Mobile learning revisited

In the world of ELT teacher blogs, magazines, webinars and conferences right now, you would be hard pressed to avoid the topic of generative AI. Ten years ago, the hot topic was ‘mobile learning’. Might there be some lessons to be learnt from casting our gaze back a little more than a decade?

One of the first ELT-related conferences about mobile learning took place in Japan in 2006. Reporting on this a year later, Dudeney and Hockly (2007: 156) observed that ‘m-learning appears to be here to stay’. By 2009, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme was asking ‘will mobile learning change language learning?’ Her answer, of course, was yes, but it took a little time for the world of ELT to latch onto this next big thing (besides a few apps). Relatively quick out of the blocks was Caroline Moore with an article in the Guardian (8 March 2011) arguing for wider use of mobile learning in ELT. As is so often the case with early promoters of edtech, Caroline had a vested interest, as a consultant in digital language learning, in advancing her basic argument. This was that the technology was so ubiquitous and so rich in potential that it would be foolish not to make the most of it.

The topic gained traction with an IATEFL LT SIG webinar in December 2011, a full-day pre-conference event at the main IATEFL conference early the following year, along with a ‘Macmillan Education Mobile Learning Debate’. Suddenly, mobile learning was everywhere and, by the end of the year, it was being described as ‘the future of learning’ (Kukulska-Hulme, A., 2012). In early 2013, ELT Journal published a defining article, ‘Mobile Learning’ (Hockly, N., 2013). By this point, it wasn’t just a case of recommending teachers to try out a few apps with their learners. The article concludes by saying that ‘the future is increasingly mobile, and it behoves us to reflect this in our teaching practice’ (Hockly, 2013: 83). The rhetorical force was easier to understand than the logical connection.

It wasn’t long before mobile learning was routinely described as the ‘future of language learning’ and apps, like DuoLingo and Busuu, were said to be ‘revolutionising language learning’. Kukulska-Hulme (Kukulska-Hulme et al., 2017) contributed a chapter entitled ‘Mobile Learning Revolution’ to a handbook of technology and second language learning.

In 2017 (books take a while to produce), OUP brought out ‘Mobile Learning’ by Shaun Wilden (2017). Shaun’s book is the place to go for practical ideas: playing around with photos, using QR codes, audio / video recording and so on. The reasons for using mobile learning continue to grow (developing 21^st century skills like creativity, critical thinking and digital literacy in ‘student-centred, dynamic, and motivating ways’).

Unlike Nicky Hockly’s article (2013), Shaun acknowledges that there may be downsides to mobile technology in the classroom. The major downside, as everybody who has ever been in a classroom where phones are permitted knows, is that the technology may be a bigger source of distraction than it is of engagement. Shaun offers a page about ‘acceptable use policies’ for mobile phones in classrooms, but does not let (what he describes as) ‘media scare stories’ get in the way of his enthusiasm.

There are undoubtedly countless examples of ways in which mobile phones can (and even should) be used to further language learning, although I suspect that the QR reader would struggle to make the list. The problem is that these positive examples are all we ever hear about. The topic of distraction does not even get a mention in the chapter on mobile language learning in ‘The Routledge Handbook of Language Learning and Technology’ (Stockwell, 2016). Neither does it appear in Li Li’s (2017) ‘New Technologies and Language Learning’.

Glenda Morgan (2023) has described this as ‘Success Porn in EdTech’, where success is exaggerated, failures minimized and challenges rendered to the point that they are pretty much invisible. ‘Success porn’ is a feature of conference presentations and blog posts, genres which require relentless positivity and a ‘constructive sense of hope, optimism and ambition’ (Selwyn, 2016). Edtech Kool-Aid (ibid) is also a feature of academic writing. Do a Google Scholar search for ‘mobile learning language learning’ to see what I mean. The first article that comes up is entitled ‘Positive effects of mobile learning on foreign language learning’. Skepticism is in very short supply, as it is in most research into edtech. There are a number of reasons for this, one of which (that ‘locating one’s work in the pro-edtech zeitgeist may be a strategic choice to be part of the mainstream of the field’ (Mertala et al., 2022)) will resonate with colleagues who wish to give conference presentations and write blogs for publishers. The discourse around AI is, of course, no different (see Nemorin et al., 2022).

Anyway, back to the downside of mobile learning and the ‘media scare stories’. Most language learning takes place in primary and secondary schools. According to a recent report from Common Sense (Radesky et al., 2023), US teens use their smart phones for a median of 4 ½ hours per day, checking for notifications a median of 51 times. Almost all of them (97%) use their phones at school, mostly for social media, videos or gaming. Schools have a variety of policies, and widely varying enforcement within those policies. Your country may not be quite the same as the US, but it’s probably heading that way.

Research suggests that excessive (which is to say typical) mobile phone use has a negative impact on learning outcomes, wellbeing and issues like bullying (see this brief summary of global research). This comes as no surprise to most people – the participants at the 2012 Macmillan debate were aware of these problems. The question that needs to be asked, therefore, is not whether mobile learning can assist language learning, but whether the potential gains outweigh the potential disadvantages. Is language learning a special case?

One in four countries around the world have decided to ban phones in school. A new report from UNESCO (2023) calls for a global smart phone ban in education, pointing out that there is ‘little robust research to demonstrate digital technology inherently added value to education’. The same report delves a little into generative AI, and a summary begins ‘Generative AI may not bring the kind of change in education often discussed. Whether and how AI would be used in education is an open question (Gillani et al., 2023)’ (UNESCO, 2023: 13).

The history of the marketing of edtech has always been ‘this time it’s different’. It relies on a certain number of people repeating the mantra, since the more it is repeated, the more likely it will be perceived to be true (Fazio et al., 2019): this is the illusory truth effect or the ‘Snark rule[1]’. Mobile learning changed things for the better for some learners in some contexts: claims that it was the future of, or would revolutionize, language learning have proved somewhat exaggerated. Indeed, the proliferation of badly-designed language learning apps suggests that much mobile learning reinforces the conventional past of language learning (drilling, gamified rote learning, native-speaker models, etc.) rather than leading to positive change (see Kohn, 2023). The history of edtech is a history of broken promises and unfulfilled potential and there is no good reason why generative AI will be any different.

Perhaps, then, it behoves us to be extremely sceptical about the current discourse surrounding generative AI in ELT. Like mobile technology, it may well be an extremely useful tool, but the chances that it will revolutionize language teaching are extremely slim – much like the radio, TV, audio / video recording and playback, the photocopier, the internet and VR before it. A few people will make some money for a while, but truly revolutionary change in teaching / learning will not come about through technological innovation.

References

Dudeney, G. & Hockly, N. (2007) How to Teach English with Technology. Harlow: Pearson Education

Fazio, L. K., Rand, D. G. & Pennycook, G. (2019) Repetition increases perceived truth equally for plausible and implausible statements. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 26: 1705–1710. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-019-01651-4

Hockly, N. (2013) Mobile Learning. ELT Journal, 67 (1): 80 – 84

Kohn, A. (2023) How ‘Innovative’ Ed Tech Actually Reinforces Convention. Education Week, 19 September 2023.

Kukulska-Hulme, A. (2009) Will Mobile Learning Change Language Learning? reCALL, 21 (2): 157 – 165

Kukulska-Hulme, A. (2012) Mobile Learning and the Future of Learning. International HETL Review, 2: 13 – 18

Kukulska-Hulme, A., Lee, H. & Norris, L. (2017) Mobile Learning Revolution: Implications for Language Pedagogy. In Chapelle, C. A. & Sauro, S. (Eds.) The Handbook of Technology and Second Language Teaching and Learning. John Wiley & Sons

Li, L. (2017) New Technologies and Language Learning. London: Palgrave

Mertala, P., Moens, E. & Teräs, M. (2022) Highly cited educational technology journal articles: a descriptive and critical analysis, Learning, Media and Technology, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2022.2141253

Nemorin, S., Vlachidis, A., Ayerakwa, H. M. & Andriotis, P. (2022): AI hyped? A horizon scan of discourse on artificial intelligence in education (AIED) and development, Learning, Media and Technology, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2022.2095568

Radesky, J., Weeks, H.M., Schaller, A., Robb, M., Mann, S., and Lenhart, A. (2023) Constant Companion: A Week in the Life of a Young Person’s Smartphone Use. San Francisco, CA: Common Sense.

Selwyn, N. (2016) Minding our Language: Why Education and Technology is Full of Bullshit … and What Might be Done About it. Learning, Media and Technology, 41 (3): 437–443

Stockwell, G. (2016) Mobile Language Learning. In Farr, F. & Murray, L. (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Language Learning and Technology. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 296 – 307

UNESCO (2023) Global Education Monitoring Report 2023: Technology in Education – A Tool on whose Terms?Paris: UNESCO

Wilden, S. (2017) Mobile Learning. Oxford: OUP

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[1] Named after Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ in which the Bellman cries ‘I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.’

Design thinking and ELT

There has recently been a spate of articles and blog posts about design thinking and English language teaching. You could try ‘Design Thinking in Digital Language Learning’, by Speex, provider of ‘online coaching and assessment solutions’, ‘Design Thinking Activities in the ESL Classroom’, brought to you by Express Publishing, market leaders in bandwagon-jumping, or a podcast on ‘Design thinking’ from LearnJam. Or, if you happen to be going to the upcoming IATEFL conference, there are three presentations to choose from:

• Design thinking, a sticky side up path to innovators
• ESP course development for cultural creative design with design thinking
• Reimagining teacher-centered professional development – can design thinking help?

The term ‘design thinking’ dates back decades, but really took off in popularity around 2005, and the following year, it was a theme at the World Economic Forum (Woudhuysen, 2011) The Harvard Business Review was pushing the idea in 2008 and The Economist ran a conference on the topic two years later. Judging from Google Trends, its popularity appeared to peak about a year ago, but the current dip might only be temporary. It’s especially popular in Peru and Singapore, for some reason. It is now strongly associated with Stanford University, the spiritual home of Silicon Valley, where you can join a three-and-a-half day design thinking bootcamp if you have $14,000 to spare.

What you would probably get for your money is a better understanding of ‘an approach to problem-solving based on a few easy-to-grasp principles that sound obvious: ‘Show Don’t Tell,’ ‘Focus on Human Values,’ ‘Craft Clarity,’ ‘Embrace Experimentation,’ ‘Mindful of Process,’ ‘Bias Toward Action,’ and ‘Radical Collaboration’’ (Miller, 2015). In the Stanford model of design thinking, which is the most commonly cited, this boils down to five processes: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test.

I appreciate that this must sound a bit vague. I’d make things clearer if I could, but the problem is that ‘the deeper you dig into Design Thinking, the vaguer it becomes’ (Vinsel, 2017). If one thing is clear, however, it’s that things aren’t very clear (Johansson-Sköldberg et al., 2013), and haven’t been since the bandwagon got rolling. Back in 2010, at the 8^th Design Thinking Research Symposium, Badke-Schaub et al. (2010) entitled their paper ‘Design thinking: a paradigm on its way from dilution to meaninglessness’. At a more recent conference, Bouwman et al. (2019) reported that the term is ‘becoming more and more vague’. So, is it a five-step process or not? According to Marty Neumeier, author of many books on design thinking, it is not: ‘that’s crap design thinking, of which there is plenty, I agree’.

My first direct experience of design thinking was back in 2015/16 when I took part in a meeting with publishers to discuss a new coursebook project. My main recollection of this was brainstorming various ideas, writing them down on Post-its, and adding them to other Post-its on the walls around the room. I think this was a combination of the empathizing and defining stages, but I could be wrong. Some years later, I took part in an online colloquium where we did something similar, except the Post-its were now digitalized using the Miro collaborative whiteboard. On both these occasions, the scepticism was palpable (except on the part of the facilitators), but we could all console ourselves that we were being cutting-edge in our approach to problem-solving.

Not everyone has been quite so ambivalent. Graphic designer, Natasha Jen, entitled her talk ‘Design Thinking is Bullsh*t’ and urged design practitioners to avoid the jargon and buzzwords associated with their field, to engage in more self-criticism, to base their ideas on evidence, and to stop assuming that their five-step process is needed for anything and everything (Vinsel, 2017). Vinsel (2017) likens design thinking to syphilis. Even the Harvard Business Review has changed its tune. Iskander (2018) doesn’t mince her words:

When it comes to design thinking, the bloom is off the rose. Billed as a set of tools for innovation, design thinking has been enthusiastically and, to some extent, uncritically adopted by firms and universities alike as an approach for the development of innovative solutions to complex problems. But skepticism about design thinking has now begun to seep out onto the pages of business magazines and educational publications. The criticisms are several: that design thinking is poorly defined; that the case for its use relies more on anecdotes than data; that it is little more than basic commonsense, repackaged and then marketed for a hefty consulting fee. As some of these design thinking concepts have sloshed into the world of policy, and social change efforts have been re-cast as social innovation, the queasiness around the approach has also begun to surface in the field of public policy.

Design thinking meets all the criteria needed to be called a fad (Brindle & Stearns, 2021). And like all fads from the corporate world, it has arrived in ELT past its sell-by date. Its travelling companions are terms like innovation, disruption, agile, iteration, reframing, hubs, thought leaders and so on. See below for a slide from Natasha Jen’s talk. As fads go, it is fairly harmless, and there may well be some design-thinking-inspired activities that could be useful in a language classroom. But it’s worth remembering that, for all its associations with ‘innovation’, the driving force has always been commercialization (Vinsel, 2017). In ELT, it’s about new products – courses, coursebooks, apps and so on. Whatever else may be intended, use of the term signals alignment with corporate values, an awareness of what is (was?) hip and hot in the start-up world. It’s a discourse-shaper, reframing our questions and concerns as engineering problems, suggesting that solutions to pretty much everything can be found by thinking in the right kind of corporate way. No wonder it was catnip to my publishers.

References

Badke-Schaub, P.G., Roozenburg, N.F.M., & Cardoso, C. (2010) Design thinking: a paradigm on its way from dilution to meaninglessness? In K. Dorst, S. Stewart, I. Staudinger, B. Paton, & A. Dong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th Design Thinking Research Symposium (DTRS8) (pp. 39-49). DAB documents.

Bouwman, S., Voorendt, J., Eisenbart, B. & McKilligan, S. (2019) Design Thinking: An Approach with Various Perceptions. Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Brindle, M. C. & Stearns, P. N. (2001) Facing up to Management Faddism: A New Look at an Old Force. Westport, CT: Quorum Books

Iskander, N. (2018) Design Thinking Is Fundamentally Conservative and Preserves the Status Quo. Harvard Business Review, September 5, 2018

Johansson-Sköldberg, U., Woodilla, J. & Çetinkaya, M. (2013) Design Thinking: Past, Present and Possible Futures. Creativity and Innovation Management, 22 (2): 121 – 146

Miller, P. N. (2015) Is ‘Design Thinking’ the New Liberal Arts? The Chronicle of Higher Education March 26, 2015

Vinsel, L. (2017) Design Thinking is Kind of Like Syphilis — It’s Contagious and Rots Your Brains. Medium Dec 6, 2018

Woudhuysen, J. (2011) The Craze for Design Thinking: Roots, A Critique, and toward an Alternative. Design Principles And Practices: An International Journal, Vol. 5

The last word on motivation

Motivation and research

Ljke quite a few of the topics I have explored in this blog, motivation is something about which we can all agree on its importance, but without being entirely clear about what it means. It is closely connected to a number of other human attributes – reasons for learning, goal-setting, strength of desire to achieve goals, attitudes towards and interest in English, effort and self-regulation, learner autonomy … (Lamb, 2016) and the list could be continued. In fact, it means so many things that the American Psychological Association has considered deleting the word as a search term in the main psychological database (Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2013).

In the world of language learning, research into motivation got going over 60 years ago (Gardner & Lambert, 1959), really took off in the 1990s, and has become ‘one of the most popular research topics, showing an exponential increase in quantity year after year’ (Al-Hoorie et al., 2021: 139). The main reason for this is no doubt the widely shared perception of the importance of ‘motivation’ (and demotivation), but also, perhaps, because motivation is seen as an easy topic among novice researchers (Ushioda, 2016), relying, as it typically does, on a questionnaire.

However, all is not well in this world of language motivation research. First of all, researchers are questioning whether motivation to learn a language is fundamentally any different from motivation to learn anything else (Al-Hoorie & Hiver, 2020). Some research suggests that it is not, and that the complex network of ‘identity, emotions, social and political factors, both inside and outside of school’ (Al-Hoorie et al., 2021: 141) that are seen as relevant to language learning motivation apply equally to learning maths. Attempts to carve out a particular space for language learning motivation (such as Dörnyei’s (2009) ‘L2 motivational self system’) may have much appeal, but are less convincing when studied more closely (Al-Hoorie, 2018).

All of which leaves us where exactly? The conclusion of Al-Hoorie et al (2021) is that we might gain a better understanding of language learning motivation through the lens of complex dynamic systems theory, but the complexity of any insights gained makes it unlikely that this would lead to ‘workable pedagogical recommendations’. Since the whole point of researching motivation is to generate ‘workable pedagogical recommendations’, Al-Hoorie et al’s inescapable conclusion is that motivation research should be abandoned … and that attention should shift ‘to the more tangible and actionable construct of engagement’. This view would seem to be shared by Mercer and Dörnyei (2020). But is ‘engagement’ really any more tangible and actionable than ‘motivation’? I don’t think so. The concept of ‘engagement’ unifies motivation and its activation, according to Mercer & Dörnyei (2020: 6), which means that ‘engagement’ is an even more complex concept than motivation alone.

The mantra of researchers is ‘more research needed’ (Maley, 2016), so, even when criticising the research, it’s hardly surprising that Al-Hoorie et al argue for more research … just with a different focus. So, besides abandoning ‘motivation’ and looking at ‘engagement’ instead, more research that is ‘interventional in nature’ is needed – as it is a ‘rare commodity’ (Al-Hoorie et al., 2021: 141-2).

Motivation and practice

There’s no shortage of stuff out there telling us how to do motivation in the language classroom. There are books full of practical ideas and tips (e.g. Dörnyei & Hadfield, 2013; Renandya, 2015; Thorner, 2017). There is also any amount of online stuff about motivation, the main purpose of which is to sell something: a brand, a product (such as a coursebook or an app) or an idea (such as coaching). And then there are the ‘pedagogical applications’ that come at the end of the research papers, which ‘more often than not do not logically and unambiguously follow from the results of the research’ (Al-Hoorie et al., 2021: 138).

There are two big problems with all of this. We know that motivational classroom interventions can ‘work’, but we cannot actually measure ‘motivation’. We can only measure proxies for motivation, and the most common of these is self-reported intended effort – which actually tells us very little. Achievement may correlate with intended effort … but it may not! Much of the research literature implies that motivational interventions may be helpful, but fails to demonstrate clearly that they will be (see Howard et al., 2021, as an example). Equally problematic is the fact that we don’t know which kinds of interventions are likely to be most beneficial (see, for example, Lazowski & Hulleman, 2015). In other words, we are in the dark.

This is not to say that some of the tips and practical classroom ideas are not worth trying out. Most tips you will come across will strike you as self-evident (e.g. intrinsic beats extrinsic, success breeds motivation, rewards beat punishment) and, like Renandya (2015), quite reasonably draw on mainstream motivational theory. Regarding the practical side of things, Al-Hoorie et al (2021: 147) conclude that ‘probably the best advice to give to a novice teacher is not to bury themselves in recently published language motivation research, but to simply rely on experience and trial and error, and perhaps a good mentor’. As for good, experienced teachers, they already know ‘far more about motivating students than the sum of knowledge that can be gained from research’ (Henry et al, 2019: 15).

It is therefore just as well that it wouldn’t cross most teachers’ minds to even think of exploring this research.

Motivation and symbolic power

Hoorie et al (2021: 139- 142) observe that ‘giving advice to teachers has become de rigueur of late, which strikes us as antithetical to engaging in necessary critical reflection and the limits of available empirical evidence’. Teachers, they note, have to ‘make constant, split-second decisions to adapt to changing and evolving contexts. Asking teachers to learn how to teach from research findings is akin to asking an individual to learn how to drive or swim through reading books sans actual practice. Books might help in some respects, but in the end drivers and swimmers have to refine their skills through sustained practice and by trial and error due to the complex and unpredictable nature of context’.

In this light, it is hard not to view the discourse of language motivation research through the lens of ‘symbolic power’. It is hard not to reflect on the relation of research and practice in solving real-world language-related problems, to wonder whether such problem-solving has been hijacked by ‘professional experts’, and to wonder about the devaluation of the contribution of practitioners (Kramsch, 2021: 201).

References

Al-Hoorie, A.H. (2018) The L2 motivational self system: A meta-analysis. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 8 (4) https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt/article/view/12295

Al-Hoorie, A. H. & Hiver, P. (2020) The fundamental difference hypothesis: expanding the conversation in language learning motivation. SAGE Open, 10 (3) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244020945702

Al-Hoorie, A.H., Hiver, P., Kim, T.Y. & De Costa, P. I. (2021) The Identity Crisis in Language Motivation Research. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 40 (1): 136 – 153

Dörnyei, Z. (2009) The L2 motivational self system. In Z. Dörnyei & E. Ushioda (Eds.) Motivation, language identity and the L2 self (pp. 9-42). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Dörnyei, Z. & Hadfield, J. (2013) Motivating Learning. Harlow: Pearson

Dörnyei, Z. & Ushioda, E. (2013) Teaching and Researching Motivation 2^nd Edition. Abingdon: Routledge

Gardner, R. C. & Lambert, W. E. (1959) Motivational variables in second-language acquisition. Canadian Journal of Psychology / Revue Canadienne de Psychologie, 13 (4): 266 – 272

Henry, A., Sundqvist, P. & Thorsen, C. (2019) Motivational Practice: Insights from the Classroom. Studentlitteratur

Howard, J. L., Bureau, J. S., Guay, F., Chong, J. X. Y. & Ryan, R. M. (2021) Student Motivation and Associated Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis From Self-Determination Theory. Perspectives on Psychological Science, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1745691620966789

Kramsch, C. (2021) Language as Symbolic Power. Cambridge: CUP

Lamb, M. (2016) Motivation. In Hall, G. (Ed.) The Routledge Handbook of English Language Teaching. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 324 -338

Lazowski, R. & Hulleman, C. (2015) Motivation Interventions in Education: A Meta-Analytic Review. Review of Educational Research, 86 (2)

Maley, A. (2016) ‘More research is needed’ – A Mantra too Far? Humanising Language Teaching, 18 (3)

Mercer, S. & Dörnyei, Z. (2020) Engaging Language Learners in Contemporary Classrooms. Cambridge: CUP

Renandya, W.A. (2015) L2 motivation: Whose responsibility is it? English Language Teaching, 27 (4): 177-189.

Thorner, N. (2017) Motivational Teaching. Oxford: OUP

Ushioda, E. (2016) Language learning motivation through a small lens: a research agenda. Language Teaching, 49 (4): 564 – 577

Wellbeing in ELT: a Status Report

When I last blogged about teacher wellbeing in August 2020, we were in the early throes of COVID, and Sarah Mercer and Tammy Gregersen had recently published their timely book about wellbeing (Mercer & Gregersen, 2020). Now, over two years later, it seems appropriate to take another look at the topic, to evaluate the status of the concept of ‘wellbeing’ in ELT.

Wellbeing as an object of study

The first thing to be said is that wellbeing is doing just fine. Since 1995, the frequency of use of ‘subjective well-being’ in books has increased by a factor of eight, and, across multiple languages, academic attention to wellbeing and related concepts like ‘happiness’ is growing (Barrington-Leigh, 2022). Interest in teacher wellbeing is no exception to this trend. There are, however, a few problems, according to a recent systematic review of the research literature (Hascher & Waber, 2021). There is, apparently, little consensus on how the term should be defined. There is little in the way of strong evidence that wellbeing correlates with good teaching, and, to my surprise, there is a lack of studies pointing to actual shortfalls in teacher wellbeing. Empirical evidence regarding the effectiveness of programmes aiming to foster teacher wellbeing is, less surprisingly, scarce.

Researchers in English language teacher wellbeing are well aware of all this and are doing their best to fill in the gaps. A ‘research group for wellbeing in language education’ has recently been formed at the University of Graz in Austria, where Sarah Mercer works. This is part of a push to promote positive psychology in language teaching publications, and the output of Sarah Mercer, Tammy Gregersen and their associates has been prodigious.

Next year will see the publication of a book-length treatment of the topic with ‘Teacher Well-Being in English Language Teaching An Ecological Approach’ (Herrera et al, 2023). It will be interesting to see to what extent teacher wellbeing is dealt with as a social or political issue, as opposed to something amenable to the interventions of positive psychology.

In the wider world of education, wellbeing is not as frequently seen through the lens of positive psychology as it is in ELT circles. Other perspectives exist: a focus on working conditions or a focus on mental health, for example (Hascher & Waber, 2021). And then there is neuroscience and wellbeing, which I am eagerly awaiting an ELT perspective on. I have learnt that certain brain patterns are related to lower well-being (in the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex/ praecuneus, and angular gyrus areas, to be gratuitously specific). Lower wellbeing correlates with patterns that are found when the brain is at wakeful rest, such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering (Bartels et al. 2022). All of which sounds, to me, like a strong argument for mindfulness practices. Keep your eye out for ELT publishers’ webinars (see below) and you’ll no doubt hear someone taking this line, along with some nice fMRI images.

Wellbeing and self-help

Academic study of wellbeing proceeds apace, but the ultimate justification for this research can only be found in its ability to help generate solutions to a real-world problem. In this sense, it is no different from the field of applied linguistics in general (from where most of the ELT wellbeing researchers come): it is its ability to solve problems which ‘alone justifies its existence in the first place’ (Widdowson, 2018: 142).

But here we run into something of a brick wall. Whilst it is generally acknowledged that improvements to teacher wellbeing require ‘structural and systemic levels of change’ and that ‘teachers should not have to compensate for fundamental flaws in the system as a whole’ (Mercer & Gregersen, 2020: 9), the ‘solutions’ that are proposed are never primarily about systems, but always about ‘me’. Take a look at any blog post on teacher wellbeing in ELT and you will see what could be called the psychologizing of the political. This process is at the heart of the positive psychology movement which so dominates the current world of wellbeing in ELT.

A look at the Teacher Wellbeing SIG of BRAZ-TESOL (on Facebook or Instagram) gives a good sample of the kind of advice that is on offer: write out a self-appreciation list, respect others, remember you are unique, be grateful, smile, develop emotional intelligence and a growth mindset, start with yourself, take care of yourself, look after your ‘authentic self’, set goals, believe that nothing is impossible, take small steps, pause and breathe, spend time with positive people, learn to say no, and so on. This advice is offered in all seriousness, but is not so very different from the kind of advice offered by @lifeadvicebot on Twitter (‘Are you struggling with the impact of sexism? Consider cultivating a sense of gratitude’ or ‘Worried about racism? Why not try stretching your back and shoulders?).

I don’t mean to suggest that mindfulness and the other nostrums on offer will be of no benefit to anybody at all, but, however well-intentioned such advice may be, it may be ‘rather better for its promoters than for its putative beneficiaries’ (Widdowson, 2021: 47). The advice is never new or original. It is rutted with the ‘grooves of borrowed thought’, lifting directly from the long tradition of self-help literature, of which it is yet another exemplar. Like all self-improvement literature, you don’t need any deep commitment to read it. Written in an accessible style (and in the case of the BRAZ-TESOL SIG in the form of illustrated inspirational quotes), there is a slight problem with all this advice. If you do decide to dive into it repeatedly, you will quickly discover ‘that it is not such a long way from surface to bottom’ (Lichterman, 1992: 427). Like all self-help literature, as Csikszentmihalyi (1990) observed on the back cover of his best-selling work, it will probably have no effect whatsoever. Whether you agree with Csikszentmihalyi or not, there is a delicious irony in the fact that this comment appeared on the back cover of his own self-help book. Like all positive psychologists, he thought he had something new and scientifically grounded to say.

There are also increasing numbers of wellbeing coaches – a thoroughly unsurprisingly development. Many of them are positive psychology adepts, some describe themselves as neuro-science based, and have a background in Neuro-Linguistic Processing. In the context of education, expect the phrase ‘life skills’ to be thrown in from time to time. See this article from Humanising Language Teaching as an example.

But self-help literature treads familiar ground. Work on the self may seem like ‘an antidote to the anxiety-provoking uncertainties of [our] economic and social order’ (McGee, 2005: 43), but it has nowhere to go and is doomed to follow its Sisyphean path. If research into teacher wellbeing in ELT cannot shake off its association with positive psychology and self-help, its justification (and interest in it) will soon slip away.

Wellbeing as a marketing tool

Wellbeing is ideally positioned as a marketing trope … as long as the connections between low wellbeing and pay / working conditions are not dwelled on. It’s a ‘new’ and ‘virtuous’ topic that sits comfortably beside inclusivity, sustainability and environmental awareness. Teaching is a caring profession: a marketing focus on wellbeing is intended to be taken as a sign that the marketers care too. They have your best interests at heart. And when the marketing comes in the form of wellbeing tips, the marketers are offering for free something which is known to be appreciated by many teachers. Some teacher wellbeing books, like the self-published ‘The Teacher’s Guide to Self-Care: Build Resilience, Avoid Burnout, and Bring a Happier and Healthier You to the Classroom’ (Forst, 2020), have sold in considerable quantities.

BETT, which organises a global series of education shows whose purpose is to market information technology in education, is a fascinating example of wellbeing marketing. The BETT shows and the website are packed with references to wellbeing, combining the use of wellbeing to market products unrelated to wellbeing, at the same time as marketing wellbeing products. Neat, eh? Most of these uses of ‘wellbeing’ are from the last couple of years. The website has a wellbeing ‘hub’. Click on an article entitled ‘Student Wellbeing Resources’ and you’ll be taken to a list of products you can buy. Other articles, like ‘Fostering well-being and engagement with Microsoft education solutions’, are clearer from the get-go.

All the major ELT publishers have jumped on the bandwagon. Some examples … Macmillan has a ‘wellness space’ (‘a curated playlist of on-demand webinars and practical resources to specifically support your well-being – and for you to return to as often as you like’). They were also ‘delighted to have championed mindfulness at the IATEFL conference this year!’ Pearson has a ‘wellbeing zone’ – ‘packed with free resources to support teachers, parents and young people with mental health and wellbeing – from advice on coping with anxiety and exam stress, to fun activities and mindfulness’. Last year, Express Publishing chose to market one of its readers with the following introductory line: ‘#Reading for pleasure improves #empathy, #socialrelationships and our general #wellbeing’. And on it goes.

Without going as far as to say that these are practices of ‘wellbeing washing’, it is only realistic, not cynical, to wonder just how seriously these organisations take questions of teacher wellbeing. There are certainly few ELT writers who feel that their publishers have the slightest concern about their wellbeing. Similarly, we might consider the British Council, which is ‘committed to supporting policymakers, school leaders and teachers in improving mental wellbeing in schools’. But less committed, it would seem, to their own teachers in Kabul or to their staff who went on strike earlier this year in protest at forced redundancies and outsourcing of jobs.

How long ‘wellbeing’ will continue to be seen as a useful marketing trope in ELT remains to be seen. It will be hard to sustain for very long, since there is so little to say about it without repetition, and since everyone is in on the game. My guess is that ‘wellbeing’ will soon be superseded by ‘sustainability’. ‘Sustainability’ is a better hooray word than ‘wellbeing’, because it combines environmental quality and wellbeing, throwing in ‘lifelong learning’ and ‘social justice’ for good measure (Kapranov, 2022). The wellbeing zones and hubs won’t need to be dismantled just yet, but there may well be a shift towards more sustainable self-care. Here are some top tips taken from How To Self-Care The Sustainable Way on the Wearth website: snooze your way to wellbeing, indulge and preen your body, grab a cuppa, slip into a warming bath, mindfully take care of your mind, retail therapy the wholesome way. All carbon-neutral, vegan and cruelty-free.

References

Barrington-Leigh, C. P. (2022) Trends in Conceptions of Progress and Well-being. In Helliwell, J. F., Layard, R., Sachs, J. D., De Neve, J.-E., Aknin, L. B. & Wang, S. World Happiness Report 2022. https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2022/WHR+22.pdf  New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Bartels, M., Nes, R. B., Armitage, J. M., van de Weijer, M. P., de Vries L. P. & Haworth, C. M. A. (2022) Exploring the Biological Basis for Happiness. In Helliwell, J. F., Layard, R., Sachs, J. D., De Neve, J.-E., Aknin, L. B. & Wang, S. World Happiness Report 2022. https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2022/WHR+22.pdf  New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row

Forst, S. (2020) The Teacher’s Guide to Self-Care: Build Resilience, Avoid Burnout, and Bring a Happier and Healthier You to the Classroom. The Designer Teacher, LLC

Hascher, T. & Waber, J. (2021) Teacher well-being: A systematic review of the research literature from the year 2000–2019. Educational Research Review, 34 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1747938X21000348

Kapranov, O. (2022) The Discourse of Sustainability in English Language Teaching (ELT) at the University of Oxford: Analyzing Discursive Representations. Journal of Teacher Education for Sustainability, 24 (1):35-48 https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/jtes-2022-0004

Pentón Herrera, L. J., Martínez-Alba, G. & Trinh, E. (Eds.) (2023) Teacher Well-Being in English Language Teaching: An Ecological Approach. Abingdon: Routledge

Lichterman, P. (1992) Self-help reading as a thin culture. Media, Culture and Society, 14: 421 – 447

McGee, M. (2005) Self-Help, Inc. Oxford: OUP

Mercer, S. & Gregersen, T. (2020) Teacher Wellbeing. Oxford: OUP

Widdowson, H. G. (2018) Applied linguistics as a transdisciplinary practice: What’s in a prefix? AILA Review, 31 (1): 135- 142

Widdowson, H. G. (2021) On the Subject of English. Berlin: De Gruyter

Learning and earning

In the campaign for leadership of the British Conservative party, prime ministerial wannabe, Rishi Sunak, announced that he wanted to phase out all university degrees with low ‘earning potential’. This would mean the end of undergraduate courses in fashion, film, philosophy, English language and media studies. And linguistics. More of an attention-grabbing soundbite than anything else, it reflects a view of education that is shared by his competitor, Liz Truss, who ‘is passionate about giving every child basic maths and science skills’ as a way of driving the contribution of education to the economy.

It’s a view that is shared these days by practically everyone with any power and influence, from national governments to organisations like the EU and the OECD (Schuller, 2000). It is rooted in the belief that what matters most in education are the teachable knowledges, skills and competences that are relevant to economic activity (as the OECD puts it). These competences are seen to be essential to economic growth and competitivity, and essential to individuals to enhance their employment potential. Learning equals earning. The way for societies to push this orientation to education is to allow market forces to respond to the presumed demands of the consumers of education (students and their sponsors), as they seek to obtain the best possible return on their investment in education. Market forces are given more power when education is privatized and uncoupled from the state. For this to happen, the market may need a little help in the form of policies from the likes of Sunak and Truss.

This set of beliefs has a name: human capital theory (Becker, 1993). Human capital refers both to the skills that individuals ‘bring to bear in the economy and the need for capital investment in these’ (Holborow, 2012). It is impossible to overstate just how pervasive this theory in contemporary approaches to education is. See, for example, this selection of articles from Science Direct. It is also very easy to forget how recently the lens of human capital has become practically the only lens through which education is viewed.

Contemporary language teaching is perhaps best understood as a series of initiatives that have been driven by human capital theory. First and foremost, there is the global ‘frenzied rush towards acquiring English’ (Holborow, 2018), driven both by governments and by individuals who see that foreign language competence (especially English) ‘might […]open up new opportunities for students [and] assist them in breaking social barriers’ (Kormos & Kiddle, 2013). Children, at ever younger ages (even pre-school), are pushed towards getting a headstart in the race to acquire human capital, whilst there has been an explosive growth in EMI courses (Lasagabaster, 2022). At the same time, there has been mushrooming interest in so-called 21^st century skills (or ‘life skills’ / ‘global skills’) in the English language curriculum. These skills have been identified by asking employers what skills matter most to them when recruiting staff. Critical and creative thinking skills may be seen as having pre-Human Capital, intrinsic educational worth, but it is their potential contribution to economic productivity that explains their general current acceptance.

Investments in human capital need to be measured and measurable. Language teaching needs to be made accountable. Our preoccupation with learning outcomes is seen in the endless number of competency frameworks, and with new tools for quantifying language proficiency. Technology facilitates this evaluation, promises to deliver language teaching more efficiently, and technological skills are, after English language skills themselves, seen to be the most bankable of 21^st century skills. Current interest in social-emotional learning – growth mindsets, grit, resilience and so on – is also driven by a concern to make learning more efficient.

In all of these aspects of language teaching / learning, the private sector (often in private-public partnerships) is very visible. This is by design. Supported by the state, the market economy of education grows in tandem with the rising influence of the private sector on national educational policy. When education ministers lose their job, they can easily find well-paid consultancies in the private sector (as in the case of Sunak and Truss’s colleague, Gavin Williamson).

One of the powers of market-economy ideologies is that it often seems that ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA). There are, however, good reasons to try to think in alternative terms. To begin with, and limiting ourselves for the moment to language teaching, there is a desperate lack of evidence that starting English language learning at very young ages (in the way that is most typically done) will lead to any appreciable gains in the human capital race. It is generally recognised that EMI is highly problematic in a variety of ways (Lasagabaster, 2022). The focus on 21^st century skills has not led to any significant growth in learning outcomes when these skills are measured. There is a worrying lack of evidence that interventions in schools to promote improvements in critical or creative thinking have had much, if any, impact at all. Similarly, there is a worrying lack of evidence that attention to growth mindsets or grit has led to very much at all. Personalized learning, facilitated by technology, likewise has a dismal track record. At the same time, there is no evidence that the interest in measuring learning outcomes has led to any improvement in those outcomes. For all the millions and millions that have been invested in all these trends, the returns have been very slim. Perhaps we would have done better to look for solutions to those aspects of language teaching which we know to be problematic. The obsession with synthetic syllabuses delivered by coursebooks (or their online equivalents) comes to mind.

But beyond the failure of all these things to deliver on their promises, there are broader issues. Although language skills (usually English) have the potential to enhance employment prospects, Holborow (2018) has noted that they do not necessarily do so (see, for example, Yeung & Gray, 2022). Precisely how important language skills are is very hard to determine. A 2016 survey by Cambridge English found that ‘approximately half of all employers offer a better starting package to applicants with good English language skills’ and a similar number indicate that these skills result in faster career progression. But these numbers need to be treated with caution, not least because Cambridge English is in the business of selling English. More importantly, it seems highly unlikely that the figures that are reported reflect the reality of job markets around the world. The survey observes that banking, finance and law are the sectors with the greatest need for such skills, but these are all usually graduate posts. An average of 39% of the population in OECD countries has tertiary education; the percentage is much lower elsewhere. How many students of a given age cohort will actually work in these sectors? Even in rich countries, like Germany and the Netherlands, between 40 and 60% of workers are employed in what is termed ‘nonstandard forms of work’ (OECD, 2015) where language skills will count for little or nothing. These numbers are growing. Language skills are of most value to those students who are already relatively advantaged. That is not to say that there are no potential benefits to everyone in learning English, but these benefits will not be found in better jobs and wages for the majority. One interesting case study describes how a Swiss airport company exploits the language skills of migrant workers, without any benefits (salary or mobility) accruing to the workers themselves (Duchêne, 2011).

The relationship between learning English and earning more is a lot more complex than is usually presented. The same holds true for learning more generally. In the US, ‘nearly two-thirds of job openings in 2020 required no more than a high school diploma’ (Brown et al., 2022: 222). Earnings for graduates in real terms are in decline, except for those at the very top. For the rest, over $1.3 trillion in student loan debt remains unpaid. Elsewhere in the world, the picture is more mixed, but it is clear that learning does not equal earning in the global gig economy.

This evident uncoupling of learning from earning has led some to conclude that education is ‘a waste of time and money’ (Caplan, 2018), a view that has been gaining traction in the US. It’s not an entirely unreasonable view, if the only reason for education is seen to be its contribution to the economy. More commonly, the reaction has been to double-down on human capital theory. In Spain, for example, with its high levels of youth unemployment, there are calls for closer links between educational institutions, and graduates themselves are blamed for failing to take ‘advantage of the upgrading in the demand for skills’ (Bentolilla et al., 2022). This seems almost wilfully cruel, especially since the authors note that there is global trend in falling economic returns in tertiary education (ILO, 2020).

But, rather than doubling-down on human capital theory (e.g. more vocational training, more efficient delivery of the training), it might be a good idea to question human capital theory itself. Both early and more recent critics have tended to accept without hesitation that education can enhance worker productivity, but argue that, as a theory, it is too simplistic to have much explanatory power, and that the supporting evidence is weak, vague or untestable (Bowles & Gintis, 1975; Fix, 2018). Language skills, like education more generally, do not always lead to better employment prospects and salaries, because ‘wider, systemic social inequalities come into play’ (Holborow, 2018). It is not because black women need to brush up on their 21^st century skills that they earn less than white men.

Until recently, critics of human capital theory have been a minority, and largely unheard, voice. But this appear to be changing. The World Bank, more guilty than anyone for pushing human capital theory on the global stage (see here), has recognised that hoped-for job outcomes do not always materialize after massive investments in training systems (World Bank, 2013). Mainstream critics include the Nobel prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, and the recent OUP title, ‘The Death of Human Capital?’ (Brown et al., 2020) is likely to spur debate further. The assumption that human capital theory holds water no longer holds water.

When we turn back to English language teaching, we might benefit from some new thinking. For sure, there will be large numbers of English language learners whose only purpose in studying is utilitarian, whose primary desire is to enhance their human capital. But there are also millions, especially children studying in public schools, for whom things are rather different. A major change in thinking involves a reconceptualization of the point of all this English study. If learning English is not, for the majority, seen primarily as a preparation for the workplace, but as compensation for the realities of (un)employment (Brown et al., 2020: 13), most of the recent innovations in ELT would become highly suspect. We would have a much less impoverished view of ‘the complex and multifaceted nature of language’ (Holborow, 2018) and we would find more space for plurilingual practices. A brake on relentless Englishization might be no bad thing (Wilkinson & Gabriëls, 2021). We might be able to explore more fully artistic and creative uses of language. Who knows? We might finally get round to wider implementation of language teaching approaches that we know have a decent chance of success.

References

Becker, G. S. (1993). Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (3^rd ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Bentolila, S., Felgueroso, F., Jansen, M. et al. (2022). Lost in recessions: youth employment and earnings in Spain. SERIEs 13: 11–49. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13209-021-00244-6

Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1975). The Problem with Human Capital Theory – a Marxian critique. The American Economic Review, 65 (2): 74 – 83

Brown, S., Lauder, H. & Cheung, S. Y. (2020). The Death of Human Capital? New York: Oxford University Press

Caplan, B. (2018). The Case against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

Duchêne, A. (2011). Neoliberalism, Social Inequalities, and Multilingualism: The Exploitation of Linguistic Resources and Speakers. Langage et Société, 136 (2): 81 – 108

Fix, B. (2018). The Trouble with Human Capital Theory. Working Papers on Capital as Power, No. 2018/7

Holborow, M. (2012). Neoliberal keywords and the contradictions of an ideology. In Block, D., Gray, J. & Holborow, M. Neoliberalism and Applied Linguistics. Abingdon: Routledge: 33 – 55

Holborow, M. (2018). Language skills as human capital? Challenging the neoliberal frame. Language and Intercultural Communication, 18: (5): 520-532

ILO (2020). Global employment trends for youth, 2020. Geneva: International Labour Organization

Kormos, J., & Kiddle, T. (2013). The role of socio-economic factors in motivation to learn English as a foreign language: the case of Chile. System, 41(2): 399-412

Lasagabaster, D. (2022). English-Medium Instruction in Higher Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

OECD (2015). In It Together, Why Less Inequality Benefits All. Paris: OECD

Schuller, T. (2000). Social and Human Capital: The Search for Appropriate Technomethodology. Policy Studies, 21 (1): 25 – 35

Wilkinson, R., & Gabriëls, R. (Eds.) (2021). The Englishization of Higher Education in Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

World Bank (2012). World Development Report 2013: Jobs. Washington, DC: World Bank

Yeung, S. & Gray, J. (2022). Neoliberalism, English, and spoiled identity: The case of a high-achieving university graduate in Hong Kong. Language in Society, First View, pp. 1 – 22

How to write about AI in language learning

The paragraph above was written by an AI-powered text generator called neuroflash https://app.neuro-flash.com/home which I told to produce a text on the topic ‘AI and education’. As texts on this topic go, it is both remarkable (in that it was not written by a human) and entirely unremarkable (in that it is practically indistinguishable from hundreds of human-written texts on the same subject). Neuroflash uses a neural network technology called GPT-3 – ‘a large language model’ – and ‘one of the most interesting and important AI systems ever produced’ (Chalmers, 2020). Basically, it generates text by predicting sequences of words based on huge databases. The nature of the paragraph above tells you all you need to know about the kinds of content that are usually found in texts about AI and education.

Not dissimilar from the neuroflash paragraph, educational commentary on uses of AI is characterised by (1) descriptions of AI tools already in use (e.g. speech recognition and machine translation) and (2) vague predictions which invariably refer to ‘the promise of personalised learning, adjusting what we give learners according to what they need to learn and keeping them motivated by giving them content that is of interest to them’ (Hughes, 2022). The question of what precisely will be personalised is unanswered: providing learners with optimal sets of resources (but which ones?), providing counselling services, recommendations or feedback for learners and teachers (but of what kind?) (Luckin, 2022). Nearly four years ago, I wrote https://adaptivelearninginelt.wordpress.com/2018/08/13/ai-and-language-teaching/ about the reasons why these questions remain unanswered. The short answer is that AI in language learning requires a ‘domain knowledge model’. This specifies what is to be learnt and includes an analysis of the steps that must be taken to reach that learning goal. This is lacking in SLA, or, at least, there is no general agreement on what it is. Worse, the models that are most commonly adopted in AI-driven programs (e.g. the deliberate learning of discrete items of grammar and vocabulary) are not supported by either current theory or research (see, for example, VanPatten & Smith, 2022).

In 2021, the IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG organised an event dedicated to AI in education. Unsurprisingly, there was a fair amount of input on AI in assessment, but my interest is in how AI might revolutionize how we learn and teach, not how we assess. What concrete examples did speakers provide?

Rose Luckin, the most well-known British expert on AI in education, kicked things off by mentioning three tools. One of these, Carnegie Learning, is a digital language course that looks very much like any of the ELT courses on offer from the big publishers – a fully blendable, multimedia (e.g. flashcards and videos) synthetic syllabus. This ‘blended learning solution’ is personalizable, since ‘no two students learn alike’, and, it claims, will develop a ‘lifelong love of language’. It appears to be premised on the idea of language learning as optimizing the delivery of ‘content’, of this content consisting primarily of discrete items, and of equating input with uptake. Been there, done that.

A second was Alelo Enskill https://www.alelo.com/about-us/ a chatbot / avatar roleplay program, first developed by the US military to teach Iraqi Arabic and aspects of Iraqi culture to Marines. I looked at the limitations of chatbot technology for language learning here https://adaptivelearninginelt.wordpress.com/2016/12/01/chatbots/ . The third tool mentioned by Luckin was Duolingo. Enough said.

Another speaker at this event was the founder and CEO of Edugo.AI https://www.edugo.ai/ , an AI-powered LMS which uses GPT-3. It allows schools to ‘create and upload on the platform any kind of language material (audio, video, text…). Our AI algorithms process and convert it in gamified exercises, which engage different parts of the brain, and gets students eager to practice’. Does this speaker know anything about gamification (for a quick read, I’d recommend Paul Driver (2012)) or neuroscience, I wonder. What, for that matter, does he know about language learning? Apparently, ‘language is not just about words, language is about sentences’ (Tomasello, 2022). Hmm, this doesn’t inspire confidence.

When you look at current uses of AI in language learning, there is very little (outside of testing, translation and speech ↔ text applications) that could justify enthusiastic claims that AI has any great educational potential. Skepticism seems to me a more reasonable and scientific response: de omnibus dubitandum.

Education is not the only field where AI has been talked up. When Covid hit us, AI was seen as the game-changing technology. It ‘could be deployed to make predictions, enhance efficiencies, and free up staff through automation; it could help rapidly process vast amounts of information and make lifesaving decisions’ (Chakravorti, 2022). The contribution of AI to the development of vaccines has been huge, but its role in diagnosing and triaging patients has been another matter altogether. Hundreds of predictive tools were developed: ‘none of them made a real difference, and some were potentially harmful’ (Heaven, 2021). Expectations were unrealistic and led to the deployment of tools before they were properly trialled. Thirty months down the line, a much more sober understanding of the potential of AI has emerged. Here, then, are the main lessons that have been learnt (I draw particularly on Engler, 2020, and Chakravorti, 2022) that are also relevant to education and language learning.

• Anticipate what could go wrong before anticipating what might go right. Engler (2020) writes that ‘a poorly kept secret of AI practitioners is that 96% accuracy is suspiciously high for any machine learning problem’. In language learning, it is highly unlikely that personalized recommendations will ever reach anything even approaching this level of reliability. What are the implications for individual learners whose learning is inappropriately personalised?
• We also know that a significant problem with AI systems is bias (O’Neil, 2016). There is a well-documented history of discriminatory outcomes because of people’s race, gender, social class or disability profile. Bias needs to be addressed proactively, not reactively.
• Acknowledge from the outset that, for AI to work, huge amounts of data related to prior outcomes will be needed. In the cases of both Covid and language learning, much of this data will be personal. This raises immediate questions of privacy and consent, especially for learners who are children. Don’t minimise this issue.
• Common by-products of AI use include insecure data storage, digital surveillance and consolidation of market power (Engler, 2020). Since such issues are so pervasive, assume they will be a problem, and need to be considered in evaluating the potential of any piece of AI edtech.
• Find out what the subject matter experts have to say: ‘AI is only helpful when applied judiciously by subject-matter experts—people with long-standing experience with the problem that they are trying to solve […] Effectively predicting a badly defined problem is worse than doing nothing at all’ (Engler, 2020). It may be that the problem the AI is trying to help solve is the wrong problem and not worth solving at all (e.g. more efficient ‘delivery’ of explicit grammatical knowledge, gamifying gapfills).

To bring this post to an end, I returned to the AI / GTP-3 driven neuroflash program. This time, I asked it to write a longer piece entitled ‘The dangers of artificial intelligence in education: what could go wrong?’. Here’s what it came up with:

There are a few potential dangers of artificial intelligence in education. One is that AI could be used to replace human teachers. This could lead to a decline in the quality of education, as machines are not yet capable of replicating the full range of human emotions and social interactions that are necessary for teaching. Additionally, AI could be used to create biased or “racist” educational materials, as has already happened with some commercial software products. Finally, AI could be used to track and monitor students in ways that invade their privacy, or that could be used to manipulate their behavior.

All of these dangers are real and should be taken seriously. However, it’s important to remember that AI is still a new technology, and its impact on education is not yet fully understood. As such, we should tread cautiously when implementing AI into our educational systems.

When it comes to education, artificial intelligence could be a double-edged sword. While AI has the potential to revolutionize the field of education and help students learn in more efficient ways, there are also dangers that need to be considered.

One of the dangers of AI in education is that it could lead to a more standardized and homogenized form of learning. If all students are relying on AI-based learning tools, they may all end up learning the same things in the same way. This could lead to a loss of creativity and individuality in education.

Another danger is that AI-based learning tools could become too reliant on data and algorithms. This could lead to a situation where students are simply being taught what the machines think they should know, rather than being allowed to explore and discover new things for themselves.

Finally, there is the danger that AI could eventually replace human teachers altogether. While this may seem like a far-fetched scenario, it is not outside the realm of possibility. If AI-based learning tools become sophisticated enough, they may one day be able to do the job of teaching just as well as humans can.

These are just some of the dangers that need to be considered when it comes to artificial intelligence in education. While AI has the potential to revolutionize education, we need to be careful about how we implement it so that we don’t end up doing more harm than good.

References

Chakravorti, B. (2022) Why AI Failed to Live Up to Its Potential During the Pandemic. Harvard Business Review March 17,2022. https://hbr.org/2022/03/why-ai-failed-to-live-up-to-its-potential-during-the-pandemic

Chalmers, D. (2020) Weinberg, Justin (ed.). “GPT-3 and General Intelligence”. Daily Nous. Philosophers On GPT-3 (updated with replies by GPT-3) July 30, 2020. https://dailynous.com/2020/07/30/philosophers-gpt-3/#chalmers

Driver, P. (2012) The Irony of Gamification. In English Digital Magazine 3, British Council Portugal, pp. 21 – 24 http://digitaldebris.info/digital-debris/2011/12/31/the-irony-of-gamification-written-for-ied-magazine.html

Engler, A. (2020) A guide to healthy skepticism of artificial intelligence and coronavirus. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution https://www.brookings.edu/research/a-guide-to-healthy-skepticism-of-artificial-intelligence-and-coronavirus/

Heaven, W. D. (2021) Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped. MIT Technology Review, July 30, 2021. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/30/1030329/machine-learning-ai-failed-covid-hospital-diagnosis-pandemic/

Hughes, G. (2022) What lies at the end of the AI rainbow? IATEFL LTSIG Newsletter Issue April 2022

Luckin, R. (2022) The implications of AI for language learning and teaching. IATEFL LTSIG Newsletter Issue April 2022

O’Neil, C. (2016) Weapons of Math Destruction. London: Allen Lane

Tomasello, G. (2022) Next Generation of AI-Language Education Software:NLP & Language Modules (GPT3). IATEFL LTSIG Newsletter Issue April 2022

VanPatten, B. & Smith, M. (2022) Explicit and Implicit Learning in Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Lifelong learnings

Always learning

In an earlier post , I explored the use of the phrase ‘Always learning’ as a promotional tagline by Pearson. Pearson’s use of the phrase peaked in the early years of the 2010s at a time when the company, facing growing criticism for the length and aggressivity of its tentacles in US education (Ravitch, 2012; Sellar et al, 2016), was particularly keen to fashion ‘its image as a socially responsible edu-business’. Not coincidentally, ‘lifelong learning’, the big idea evoked by ‘Always learning’, saw a resurgence of interest around the same time, as the United Nations published their Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. The fourth of these was:

‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.’

This was an extension of the earlier (2000) UN Millennium Development Goal, which aimed for universal primary education. It had been recognised that this was not sufficient to break global cycles of poverty. For that, not only universal secondary education, but also post-secondary (lifelong) learning, were needed, too. The goal was criticised for being vague, over-ambitious and unrealisable, but it was so obviously a ‘good thing’ that it could do nobody any harm to be associated with it.

Lifelong learning, democracy and human capital

The idea of lifelong education may be vague, but its history can be traced back to at least Confucius who said that ‘life is limited, while learning is limitless’ (Guo-Dong, 1994). Plato advocated lifelong learning for the highest ranking members of society. Comenius promoted a more democratic version of lifelong learning, as did Condorcet during the French Revolution (Matheson & Matheson, 1996). More recent incarnations of the idea are often traced back to John Dewey (Fleming, 2011), who saw a close connection between education and democracy, and believed that learning should continue past school ‘irrespective of age’ (Dewey, 1916: 55). The UNESCO report (Faure, 1972), which did so much to establish the idea of lifelong learning in contemporary educational discourse, was very much in the democratic Dewey tradition.

In more recent discourse, the democratic veneer remains visible, but a human capital approach to lifelong learning is now clearly privileged (Fleming, 2011). Supported by international bodies like the OECD and the EU, current discourses prioritize the needs of the marketplace, and place the emphasis on learning as an individualized responsibility (Olssen, 2006). References abound to the rapidly changing nature of our contemporary world, especially the world of work, where only lifelong learning can offer the adaptability and flexibility needed for our occupational, political and ecological survival. Notions of a fuller life and self-actualization have not gone away, but interest is much more squarely centred on the part that lifelong learning can play in the development of human capital. A recent (2021) article from Pearson entitled ‘New research shows employers see lifelong learning as the ‘new normal’ as UK Government releases skills data’ https://plc.pearson.com/en-US/news/new-research-shows-employers-see-lifelong-learning-new-normal-uk-government-releases-skills is typical in this respect. In a similar vein, MOOC provider, FutureLearn (2022), has recently brought out a report into the ‘future of learning’ in which ‘lifelong learning’ is seen as ‘critical to upskilling the workforce of the future’.

Like so many other words I have looked at on this blog, ‘lifelong learning’ ‘has all the trappings of what might be termed a ‘good idea’ — it is bedecked with hurrah words and emotive terms, liberally dispersed by its proponents, and this gives it an air of conceptual solidity, together with making it more readily popular’ (Matheson & Matheson). Meaning little more than learning that is not confined to school, the best way of understanding the term is perhaps to look at what people actually do with it.

Lifelong learning and English language teaching

In the world of English language teaching, one of the early uses of the term ‘lifelong learning’ was in the title of a plenary IATEFL presentation, ‘Developing learner autonomy – preparing learners for lifelong learning’ (Dam, 2002). It was an interesting, but hardly contentious, lecture, arguing that (1) lifelong learning is necessary because schools can’t teach everything, (2) that learner autonomy is necessary for lifelong learning, so (3) our educational focus should be more on learning and less on teaching. Precisely what should be learnt in the long life of learning is left unspecified, and whether that learning should literally continue till death do us part remained equally unclear. Leni Dam was invoking the fashionable term of ‘lifelong learning’ to sell the idea of ‘learner autonomy’. But it really wasn’t needed: even month-long learning would be enough to justify the encouragement of learner autonomy.

There is, however, no disputing the potential of the term ‘lifelong learning’ in selling ideas. I recently came across the lovely phrase ‘premature ultimate’ (try googling it!) – ‘a concept or term that provokes such reverence and contains such connotative potency that its invocation tends to silence any further discussion on a matter’ (Brookfield, 1986). Great for selling, in other words, as on the website of the wonderfully named ‘Enjoy TEFL’ , ‘the Global Number 1 Accredited TEFL and Mindfulness Provider’, which manages to pack ‘lifelong learning’, ‘21^st century’, ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ into just two lines. Their current promotion offers two free mindfulness courses when you buy a 120 / 180 hour TEFL course.

Linking ‘lifelong learning’ and ‘21^st century skills’ is standard practice. The Lifelong Learning Programme 2007 – 2013 of the EU had rather vague objectives, but the desirable skills that were listed were largely indistinguishable from other lists of C21 skills / global skill / soft skills: communication competencies, digital competencies, social and emotional skills, and so on (Kaplan, 2016). Coupling the two concepts means that anything loosely connected with the latter can be promoted by association with the former. Two examples. Creativity and lifelong learning are associated in an article by Daniel Xerri (2017) that seeks to ‘mobilise students’ creative thinking’ and to show ‘how the English language classroom can serve as an incubator for an awareness of the need to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education, and to promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’. Xerri is certainly interested in using ‘creativity’ tasks to promote awareness of the first part of the UN’s SDG, but the ‘lifelong learning’ bit is not explored at all. In contrast, Reinders et al (2022) explore in some depth what they mean by ‘lifelong learning’, but the bottom line is the promotion of the use of digital tools in language learning. ‘Lifelong learning’ (or ‘lifewide learning[1]’, as they call it) is just one reason for advocating the use of digital technologies.

Competing with ‘Enjoy TEFL’ for the prize of the crudest invocation of ‘lifelong learning’ is Darren Nicholls, a product manager for Pearson. A promo for some new Pearson proficiency tests describes them as ‘web-based tests [that] first stream students into the appropriate class and then monitor their progress over an extended period of time. Both tests are hosted on a new platform, Test Hub, which supports lifelong learning by bringing together all proficiency assessments under one roof’. Lifelong learning would seem to mean digital homework.

Lifelong learning and CPD

I have often heard myself (and many others) saying that a good teacher is one who never stops learning. It’s the kind of wisdom of online memes. Once you stop learning you start dying, Albert Einstein didn’t actually say, but let’s not worry about attributional details. ‘Enjoy TEFL’ tries to sell its courses by appealing to the same sentiment, and they are not alone. The blurb for an IATEFL Poland webinar says ‘Being networked is of key importance to all professionally active people in the process of lifelong learning …’ A joint LTSIG and TDSIG conference in Istanbul in 2012 waxed lyrical: ‘This is an age of lifelong learning, or ‘perpetual beta’, of learning anywhere, any place, any time’. Professional development is a lifelong obligation and, for those who are super-keen, JALT (the Japanese Association of Language Teachers) has a ‘Lifelong Language Learning Special Interest Group’ which organises events and a regular newsletter.

All well and good, you may be thinking, but pause a moment to think about the way in which the discourse of lifelong learning ‘orientates education to the enterprise society where the learner (or the teacher as learner) becomes an entrepreneur of him / herself’ (Olssen, 2006). Never mind that increasing numbers of teachers are on zero-hours contracts or fail to take home the minimum wage, a commitment to lifelong professional development is expected. Where better place to start than next week’s IATEFL conference, with its free, daily mindfulness workshops? If you’re based in the UK and working at one of the many language schools that pays the minimum wage, you’ll only need to clock up about 100 hours of teaching to afford it.

References

Brookfield, S. (1986) Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning. Hoboken, NJ: Jossey – Bass

Dam, L. (2002) Developing learner autonomy – preparing learners for lifelong learning. In Pulverness, A. (Ed.) IATEFL 2002 York Conference Selections. Whitstable, Kent: IATEFL

Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and education. New York: Macmillan.

Faure, E. (1972) Learning to be: The world of education today and tomorrow. Paris: UNESCO.

Fleming, T. (2011) Models of Lifelong Learning: An Overview. In M. London (Ed.). Oxford Handbook of Lifelong Learning (pp. 29-39). New York: Oxford University Press.

FutureLearn (2022) The Future of Learning Report 2022. London: FutureLearn https://www.futurelearn.com/info/thefutureoflearning

Guo-Dong, X. (1994) Lifelong education in China: new policies and activities. International Review of Education, 40, (3-5)

Jackson, N. J. (Ed.) (2011) Learning for a complex world: A lifewide concept of learning, development and achievement. AuthorHouse Publishing. Available at: https://www.lifewideeducation.uk/learning-for-a-complex-world.html

Kaplan, A. (2016) Lifelong Learning: Conclusions From A Literature Review. International Online Journal of Primary Education, 5 (2): pp. 43 – 50

Matheson, D. & Matheson, C. (1996) Lifelong Learning and Lifelong Education: a critique. Research in Post‐Compulsory Education, 1 (2): pp. 219-236, DOI: 10.1080/1359674960010207

Olssen, M. (2006) Understanding the mechanisms of neoliberal control: lifelong learning, flexibility and knowledge capitalism. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 25 (3): pp. 213-230.

Ravitch, D. (2012) The United States of Pearson? http://dianeravitch.net/2012/05/07/the-united-states-of-pearson-2/

Reinders, H., Dudeney, G., & Lamb, M. (2022) Using Technology to Motivate Learners. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Sellar, S., Hogan, A. & Lingard, B. (2016) Always Learning. Education International https://www.ei-ie.org/en/item/21091:always-learning

Xerri, D. (2017) Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. In Maley, A. & Peachey, N. (Eds.) Integrating global issues in the creative English language classroom: With reference to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. London: British Council, pp. 49 – 56

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[1] ‘Lifewide learning’ is not a term made up by Reinders et al. The idea has been around for over 20 years, piggy-backing on lifelong learning, and referring to the fact that learning takes place in a variety of different environments and situations. For more information, see Jackson (2011). And, if you really have nothing better to do, check out ‘lifedeep learning’. I thought, at first, it was a joke, but it’s been written about in all seriousness.

ELT slogans

There’s a wonderful promotional video for Pearson English https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6o1s8U88N8 that packs as many clichéd slogans and images into one minute as you could ever wish for. Here’s the script:

Great things happen when you dare to dream / Learning is a journey filled with challenge, wonder and discovery / Educators not only inspire the future they also define it / We partner with the learning community to change futures / It’s our passion / Together we can inspire / Together we can empower / Together we can achieve / Change is happening all around us, faster than ever / Let’s empower change / There’s an exciting future ahead / Expect great things / Pearson English / Dare to learn, dare to change / Pearson always learning

How futures will be changed, what exactly can be inspired or empowered, what great things we can expect, what we might dare to learn or change – all these minor details are left unanswered. It is a wonderful example of advertising language, aka bullshit, defined by philosopher Harry Frankfurt (2005) as discourse that is only intended to persuade, without any concern for truth. It’s language where meanings are not shared, but where emotional responses are desired.

Pearson refers to its slogan ‘Always learning’ as their ‘brand tagline’. It is, they say, ‘Short, bold, and memorable, “Always Learning” encapsulates our learners and ourselves. It highlights Pearson’s commitment to constantly be discovering, learning and improving ourselves. And it describes what we enable our learners to do–to keep learning, whenever, wherever and however it suits them, throughout every stage of their lives’. The company provides detailed advice to its employees about how the slogan can be used: when, where, when not, colour combinations, good and bad examples of use, translations, etc. All of this makes for fascinating reading, which, strangely, is available online (at least, for the time being!).

Bullshit is a wise approach in advertising ELT products. If you get too specific / meaningful, you run the risk of coming out with bullshit of the non-philosophical kind. Macmillan English, for example, has the new slogan ‘Advancing learning’ and says: As technology opens new doors for teachers and students, we use our expertise to create products that suit different learning styles and design innovative new tools for teachers and students.

With ELT conference season getting underway in some parts of the world, slogans, clichés and buzzwords are vying for our attention in the marketing of these events. There are ELT conferences of a commercial, predatory kind (‘guaranteed publication of your work in the conference proceedings’) where the slogans are clearly bullshit (in the philosophical sense). The upcoming ‘4^th International Conference on Modern Research in Education, Teaching and Learning’ (22 – 24 April in Barcelona) has the marvellous slogan ‘The only of all English language teaching conference’ and can be attended for only €320 (much cheaper if you just want to listen without presenting).

But for conferences organised by teachers’ associations, it would be inaccurate and inappropriate to describe their choice of slogans as bullshit. This doesn’t mean, however (as an entertaining blog post at ELT Rants, Reviews and Reflections in 2015 described them), that they are not ‘buzzword-heavy word salads [that] are rinsed, re-used, and repeated ad nauseum’. Here’s a small current selection for you to take your pick from. The resemblance, in many cases, to the language of the Pearson promo video is striking.

ELT in the digital era and beyond: innovation, engagement, and resilience (ThaiTESOL)

The hybrid transition: emotional, social and educational impacts on language learning (TESOL Kuwait)

Connecting teachers, empowering learners (BBELT)

Innovating changes: a world of diversity (TESOL Spain)

Translanguaging and multilingualism in language teaching (TESOL Arabia)

Inspiring collaboration (BELTA)

For me, the standout slogan is definitely TESOL Arabia, since it is the only one that seems to be about something specific. But perhaps I’m wrong. Both translanguaging and multilingualism can mean quite a few different things. When you put the terms together, my thoughts turn first to questions of social justice, and the idea of a conference in which social justice is discussed in the Hyatt Regency hotel in Dubai is fairly surreal. As in most of these examples, conferences for ELT teachers tend to opt for broad themes which aim to include almost everyone in the field (Raza, 2018) and will usually index innovation, excellence, empowerment, and / or wellbeing.

A good slogan will include words that are themselves sloganized (Schmenk et al., 2019). ‘Innovation’ and ‘empowering’ are good examples here. Neither can truly be understood without familiarity with extensive co-texts which confer connotational meaning and rhetorical force. ‘Change’ (for ‘innovation’) and ‘helping’ (for ‘empowering’) don’t quite have the same heft, even though they basically mean the same.

It’s important that buzzwords don’t mean too much, but the ‘key processing features of successful slogans are simplicity, memorability and emotionality’ (Pavlenko, 2019: 146). By ‘emotionality’, Pavlenko means words that carry an upbeat / positive message. In this sense, TESOL Kuwait’s ‘emotional, social and educational impacts’ all sound rather neutral and academic. I think that ‘engagement, diversity and outcomes’ might resonate better. Similarly, ‘hybrid’ still needs to shake off some negative associations: ‘digital’ sounds more positively modern. Hats off to ThaiTESOL, whose ‘the digital era and beyond’ sounds positively visionary.

Even though slogans shouldn’t mean too much, they only work as slogans ‘as if their meaning were obvious’ (Schmenk et al., 2019: 4). In their exploration of sloganization in language education discourse, Schmenk et al (2019) look at ‘communicative language teaching’, ‘learner autonomy’, ‘innovation’, ‘multiple intelligences’, ‘intercultural / transcultural language learning’, ‘input’, ‘language commodification’ and ‘superdiversity’. In this blog, I’ve considered ‘innovation’, ‘resilience’, ‘translanguaging’ and ‘multilingualism’, among others. These buzzwords come and go – the field of language teaching is as keen on current trends as any other field – and they can usually be grouped into broader trends, which academics like to call ‘turns’. There’s the ‘social turn’ (Block, 2003), the ‘intercultural turn’ (Thorne, 2010), the ‘multilingual turn’ (May, 2013), the ‘critical turn’ (Dasli & Diáz, 2017), the ‘emotional turn’ (White, 2018), and these are just for starters. If you’re quick, you won’t be too late to register for the 2^nd International Conference on Linguistic, Literary and Pedagogical Turns at the University of Wah. The conference doesn’t have a slogan, but my suggestion would be ‘The Turn Turn’.

Schmenk et al (2019: 3) note that language education is an inherently interdisciplinary field so it is not surprising to find so many of its current trends drawn from other disciplines. This has not always been the case. If we go back 30 / 40 years, the hot topics included corpora, task-based learning, and lexical approaches. Now, in the choice of slogans, ELT conferences are not dissimilar from other professional conferences in sales and marketing, management and leadership – see for example this website offering advice about organising such events.

Slogans and buzzwords are, of course, a marketing tool for ELT conferences and publishers, but they also play an important role in academic branding – the personal brand you construct for yourself as an academic. Aneta Pavlenko (2019: 1488 – 151) offers a useful set of strategies for this kind of academic branding, but similar strategies can also be used by ELT freelancers

• Adopt a slogan / buzzword (simple, memorable and positive)
• Link it to your work (easiest if it was either your idea in the first place or you were one of the first to import the idea into language education)
• Institutionalize the slogan by organising conferences, courses, journals, supervising dissertations, and so on
• Recycle the slogan endlessly (especially in the titles of publications)
• Keep things pretty vague so you can’t be criticised too much
• Frame the phenomenon in question with words like ‘radical’, ‘unprecedented’, ‘hugely complex’, ‘tremendously important’

Quoting the work of Michael Billig (2013), Pavlenko (2019: 160) suggests that we should not necessarily be asking ourselves what slogans and buzzwords mean. A better question is: what is the person who is using these words attempting to do with them?

My favourite ELT slogan is an anti-slogan slogan. It is Bo Cai Zhong Chang (‘assimilating merits of different teaching approaches for our own use’) which was used in China to advocate for a ‘methodological approach appropriate to the specific sociopolitical realities of the country’ (Feng & Feng, 2001). China has a long history of powerful slogans, of course, with ‘Dare to think, dare to act’ being the key phrase during the Great Leap Forward. Did the people at Pearson have this in mind when they came up with ‘Dare to learn, dare to change’?

References

Billig, M. (2013) Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Block, D. (2003) The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

Dasli, M. & Diáz, A. R. (Eds.) (2017) The Critical Turn in Language and Intercultural Communication Pedagogy. New York: Routledge

Feng, A. & Feng, A. (2001) ‘Bo Cai Zhong Chang’ – A slogan for effective ELT methodology for College English education. English Language Teaching, 1: 1 – 22

Frankfurt, H. G. (2005) On Bullshit. Princeton: Princeton University Press

May. S. (Ed.) (2013) The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual education. New York: Routledge

Pavlenko, A. (2019) Superdiversity and Why It Isn’t: Reflections on Terminological Innovation and Academic Branding. In Schmenk, B., Bredibach, S. & Küster, L. (Eds.) Sloganization in Language Education Discourses. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. pp. 142 – 168.

Raza, K. (2018) The Alignment of English Language Teacher Association Conference Themes to Research Agendas: An Investigation of TESOL International Association and IATEFL. In A. Elsheikh et al. (Eds.), The Role of Language Teacher Associations in Professional Development, Second Language Learning and Teaching. Cham: Springer pp. 117 – 129

Schmenk, B., Bredibach, S. & Küster, L. (Eds.) (2019) Sloganization in Language Education Discourses. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Thorne, S. L. (2010) The ‘Intercultural Turn’ and Language Learning in the Crucible of the New Media. In Helm, F. & Guth, S. (Eds.) Telecollaboration 2.0 for Language and Intercultural Learning. Bern: Peter Lang. pp. 139 – 164

White C.J. (2018) The Emotional Turn in Applied Linguistics and TESOL: Significance, Challenges and Prospects. In: Martínez Agudo J. (Eds) Emotions in Second Language Teaching. Cham: Springer

Multilingualism, linguanomics and lingualism

You have probably heard the following joke, or a version of it. What do we call a person who speaks three languages? A trilingual. And a person who speaks two languages? A bilingual. And someone who only speaks one language? An American. For the joke to work, even mildly, the listener has to buy in to the idea that multilingualism / plurilingualism is a ‘good thing’, and that too many Americans are monolingual.
Not everybody would share these views. Some would prefer the US (and other countries of immigration) to be more of a language graveyard than less of one. Negativity about multilingualism can be extreme, as in the wrath of those on Twitter who found a Coca Cola advertisement profoundly un-American, supportive of communism and terrorism. The advert in question showed a multicultural bunch of people sharing a Coke in perfect harmony while singing a multilingual rendition of ‘America the Beautiful’. To make things even worse, the commercial was shown at that homage to all things American, the Super Bowl.
Enthusiasm for multilingualism is, in part, a liberal reaction to the reactionary monolingualism of the ‘if-you-can’t-speak-our-language-go-back-to-your-own-fucking-country’ variety. Countering the post- 9/11 rise in monolingual linguistic prescriptivism in some countries (Cameron, 2013), tolerant multilingualism indexes visions of perfectly harmonious communities and the rhetoric of human rights and autonomy (Gramling, 2016: 205). It values diversity for its own sake.
It is also, in part, a reaction (see, for example, the Wikipedia entry or Maher, 2017) to a number of clearly widespread myths and misconceptions (e.g. that multilingual societies are less harmonious than monolingual ones or that bilingually raised children are cognitively disadvantaged). Going further than mere rebuttals, advocates of multilingualism argue, with some evidence, that it is good for critical and creative thinking, beneficial for problem-solving and decision-making, makes us more open to new ideas, more tolerant, more embracing of divergent thinking, and it can help stave off dementia. What is there not to like?
Most enthusiasts of multilingualism will list and expand on all the advantages of multilingualism that I have already mentioned, but many will also be interested in its market potential. Linguanomics, the title of a book by Gabrielle Hogan-Brun (2017), is the exploration of the economic aspects of multilingualism, the links between linguistic diversity and economic growth, and the ways in which linguistic capital may be converted into monetary capital. Citing Hogan-Brun, a blog post (Hardach, 2018; see also Hardach, 2021) for the World Economic Forum suggests that companies which invest more in languages do better in export markets; that countries with better language skills have higher GDP; and, therefore, countries should do more to tap the ‘vast, linguistic resource [of] migrant families’. Diversity has become human capital. Multilingualism is not just an end in itself, but a tool ‘in global collaborations to make the world a better place’ (Stein-Smith, 2021b) primarily through economic growth. In this framing, becoming multilingual (i.e. learning another language) is acquiring the ultimate 21st century skill (Stein-Smith, 2021a), so long, of course, as the language has value in the market place. English, for example.
Like all 21st century skills, multilingualism appears to have a readily obvious meaning, but does not, in fact, lend itself easily to a simple definition. Perhaps the defining feature of all 21st century skills is precisely the lack of precision, allowing the idea to be embraced by different people, from critical theorists to investment bankers, for different reasons. The European Commission (2007:6) defines the term as: ‘the ability of societies, institutions, groups and individuals to engage, on a regular basis, with more than one language in their day-to-day lives’. It leaves unanswered the key questions of what a language is, which languages are being referred to, and in which aspects of people’s day-to-day lives. But answers of a sort can be found when we look at the reasons for the European policy of multilingualism. In addition to the importance of diversity and respect for identities, the policy is intended (1) on a collective basis, to contribute to European unity (reflecting the EU’s motto ‘United in Diversity’) and (2) on an individual basis, to develop human capital and job mobility.
Can a policy of multilingualism be both a celebration of diversity and a tool for linguanomics – the development of human capital through languages? Problems arise when we look for the answer to the question of which language. Are we differentiating languages and dialects, and, if so, how? When the European Commission (2005: 4) says that it would like all European citizens to have ‘practical skills in at least two languages in addition to his or her mother tongue’, it’s fairly clear that this means ‘foreign languages’. And if part of the purpose of learning ‘foreign languages’ is to develop human capital, the language of choice is likely to be English most of the time. A particular kind of English. Closely related is the question of what is meant by ‘mother tongue’. If your home language is not the national language of the country in which you live, you’re unlikely to get much help from European states in developing your competencies in it. In practice, when development of human capital is weighed against diversity, the former takes precedence every time. Multilingualism in this European context is overridingly concerned with languages associated with nation states and is tied ‘to a future anterior of successful language learning among new citizens’ […] it ‘fulfils all the characteristics of neoliberal self-making: horizontal, voluntaristic, entrepreneurial, opportunity-rich, privatizable, decentralized, team-oriented, and, at turns hopeful or mute about structural poverty and other forms of socio-economic precaritization’ (Gramling, 2016: 204). In other words, interest in diversity may only be skin-deep: advocacy of multilingual policies may, in fact, be mostly about ‘targeting the anxiety within the [white, privileged, monolingual] majority about social and linguistic pluralism’ (McNamara, 2011: 38).
‘Language’, ‘diversity’ and ‘multilingualism’ are all strategically deployable shifters (Moore, 2015): their meanings shift in relation to the purposes for which the terms are being used. Multilingualism can stand in opposition to the bigotry of people in MAGA caps, but it can also stand in opposition to ‘unassimilated’ monolingual, migrant populations who haven’t learnt the language of the ‘host nation’. This is all rather problematic for those who do not want their espousal of multilingualism to be associated with xenophobia or a neoliberal agenda, and for those who want to dissociate diversity from human capital (Flores, 2013). Multilingualism, therefore, needs to be disambiguated, so that the multilingualism that is oriented towards social justice is not appropriated by those whose main interest in language learning is linguanomics (Katznelson & Bernstein, 2017).
This, I think, is what is behind the so-called ‘multilingual turn’ in applied linguistics, a turn that tries to bring social justice to the fore. In an attempt at terminological smash-and-grab, critical applied linguists set about reclaiming the term (May, 2013; Conteh & Meier, 2014). There are differences in interpretation between them (Meier, 2017), but the common denominator is a desire to redefine ‘language’ – not as a fixed and largely territorial system owned by native-speakers, but as a dynamic, complex, social, deterritorialized practice owned by its users. There is ample evidence to indicate that various forms of linguistic intermixing are more characteristic of everyday spoken communication than the orderly use of what we might call ‘monolanguages’ – separate, individual, named languages. The multilingualism of the multilingual turn contends that lingualism (Block, 2013) – the belief in the existence of monolanguages – is contrary to the evidence, and must be dispensed with in order to get away from the social injustice of native-speaker norms, of accentism, and linguistic prejudice.
In this light, the term ‘multilingual’ is problematic. It denotes countability and plurality. If we want or need to distance ourselves from lingualism – the idea of languages as bounded entities (e.g. English, Hebrew, Xhosa), ‘language’ needs to become a verb: ‘languaging’ or ‘translanguaging’ (see my previous post). The multilingual turn has led us to translanguaging and ‘few voices in applied linguistics have found fault with this positive counter-distinction of translanguaging over multilingualism’ (Gramling, 2021: 29). It is translanguaging, rather than multilingualism, that is now being offered as a, even the, theory of language (Li Wei, 2018).
For a strong critique of the idea that named languages (like English) do not exist, you could do worse than read a recent post by Geoff Jordan. Or you could simply try asking someone who’s about to take a TOEFL exam what they think of the idea (Gramling, 2021: 26). Even if we cannot clearly define the boundaries of what constitutes a named language like English, we cannot simply disinvent it. Our lives can be shaped by language exams, our online interactions are shaped by our choice of named language, and many of us invest a significant part of our identity in a named language. You may go along with Li Wei (2021) in disapproving of lingualism, but it won’t be going away any time soon. Quite how we are supposed to dispense with lingualism also remains less than clear. Perhaps Li Wei might begin by trying to get rid of the PGCE in Languages, or the MAs in TESOL or French at his own university, or its language proficiency requirements for students from countries that are not ‘majority English-speaking’. I suspect, though, that his institution’s linguanomic dispositive of multilingualism might prevent that happening.
Lingualism is at the heart of much English language learning, of English medium instruction, and of Li Wei’s own university (UCL) where nearly half the student body has paid to benefit from the linguistic capital that is on sale there. Lingualism may be (but is not necessarily) ‘indifferent to social justice, migration, asylum, refuge, immigration, decoloniality, or liberation from the strictures of monolingualism’ (Gramling, 2021: 66), but multilingualism of the translanguaging kind is unlikely to make much of a dent in our monolingualising world, either. It certainly isn’t going to help anyone who has to take a gate-keeping language test (Cameron, 2013). For all the noise about translanguaging in TESOL, it’s worth noting (Gramling, 2021: 70) that the overwhelming majority of current research into multilingualism comes, not from TESOL or applied linguistics, but from computational engineers and Natural Language Processing specialists. Compared to multilingual linguanomics, the ‘multilingual turn’ is a very niche affair. Most people have never heard of it, and never will.
Academic handbooks on multilingualism stretch to over a thousand pages, and there are countless journals devoted to the topic. Attempts have been made to condense the topic to 130 pages (Maher, 2017), and even 15 pages (Cenoz, 2015), but multilingualism is a discursive construct, a category in the process of continuous reinvention (Gramling, 2021). Discourses about monolingualism and multilingualism are what Deborah Cameron (2013) has called discourses of ‘verbal hygiene’ – the normative practices through which people attempt to improve languages or regulate their use. Such discourses, whether coming from xenophobes, neo-liberals, or those with more liberal perspectives, are:
linked to other preoccupations which are not primarily linguistic, but rather social, political and moral. The logic behind verbal hygiene depends on a tacit, common-sense analogy between the order of language and the larger social order; the rules or norms of language stand in for the rules governing social or moral conduct, and putting language to rights becomes a symbolic way of putting the world to rights (Cameron, 2013: 61).
Cameron adds that verbal hygiene is a response to the anxieties of a specific moment and place, and that we should be wary of assuming that preoccupations about, say, multilingualism and monolingualism will have the same symbolic meanings in different times and places. With that in mind, I know I need to be careful about the way I react to the writings of Li Wei, Ofelia García, Nelson Flores, or Guadalupe Valdés. Their professional worlds of the ‘multilingual turn’ in bilingual and immersion education in mostly English-speaking countries hardly intersect at all with my own professional world of EFL teaching in central Europe, where rejection of lingualism is not really an option.

References
Block, D. (2013) Moving beyond ‘Lingualism’: Multilingual embodiment and Multimodality in SLA. In May. S. (Ed.) (2013) The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual education. New York: Routledge. pp. 54 – 77
Cameron, D. (2013) The one, the many, and the Other: Representing multi- and mono-lingualism in post-9/11 verbal hygiene. Critical Multilingualism Studies, 1 (2): 59 – 77
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Out with the old, in with the new: ELF and translanguaging

The world of language learning and teaching is full of theoretical constructs and claims, most of which have their moment of glory in the sun before being eclipsed and disappearing from view. In a recent article looking at the theoretical claims of translanguaging enthusiasts, Jim Cummins (2021) suggests that three criteria might be used to evaluate them:

1 Empirical adequacy – to what extent is the claim consistent with all the relevant empirical evidence?

2 Logical coherence – to what extent is the claim internally consistent and non-contradictory?

3 Consequential validity – to what extent is the claim useful in promoting effective pedagogy and policies?

Take English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), for example. In its early days, there was much excitement about developing databases of ELF usage in order to identify those aspects of pronunciation and lexico-grammar that mattered for intercultural intelligibility. The Lingua Franca Core (a list of pronunciation features that are problematic in ELF settings when ELF users mix them up) proved to be the most lasting product of the early empirical research into ELF (Jenkins, 2000). It made intuitive good sense, was potentially empowering for learners and teachers, was clearly a useful tool in combating native-speakerism, and was relatively easy to implement in educational policy and practice.

But problems with the construct of ELF quickly appeared. ELF was a positive reframing of the earlier notion of interlanguage – an idea that had deficit firmly built in, since interlanguage was a point that a language learner had reached somewhere on the way to being like a native-speaker. Interlanguage contained elements of the L1, and this led to interest in how such elements might become fossilized, a metaphor with very negative connotations. With a strong desire to move away from framings of deficit, ELF recognised and celebrated code-switching as an integral element in ELF interactions (Seidlhofer, 2011: 105). Deviations from idealised native-speaker norms of English were no longer to be seen as errors in need of correction, but as legitimate forms of the language (of ELF) itself.

However, it soon became clear that it was not possible to describe ELF in terms of the particular language forms that its users employed. In response, ELF researchers reframed ELF. The focus shifted to how people of different language backgrounds used English to communicate in particular situations – how they languaged, in other words. ELF was no longer a thing, but an action. This helped in terms of internal consistency, but most teachers remained unclear about how the ELF.2 insight should impact on their classroom practices. If we can’t actually say what ELF looks like, what are teachers supposed to do with the idea? And much as we might like to wish away the idea of native speakers (and their norms), these ideas are very hard to expunge completely (MacKenzie, 2014: 170).

Twenty years after ELF became widely used as a term, ELF researchers lament the absence of any sizable changes in classroom practices (Bayyurt & Dewey, 2020). There are practices that meet the ELF seal of approval (see, for example, Kiczkowiak & Lowe, 2018), and these include an increase in exposure to the diversity of English use worldwide, engagement in critical classroom discussion about the globalisation of the English language, and non-penalisation of innovative, but intelligible forms (Galloway, 2018: 471). It is, however, striking that these practices long pre-date the construct of ELF. They are not direct products of ELF.

Part of the ‘problem’, as ELF researchers see it, has been that ELF has been so hard to define. Less generously, we might suggest that the construct of ELF was flawed from the start. Useful, no doubt, as a heuristic, but time to move on. Jennifer Jenkins, one of the most well-known names in ELF, has certainly not been afraid to move on. Her article (Jenkins, 2015) refines ELF.2 into ELF.3, which she now labels as ‘English as a Multilingual Franca’. In this reframed model, ELF is not so much concerned with the difference between native speakers and non-native speakers, as with the difference between monolinguals and multilinguals. Multilingual, rather than ‘English’, is now the superordinate attribute. Since ELF is now about interactions, rather than ELF as a collection of forms, it follows, in ELF.3, that ELF may not actually contain any English forms at all. There is a logic here, albeit somewhat convoluted, but there’s also a problem for ELF as a construct, too. If ELF is fundamentally about multilingual communication, what need is there for the term ‘ELF’? ‘Translanguaging’ will do perfectly well instead. The graph from Google Trends reveals the rises and falls of these two terms in the academic discourse space. After peaking in 2008 the term ‘English as a Lingua Franca’ now appears to be in irreversible decline.

So, let’s now turn to ‘translanguaging’. What do Cummins, and others, have to say about the construct? The word has not been around for long. Most people trace it back to the end of the last century (Baker, 2001) and a set of bilingual pedagogical practices in the context of Welsh-English bilingual programmes intended to revitalise the Welsh language. In the early days, translanguaging was no more than a classroom practice that allowed or encouraged the use (by both learners and teachers) of more than one language for the purposes of study. The object of study might be another language, or it might be another part of the curriculum. When I wrote a book about the use of L1 in the learning and teaching of English (Kerr, 2014), I could have called it ‘Translanguaging Activities’, but the editors and I felt that the word ‘translanguaging’ might be seen as obscure jargon. I defined the word at the time as ‘similar to code-switching, the process of mixing elements form two languages’.

But obscure jargon no longer. There is, for example, a nice little collection of activities that involve L1 for the EFL / ESL classroom put together by Jason Anderson http://www.jasonanderson.org.uk/downloads/Jasons_ideas_for_translanguaging_in_the_EFL_ESL_classroom.pdf that he has chosen to call ‘Ideas for translanguaging’. In practical terms, there’s nothing here that you might not have found twenty or more years ago (e.g. in Duff, 1989; or Deller & Rinvolucri, 2002), long before anyone started using the word ‘translanguaging’. Anderson’s motivation for choosing the word ‘translanguaging’ is that he hopes it will promote a change of mindset in which a spirit of (language) inclusivity prevails (Anderson, 2018). Another example: the different ways that L1 may be used in a language classroom have recently been investigated by Rabbidge (2019) in a book entitled ‘Translanguaging in EFL Contexts’. Rabbidge offers a taxonomy of translanguaging moments. These are a little different from previous classifications (e.g. Ellis, 1994; Kim & Elder, 2005), but only a little. The most significant novelty is that these moments are now framed as ‘translanguaging’, rather than as ‘use of L1’. Example #3: the most well-known and widely-sold book that offers practical ideas that are related to translanguaging is ‘The Translanguaging Classroom’ by García and colleagues (2017). English language teachers working in EFL / ESL / ESOL contexts are unlikely to find much, if anything, new here by way of practical ideas. What they will find, however, is a theoretical reframing. It is the theoretical reframing that Anderson and Rabbidge draw their inspiration from.

The construct of translanguaging, then, like English as a Lingua Franca, has brought little that is new in practical terms. Its consequential validity does not really need to be investigated, since the pedagogical reasons for some use of other languages in the learning / teaching of English were already firmly established (but not, perhaps, widely accepted) a long time ago. How about the theory? Does it stand up to closer scrutiny any better than ELF?

Like ELF, ‘translanguaging’ is generally considered not to be a thing, but an action. And, like ELF, it has a definition problem, so precisely what kind of action this might be is open to debate. For some, it isn’t even an action: Tian et al (2021: 4) refer to it as ‘more like an emerging perspective or lens that could provide new insights to understand and examine language and language (in) education’. Its usage bounces around from user to user, each of whom may appropriate it in different ways. It is in competition with other terms including translingual practice, multilanguaging, and plurilingualism (Li, 2018). It is what has been called a ‘strategically deployable shifter’ (Moore, 2015). It is also unquestionably a word that sets a tone, since ‘translanguaging’ is a key part of the discourse of multilingualism / plurilingualism, which is in clear opposition to the unfavourable images evoked by the term ‘monolingualism’, often presented as a methodological mistake or a kind of subjectivity gone wrong (Gramling, 2016: 4). ‘Translanguaging’ has become a hooray word: criticize it at your peril.

What started as a classroom practice has morphed into a theory (Li, 2018; García, 2009), one that is and is likely to remain unstable. The big questions centre around the difference between ‘strong translanguaging’ (a perspective that insists that ‘named languages’ are socially constructed and have no linguistic or cognitive reality) and ‘weak translanguaging’ (a perspective that acknowledges boundaries between named languages but seeks to soften them). There are discussions, too, about what to call these forms of translanguaging. The ‘strong’ version has been dubbed by Cummins (2021) ‘Unitary Translanguaging Theory’ and by Bonacina-Pugh et al. (2021) ‘Fluid Languaging Approach’. Corresponding terms for the ‘weak’ version are ‘Crosslinguistic Translanguaging Theory’ and ‘Fixed Language Approach’. Subsidiary, related debates centre around code-switching: is it a form of translanguaging or is it a construct better avoided altogether since it assumes separate linguistic systems (Cummins, 2021)?

It’s all very confusing. Cenoz and Gorter (2021) in their short guide to pedagogical translanguaging struggle for clarity, but fail to get there. They ‘completely agree’ with García about the fluid nature of languages as ‘social constructs’ with ‘no clear-cut boundaries’, but still consider named languages as ‘distinct’ and refer to them as such in their booklet. Cutting your way through this thicket of language is a challenge, to put it mildly. It’s also probably a waste of time. As Cummins (2021: 16) notes, the confusion is ‘completely unnecessary’ since ‘there is no difference in the instructional practices that are implied by so-called strong and weak versions of translanguaging’. There are also more important questions to investigate, not least the extent to which the approaches to multilingualism developed by people like García in the United States are appropriate or effective in other contexts with different values (Jaspers, 2018; 2019).

The monolingualism that both ELF and translanguaging stand in opposition to may be a myth, a paradigm or a pathology, but, whatever it is, it is deeply embedded in the ways that our societies are organised, and the ways that we think. It is, writes David Gramling (2016: 3), ‘clearly not yet inclined to be waved off the stage by a university professor, nor even by a ‘multilingual turn’.’ In the end, ELF failed to have much impact. It’s time for translanguaging to have a turn. So, out with the old, in with the new. Or perhaps not really all that new at all.

The king is dead. Long live the king and a happy new year!

References

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Bayyurt, Y. & Dewey, M. (2020) Locating ELF in ELT. ELT Journal, 74 (4): 369 – 376

Bonacina-Pugh, F., Da Costa Cabral, I., & Huang, J. (2021) Translanguaging in education. Language Teaching, 54 (4): 439-471

Cenoz, J. & Gorter, D. (2021) Pedagogical Translanguaging. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Cummins, J. (2021) Translanguaging: A critical analysis of theoretical claims. In Juvonen, P. & Källkvist, M. (Eds.) Pedagogical Translanguaging: Theoretical, Methodological and Empirical Perspectives. Bristol: Multilingual Matters pp. 7 – 36

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Rabbidge, M. (2019) Translanguaging in EFL Contexts. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge

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Tian, Z., Aghai, L., Sayer, P. & Schissel, J. L. (Eds.) (2020) Envisioning TESOL through a translanguaging lens: Global perspectives. Cham, CH: Springer Nature.