Shiv on Learning

Strangely the ELT industry, despite its size, age and importance, has no objective system of evaluating and comparing schools, methodologies or any language learning service.  What is today described as the best pedagogy or methodology is so because it is the good opinion of influential people in the industry, it has not been empirically proven to be so.

While objective measures of effectiveness may seem a challenging task, they exist in many other areas of education. When selecting high schools, colleges and universities students and parents have access to league tables listing, among other things, the percentage of students from each institution that achieve certain goals.

It would be extremely useful for an ESL student wanting to achieve a certain IELTS score to know which school has the better track record of teaching students to pass. At the moment they have to choose a school without access to any such information. All they have to guide them is the marketing blurb from the schools. Even the most expensive English schools do not release data on how quickly students progress.

The trouble with this situation is that schools need to focus on marketing ahead of effectiveness in order to be successful.  A school that is good at marketing need not be good at teaching.

A greater concern is that effectiveness (how quickly the students improve) is not the biggest driver for the industry.  There is no incentive to continually push the bar higher and higher.  To someone like me with a background in the software industry ELT is far from innovative, in fact it is almost stagnant. Innovation when it occurs does so in small communities and does not spread very far. The communicative methodologies have their origins in the 70s, the Dogme ELT group is already 10 years old, yet in that vast amount of time that has passed since their inception neither has become dominant.

For any business to make an investment adopting a new methodology there needs to be sufficient financial reward in doing so. Currently there is none and the money is better spent on marketing.

If league tables of schools were published, better schools would attract more students. The primary driver for change in the industry would become a schools rank in the league tables, their rank determined by students’ progress. As schools strive for better results the rest of the industry will follow, publishers and other suppliers will be pushed to gear their material towards the methodologies that are proving to be more effective.

Implementing such a system is not without its risks. Measures of student progress need to be objective and reliable and also conducted by an independent body.  Tests scores on a reliable exam would be a good indication but the time the student has spent at the school needs to be a factor.

The successful implementation of such a system would bring great benefits to both students and the industry. Students’ progress would become the primary concern of all in the industry. The practice of hiring cheaper less qualified teachers would no longer be fruitful. Investing in staff development would gain greater importance in schools. Successful methodologies would be adopted quickly across the industry and bad practice would be abandoned faster.

The endless debates about methodologies, pedagogy etc would actually have some objective data to draw on. Nonsense debates like “Is an IWB good or bad?” would not exist (it depends on how you use it).

Teachers would be big winners from such a system as any institution wishing to do well would need to invest in good teachers and continually invest in their professional development. Currently in many countries anyone with a university degree that speaks English can get a job teaching it, no qualifications necessary. This would no longer be the case.

The biggest winners however will be students with more of them able to learn a greater amount in less time and probably at less cost. Not being experts in ELT, students are not able to tell if a school is good or not based on descriptions of their services. League tables would provide them with meaningful data on which they can compare institutions.

You might wonder how body language works when practising English online.  I will tell you how conveying meaning is possible in a virtual world and can be in many cases more effective.  If you would like to read post #2 click here.

Body Language and inhibition:

A great advantage of teaching face to face is using body language and facial expressions.  A good teacher will always try and use these tools to the best of their ability.  In a virtual world you don’t have your own body language and facial expressions but you do have those of your avatar.  These can be much more powerful than your actual body.  By that I mean teaching elementary students using techniques like TPR can often be embarrassing for the teacher and the learner.  Who really wants to climb on the table or hide behind the door to learn prepositions?  Learning prepositions using your avatar however is fun, engaging and not embarrassing.  It isn’t your real body jumping up and down or hiding underneath something!  Also when you know nobody can see you go red and blush, you are more likely to take risks and make mistakes which is essential to making progress in language learning.

TPR in classrooms can be tricky.

Using your avatar to move around is liberating.

By Jessica Driscoll

We Are Languagelab

A Chat with Jeremy Harmer

Continuing our discussion on benefits for students my next port of call is the classroom and how practising English in what is essentially an artificially constructed environment may not be the best place to do this.

Classroom is an artificial environment:

In the average classroom there is usually some standard equipment; chairs, desks, perhaps a projector or computer and maybe even an IWB.  So when teachers do role-play activities there is a lot of imagining for the students to do, as there isn’t a train station or cafe or gallery in the classroom.  In a virtual world you can go and visit the gallery, buy a train ticket and go to the theatre.  You don’t need to imagine it you can be there so the time can be spent producing language you have learned and not pretending to be the barman.  The environments in English City are created with the CEF in mind so that all the sessions can have the ALT Can Do statements as the basis for student discussion.

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Students in class having to imagine a scenario like checking into a hotel

Students actively participating and checking into a hotel in English City.

By

Jessica Driscoll