Comments after the Beijing TEFL Conference

A teacher attended a TEFL Conference in Beijing and reported back on the key points (in italics below) with my comments.

1. The emphasis throughout was that students, not teachers should initiate most of the work.

Students can do this only if they are given some direction and training how to do it as well as the power and the freedom. What kind of work are they supposed to do? Preparing for exam work? That doesn't give them much leeway.

2. Don’t go to extremes. All new and no old usually causes problems. Add the new to the old and discard some of the old.

This is fine as long as they don't use it as an excuse to have all old and no new. Professor Li Xiao Ju introduced the communicative approach in 1980 and they nearly stoned her as a heritic. Around 1990 the Education Ministry accepted the communicative approach but had to back down over stiff resistence. Now they have the "eclectic clause" which means they pick and choose what they want from communicative approach often picking nothing.

3. Listening – Xian Medical College. Listening plus is the answer. Teacher of Listening is regarded as a ‘button pusher’ for a machine. Isolated skills impair learning. Each teacher, half their classes were left as normal and half the classes were given the new program. They used the same text book. Students in LISTENING PLUS listened in the normal way, and then listened seeing the text, with some words or phrases removed. In pairs (or small groups) they then discussed what the missing words were. They were also given exercises from the CCTV series ‘Let’s Talk’. The students discussed and so listening had a context, conversation, discussion.

This may be a good way to start off with new or lower level learners. It focuses intense concentration on one word rather than teaching the student how to glean meaning from a recorded conversation or lecture. Because some students try to do listening word by word it makes it difficult when such a strategy is impossible and they have to get the gist from the recording. The former is considered the "bottom-up" strategy of the traditional approach and the latter is considered part of the "top-down" strategy of the communicative approach.

4. English is imbedded solidly when a person is exposed to English for 90 minutes without a break. IMPLICATIONS: Whenever we interrupt the English learning with Chinese, we break the 90 minutes and thus the students’ chance to learn well. (Classes thus should not have a break.)

Interesting. Did they support this with research? You cannot just make a statement like this without some research behind it. Normally no one would assert such a thing unless they did some testing. Did they say anything about the long cherished habit of teachers explaining meaning of words or grammar in Chinese?

5. Essential to include tasks in learning, but not to overdo it. Task should come after the language has been learned, not before. Not TASK BASED LEARNING but TASK SUPPORTED LEARNING.

Using tasks before teaching, an alternative to the old PPP approach, is a way to stimulate the students' mind and get them engaged in the subject. Authors, movie directors and gamesters use the technique constantly. Throw out a challenging idea. "What is the one common characteristic all millionaires have that you may have, too?" "Can you connect the nine dots with only four lines without lifting your pencil?" "When she got out of the taxi she handed the driver a copy of an Email instead of the taxi fare. The driver objected but when he began to read the message he couldn't stop his tears."

This is the appetizer. It makes the student hungry for the answer. This gets the student activated on a certain subject. He calls into service all of his mental faculties, ideas, understanding and experiences. He sorts all of this and focuses everything he's got on the problem. When the teacher later offers more vocabulary, gambits, phrases and grammar it all gets added to the student's personal resources before all getting filed away again at the end of the exercise into the student's mind.

8. Computer testing; don’t just put the paper questions on the computer.

To fully use the computer the program should be designed to take the students' answers and analyze them.

CALL is Computer Aided Language Learning. But ICALL is Intelligent Computer Aided Language Learning, using the computer to guide the student a little more intelligently. ESL Blue on the web is a good simple example of this. The BULATS test, made by the same people that did the IELTS test, is a smart test which changes itself according to the perceived skill of the student allowing the test to more closely zero in on the students level of skill.

9. "Currently the standard expectation for College English is too high." Prof. Wen Qiu-fang. L2 speakers should be the model for L2 learners, not L1 speakers. Since 1880’s it has been advocated that L1 should not be used to teach L2. It is not new.

Interesting idea. This touches on the idea of Global English and the fact that the communication partner most students will have when they join the workforce may well NOT be a native speaker of English.

I have found, from learning some French, that I can communicate best with non-native French speakers who also learned a little French. It seems that we know the same vocabulary and our grammar is very simple and possibly primitive even to the extent of being incorrect but easily understood by those like us.

10. Grammar is essential AFTER the language is known, not to teach the language. Learn the words, the form, the context (internal as well asexternal) before you learn the grammar. Grammar is to allow the student to go on and develop the structure in other situations.

Right. That's similar to what Krashen says. Grammar instruction is more like repair work.

11. Obstacles to overcome. Fear of teacher; teach students to question. Fear of standing out; teach students to be original and, whether you agree or disagree, respect the opinion. Allow others to question it without degrading it. Learn to agree to disagree in many situations.

Very good. One big problem is the exam which reduces all comment, reaction and idea to "right" and "wrong" answers. Many of my students cannot accept a comment like, "Well, in American we would say..." The student answers, "On the test it has to be right or wrong." Since many teachers are getting judged by how well their students do in exams it remains to be seen if teachers will find a way to shake loose from the shackles of "teaching to the test".

Another teacher issue is the respect teachers customarily and traditionally receive. This is kind of nice and a great change to some of the attitudes some students in the west display towards teachers. Although many of us foreigners are casual or even too casual with our students, I think it will take time for this to change with our Chinese colleagues.

Why another CALL symposium?

I am wondering if we are seeing the end of these conferences. Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL) conferences should be the first ones to flee the brick-and-mortar model and hit the Internet airwaves.

Sitting down here in Guangzhou, I often wonder, should I try to go to one of these things? I use my computer a lot in my teaching. I'm sending Emails and SMS to my students with my computer, I use PowerPoint's in all of my classes. I have a website to teach my students and a website to share my views on teaching. I have started an Open Source Coursebook free for all teachers to use and contribute to as a way to give us dynamic customizable coursebooks better suited to our needs. I use the computer to analyze the corpus of many of my lessons and texts by computer.

Long ago I decided to put all my teaching work into the computer and now I have years of lessons and courses in my machine. I have over 400 video clips, about 100 news clips in English/English and two feature length films in English/English inside my notebook ready to be called on when needed.

So I am certainly interested in the ways computers can aid language learning.
I suppose it would cost me at least $500 in plane tickets, hotel and meals to go there and about another $500 in lost work. And I ask myself, will I get $1000 of value out of it?

The International Symposium of CALL in Beijing just finished and I am wondering if I made the right decision in not going. Teachers who went had little to report.

Of course, it would be great to get out of the house and get out of the school and get out of the city to have a change of scene. But if I want a change of scene I think a beach on Sanya would be more enjoyable. Often we are given very little information about the exact content of the conference. One list member seemed to suggest that the meeting wasn't as practical as he was hoping it would be.

Amazon.com offers more information on a $5 book than conference organizers do about a conference. At Amazon you can read the publisher's blurb describing the book the way they want to put it. You can read parts of the book or even a whole chapter to see if you like it. Then you can read comments, reactions, criticisms and praises of the book by people like you and me and they often suggest other books or even better books. It is not a perfect system but do conference organizers give you a sample of the presentations? Is there a place where you can hear the positive AND the negative reactions of people who have heard the presentation? You may ask how can we hear reactions when the conference hasn't even happened yet? Well, I did a search on the people presenting at the symposium and they have been giving the same presentations all over the world.

They should just blog it, film it and post it or podcast it. Maybe it adds to their mystique if you can only catch them in their rare public appearances. I could not find much content of what they were going to say on the Internet, just references to them giving talks around the world.

Lots of big names have put their stuff on the Net free for the world. Stephen Krashen does conferences. Mert met him in Russia recently. You don't have to chase him at symposiums. He also has his own website at http://www.sdkrashen.com/ where you'll find tons of his articles explaining everything he believes about English teaching.

I'm a real fan of Jack Richards, author of New Interchange. He has a website that explains his views, theories and research on language teaching at http://www.professorjackrichards.com/. I don't know if he is on any lists.

Many of the people who go to conferences have their trips paid for by their schools or companies but I pay out of my own pocket and have to really justify the costs. I usually hear from people that attend these things that the biggest benefit they get out of it was to meet new colleagues in the teaching profession, make some friends amongst peers, network, etc, and it often seems the main attraction was not the main benefit. I never hear anyone say that what they heard was worth $1000 (although I'm positive it must happen, maybe.)

For $1000 I could probably buy 15 or 20 good books and a ticket to Sanya and a beachside hotel room. I feel I would certainly learn something from those books while watching the sunrise over an espresso or cooling myself on the beach with a Budweiser.

I learn a lot from the Internet. I've been learning a lot about corpus and have also been exploring a side interest in complexity theory and Schelling. Often experts leave their Email addresses and I write them. I write professors and experts all over the world. (TIP: Make your first Email to them a short simple thanks for writing something that helped you. After they thank you for your thanks you can ask your questions.)

I wrote Ronald Gray about his paper on Truscott's grammar correction ideas, John Milton who wrote an amazing writing marking program, Ben Szekely at Harvard about his paper on intelligent ranking systems, Zane Berge at the Universtity of Maryland about his studies into motivation in online training, Ricard Zach at the University of Calgary about some ideas in using Excel to develop a CRM for students, and that is just in the past few months.

Anyone can do this to seek out answers from experts who are great people and very helpful.
The Internet is getting better everyday. More and more professors and experts are sharing their best stuff on the Internet. Knowledge is getting freer as in "no money" not just ease of access or availability. MIT is working as fast as it can to put all their courses and lectures up on the Internet free for anyone with at least a dialup connection. Every month I get an Email from them telling me about the latest video I can watch of some IT CEO talking about the future of technology or NASA manager talking about the heavens. I love those things and what I've learned from Semler, Friedman, Drucker and others have changed the way I work and think about work.

And of course, the computer enables us to communicate with each other like we do on mailing lists. Peter Neu posted some things about social constructionist theory. This is the idea of people bringing their knowledge together to interact and learn together rather than simply being told what to do by a teacher. Hmmm, sounds like the mailing lists we're on or blogs and what we've been doing for the past several years. I have learned so much here and have made some great friends. And you and I are all networking and communicating with each other and with our colleagues and peers just like people like to do at those conferences.

Thank God for the Internet. Thank God for the computer. All of this is, literally, at our fingertips.

Isn't it curious that we are sometimes tempted to travel to the other side of the country to listen to someone tell us how to use a computer to do our job?