours a week they've got teaching classes of 45 students they're teaching mandated course books for mandated exams that a head child they're not post method they don't have a chance to be critical reflectors on their own methodology and so he said the concept of meth has not been replaced by the concept post method but rather by the ear off textbook defined practice what the majority of teachers teach and how they teach they're now determined by the textbook so in other words it is the matador el matador the textbook is the method and vice versa it's we've come sort of full circle according to Amrani now I'm going to throw that one out we can discuss that after I've done my bit but it's an interesting idea that maybe methods don't really exist anymore that course books or textbooks exist and that's it Punto well anyway to be discussed going back to my collection of books though as I said are I find them interesting form all sorts of points of view not least the design they're so beautiful some of them but the methods that they enshrine or rather not so much the methods but the principles or the methodology I haven't defined methodology when I'm talking about methodologies the more descriptive thing it just describes what teachers - it doesn't prescribe what they shouldn't method and the methodology underlying a lot of these books is very interesting when you and peel it and often it's unstated it's implicit you have to find it look at these books and say no what is it that's going on here Wow would these people how are people learning from this way what would the teachers doing but occasionally you get explicit statements of what the methodology what the writer was intending so this is a book there was a series produced in the 1920s and 30s written by a woman and interestingly enough which was rare and my land my corpus of textbooks and written for different languages so the same book was produced for German for French and also for Esperanto and using the same illustration so it's basically it's a picture dictionary with these fabulous illustrations or everything beautifully numbered row I think it's particularly interesting as in the short introduction that the writer writes this is the teacher this is a advice for the teachers she says in oral and written exercises of all kinds an effort must be made to associate the matter under treatment with the pupils own observations to illustrate it from his own experience now I don't those of you who are Sara Moses talk just before the break we'll see a connection here Sara was talking about relevance in the importance of making the classroom activities relevant to the learners own interest lives needs etc and I think what's that's fascinating so thora Goldschmidt doesn't use the word relevance but she is talking about relevance essentially she's saying make the material relevant to the learners by associating it with their own lives oh there you are and then so this was in 1923 1923 this was even before I was born people who were saying this about relevance so this is what I find really interesting about these books they said actually we can laugh at them but sometimes they're little gems of wisdom that are tucked away here which to me suggests that there's there are methods and methods and methods but there is good methodology and that doesn't actually change and that's really the the point of what I want to talk about today good methodology so what I want to do I'm just going to share a couple more observations so this is it from my collection of books for teachers so these are books written for teachers methodology books these are the earlier equivalents of books like pen ears book on methodology for example written some of these going back to the nineteen tens I think English for coming Americans these are Americans who are coming to America and so on and so on and so on that's how beautiful these books I just love the kind of simplicity of the design apart from anything else and their titles but looking at these methodology books and going through them you find some really really interesting things I just want to share with you some of the some quotations from a mixture of these books and I'm really annoyed that I didn't think of witness Chris here Chris Alison used paddle it in his course and his talk so with padlet you can answer the questions I'm going to give you without any fear of being judged thank you and but we can't do that so you're just going to have to do this and be judged but you're old enough and and the point is that there's no right answers to this but what I'm going to throw out some equations and I just want you to decide if it's if it were padlet you say yes I agree no I don't agree yeah but I'm going to give you to do this instead of how did you do the the thumbs up or the thumbs down if you agree now that's it's very crude measure of agreement it's not a a what's its name scale like a scale you have no choice here it's either you like it or you don't okay it's a game it's not a test okay so this is the quotation number one from 1956 language is not a sterile subject to be confined to the classroom one of two things must be done either life must be brought to the classroom or the class must be taken to life thumbs up or thumbs down I'll give you an easy one first anybody got their thumbs down incidentally I'd be really interested in here if you do because there's always a there's always a transgressive answer to all these questions but I think what interesting again yes what we try to do all the time tape the classroom to life will bring life into the classroom again it's that same thing about authentic ating the language learning experience making it relevant the way that Sarah was talking about and of course you see this was the 1956 how did you take the classroom to life or bring life to the classroom in 1956 how can you do it now I mean so much more easily because of Technology with all the problems that are involved with that but nevertheless the idea of the poorest class in the classroom which has you know Horace walls where you can life impacts on the classroom and you can take learners out and have them communicating with people in the real world that's fantastic but in 1956 people were saying this Peter Streete words was saying that so yeah no problem with that 1964 the students should never be called upon to say anything that he has not already learned through imitation of his teacher thumbs up yeah good oh yeah I mean okay we know where this was coming from this was where this is 1964 this was that's kind of this period sort of mid century where there was this kind of like retraction in terms of the generosity of the methodology it suddenly became very constrained and in fact I dare I say this is how I was trained this was how I was trained that you know know the students mustn't say anything that they haven't heard you say first and they must write anything that they haven't seen written first because what will happen if they say something that they haven't heard they might make a mistake then imagine all hell will break loose somebody might leave off the third person s and then other people pick it up and sooner or go through the class like a virus so don't let them make mistakes that's how is I was trained my whole methodology initially was don't do anything and which students might possibly make a mistake and of course now we know we only learned through making mistakes learn anyway so yes 97 so that's when I would say I'm not saying it's unequivocally wrong but I would question it now and the light of where we are like in 1961 forgive the gender bias in this quotation but that's where we were 1961 the teacher must really be himself or herself and give himself or her so talking to real people about real things and then training his pupils to talk to one another about real things you've got your thumbs down because okay okay not about the teacher yeah I think that implication is that they're talking about real things that relate to them so so in a sense it's not inconsistent with the idea we've been looked at before about authenticating but of course if it's just the teacher whose agenda then of course that would be suspect but it is interesting again these notions of student-centered learning and student-centered driven content were around long before the advent of the communicative approach which you think was at least another decade down the line a commander structure is more easily acquired by reading speaking and writing the language than by hearing and studying explanations you get it really speaking and writing the language then by hearing and studying explanations yeah you are happy with that so again this is interesting also again given the date that it's a sort of like experiential skills based learning it doesn't say tasks based learning or project-based learning but that's the natural extension is and if you take this idea of experiencing the language rather than learning about the language then we associate that with the communicative approach and everything that came after not with 1955 the key to language learning is well plan a lively drill drill drill anyone want to commit themselves on this anybody happy with that the key the key okay not to say that drilling doesn't ever have a role that I would say which the key to anybody I mean correct me if I'm wrong I think we may have moved on but I'm not holding as I say I mean I'm keeping my options open in terms of drilling and I'll come back to that point shortly and let the wonderful Lionel billows in this book takes the language teach you said the language must not be allowed to stay in prison between the pages of a book and I think again this is part of a theme you see developing here but again this was in 1961 and one more good measure this is a book for teaching juniors what we'll call juniors then they should feel the juniors the primary well the infant's should feel that each lesson is their lesson not that not the teachers in an English caste which is well run the teachers only a guide that's amazing this is but this is actually before I was born and I thought these ideas were like progressive education you know 1980 is humanism caring and sharing in the classroom no these were ideas so good ideas have been around for a very long time and this is one of the things we need to remind ourselves first of all there's nothing new Under the Sun but also may be worth backtracking from time to time see what it is we can salvage from the history of English language teaching the archaeology of length English language teaching or language teaching generally or education generally see what is valid and relevant today and not pat ourselves on the back too much that we're so modern and innovative most of these ideas have been around for a very long time so we're on teacher training courses and I'm be guilty of this as much as anybody there's a tendency to teach the history of methods as if it were a bit like this the evolution of the species so we started off with these very kind of crude forms grammar translation and then we saw the light and more evidence based learning and research etc and so you could map on to this all the various people you know Berlitz Parma Skinner Chomsky and of course the immortal Henry would assume as them as at the at the top of the ladders that were at the top of the tree this is how we teach the narrative the modernist narrative which is methodology on courses you know methodology 101 kind of thing that it started off in the darkness but slowly we've been moving into the light and now we have wonderful methods and we have the technology to to expedite them I'm not sure if it is if you look back it through my books and any other books on language teaching over the last 500 years or even more you'll find in fact it's not about evolution it's about sort of revolution or recycling even and this is not an idea books that I had at all in fact Alistair penny called way back in 1989 looked at the history of methods and said actually it's just about the same basic parameters of your life or factors that are being reconfigured for each generation the same things come round again and again but with different reconfigurations tart it up a little bit modern that will glassy etc and made ideologically acceptable for successive generations but their basic the same options so what are these options and that's what I want to look at very quickly now what are the options he's talking about if you go to any definition of method in any of the encyclopedias or dictionaries this is a very well-known one it's been around which isn't remit dictionary of language teaching reply linguistics they identify at least six dimensions if you like in terms of what these options are a method is going to have inbuilt into it some views about the nature of language about the nature of language learning specifically second language learning about the goals and objectives about the types of syllabus the role of the teachers etc and the activities themselves and the procedures and perhaps along with that the materials that go with these activities those some of that so looking for the these options that Pennycook was talking about this is where I went and well there's at least six different dimensions here let's see how this pans out in fact so if we take the nature of language we can see that the history of methods is really being a pendulum swing between methods that focus on form on structure today we're going to do the present perfect continuous and methods that focus on function today we're going to talk about how to make requests today we're going to do narration today we're going to talk about complaining or whatever you see what I mean is that very much has been the trajectory in my own experience a swing between form and function not to say that one is better the other or that they aren't they can't both be implicated in language teaching but there the way that syllabus is designed for example as often a reflection of a bias towards one end of that dimension or the other and then the nature of language also oh no this should be the nature of learning language not nature of language whether the approach is analytic that is to say we're going to analyze the present perfect continuous we're going to take it apart and look at it and identify all its parts or whether is more experiential we're going to learn it by actually using it in doing it and that would be the nature of of language learning and and I say yeah and again the pendulum has swung backwards and forwards over centuries between analyzing language and experiencing language a Scholastic academic approach if you like on the one hand and then a more experienced you what are the goals of second language learning well again the goals have fluctuated between a focus on accuracy so when I was first trained was accuracy accuracy accuracy hints no mistakes to drill drill drill to they get it right and then move on or communication so only after about a year of teaching or two years of teaching when I was very frustrated with the accuracy approach the community would approach blessedly burst upon us and just in time as I would have given up teaching but I couldn't go and drilling for the rest of my life and communication came across and it was all bliss was it in that dawn to be alive it really was it was like oh the shackles were off we could talk about anything in the classroom didn't matter if they made mistakes they never pass IELTS but you know hey so that's um so that's a very important kind of distinction and then the kinds of syllabuses that we've seen over the years syllabuses is based on the systems that is a grammar of a dog phonology lexis whatever you want to put in there and and the skills reading writing listening speaking etc and whether of course a more recent debate is whether the syllabus is segregated from the curriculum so we have your English language class or your French language class or your whatever on the one hand and then all the other subjects in the curriculum or where the second languages are integrated into the other subjects so you're teaching math you're teaching biology or teaching geography through the target language a sin will no that would be an integrated curriculum and I put it the role of teachers and learners and materials using the label from Richards and Schmidt I mean I've said cognitive and affective because I wanted to put that in somewhere I'm not sure I actually was listening to Chris's talk this afternoon I was thinking is cognitive affective is a kind of relationship almost between teachers and learners whether the focus is on cognition more than I'll say effect that is to say emotion whole person learning etc and there has been a fluctuation in that direction and related to their to the notion of the teacher as the transmitter of knowledge I am the teacher I know the present perfect continuous you do not know the present perfect continuous I'm going to teach you the present perfect continuous and you're going to be eternally grateful and that would be the transmissive the transmissive rock and I got to test you I noticed you you won't be so grateful after that and then dialogic where it's more symmetrical the relationship between the teachers and the learners and dialogic I'm borrowing of course acknowledging our Brazilian French here from the work of power of three where you have a more reciprocal relationship where we're learning as co-constructed between the people in the room as it were and finally the teaching procedures and as all sorts of ways we could categorize these but a very basic distinction between deductive approaches this is the rule and I'm going to teach you the rule and then you're going to practice it versus inductive approach approaches that here are some examples or here's a text or here's some corpus data you're going to work out the rule and then we're going to practice it and then of course a very important distinction in the second line which are in a very fraught distinction in the sense that it generates a lot of heat is the role of the first language and the process should instruction a second language involve the first language or should we keep the first language right out of the picture because after all the first language might interfere with the second language as I was originally trained so we've got bilingual approaches which involve both language learners both languages being compatible in the classroom and then monolingual approaches where you keep the first language out of the classroom so those are some of the kind of options and if you can drag oh my ties them on like this you can see that there's one two three four five six seven eight nine at least options there that they are presented as being diametrically opposed but of course they're not we know as teachers as administrators and as publishers and as course book writers and as teacher educators that in fact when it will be an interesting exercise to give this to a group of teachers they situate yourself on these dimensions and you'd find what most teachers would probably draw a kind of wiggly line down the middle not committing themselves totally to a form-based approach who would who would I mean there must be some focus on meaning on functional and language use in the classroom and so but some people might take a more radical stand and and push themselves either to the very far left or the very far right now you notice that in fact I've organized them so that there are there's a commonality between most of these dimensions on this side and a commonality in if you had to take one method in the history of methods which method would you say which most down this end which for folks analytic accuracy based on and bilingual grammar translation translation well this is the still the default method in many vast parts of the world people are still ready unless nothing wrong with that there's nothing wrong with it but that they're in a sense missing out on some of the other things that could be going on in the curriculum if you had a method that was way over this end what will might it be yeah something experiential clearly something focus on meaning something which is more sort of learner effective more holistic more integrated and so on and that would be one would be task based learning project-based learning activity based learning some again the things that Sarah mentioned I think which yes which are more engaging perhaps apart from anything else so but that doesn't mean to say that there's not there's not all sorts of other possibilities down the middle different combinations of cetera the point is that this probably when you think about it just been only ever in the history of language teaching being two methods two methods that is to say the methods that are associated the left of the top of the diagram and the methods and these I would say to attract the Scholastic academic intellectual kind of methods versus the natural natural as in first language acquisition acquisition like experiential methods and everything else is just to be in a combination that's the point the Pennycook we're saying everything is just a permutation of those two basic extremes yeah with me okay however method is the term method is very persistent in the literature it hasn't gone away just because we've reconfigured the framework aside like I said people still like talking about methods and and and Bell says in this article that came out a few years ago methods and not dead teachers teaches themselves seem to be not only aware of the usefulness but they're kind of hungry to know more about methods and I'm interested in this as a teacher educator I'm interested in why this is the case why has the notion of mere one of the reasons method hasn't gone away of course that for those reasons I said at the beginning it's associated with nice thing methods and new methods of systematic methods of scientific etc no nobody's gonna gain say that and also the discourse of Education favors the use of the term method generally and but secondly if you go into websites you'll find and this is taken directly from different websites that advertising different methods methods or materials or courses etc programs on the Internet and I've taken out the names but this is the term method it's easy to find again and again and again just Google language learning method and 500 hundred hundreds of references so method as a as a term certainly hasn't gone away it's very durable and it has a certain potency and I think it was that reason that might have motivated me here's a bit of a shameless plug to write a book called thirty teaching methods because I figure there is some something to be got from looking at these methods and going back part of the general interest of know more about our profession historically but looking at what is in these methods now that we could take away from them what's in it for us so what I did in this book was two very very very briefly look at 30 different methods some of them going quite a way back and to describe the method and then also to identify the takeaways now what this must have worked with somebody so it's trying to tease out what might be a takeaway from this and it's an interesting exercise apart from anything else and also I think part of what I wanted to do was show that this is only thirty I mean but every but since I wrote this book over a year ago people have come in Abood she didn't include such and such a method or what about XML that oh my god there may be a sequel which is the thirty more method [Laughter] you read it here first but but there is a serious side to that which is that not only what we can take away but also we mustn't get trapped in a single method and that's the whole problem actually becomes blind or blinkered to the other possibilities that are out there just because the method that we've been trained in says you should not do this and you should do that doesn't mean to say that perhaps there are alternatives and it might be worth exploring those alternatives and that's a very interesting teacher education professional development agender saying okay I know that you did and I know you believe in this but how about doing it differently and just see what it feels like so that was half the point of this book and I think going back to Richards and well going to Richards and Rogers here in their book on methods they're much more comprehensive book or methods which many of you will know have used as a textbook and is now in its third edition Karen is that right and it was a it certainly it was a go-to book for me when I was writing my own book methods can be studied not as prescriptions notice how you should teach but as a source of will use practices which teachers can adapt or implement based on their own needs so it's interesting and I think particularly for novice teachers for new teachers people come into the profession you can't just say to new teachers Oh doesn't really matter what you teachers go out there and you know get a feel for it in an effort not to be prescriptive go with the flow no no no I mean you that's like forget it it's teachers need a structure they need routines they need a framework then over time they can abandon that structure or they can adapt it they can find new frameworks they can incorporate such but initially methods do serve that kind of structuring role but the key thing here is not the method perhaps is whether the teacher believes in it Jayne Spiro wrote the critical factor in success is the of a method as the commitment and belief of the teacher and the methods he or she is using and the continuing reflection of the teachers to earth I mean the two things there the commitment belief on one hand and then the reflection on the other don't get stuck in the method just because you believe in it but belief in a method is very very important and I think Sara would confirm this is the teachers own the the way that teacher projects his or her commitment and belief in the method is going to go a long way towards convincing the learners the method right you think you know even your hand is on my nose if the teacher really believes that's going to help the learners will true all of these methods had practitioners and many of those predict practitioners were very convinced and the efficacy of those methods and the we we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that it's your conviction as a teacher that is very very important and finally and I think Karin quoted this yesterday in her talk the British educate early British American education is William Dylan William visit said he's writing about curricula but I think it's a equally applies in I'll show how it applies a bad curriculum well taught you get it a bad curriculum world toward is invariably a better experience for students than a good curriculum badly taught pedigree I hate the use of a verb here but it's one we're lumped with pedagogical Trump's curriculum that it's a pedagogy is more important than the curriculum or more precisely pedagogy is curriculum because what matters is how things are taught rather than what is taught how things are taught rather than what is taught and so if you take out the world curricula replace it by method I think it equally well applies a bad method of bad in the sense that we don't you know there's no there's no theoretical basis for this method like grammar translation or for audio lingual ISM or whatever but if it's world torts and they're really better than that experienced in a good method like communicative approach which is badly taught petteri Trump's method or pedagogy is myth so the point is you know the point that I'm trying to make is what's the name of this conference better learning it's all about better learning and better and as result of better teaching and the relationship between the two things it's not necessarily about a better method so when people come to me and say that's Kai what's the what's the latest method what's the best method no I can't tell you that I don't actually think it matters I think the best method is the ones that your teachers are teaching well with conviction and passion because they believe in it and because they believe in better learning this is what's becoming an expert professional is all about its learning it's was the term that was used earlier this morning I think in bridges talk about adaptive expertise and the ability to recognize is actually say that that class I just did exactly the same lesson at nine o'clock it just didn't work at at 11 o'clock now why would a reflective teacher goes back it says okay I'm gonna have to rethink here the non reflective teacher just soldiers on is if nothing had happened but but that ability to adapt if not on the spot but certainly in reflection is really really important I think this is why there is as you say there's no best method because your reflective teacher will be constantly changing even if they're teaching supposedly from what just app method or app course book they were making adaptations for every different class that they teach and I mean it is true that we do know not a lot more than we did a hundred years ago or even 50 years or even 20 years ago about how people learn languages or how people learn generally and there are still lots of stuff that's coming and we know a lot more about language now so it would be false to say that in their sense yeah the picture that I painted of going around in circles it's not going around circles it's going around in a spiral though each time we pick up on the same sort of techniques and approaches but we're they're informed by by new evidence at cetera at the same time in the social sciences you're always going to be well there's two problems here one is that social science is generally being sort of soft science is always difficult to get convincing results from however much research that is done so they're always you'll say oh yeah but it's you know but that you didn't take into account such and such and there's so many variables not least the teacher themselves and that's the point about the teacher being very committed doesn't any matter what she's teaching as long as she's committed to it in a sense but I think we need as a profession to take evidence seriously and we need to be rigorous at the same time we need to keep a little bit of softness there and flexibility in wiggle room for the fact that there are never going to be black and white answers to any of these questions and I do in fact the last chapter of the book of my methods booker's is on principle of good collectors is where I try to sort of say well this is but that itself has been a concept that has been contested and people who say well actually this principle is just it's just it's an excuse for sort of lack of rigor I think that's a really interesting argument and discussion and I think it's one that's worth pursuing and I totally agree with you Patrick as I said before the need for rigor at the same time I have to keep my options open and I you know I've got a lot softer now than I used to be I used to be as Herbert well knows I used to be a strong critic of certain methodologies which I thought were too soft and too and rigorous and the Herbert and I have had very interesting discussions about that's coming from different and I think we probably met in the middle now and I think this is something that you do learn with age and certain wisdom sets area you say yeah actually you know I was Herbert is probably one of the best teachers I know who have seen as the talks in anything that I've ever met so I have to take what he does in the classroom seriously even if I find a little bit not sure if I would do that myself so this is what we learned through experience not just our own personal experience but experience like this coming to accomplish letters and talking about them for me one of the most formative experiences in terms of my own development as a teacher trainer was going in to watch teachers who what are you doing I wouldn't I was told never to do that and I was what and yet the students were loving it I said I really had to rethink it was a real major chip changing exercise like this it gets all the rules but it seems to be some kind of effect not saying I was working in terms of language learning and this is one of the difficult things to ever trace how to what extent and method is affect that's what they gave up in the nineteen Age one of the problems with the method approach was it was impossible to prove when you're compared to a method you could never rule out all the variables so you could never say that yes this conclusive despite what people have said about particular method this you cannot say this method is conclusively better than that method Patrick is it the point there are some things you would never do in a classroom and that's true and you're not going to get much mileage out of for example beating the students every time they make a mistake you would lose your job there's certain things you that are completely out of bounds but there's a lot less that's out of bounds from my point of view than they used to be when I was rather more rigid in terms of my approach so there's a difference between rigor and rigidity and I would go for rigor any day not rigidity but sometimes it's difficult to draw them whether these principles are explicit or implicit and I think that's a very interesting thing from an institutional point of view is whether you often they're not explicit and I'm not sure that's a good idea that institution is running along with the same principles but they're not really very clear and they may have derived from a similar training procedure that all the people were trained in the same way initially the same textbooks etc but what often brings out these principles and makes them explicit is some kind of crisis and the crisis maybe that's we're going to redesign at the end of course test for example and we're going to do that together and I've never guarantee you get a group of teachers and groups planning a test and you see all sorts of issues come out there have been latent and suddenly it's all about with is it accuracy we should be testing or is it fluency we should be testing is it communicative effectiveness should be testing should be testing holistically should we in testing subjectively or object to be etcetera etcetera etcetera now this is really important discussion to have and I'm very grateful again were the organizations that I've worked and we've been able to make these principles explicit through activities like this joint syllabus writing joint test writing norming procedures whereby for example we're all going to listen to ah learn speaking recorded spontaneous speech we're going to grade it on a scale of one to five and then give our reasons why we graded it's amazing the variety of different responses you will get in one institution people got white from one to five in terms of fluency or whatever ranking so this is a very very important exercise I think at any institution is making these principles explicit because unless they're explicit you can't do anything about them Thank You Betsy I think we're probably out of time so I'll leave it to [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Cambridge University Press ELT

Views: 44,193

Rating: 4.9375973 out of 5

Keywords: ELT, ESL, Scott Thornbury, teacher training, teacher developmemt, better learning, cambridge conference, teacher conference, method teaching, english language teaching

Id: nue8AN9XsuY

Length: 49min 11sec (2951 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 04 2019