Perspectives on language teaching research

I’ve written about the relationship (or, rather, the lack of one) between language teachers and language teaching research before. I’m talking about the kind of research that is primarily of the ‘what-works’ variety, since that is likely to be of most relevance to teachers. It’s the kind of research that asks questions like: can correction be beneficial to language learners? Or: can spaced repetition be helpful in vocabulary acquisition? Whether teachers find this relevant or not, there is ample evidence that the vast majority rarely look at it (Borg, 2009).

See here, for example, for a discussion of calls from academic researchers for more dialogue between researchers and teachers. The desire, on the part of researchers, for teachers to engage more (or even a little) with research, continues to grow, as shown by two examples. The first is the development of TESOLgraphics, which aims to make research ‘easy to read and understand to ESL, EFL, EAP, ESP, ESOL, EAL, TEFL teachers’ by producing infographic summaries. The second is a proposed special issue of the journal ‘System’ devoted to ‘the nexus of research and practice in and for language teacher education’ and hopes to find ways of promoting more teacher engagement with research. Will either of these initiatives have much impact? I doubt it, and to explain why, I need to take you on a little detour.

The map and the territory

Riffing off an ultra-short story by Jorge Luis Borges (‘On Exactitude in Science’, 1946), the corpus linguist Michael Stubbs (2013) wrote a piece entitled ‘Of Exactitude in Linguistics’, which marked his professional retirement. In it, he described a world where

the craft of Descriptive Linguistics attained such Perfection that the Transcription of a single short Conversation covered the floor of an entire University seminar room, and the Transcription of a Representative Sample of a single Text-Type covered the floor area of a small department to a depth of several feet. In the course of time, especially after the development of narrow phonetic transcription with intonational and proxemic annotation, even these extensive Records were found somehow wanting, and with the advent of fully automatic voice-to-orthography transcription, the weight of the resulting Text Collections threatened severe structural damage to University buildings.

As with all humour, there’s more than a grain of truth behind this Borgesian fantasy. These jokes pick up on what is known as the Richardson Effect, named after a British mathematician who noted that the length of the coastline of Great Britain varies according to the size of the units that are used to measure it – the smaller the unit, the longer the coastline. But at what point does increasing exactitude cease to tell us anything of value?

Both Borges and Lewis Fry Richardson almost certainly knew Lewis Carroll’s novel ‘Sylvie and Bruno Concluded’ (1893) which features a map that has the scale of a mile to a mile. This extraordinarily accurate map is, however, never used, since it is too large to spread out. The cost of increasing exactitude is practical usefulness.

The map of language

Language is rather like a coastline when it comes to drilling down in order to capture its features with smaller and smaller units of measurement. Before very long, you are forced into making decisions about the variety of the language and the contexts of use that you are studying. Precisely what kind of English are you measuring? At some point, you get down to the level of idiolect, but idiolects can be broken down further as they vary depending on the contexts of use. The trouble, of course, is that idiolects tell us little that is of value about the much broader ‘language’ that you set out to measure in the first place. The linguistic map obscures the linguistic terrain.

In ultra close-up, we can no longer distinguish one named language from another just by using linguistic criteria (Makoni & Pennycook, 20077:1). Extending this logic further, it makes little sense to even talk about named languages like English, to talk about first or second languages, about native speakers or about language errors. The close-up view requires us to redefine the thing – language – that we set out to define and describe. English is no longer a fixed and largely territorial system owned by native-speakers, but a dynamic, complex, social, deterritorialized practice owned by its users (May, 2013; Meier, 2017; Li Wei, 2018). In this view, both the purpose and the consequence of describing language in this way is to get away from the social injustice of native-speaker norms, of accentism, and linguistic prejudice.

A load of Ballungs

Language is a fuzzy and context-dependent concept. It is ‘too multifaceted to be measured on a single metric without loss of meaning, and must be represented by a matrix of indices or by several different measures depending on which goals and values are at play’ (Tal, 2020). In the philosophy of measurement, concepts like these are known as ‘Ballung’ concepts (Cartwright & Bradburn, 2011). Much of what is studied by researchers into language learning are also ‘Ballung’ concepts. Language proficiency and language acquisition are ‘Ballung’ concepts, too. As are reading and listening skills, mediation, metacognition and motivation. Critical thinking and digital literacies … the list goes on. Research into all these areas is characterised by multiple and ever-more detailed taxonomies, as researchers struggle to define precisely what it is that they are studying. It is in the nature of most academic study that it strives towards exactitude by becoming more and more specialised in its analysis of ‘ever more particular fractions of our world’ (Pardo-Guerra, 2022: 17).

But the perspective on language of Makoni, Pennycook, Li Wei et al is not what we might call the ‘canonical view’, the preferred viewpoint of the majority of people in apprehending the reality of the outside world (Palmer, 1981). Canonical views of language are much less close-up and allow for the unproblematic differentiation of one language from another. Canonical views – whether of social constructs like language or everyday objects like teacups or birds – become canonical because they are more functional for many people for everyday purposes than less familiar perspectives. If you want to know how far it is to walk from A to B along a coastal footpath, the more approximate measure of metres is more useful than one that counts every nook and cranny in microns. Canonical views can, of course, change over time – if the purpose to which they are put changes, too.

Language teaching research

There is a clear preference in academia for quantitative, empirical research where as many variables as possible are controlled. Research into language teaching is no different. It’s not enough to ask, in general terms, about the impact on learning of correction or spaced repetition. ‘What works’ is entirely context-dependent (Al-Hoorie, et al., 2023: 278). Since all languages, language learners and language learning contexts are ‘ultimately different’ (Widdowson, 2023: 397), there’s never any end to the avenues that researchers can explore: it is a ‘self-generating academic area of inquiry’ (ibid.). So we can investigate the impact of correction on the writing (as opposed to the speaking) of a group of Spanish (as opposed to another nationality) university students (as opposed to another age group) in an online setting (as opposed to face-to-face) where the correction is delayed (as opposed to immediate) and delivered by WhatsApp (as opposed to another medium) (see, for example, Murphy et al., 2023). We could carry on playing around with the variables for as long as we like – this kind of research has already been going on for decades.

When it comes to spaced repetition, researchers need to consider the impact of different algorithms (e.g. the length of the spaces) on different kinds of learners (age, level, motivation, self-regulation, etc.) in their acquisition of different kinds of lexical items (frequency, multi-word units, etc.) and how these items are selected and grouped, the nature of this acquisition (e.g. is it for productive use or is it purely recognition?). And so on (see the work of Tatsuya Nakata, for example).

Such attempts to control the variables are a necessary part of scientific enquiry, they are part of the ‘disciplinary agenda’, but they are unlikely to be of much relevance to most teachers. Researchers need precision, but the more they attempt to ‘approximate the complexities of real life, the more unwieldy [their] theories inevitably become’ (Al-Hoorie et al., 2023). Teachers, on the other hand, are typically more interested in canonical views that can lead to general take-aways that can be easily applied in their lessons. It is only secondary research in the form of meta-analyses or literature reviews (of the kind that TESOLgraphics) that can avoid the Richardson Effect and might offer something of help to the average classroom practitioner. But this secondary research, stripped of the contextual variables, can only be fairly vague. It can only really tell us, for example, that some form of written correction or spaced repetition may be helpful to some learners in some contexts some of the time. In need of ‘substantial localization’, it has been argued that the broad-stroke generalisations are often closer to ‘pseudo-applications’ (Al-Hoorie et al., 2023) than anything that is reliably actionable. That is not to say, however, that broad-stroke generalisations are of no value at all.

Finding the right map

Henry Widdowson (e.g. 2023) has declared himself sceptical about the practical relevance of SLA research. Reading journals like ‘Studies in Second Language Acquisition’ or ‘System’, it’s hard not to agree. Attempts to increase the accessibility of research (e.g. open-access or simple summaries) may not have the desired impact since they do not do anything about ‘the tenuous link between research and practice’ (Hwang, 2023). They cannot bridge the ‘gap between two sharply contrasting kinds of knowledge’ (McIntyre, 2006).

There is an alternative: classroom-based action research carried out by teachers. One of the central ideas behind it is that teachers may benefit more from carrying out their own research than from reading someone else’s. Enthusiasm for action research has been around for a long time: it was very fashionable in the 1980s when I trained as a teacher. In the 1990s, there was a series of conferences for English language teachers called ‘Teachers Develop Teachers Research’ (see, for example, Field et al., 1997). Tirelessly promoted by people like Richard Smith, Paula Rebolledo (Smith et al., 2014) and Anne Burns, action research seems to be gaining traction. A recent British Council publication (Burns, 2023) is a fine example of what insights teachers may gain and act on with an exploratory action research approach.

References

Al-Hoorie A. H., Hiver, P., Larsen-Freeman, D. & Lowie, W. (2023) From replication to substantiation: A complexity theory perspective. Language Teaching, 56 (2): pp. 276 – 291

Borg, S. (2009) English language teachers’ conceptions of research. Applied Linguistics, 30 (3): 358 – 88

Burns, A. (Ed.) (2023) Exploratory Action Research in Thai Schools: English teachers identifying problems, taking action and assessing results. Bangkok, Thailand: British Council

Cartwright, N., Bradburn, N. M., & Fuller, J. (2016) A theory of measurement. Working Paper. Centre for Humanities Engaging Science and Society (CHESS), Durham.

Field, J., Graham, A., Griffiths, E. & Head. K. (Eds.) (1997) Teachers Develop Teachers Research 2. Whitstable, Kent: IATEFl

Hwang, H.-B. (2023) Is evidence-based L2 pedagogy achievable? The research–practice dialogue in grammar instruction. The Modern Language Journal, 2023: 1 – 22 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/modl.12864

Li Wei. (2018) Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language. Applied Linguistics, 39 (1): 9 – 30

Makoni, S. & Pennycook, A. (Eds.) (2007) Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters

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

McIntyre, D. (2006) Bridging the gap between research and practice. Cambridge Journal of Education 35 (3): 357 – 382

Meier, G. S. (2017) The multilingual turn as a critical movement in education: assumptions, challenges and a need for reflection. Applied Linguistics Review, 8 (1): 131-161

Murphy, B., Mackay J. & Tragant, E. (2023) ‘(Ok I think I was totally wrong: new try!)’: language learning in WhatsApp through the provision of delayed corrective feedback provided during and after task performance’, The Language Learning Journal, DOI: 10.1080/09571736.2023.2223217

Palmer, S.E. et al. (1981) Canonical perspective and the perception of objects. In Longand, J. & Baddeley. A. (Eds.) Attention and Performance IX. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. pp. 135 – 151

Pardo-Guerra, J. P. (2022) The Quantified Scholar. New York: Columbia University Press

Smith, R., Connelly, T. & Rebolledo, P. (2014). Teacher research as CPD: A project with Chilean secondary school teachers. In D. Hayes (Ed.), Innovations in the continuing professional development of English language teachers (pp. 111–128). The British Council.

Tal, E. “Measurement in Science”, In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (Ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/measurement-science/

Widdowson, H. (2023) Webinar on the subject of English and applied linguistics. Language Teaching, 56 (3): 393 – 401

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

EMI versus plurilingualism

Seven years ago, the British Council brought out a report (Dearden, 2014), entitled ‘English as a medium of instruction – a growing global phenomenon’. The report noted the ‘rapid expansion’ of EMI provision, but observed that in many countries ‘there is a shortage of linguistically qualified teachers; there are no stated expectations of English language proficiency; there appear to be few organisational or pedagogical guidelines which might lead to effective EMI teaching and learning; there is little or no EMI content in initial teacher education (teacher preparation) programmes and continuing professional development (in-service) courses’.

Given issues such as these, we should not expect research findings about the efficacy of EMI to be unequivocally positive, and the picture that emerges from EMI research is decidedly mixed. In some countries, learning of academic content has deteriorated, and drop-out rates have been high, but we do not have enough information to make global generalisations. Improvements in English language skills are also often disappointing, although a number of research reports indicate gains in listening. We cannot, however, assume that following EMI studies will lead to greater language gains than, say, attending fewer hours of an intensive English course. The idea that two birds can be killed with one stone remains speculative.

The widespread rolling-out of EMI programmes in higher education has led to concerns about a negative effect on the status of other languages. There is also a danger that EMI may exacerbate social inequalities. Those who are most likely to benefit from the approach are ‘those whose life chances have already placed them in a position to benefit from education’ (Macaro, 2018). It is clear that EMI has spread globally without sufficient consideration of both its benefits and its costs.

This year, the British Council brought out another report on EMI (Sahan, et al., 2021), looking at EMI in ODA-categorised countries, i.e. receivers of foreign aid, mostly in the Global South. What has changed in the intervening seven years? The short answer is not a lot. Unabated growth continues: problematic issues remain problematic. Support for EMI lecturers remains limited and, when it is offered, usually takes the form of improving teachers’ general English proficiency. The idea that EMI lecturers might benefit from ‘training in appropriate materials selection, bilingual teaching pedagogies, strategies for teaching in multilingual or multicultural classrooms, [or] an awareness of their students’ disciplinary language needs’ does not seem to have taken root. The insight that EMI requires a shift in methodology in order to be effective has not really got through either, and this, despite the fact that it is well-known that many lecturers perceive EMI as a challenge. The growing body of research evidence showing the positive potential of plurilingual practices in higher education EMI (e.g. Duarte & van der Ploeg, 2019) is not, it would appear, widely known to universities around the world offering EMI classes. The only mention of ‘plurilingualism’ that I could find in this report is in the context of a discussion about how the internationalization (aka Englishization) of higher education acts as a counter-force to the plurilingualism promoted by bodies like the Council of Europe.

The home of the Council of Europe’s ‘European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML)’ is in Austria, where I happen to live. Here’s what the ECML’s website has to say about itself:

Developing every individual’s language repertoire and cultural identities and highlighting the social value of linguistic and cultural diversity lie at the core of ECML work. Plurilingual education embraces all language learning, e.g. home language/s, language/s of schooling, foreign languages, and regional and minority languages.

To support plurilingual education, a ‘Framework of Reference for Pluralistic Approaches to Languages and Cultures’ has been developed, along with a bank of resources and teaching materials that are linked to the descriptors in the frame of reference. Plurilingualism is clearly taken very seriously, and, across the country there are many interesting plurilingual initiatives in primary and secondary schools.

But not at universities. There is steady growth in EMI, especially at master’s level. Almost a quarter of all master’s at the University of Vienna, for example, are EMI. However, this has not been accompanied by any real thought about how EMI changes things or how EMI could best be implemented. It has simply been assumed that the only thing that differentiates teaching in German from using EMI is the choice of language itself (Dannerer et al., 2021). Only when things go wrong and are perceived as problematic (e.g. severe student dropout rates) ‘does the realization follow that there is so much more to teaching in another medium than language proficiency alone’ (ibid). Even language proficiency is not deemed especially worthy of serious consideration. Dannerer et al (2021) note that ‘the skills of teachers […] are neither tested nor required before they begin to offer courses in English. Although there are English language courses for students, academic, and administrative staff, they are mainly voluntary.’ There are no clear policies ‘as to when English or other languages should be employed, by whom, and for what’ (ibid). In summary, ‘linguistic and cultural plurality in Austrian higher education is not considered an asset that brings added value in terms of institutional diversity or internationalization at home’. Rather, in the context of EMI, it is something that can be Englishized and ignored.

Higher education EMI in Austria, then, is, in some ways, not so very different from EMI in the countries that feature in the recent British Council report. Or, for that matter, anywhere else in the world, with just a few exceptions (such as a number of universities in bilingual parts of Spain). My question is: why is this the case? Why would universities not actively pursue and promote plurilingual approaches as part of their EMI provision, if, as seems highly probable, this would result in learning gains? Are they really unaware of the potential benefits of plurilingual approaches in EMI? Is the literature out there (e.g. Paulsrud, et al., 2021) beyond their budgets? Have they, perhaps, just not got round to it yet? Is there, perhaps, some sort of problem (contracts? pay? time?) in training the lecturers? Or, as the British Council report seems to suggest, is there some irreconcilable tension between plurilingualism and the Englishizing world of most EMI? And, if this is the case, could it be that plurilingualism is fighting a losing battle?

References

Dannerer, M., Gaisch, M. & Smit, U. (2021) Englishization ‘under the radar’: Facts, policies, and trends in Austrian higher education. In Wilkinson, R. & Gabriëls, R. (Eds.) (2021) The Englishization of Higher Education in Europe. Amsterdam University Press, pp. 281 – 306

Dearden, J. (2014) English as a medium of instruction – a growing global phenomenon. London: British Council

Duarte, J. & van der Ploeg, M. (2019) Plurilingual lecturers in English medium instruction in the Netherlands: the key to plurilingual approaches in higher education? European Journal of Higher Education, 9 (3) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21568235.2019.1602476

Macaro, E. (2018) English Medium Instruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Paulsrud, B., Tian, Z. & Toth, J. (Eds.) (2021) English-Medium Instruction and Translanguaging. Bristol: Multilingual Matters

Sahan, K., Mikolajewska, A., Rose, H., Macaro, E., Searle, M., Aizawa, I., Zhou, S. & Veitch, A. (2021) Global mapping of English as a medium of instruction in higher education: 2020 and beyond. London: British Council

Wilkinson, R. & Gabriëls, R. (2021) The untapped potentials of EMI programmes. The Dutch case, System, 103, 102639

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

Innovation is great

Innovation and ELT

Next week sees the prize ceremony of the nineteenth edition of the British Council’s ELTons awards, celebrating ‘innovation in English language teaching and learning … the newest and most original courses, books, publications, apps, platforms, projects, and more.’ Since the Council launched the ELTons in 2003, it hasn’t been entirely clear what is meant by ‘innovation’. But, reflecting the use of the term in the wider (business) world, ‘innovation’ was seen as a positive value, an inherently good thing, and almost invariably connected to technological innovation. One of the award categories in the ELTons is for ‘digital innovation’, but many of the winners and shortlisted nominations in other categories have been primarily innovative in their use of technology (at first, CD-ROMs, before web-based applications became standard).

Historian Jill Lepore, among others, has traced the mantra of innovation at the start of this century back to renewed interest in the work of mid-20^th century Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter, in the 1990s. Schumpeter wrote about ‘creative disruption’, and his ideas gained widespread traction with the publication in 1997 of Clayton Christensen’s ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business’. Under Christensen, ‘creative disruption’ morphed into ‘disruptive innovation’. The idea was memorably expressed in Facebook’s motto of ‘Move fast and break things’. Disruptive innovation was always centrally concerned with expanding the market for commercial products by leveraging technology to gain access to more customers. Innovation, then, was and is a commercial strategy, and could be used either in product development or simply as an advertising slogan.

From the start of the innovation wave, the British Council has been keen to position itself in the vanguard. It does this for two reasons. Firstly, it needs to promote its own products and, with the cuts to British Council funding, its need to generate more income is increasingly urgent: ELT products are the main source of this income. Secondly, as part of the Council’s role in pushing British ‘soft power’, it seeks to promote Britain as a desirable, and therefore innovative, place to do business or study. This is wonderfully reflected in a series of videos for the Council’s LearnEnglish website called ‘Britain is Great’, subsets of which are entitled ‘Entrepreneurs are GREAT’ and ‘Innovation is GREAT’ with films celebrating the work of people like Richard Branson and James Dyson. For a while, the Council had a ‘Director, English Language Innovation’, and the current senior management team includes a ‘Director Digital, Partnerships and Innovation’ and a ‘Director Transformation’. With such a focus on innovation at the heart of its organisation, it is hardly surprising that the British Council should celebrate the idea in its ELTons awards. The ELTons celebrate the Council itself, and its core message, as much as they do the achievements of the award winners. Finalists in the ELTons receive a ‘promotional kit’ which includes ‘assets for the promotion of products or publications’. These assets (badges, banners, and so on) serve to promote the Council brand at the same time as advertising the shortlisted products themselves.

Innovation and a better world

Innovation, especially ‘disruptive innovation’, is not, however, what it used to be. The work of Clayton Christensen has been largely discredited (Russell & Vinsel, 2016). The Facebook motto has been changed and ‘the Era of “Move Fast and Break Things” Is Over’ (Taneja, 2019). The interest in ‘minimal viable products’ has shifted to an interest in ‘minimal virtuous products’. This is reflected in the marketing of edtech with the growing focus on how product X or Y will make the world a better place in some way. The ELTons introduced ‘Judges’ Commendations’ for ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’ and, this year, a new commendation for ‘Environmental Sustainability and Climate Action’. Innovation is still celebrated, but ‘disruption’ has undergone a slide of meaning, so that it is more likely now to refer to disruption caused by the Covid pandemic, and our responses to it. For example, TESOL Italy’s upcoming annual conference, entitled ‘Disruptive Innovations in ELT’, encourages contributions not only about online study and ‘interactive e-learning platforms’, but also about ‘sustainable development and social justice’, ‘resilience, collaboration, empathy, digital literacy, soft skills, and global competencies’. Innovation is still presented as a good, even necessary, thing.

I am not suggesting that the conflation of innovation with positive social good is purely virtue-signalling, although it is sometimes clearly that. However, the rhetorical shift makes it harder for anyone to criticise innovations, when they are presented as solutions to problems that need to be solved. Allen et al (2021) argue that ‘those who propose solutions are always virtuous because they clearly care about a problem we must solve. Those who suggest the solution will not work, and who have no better solution, are denying the problem the opportunity of the resolution it so desperately needs’.

There are, though, good reasons to be wary of ‘innovation’ in education. First among these is the lessons of history, which teach us that today’s ‘next big thing’ is usually tomorrow’s ‘last next big thing’ (Allen, et al., 2021). On the technology front, from programmed instruction to interactive whiteboards, educational history is littered with artefacts that have been oversold and underused (Cuban, 2001). Away from technology, from Multiple Intelligences to personalized learning, we see the same waves of enthusiasm and widespread adoption, followed by waning interest and abandonment. The waste of money and effort along the way has been colossal, although that is not to say that there have not been some, sometimes significant, gains.

The second big reason to be wary of technological innovations in education is that they focus our attention on products of various kinds. But products are not at the heart of schooling: it is labour, especially the work of teachers, which occupies that place. It is not Zoom that made possible the continuation of education during the pandemic lockdowns. Indeed, in many parts of the world, lower-tech or zero-tech solutions had to be found. It was teachers’ readiness to adapt to the new circumstances that allowed education to stumble onwards during the crisis. Vinsel and Russell’s recent book, ‘The Innovation Delusion’ (2021) compellingly argues that the focus on innovation has led us to ‘devalue the work that underpins modern life’. They point out (Russell and Vinsel, 2016) that ‘feminist theorists have long argued that obsessions with technological novelty obscures all of the labour, including housework, that women, disproportionately, do to keep life on track’. Parallels with the relationship between teachers and technology are hard to avoid. The presentation of innovation as an inherently desirable value ‘rarely asks who benefits, to what end?’

The ‘ELT’ in the ELTons

It’s time to consider the ‘ELT’ part of the ELTons. ‘ELT’ is a hypothetical construct that is often presented as a concrete reality, rather than a loosely-bound constellation of a huge number of different practices and attitudes, many of which have very little in common with each other. This reification of ‘ELT’ can serve a number of purposes, one of which is to frame discourse in particular ways. In a post from a few years ago, Andrew Wickham and I discussed how the framing of ‘ELT’ (and education, more generally) as an industry serves particular interests, but may be detrimental to the interests of others.

Perhaps a useful way of viewing ‘ELT’ is as a discourse community. Borg (2003) argues that ‘membership of a discourse community is usually a matter of choice’. That is to say that you are part of ‘ELT’ if you choose to identify yourself as such. In Europe, huge numbers of English language teachers do not choose to identify themselves primarily as an ‘ELT teacher’: they may see this label as relevant to them, but a more immediate and primary self-identification is often as a ‘school teacher’, a ‘primary school teacher’, a ‘(modern) languages teacher’, a ‘CLIL teacher’, and so on. They work in the state / public sectors. The concerns and interests of those who do not self-identify as ‘ELT practitioners’ are most likely to revolve around their local contexts and issues. Those of us who self-identify as ‘ELT practitioners’ are more likely to be interested in what we share with others who self-identify in the same way in different parts of the globe. The relevance of local contexts and issues is mostly to be found in how they may shed light on more global concerns. If you prioritise the local over the global, your participation in the ‘ELT’ discourse community is likely to be limited. Things like the ELTons are simply off your radar.

Borg (2003) also points out that discourse communities typically have ‘experts who perform gatekeeping roles’. The discourse of ‘ELT’ is enacted in magazines, blogs, videos, webinars and conferences aimed at English language teachers. I exclude from this list academic journals and books which are known to be consulted only rarely by the vast majority of teachers. Similarly, I exclude the more accessible books that have been written specifically for English language teachers, which are mostly sold in minuscule quantities, except for those that are required reading for training courses. The greatest number of contributors to the discourse of ‘ELT’ are authors, developers and publishers of language teaching materials and tools, teachers representing product vendors or (directly or indirectly) promoting their own products, representatives of private teaching / training schools, and organisations, representatives of international examination bodies, and representatives of universities (which, in some countries, essentially function as private institutions (Chowdhury & Ha, 2014)).

In other words, the discourse of ‘ELT’ is shaped to a very significant extent by gatekeepers who have a product to sell. Their customers are often those who do not self-identify in the same way as members of the ‘ELT’ discourse community. The British Council is a key gatekeeper in this discourse and it is a private sector operator par excellence.

The lack of interest in the workers of ‘ELT’ is well documented – see for example the Teachers as Workers blog. It is hardly unexpected, especially in the private sector. The British Council has a long history of labour disputes. At the present time, the Public and Commercial Services Union in the UK is balloting members about strike action against forced redundancies, which ‘are disproportionately targeted at middle to lower graded staff, while at the same time new management positions and a new deputy chief executive officer post are to be created’. One of the aims of the union is to stop the privatisation / outsourcing of Council jobs. The British government’s recent failure to relocate British Council employees in Afghanistan led to over 100,000 people signing a petition demanding action. The public silence of the British Council did little to inspire confidence in their interest in their workers.

The Council is a many-headed beast, and some of these heads do very admirable work in sponsoring or supporting a large variety of valuable projects. I don’t think the ELTons is one of these. The ideology behind them is highly questionable, and their ‘best before’ date has long expired. And given the financial constraints that the Council is now operating under, the money might be better spent elsewhere.

References

Allen, R., Evans, M. & White, B. (2021) The Next Big Thing in School Improvement. Woodbridge: John Catt Educational

Borg, E. (2003) Discourse Community. ELT Journal 57 (4): 398-400

Chowdhury, R. & Ha, P. L. (2014) Desiring TESOL and International Education. Bristol: Multilingual Matters

Christensen, C. M. (1997) The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business. Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press

Cuban, L. (2001) Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Lepore, J. (2014) The Disruption Machine. The New Yorker, June 16, 2014. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine

Russell, A. L. & Vinsel, L. (2016) Hail the Maintainers. Aeon, 7 April 2016 https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more

Taneja, H. (2019) The Era of “Move Fast and Break Things” Is Over. Harvard Business Review, January 22, 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-era-of-move-fast-and-break-things-is-over

Vinsel, L. & Russell, A. L. (2020) The Innovation Delusion. New York: Currency Books

Who are the thought leaders?

All things told, it’s been a pretty good year for thought leaders. The face-to-face gigs have dried up, but there’s no shortage of online demand. Despite being identified, back in 2013, as one of the year’s most “insufferable” business buzzwords and clichés, thought leaders have hung on and are going strong. In fact, their numbers are increasing, or at least references to them are increasing. Ten years ago there was a tussle on Google Trends between ‘thought leader’ and ‘edtech’. The latter long ago zoomed into the stratosphere of search terms, but ‘thought leader’ has been chugging along quite nicely, despite a certain amount of flak that the term has taken. Concern about the precise nature of what is and what is not thought has been raised. There was a merciless parody-deconstruction of a TED talk by a comic pretending to be a thought leader (2.3 million views). Anand Giridharadas (2019) devoted a whole chapter of his best-selling ‘Winners Take All’ to the difference between thought leaders and critics. The former, Giridharas scoffs, love ‘an easy idea that goes down like gelato, an idea that gives hope while challenging nothing’. Elsewhere, in the New York Times, another writer jokes about thought leaders as a sort of wannabe highflying, good-doing yacht-to-yacht concept peddler. Thought leadership, in the withering words of one new book (Daub, 2020), is what some people in tech think is thinking.

But thought leadership is not rolling over and going away just yet. If you think you may have spotted a thought leader, the probability is that they have something about their thought leadership skills in the first line of their bio. You can double check someone’s aspiration to being a thought leader by their use of phrases like ‘reimagining’, ‘innovation’, ‘inclusivity’ and ‘disruption’.

The last of these is a real shibboleth and has to be used carefully. Everyone knows it is a nonsense of sorts: for every Uber there is a Hutzler 5711 banana slicer (I highly recommend the customer reviews on Amazon!). Still, you can get away with talking about ‘disruption’ if you’re in the right group of people.

We don’t have enough thought leaders in ELT. I’ve checked and there don’t seem to be too many of them out there. Broadly speaking, they can be divided into two types. There are those who are sometimes referred to by others as a ‘thought leader’ and there are those who only get referred to in that way when they’re talking about themselves. A good place to look for them is the British Council, whose remit includes thought leadership: it’s part of their ‘what we do’. But when you investigate more closely, it’s hard to identify who exactly is a ‘thought leader’ and who is just a ‘leading expert’. There’s a certain coyness about naming particular thought leaders. Not long ago, I saw a job advert for OUP which required ‘thought leadership on the exploitation of data science to drive the innovations in Assessment products and services’. I hope they filled the post satisfactorily. And Cambridge English has a Director of ‘Research and Thought Leadership’, but you can’t blame him for the job title.

Pearson offers webinars where you can find out about ‘what’s being discussed amongst our Thought Leaders’, but the presenters don’t come labelled ‘thought leader’, so you don’t know who’s a thought leader and who’s not. It’s all very tricky. TESOL is also quite oblique, promoting TESOL partnerships where you can reach ‘fellow thought leaders’ … who are never further identified.

There’s a clear need for these thought leaders to be made more visible. Who exactly are they? What’s their typical profile? ‘Who pays them’ would also be an interesting question.

Unfortunately, the BETT Show, which is a good place to spot a thought leader in the flesh, has been covid-cancelled. BETT has the laudable-sounding goal of ‘Creating a better future by transforming education’, but the future has been postponed and the transformation will be technological, enabling ‘educators and learners to thrive’. In March 2021, you can catch up with thought leaders, though, new and old, at BETT’s replacement event: Learnit Live. It’s ‘a five-day, global online event featuring global education leaders’ where you can acquire ‘the tools [needed] to thrive in a rapidly changing world’. Yes, the Future of Learning is Now.

The image is worth deconstructing a little. We’ve got measurement / accountability in the bar chart at the top. We’ve got inclusive collaboration in the handshake, insights with the electric bulb and an all-seeing eye, which I don’t think is meant to refer to data privacy issues. I’m not sure what the money icon is meant to represent, either, but perhaps I’m being obtuse. One thing is clear. The future of learning is on a screen banged down on a UK-centred globe. The event also guarantees no Zoom fatigue, and a refund is offered if you find the whole thing tedious. A General Ticket costs £160.00: thought leaders don’t come cheap.

Thought leaders are interlopers in the world of education. They really belong in the discourse of business, as reflected in the webpage of Global Thought Leaders . The adjectives say it all: changing, efficient, financial, forward-thinking, sustainable, technological, transparent. Education, however, sits a little uneasily with some of these attributes, and, for that reason, I, personally, find it hard to use the term without irony.

You can check out the list of the World’s Top 30 Education Gurus for 2020 here and it includes some of the usual suspects: Salman Khan, Sugata Mitra, the late Ken Robinson, John Hattie and Dylan William. White men, mostly. For more specifically ELT thought leaders, perhaps we should let them stay anonymous. Guruism, as Paola Rebolledo has reminded us, can be detrimental to our professional health. ‘Become your own guru,’ she calls and I would add, ‘Become your own thought leader’.

You can do this by reading Ayn Rand and ‘Talk like TED’ by Carmine Gallo. You might consider an online course on ‘Becoming a Thought Leader’ (the price includes a shareable certificate) to help you develop a compelling message, build influence, maximize your visibility, and track your impact. Or save money and buy ‘The Thought Leadership Manual: How to Grab Your Clients ….’ (I’ll leave you to complete the title). Find your niche, but focus on tech, that’s my advice.

Happy new year!

Philip

Daub, A. (2020) What Tech Calls Thinking. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Giridharas, A. (2019) Winners Take All. New York: Knopf

Current trends in ELT (UK)

Around 25 years ago, when I worked at International House London, I used to teach a course called ‘Current Trends in ELT’. I no longer have records of the time so I can’t be 100% sure what was included in the course, but task-based learning, the ‘Lexical Approach’, the use of corpora, English as a Lingua Franca, learner autonomy / centredness, reflective practice and technology (CALL and CD-ROMs) were all probably part of it. I see that IH London still offers this course (next available course in January 2021) and I am struck by how similar the list of contents is. Only ‘emerging language’, CLIL, DOGME and motivation are clearly different from the menu of 25 years ago.

The term ‘current trends’ has always been a good hook to sell a product. Each year, any number of ELT conferences chooses it as their theme. Coursebooks, like ‘Cutting Edge’ or ‘Innovations’, suggest in their titles something fresh and appealing. And, since 2003, the British Council has used its English Language Teaching Innovation Awards to position itself as forward-thinking and innovative.

You could be forgiven for wondering what is especially innovative about many of the ELTon award-winners, or indeed, why neophilia actually matters at all. The problem, in a relatively limited world like language teaching, is that only so much innovation is either possible or desirable.

A year after the ELTons appeared, Adrian Underhill wrote an article about ‘Trends in English Language Teaching Today’. Almost ten years after I was teaching ‘current trends’, Adrian’s list included the use of corpora, English as a Lingua Franca, reflective practice and learner-centredness. His main guess was that practitioners would be working more with ‘the fuzzy, the unclear, the unfinished’. He hadn’t reckoned on the influence of the CEFR, Pearson’s Global Scale of English and our current obsession with measuring everything!

Jump just over ten years and Chia Suan Chong offered a listicle of ‘Ten innovations that have changed English language teaching’ for the British Council. Most of these were technological developments (platforms, online CPD, mobile learning) but a significant newcomer to the list was ‘soft skills’ (especially critical thinking).

Zooming forward nearer to the present, Chia then offered her list of ‘Ten trends and innovations in English language teaching for 2018’ in another post for the British Council. English as a Lingua Franca was still there, but gone were task-based learning and the ‘Lexical Approach’, corpora, learner-centredness and reflective practice. In their place came SpLNs, multi-literacies, inquiry-based learning and, above all, more about technology – platforms, mobile and blended learning, gamification.

I decided to explore current ‘current trends’ by taking a look at the last twelve months of blog posts from the four biggest UK ELT publishers. Posts such as these are interesting in two ways: (1) they are an attempt to capture what is perceived as ‘new’ and therefore more likely to attract clicks, and (2) they are also an attempt to set an agenda – they reflect what these commercial organisations would like us to be talking and thinking about. The posts reflect reasonably well the sorts of topics that are chosen for webinars, whether directly hosted or sponsored.

The most immediate and unsurprising observation is that technology is ubiquitous. No longer one among a number of topics, technology now informs (almost) all other topics. Before I draw a few conclusion, here are more detailed notes.

Pearson English blog

Along with other publishers, Pearson were keen to show how supportive to teachers they were, and the months following the appearance of the pandemic saw a greater number than normal of blog posts that did not focus on particular Pearson products. Over the last twelve months as a whole, Pearson made strenuous efforts to draw attention to their Global Scale of English and the Pearson Test of English. Assessment of one kind or another was never far away. But the other big themes of the last twelve months have been ‘soft / 21^st century skills (creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, leadership, etc.), and aspects of social and emotional learning (especially engagement / motivation, anxiety and mindfulness). Three other topics also featured more than once: mediation, personalization and SpLN (dyslexia).

OUP ELT Global blog

The OUP blog has, on the whole, longer, rather more informative posts than Pearson. They also tend to be less obviously product-oriented, and fewer are written by in-house marketing people. The main message that comes across is the putative importance of ‘soft / 21^st century skills’, which Oxford likes to call ‘global skills’ (along with the assessment of these skills). One post manages to pack three buzzwords into one title: ‘Global Skills – Create Empowered 21st Century Learners’. As with Pearson, ‘engagement / engaging’ is probably the most over-used word in the last twelve months. In the social and emotional area, OUP focuses on teacher well-being, rather than mindfulness (although, of course, mindfulness is a path to this well-being). There is also an interest in inquiry-based learning, literacies (digital and assessment), formative assessment and blended learning.

Macmillan English blog

The Macmillan English ‘Advancing Learning’ blog is a much less corporate beast than the Pearson and OUP blogs. There have been relatively few posts in the last twelve months, and no clear message emerges. The last year has seen posts on the Image Conference, preparing for IELTS, student retention, extensive reading, ELF pronunciation, drama, mindfulness, Zoom, EMI, and collaboration skills.

CUP World of Better Learning blog

The CUP blog, like Macmillan’s, is an eclectic affair, with no clearly discernible messages beyond supporting teachers with tips and tools to deal with the shift to online teaching. Motivation and engagement are fairly prominent (with Sarah Mercer contributing both here and at OUP). Well-being (and the inevitable nod to mindfulness) gets a look-in. Other topics include SpLNs, video and ELF pronunciation (with Laura Patsko contributing both here and at the Macmillan site).

Macro trends

My survey has certainly not been ‘scientific’, but I think it allows us to note a few macro-trends. Here are my thoughts:

• Measurement of language and skills (both learning and teaching skills) has become central to many of our current concerns.
• We are now much less interested in issues which are unique to language learning and teaching (e.g. task-based learning, the ‘Lexical Approach’, corpora) than we used to be.
• Current concerns reflect much more closely the major concerns of general education (measurement, 21^st century skills, social-emotional learning) than they used to. It is no coincidence that these reflect the priorities of those who shape global educational policy (OECD, World Bank, etc.).
• 25 years ago, current trends were more like zones of interest. They were areas to explore, research and critique further. As such, we might think of them as areas of exploratory practice (‘Exploratory Practice’ itself was a ‘current trend’ in the mid 1990s). Current ‘current trends’ are much more enshrined. They are things to be implemented, and exploration of them concerns the ‘how’, not the ‘whether’.

Life skills, technology, teacher evaluation and the World Bank

If you cast your eye over the English language teaching landscape, you can’t help noticing a number of prominent features that weren’t there, or at least were much less visible, twenty years ago. I’d like to highlight three. First, there is the interest in life skills (aka 21^st century skills). Second, there is the use of digital technology to deliver content. And third, there is a concern with measuring educational outputs through frameworks such as the Pearson GSE. In this post, I will focus primarily on the last of these, with a closer look at measuring teacher performance.

Recent years have seen the development of a number of frameworks for evaluating teacher competence in ELT. These include

• The British Council CPD Framework
• The Cambridge English Teaching Framework
• The EAQUALS Framework for Language Teacher Training and Development
• The TESOL Technology Standards Framework

TESOL has also produced a set of guidelines for developing professional teaching standards for EFL.

Frameworks such as these were not always intended as tools to evaluate teachers. The British Council’s framework, for example, was apparently designed for teachers to understand and plan their own professional development. Similarly, the Cambridge framework says that it is for teachers to see where they are in their development – and think about where they want to go next. But much like the CEFR for language competence, frameworks can be used for purposes rather different from their designers’ intentions. I think it is likely that frameworks such as these are more often used to evaluate teachers than for teachers to evaluate themselves.

But where did the idea for such frameworks come from? Was there a suddenly perceived need for things like this to aid in self-directed professional development? Were teachers’ associations calling out for frameworks to help their members? Even if that were the case, it would still be useful to know why, and why now.

One possibility is that the interest in life skills, digital technology and the measurement of educational outputs have all come about as a result of what has been called the Global Educational Reform Movement, or GERM (Sahlberg, 2016). GERM dates back to the 1980s and the shifts (especially in the United States under Reagan and the United Kingdom under Thatcher) in education policy towards more market-led approaches which emphasize (1) greater competition between educational providers, (2) greater autonomy from the state for educational providers (and therefore a greater role for private suppliers), (3) greater choice of educational provider for students and their parents, and (4) standardized tests and measurements which allow consumers of education to make more informed choices. One of the most significant GERM vectors is the World Bank.

The interest in incorporating the so-called 21^st century skills as part of the curriculum can be traced back to the early 1980s when the US National Commission on Excellence in Education recommended the inclusion of a range of skills, which eventually crystallized into the four Cs of communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity. The labelling of this skill set as ‘life skills’ or ‘21^st century skills’ was always something of a misnomer: the reality was that these were the soft skills required by the world of work. The key argument for their inclusion in the curriculum was that they were necessary for the ‘competitiveness and wealth of corporations and countries’ (Trilling & Fadel, 2009: 7). Unsurprisingly, the World Bank, whose interest in education extends only so far as its economic value, embraced the notion of ‘life skills’ with enthusiasm. Its document ‘Life skills : what are they, why do they matter, and how are they taught?’ (World Bank, 2013), makes the case very clearly. It took a while for the world of English language teaching to get on board, but by 2012, Pearson was already sponsoring a ‘signature event’ at IATEFL Glasgow entitled ‘21st Century Skills for ELT’. Since then, the currency of ‘life skills’ as an ELT buzz phrase has not abated.

Just as the World Bank’s interest in ‘life skills’ is motivated by the perceived need to prepare students for the world of work (for participation in the ‘knowledge economy’), the Bank emphasizes the classroom use of computers and resources from the internet: Information and communication technology (ICT) allows the adaptation of globally available information to local learning situations. […] A large percentage of the World Bank’s education funds are used for the purchase of educational technology. […] According to the Bank’s figures, 40 per cent of their education budget in 2000 and 27 per cent in 2001 was used to purchase technology. (Spring, 2015: 50).

Digital technology is also central to capturing data, which will allow for the measurement of educational outputs. As befits an organisation of economists that is interested in the cost-effectiveness of investments into education, it accords enormous importance to what are thought to be empirical measures or accountability. So intrinsic to the Bank’s approach is this concern with measurement that ‘the Bank’s implicit message to national governments seems to be: ‘improve your data collection capacity so that we can run more reliable cross-country analysis and regressions’. (Verger & Bonal, 2012: 131).

Measuring the performance of teachers is, of course, a part of assessing educational outputs. The World Bank, which sees global education as fundamentally ‘broken’, has, quite recently, turned more of its attention to the role of teachers. A World Bank blog from 2019 explains the reasons:

A growing body of evidence suggests the learning crisis is, at its core, a teaching crisis. For students to learn, they need good teachers—but many education systems pay little attention to what teachers know, what they do in the classroom, and in some cases whether they even show up. Rapid technological change is raising the stakes. Technology is already playing a crucial role in providing support to teachers, students, and the learning process more broadly. It can help teachers better manage the classroom and offer different challenges to different students. And technology can allow principals, parents, and students to interact seamlessly.

A key plank in the World Banks’s attempts to implement its educational vision is its System Assessment and Benchmarking for Education Results (SABER), which I will return to in due course. As part of its SABER efforts, last year the World Bank launched its ‘Teach’ tool . This tool is basically an evaluation framework. Videos of lessons are recorded and coded for indicators of teacher efficiency by coders who can be ‘90% reliable’ after only four days of training. The coding system focuses on the time that students spend on-task, but also ‘life skills’ like collaboration and critical thinking (see below).

Like the ELT frameworks, it can be used as a professional development tool, but, like them, it may also be used for summative evaluation.

The connections between those landmarks on the ELT landscape and the concerns of the World Bank are not, I would suggest, coincidental. The World Bank is, of course, not the only player in GERM, but it is a very special case. It is the largest single source of external financing in ‘developing countries’ (Beech, 2009: 345), managing a portfolio of $8.9 billion, with operations in 70 countries as of August 2013 (Spring, 2015: 32). Its loans come attached with conditions which tie the borrowing countries to GERM objectives. Arguably of even greater importance than its influence through funding, is the Bank’s direct entry into the world of ideas:

The Bank yearns for a deeper and more comprehensive impact through avenues of influence transcending both project and program loans. Not least in education, the World Bank is investing much in its quest to shape global opinion about economic, developmental, and social policy. Rather than imposing views through specific loan negotiations, Bank style is broadening in attempts to lead borrower country officials to its preferred way of thinking. (Jones, 2007: 259).

The World Bank sees itself as a Knowledge Bank and acts accordingly. Rizvi and Lingard (2010: 48) observe that ‘in many nations of the Global South, the only extant education policy analysis is research commissioned by donor agencies such as the World Bank […] with all the implications that result in relation to problem setting, theoretical frameworks and methodologies’. Hundreds of academics are engaged to do research related to the Bank’s areas of educational interest, and ‘the close links with the academic world give a strong credibility to the ideas disseminated by the Bank […] In fact, many ideas that acquired currency and legitimacy were originally proposed by them. This is the case of testing students and using the results to evaluate progress in education’ (Castro, 2009: 472).

Through a combination of substantial financial clout and relentless marketing (Selwyn, 2013: 50), the Bank has succeeded in shaping global academic discourse. In partnership with similar institutions, it has introduced a way of classifying and thinking about education (Beech, 2009: 352). It has become, in short, a major site ‘for the organization of knowledge about education’ (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010: 79), wielding ‘a degree of power that has arguably enabled it to shape the educational agendas of nations throughout the Global South’ and beyond (Menashy, 2012).

So, is there any problem in the world of ELT taking up the inclusion of ‘life skills’? I think there is. The first is one of definition. Creativity and critical thinking are very poorly defined, meaning very different things to different people, so it is not always clear what is being taught. Following on from this, there is substantial debate about whether such skills can actually be taught at all, and, if they can, how they should be taught. It seems highly unlikely that the tokenistic way in which they are ‘taught’ in most published ELT courses can be of any positive impact. But this is not my main reservation, which is that, by and large, we have come to uncritically accept the idea that English language learning is mostly concerned with preparation for the workplace (see my earlier post ‘The EdTech Imaginary in ELT’).

Is there any problem with the promotion of digital technologies in ELT? Again, I think there is, and a good proportion of the posts on this blog have argued for the need for circumspection in rolling out more technology in language learning and teaching. My main reason is that while it is clear that this trend is beneficial to technology vendors, it is much less clear that advantages will necessarily accrue to learners. Beyond this, there must be serious concerns about data ownership, privacy, and the way in which the datafication of education, led by businesses and governments in the Global North, is changing what counts as good education, a good student or an effective teacher, especially in the Global South. ‘Data and metrics,’ observe Williamson et al. (2020: 353), ‘do not just reflect what they are designed to measure, but actively loop back into action that can change the very thing that was measured in the first place’.

And what about tools for evaluating teacher competences? Here I would like to provide a little more background. There is, first of all, a huge question mark about how accurately such tools measure what they are supposed to measure. This may not matter too much if the tool is only used for self-evaluation or self-development, but ‘once smart systems of data collection and social control are available, they are likely to be widely applied for other purposes’ (Sadowski, 2020: 138). Jaime Saavedra, head of education at the World Bank, insists that the World Bank’s ‘Teach’ tool is not for evaluation and is not useful for firing teachers who perform badly.

Saavedra needs teachers to buy into the tool, so he obviously doesn’t want to scare them off. However, ‘Teach’ clearly is an evaluation tool (if not, what is it?) and, as with other tools (I’m thinking of CEFR and teacher competency frameworks in ELT), its purposes will evolve. Eric Hanushek, an education economist at Stanford University, has commented that ‘this is a clear evaluation tool at the probationary stage … It provides a basis for counseling new teachers on how they should behave … but then again if they don’t change over the first few years you also have information you should use’.

At this point, it is useful to take a look at the World Bank’s attitudes towards teachers. Teachers are seen to be at the heart of the ‘learning crisis’. However, the greatest focus in World Bank documents is on (1) teacher absenteeism in some countries, (2) unskilled and demotivated teachers, and (3) the reluctance of teachers and their unions to back World Bank-sponsored reforms. As real as these problems are, it is important to understand that the Bank has been complicit in them:

For decades, the Bank has criticised pre-service and in-service teacher training as not cost-effective For decades, the Bank has been pushing the hiring of untrained contract teachers as a cheap fix and a way to get around teacher unions – and contract teachers are again praised in the World Bank Development Report (WDR). This contradicts the occasional places in the WDR in which the Bank argues that developing countries need to follow the lead of the few countries that attract the best students to teaching, improve training, and improve working conditions. There is no explicit evidence offered at all for the repeated claim that teachers are unmotivated and need to be controlled and monitored to do their job. The Bank has a long history of blaming teachers and teacher unions for educational failures. The Bank implicitly argues that the problem of teacher absenteeism, referred to throughout the report, means teachers are unmotivated, but that simply is not true. Teacher absenteeism is not a sign of low motivation. Teacher salaries are abysmally low, as is the status of teaching. Because of this, teaching in many countries has become an occupation of last resort, yet it still attracts dedicated teachers. Once again, the Bank has been very complicit in this state of affairs as it, and the IMF, for decades have enforced neoliberal, Washington Consensus policies which resulted in government cutbacks and declining real salaries for teachers around the world. It is incredible that economists at the Bank do not recognise that the deterioration of salaries is the major cause of teacher absenteeism and that all the Bank is willing to peddle are ineffective and insulting pay-for-performance schemes. (Klees, 2017).

The SABER framework (referred to above) focuses very clearly on policies for hiring, rewarding and firing teachers.

[The World Bank] places the private sector’s methods of dealing with teachers as better than those of the public sector, because it is more ‘flexible’. In other words, it is possible to say that teachers can be hired and fired more easily; that is, hired without the need of organizing a public competition and fired if they do not achieve the expected outcomes as, for example, students’ improvements in international test scores. Further, the SABER document states that ‘Flexibility in teacher contracting is one of the primary motivations for engaging the private sector’ (World Bank, 2011: 4). This affirmation seeks to reduce expenditures on teachers while fostering other expenses such as the creation of testing schemes and spending more on ICTs, as well as making room to expand the hiring of private sector providers to design curriculum, evaluate students, train teachers, produce education software, and books. (De Siqueira, 2012).

The World Bank has argued consistently for a reduction of education costs by driving down teachers’ salaries. One of the authors of the World Bank Development Report 2018 notes that ‘in most countries, teacher salaries consume the lion’s share of the education budget, so there are already fewer resources to implement other education programs’. Another World Bank report (2007) makes the importance of ‘flexible’ hiring and lower salaries very clear:

In particular, recent progress in primary education in Francophone countries resulted from reduced teacher costs, especially through the recruitment of contractual teachers, generally at about 50% the salary of civil service teachers. (cited in Compton & Weiner, 2008: 7).

Merit pay (or ‘pay for performance’) is another of the Bank’s preferred wheezes. Despite enormous problems in reaching fair evaluations of teachers’ work and a distinct lack of convincing evidence that merit pay leads to anything positive (and may actually be counter-productive) (De Bruyckere et al., 2018: 143 – 147), the Bank is fully committed to the idea. Perhaps this is connected to the usefulness of merit pay in keeping teachers on their toes, compliant and fearful of losing their jobs, rather than any desire to improve teacher effectiveness?

There is evidence that this may be the case. Yet another World Bank report (Bau & Das, 2017) argues, on the basis of research, that improved TVA (teacher value added) does not correlate with wages in the public sector (where it is hard to fire teachers), but it does in the private sector. The study found that ‘a policy change that shifted public hiring from permanent to temporary contracts, reducing wages by 35 percent, had no adverse impact on TVA’. All of which would seem to suggest that improving the quality of teaching is of less importance to the Bank than flexible hiring and firing. This is very much in line with a more general advocacy of making education fit for the world of work. Lois Weiner of New Jersey City University puts it like this:

The architects of [GERM] policies—imposed first in developing countries—openly state that the changes will make education better fit the new global economy by producing workers who are (minimally) educated for jobs that require no more than a 7th or 8th grade education; while a small fraction of the population receive a high quality education to become the elite who oversee finance, industry, and technology. Since most workers do not need to be highly educated, it follows that teachers with considerable formal education and experience are neither needed nor desired because they demand higher wages, which is considered a waste of government money. Most teachers need only be “good enough”—as one U.S. government official phrased it—to follow scripted materials that prepare students for standardized tests. (Weiner, 2012).

It seems impossible to separate the World Bank’s ‘Teach’ tool from the broader goals of GERM. Teacher evaluation tools, like the teaching of 21^st century skills and the datafication of education, need to be understood properly, I think, as means to an end. It’s time to spell out what that end is.

The World Bank’s mission is ‘to end extreme poverty (by reducing the share of the global population that lives in extreme poverty to 3 percent by 2030)’ and ‘to promote shared prosperity (by increasing the incomes of the poorest 40 percent of people in every country)’. Its education activities are part of this broad aim and are driven by subscription to human capital theory (a view of the skills, knowledge and experience of individuals in terms of their ability to produce economic value). This may be described as the ‘economization of education’: a shift in educational concerns away from ‘such things as civic participation, protecting human rights, and environmentalism to economic growth and employment’ (Spring, 2015: xiii). Both students and teachers are seen as human capital. For students, human capital education places an emphasis on the cognitive skills needed to succeed in the workplace and the ‘soft skills’, needed to function in the corporate world (Spring, 2015: 2). Accordingly, World Bank investments require ‘justifications on the basis of manpower demands’ (Heyneman, 2003: 317). One of the Bank’s current strategic priorities is the education of girls: although human rights and equity may also play a part, the Bank’s primary concern is that ‘Not Educating Girls Costs Countries Trillions of Dollars’ .

According to the Bank’s logic, its educational aims can best be achieved through a combination of support for the following:

• cost accounting and quantification (since returns on investment must be carefully measured)
• competition and market incentives (since it is believed that the ‘invisible hand’ of the market leads to the greatest benefits)
• the private sector in education and a rolling back of the role of the state (since it is believed that private ownership improves efficiency)

The package of measures is a straightforward reflection of ‘what Western mainstream economists believe’ (Castro, 2009: 474).

Mainstream Western economics is, however, going through something of a rocky patch right now. Human capital theory is ‘useful when prevailing conditions are right’ (Jones, 2007: 248), but prevailing conditions are not right in much of the world (even in the United States), and the theory ‘for the most part ignores the intersections of poverty, equity and education’ (Menashy, 2012). In poorer countries evidence for the positive effects of markets in education is in very short supply, and even in richer countries it is still not conclusive (Verger & Bonal, 2012: 135). An OECD Education Paper (Waslander et al., 2010: 64) found that the effects of choice and competition between schools were at best small, if indeed any effects were found at all. Similarly, the claim that privatization improves efficiency is not sufficiently supported by evidence. Analyses of PISA data would seem to indicate that, ‘all else being equal (especially when controlling for the socio-economic status of the students), the type of ownership of the school, whether it is a private or a state school, has only modest effects on student achievement or none at all’ (Verger & Bonal, 2012: 133). Educational privatization as a one-size-fits-all panacea to educational problems has little to recommend it.

There are, then, serious limitations in the Bank’s theoretical approach. Its practical track record is also less than illustrious, even by the Bank’s own reckoning. Many of the Bank’s interventions have proved very ‘costly to developing countries. At the Bank’s insistence countries over-invested in vocational and technical education. Because of the narrow definition of recurrent costs, countries ignored investments in reading materials and in maintaining teacher salaries. Later at the Bank’s insistence, countries invested in thousands of workshops and laboratories that, for the most part, became useless ‘white elephants’ (Heyneman, 2003: 333).

As a bank, the World Bank is naturally interested in the rate of return of investment in that capital, and is therefore concerned with efficiency and efficacy. This raises the question of ‘Effective for what?’ and given that what may be effective for one individual or group may not necessarily be effective for another individual or group, one may wish to add a second question: ‘Effective for whom?’ (Biesta, 2020: 31). Critics of the World Bank, of whom there are many, argue that its policies serve ‘the interests of corporations by keeping down wages for skilled workers, cause global brain migration to the detriment of developing countries, undermine local cultures, and ensure corporate domination by not preparing school graduates who think critically and are democratically oriented’ (Spring, 2015: 56). Lest this sound a bit harsh, we can turn to the Bank’s own commissioned history: ‘The way in which [the Bank’s] ideology has been shaped conforms in significant degree to the interests and conventional wisdom of its principal stockholders [i.e. bankers and economists from wealthy nations]. International competitive bidding, reluctance to accord preferences to local suppliers, emphasis on financing foreign exchange costs, insistence on a predominant use of foreign consultants, attitudes toward public sector industries, assertion of the right to approve project managers – all proclaim the Bank to be a Western capitalist institution’ (Mason & Asher, 1973: 478 – 479).

The teaching of ‘life skills’, the promotion of data-capturing digital technologies and the push to evaluate teachers’ performance are, then, all closely linked to the agenda of the World Bank, and owe their existence in the ELT landscape, in no small part, to the way that the World Bank has shaped educational discourse. There is, however, one other connection between ELT and the World Bank which must be mentioned.

The World Bank’s foreign language instructional goals are directly related to English as a global language. The Bank urges, ‘Policymakers in developing countries …to ensure that young people acquire a language with more than just local use, preferably one used internationally.’ What is this international language? First, the World Bank mentions that schools of higher education around the world are offering courses in English. In addition, the Bank states, ‘People seeking access to international stores of knowledge through the internet require, principally, English language skills.’ (Spring, 2015: 48).

Without the World Bank, then, there might be a lot less English language teaching than there is. I have written this piece to encourage people to think more about the World Bank, its policies and particular instantiations of those policies. You might or might not agree that the Bank is an undemocratic, technocratic, neoliberal institution unfit for the necessities of today’s world (Klees, 2017). But whatever you think about the World Bank, you might like to consider the answers to Tony Benn’s ‘five little democratic questions’ (quoted in Sardowski, 2020: 17):

• What power has it got?
• Where did it get this power from?
• In whose interests does it exercise this power?
• To whom is it accountable?
• How can we get rid of it?

References

Bau, N. and Das, J. (2017). The Misallocation of Pay and Productivity in the Public Sector : Evidence from the Labor Market for Teachers. Policy Research Working Paper; No. 8050. World Bank, Washington, DC. Retrieved [18 May 2020] from https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/26502

Beech, J. (2009). Who is Strolling Through The Global Garden? International Agencies and Educational Transfer. In Cowen, R. and Kazamias, A. M. (Eds.) Second International Handbook of Comparative Education. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 341 – 358

Biesta, G. (2020). Educational Research. London: Bloomsbury.

Castro, C. De M., (2009). Can Multilateral Banks Educate The World? In Cowen, R. and Kazamias, A. M. (Eds.) Second International Handbook of Comparative Education. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 455 – 478

Compton, M. and Weiner, L. (Eds.) (2008). The Global Assault on Teaching, Teachers, and their Unions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

De Bruyckere, P., Kirschner, P.A. and Hulshof, C. (2020). More Urban Myths about Learning and Education. New York: Routledge.

De Siqueira, A. C. (2012). The 2020 World Bank Education Strategy: Nothing New, or the Same Old Gospel. In Klees, S. J., Samoff, J. and Stromquist, N. P. (Eds.) The World Bank and Education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. pp. 69 – 81

Heyneman, S.P. (2003). The history and problems in the making of education policy at the World Bank 1960–2000. International Journal of Educational Development 23 (2003) pp. 315–337. Retrieved [18 May 2020] from https://www.academia.edu/29593153/The_History_and_Problems_in_the_Making_of_Education_Policy_at_the_World_Bank_1960_2000

Jones, P. W. (2007). World Bank Financing of Education. 2^nd edition. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge.

Klees, S. (2017). A critical analysis of the World Bank’s World Development Report on education. Retrieved [18 May 2020] from: https://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/2017/11/critical-analysis-world-banks-world-development-report-education/

Mason, E. S. & Asher, R. E. (1973). The World Bank since Bretton Woods. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Menashy, F. (2012). Review of Klees, S J., Samoff, J. & Stromquist, N. P. (Eds) (2012). The World Bank and Education: Critiques and Alternatives .Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Education Review, 15. Retrieved [18 May 2020] from https://www.academia.edu/7672656/Review_of_The_World_Bank_and_Education_Critiques_and_Alternatives

Rizvi, F. & Lingard, B. (2010). Globalizing Education Policy. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge.

Sadowski, J. (2020). Too Smart. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

Sahlberg, P. (2016). The global educational reform movement and its impact on schooling. In K. Mundy, A. Green, R. Lingard, & A. Verger (Eds.), The handbook of global policy and policymaking in education. New York, NY: Wiley-Blackwell. pp.128 – 144

Selwyn, N. (2013). Education in a Digital World. New York: Routledge.

Spring, J. (2015). Globalization of Education 2nd Edition. New York: Routledge.

Trilling, B. & C. Fadel (2009). 21st Century Skills. San Francisco: Wiley

Verger, A. & Bonal, X. (2012). ‘All Things Being Equal?’ In Klees, S. J., Samoff, J. and Stromquist, N. P. (Eds.) The World Bank and Education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. pp. 69 – 81

Waslander, S., Pater, C. & van der Weide, M. (2010). Markets in Education: An analytical review of empirical research on market mechanisms in education. OECD EDU Working Paper 52.

Weiner, L. (2012). Social Movement Unionism: Teachers Can Lead the Way. Reimagine, 19 (2) Retrieved [18 May 2020] from: https://www.reimaginerpe.org/19-2/weiner-fletcher

Williamson, B., Bayne, S. & Shay, S. (2020). The datafication of teaching in Higher Education: critical issues and perspectives, Teaching in Higher Education, 25:4, 351-365, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2020.1748811

World Bank. (2013). Life skills : what are they, why do they matter, and how are they taught? (English). Adolescent Girls Initiative (AGI) learning from practice series. Washington DC ; World Bank. Retrieved [18 May 2020] from: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/569931468331784110/Life-skills-what-are-they-why-do-they-matter-and-how-are-they-taught

The EdTech Imaginary in ELT

In my last post , I asked why it is so easy to believe that technology (in particular, technological innovations) will offer solutions to whatever problems exist in language learning and teaching. A simple, but inadequate, answer is that huge amounts of money have been invested in persuading us. Without wanting to detract from the significance of this, it is clearly not sufficient as an explanation. In an attempt to develop my own understanding, I have been turning more and more to the idea of ‘social imaginaries’. In many ways, this is also an attempt to draw together the various interests that I have had since starting this blog.

The Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, describes a ‘social imaginary’ as a ‘common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’ (Taylor, 2004: 23). As a social imaginary develops over time, it ‘begins to define the contours of [people’s] worlds and can eventually come to count as the taken-for-granted shape of things, too obvious to mention’ (Taylor, 2004: 29). It is, however, not just a set of ideas or a shared narrative: it is also a set of social practices that enact those understandings, whilst at the same time modifying or solidifying them. The understandings make the practices possible, and it is the practices that largely carry the understanding (Taylor, 2004: 25). In the process, the language we use is filled with new associations and our familiarity with these associations shapes ‘our perceptions and expectations’ (Worster, 1994, quoted in Moore, 2015: 33). A social imaginary, then, is a complex system that is not technological or economic or social or political or educational, but all of these (Urry, 2016). The image of the patterns of an amorphous mass of moving magma (Castoriadis, 1987), flowing through pre-existing channels, but also, at times, striking out along new paths, may offer a helpful metaphor.

Technology, of course, plays a key role in contemporary social imaginaries and the term ‘sociotechnical imaginary’ is increasingly widely used. The understandings of the sociotechnical imaginary typically express visions of social progress and a desirable future that is made possible by advances in science and technology (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015: 4). In education, technology is presented as capable of overcoming human failings and the dark ways of the past, of facilitating a ‘pedagogical utopia of natural, authentic teaching and learning’ (Friesen, forthcoming). As such understandings become more widespread and as the educational practices (platforms, apps, etc.) which both shape and are shaped by them become equally widespread, technology has come to be seen as a ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of education (Friesen, forthcoming). We need to be careful, however, that having shaped the technology, it does not comes to shape us (see Cobo, 2019, for a further exploration of this idea).

As a way of beginning to try to understand what is going on in edtech in ELT, which is not so very different from what is taking place in education more generally, I have sketched a number of what I consider key components of the shared understandings and the social practices that are related to them. These are closely interlocking pieces and each of them is itself embedded in much broader understandings. They evolve over time and their history can be traced quite easily. Taken together, they do, I think, help us to understand a little more why technology in ELT seems so seductive.

1 The main purpose of English language teaching is to prepare people for the workplace

There has always been a strong connection between learning an additional living language (such as English) and preparing for the world of work. The first modern language schools, such as the Berlitz schools at the end of the 19^th century with their native-speaker teachers and monolingual methods, positioned themselves as primarily vocational, in opposition to the kinds of language teaching taking place in schools and universities, which were more broadly humanistic in their objectives. Throughout the 20^th century, and especially as English grew as a global language, the public sector, internationally, grew closer to the methods and objectives of the private schools. The idea that learning English might serve other purposes (e.g. cultural enrichment or personal development) has never entirely gone away, as witnessed by the Council of Europe’s list of objectives (including the promotion of mutual understanding and European co-operation, and the overcoming of prejudice and discrimination) in the Common European Framework, but it is often forgotten.

The clarion calls from industry to better align education with labour markets, present and future, grow louder all the time, often finding expression in claims that ‘education is unfit for purpose.’ It is invariably assumed that this purpose is to train students in the appropriate skills to enhance their ‘human capital’ in an increasingly competitive and global market (Lingard & Gale, 2007). Educational agendas are increasingly set by the world of business (bodies like the OECD or the World Economic Forum, corporations like Google or Microsoft, and national governments which share their priorities (see my earlier post about neo-liberalism and solutionism ).

One way in which this shift is reflected in English language teaching is in the growing emphasis that is placed on ‘21^st century skills’ in teaching material. Sometimes called ‘life skills’, they are very clearly concerned with the world of work, rather than the rest of our lives. The World Economic Forum’s 2018 Future of Jobs survey lists the soft skills that are considered important in the near future and they include ‘creativity’, ‘critical thinking’, ‘emotional intelligence’ and ‘leadership’. (The fact that the World Economic Forum is made up of a group of huge international corporations (e.g. J.P. Morgan, HSBC, UBS, Johnson & Johnson) with a very dubious track record of embezzlement, fraud, money-laundering and tax evasion has not resulted in much serious, public questioning of the view of education expounded by the WEF.)

Without exception, the ELT publishers have brought these work / life skills into their courses, and the topic is an extremely popular one in ELT blogs and magazines, and at conferences. Two of the four plenaries at this year’s international IATEFL conference are concerned with these skills. Pearson has a wide range of related products, including ‘a four-level competency-based digital course that provides engaging instruction in the essential work and life skills competencies that adult learners need’. Macmillan ELT made ‘life skills’ the central plank of their marketing campaign and approach to product design, and even won a British Council ELTon (see below) Award for ‘Innovation in teacher resources) in 2015 for their ‘life skills’ marketing campaign. Cambridge University Press has developed a ‘Framework for Life Competencies’ which allows these skills to be assigned numerical values.

The point I am making here is not that these skills do not play an important role in contemporary society, nor that English language learners may not benefit from some training in them. The point, rather, is that the assumption that English language learning is mostly concerned with preparation for the workplace has become so widespread that it becomes difficult to think in another way.

2 Technological innovation is good and necessary

The main reason that soft skills are deemed to be so important is that we live in a rapidly-changing world, where the unsubstantiated claim that 85% (or whatever other figure comes to mind) of current jobs won’t exist 10 years from now is so often repeated that it is taken as fact . Whether or not this is true is perhaps less important to those who make the claim than the present and the future that they like to envisage. The claim is, at least, true-ish enough to resonate widely. Since these jobs will disappear, and new ones will emerge, because of technological innovations, education, too, will need to innovate to keep up.

English language teaching has not been slow to celebrate innovation. There were coursebooks called ‘Cutting Edge’ (1998) and ‘Innovations’ (2005), but more recently the connections between innovation and technology have become much stronger. The title of the recent ‘Language Hub’ (2019) was presumably chosen, in part, to conjure up images of digital whizzkids in fashionable co-working start-up spaces. Technological innovation is explicitly promoted in the Special Interest Groups of IATEFL and TESOL. Despite a singular lack of research that unequivocally demonstrates a positive connection between technology and language learning, the former’s objective is ‘to raise awareness among ELT professionals of the power of learning technologies to assist with language learning’. There is a popular annual conference, called InnovateELT , which has the tagline ‘Be Part of the Solution’, and the first problem that this may be a solution to is that our students need to be ‘ready to take on challenging new careers’.

Last, but by no means least, there are the annual British Council ELTon awards  with a special prize for digital innovation. Among the British Council’s own recent innovations are a range of digitally-delivered resources to develop work / life skills among teens.

Again, my intention (here) is not to criticise any of the things mentioned in the preceding paragraphs. It is merely to point to a particular structure of feeling and the way that is enacted and strengthened through material practices like books, social groups, conferences and other events.

3 Technological innovations are best driven by the private sector

The vast majority of people teaching English language around the world work in state-run primary and secondary schools. They are typically not native-speakers of English, they hold national teaching qualifications and they are frequently qualified to teach other subjects in addition to English (often another language). They may or may not self-identify as teachers of ‘ELT’ or ‘EFL’, often seeing themselves more as ‘school teachers’ or ‘language teachers’. People who self-identify as part of the world of ‘ELT or ‘TEFL’ are more likely to be native speakers and to work in the private sector (including private or semi-private language schools, universities (which, in English-speaking countries, are often indistinguishable from private sector institutions), publishing companies, and freelancers). They are more likely to hold international (TEFL) qualifications or higher degrees, and they are less likely to be involved in the teaching of other languages.

The relationship between these two groups is well illustrated by the practice of training days, where groups of a few hundred state-school teachers participate in workshops organised by publishing companies and delivered by ELT specialists. In this context, state-school teachers are essentially in a client role when they are in contact with the world of ‘ELT’ – as buyers or potential buyers of educational products, training or technology.

Technological innovation is invariably driven by the private sector. This may be in the development of technologies (platforms, apps and so on), in the promotion of technology (through training days and conference sponsorship, for example), or in training for technology (with consultancy companies like ELTjam or The Consultants-E, which offer a wide range of technologically oriented ‘solutions’).

As in education more generally, it is believed that the private sector can be more agile and more efficient than state-run bodies, which continue to decline in importance in educational policy-setting. When state-run bodies are involved in technological innovation in education, it is normal for them to work in partnership with the private sector.

4 Accountability is crucial

Efficacy is vital. It makes no sense to innovate unless the innovations improve something, but for us to know this, we need a way to measure it. In a previous post , I looked at Pearson’s ‘Asking More: the Path to Efficacy’ by CEO John Fallon (who will be stepping down later this year). Efficacy in education, says Fallon, is ‘making a measurable impact on someone’s life through learning’. ‘Measurable’ is the key word, because, as Fallon claims, ‘it is increasingly possible to determine what works and what doesn’t in education, just as in healthcare.’ We need ‘a relentless focus’ on ‘the learning outcomes we deliver’ because it is these outcomes that can be measured in ‘a systematic, evidence-based fashion’. Measurement, of course, is all the easier when education is delivered online, ‘real-time learner data’ can be captured, and the power of analytics can be deployed.

Data is evidence, and it’s as easy to agree on the importance of evidence as it is hard to decide on (1) what it is evidence of, and (2) what kind of data is most valuable. While those questions remain largely unanswered, the data-capturing imperative invades more and more domains of the educational world.

English language teaching is becoming data-obsessed. From language scales, like Pearson’s Global Scale of English to scales of teacher competences, from numerically-oriented formative assessment practices (such as those used on many LMSs) to the reporting of effect sizes in meta-analyses (such as those used by John Hattie and colleagues), datafication in ELT accelerates non-stop.

The scales and frameworks are all problematic in a number of ways (see, for example, this post on ‘The Mismeasure of Language’) but they have undeniably shaped the way that we are able to think. Of course, we need measurable outcomes! If, for the present, there are privacy and security issues, it is to be hoped that technology will find solutions to them, too.

REFERENCES

Castoriadis, C. (1987). The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Cobo, C. (2019). I Accept the Terms and Conditions. Montevideo: International Development Research Centre / Center for Research Ceibal Foundation. https://adaptivelearninginelt.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/41acf-cd84b5_7a6e74f4592c460b8f34d1f69f2d5068.pdf

Friesen, N. (forthcoming) The technological imaginary in education, or: Myth and enlightenment in ‘Personalized Learning’. In M. Stocchetti (Ed.) The Digital Age and its Discontents. University of Helsinki Press. Available at https://www.academia.edu/37960891/The_Technological_Imaginary_in_Education_or_Myth_and_Enlightenment_in_Personalized_Learning_

Jasanoff, S. & Kim, S.-H. (2015). Dreamscapes of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lingard, B. & Gale, T. (2007). The emergent structure of feeling: what does it mean for critical educational studies and research?, Critical Studies in Education, 48:1, pp. 1-23

Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso.

Robbins, K. & Webster, F. (1989]. The Technical Fix. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education.

Taylor, C. (2014). Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Urry, J. (2016). What is the Future? Cambridge: Polity Press.

 

ELT as an Industry

by Philip Kerr & Andrew Wickham

from IATEFL 2016 Birmingham Conference Selections (ed. Tania Pattison) Faversham, Kent: IATEFL pp. 75 – 78

ELT publishing, international language testing and private language schools are all industries: products are produced, bought and sold for profit. English language teaching (ELT) is not. It is an umbrella term that is used to describe a range of activities, some of which are industries, and some of which (such as English teaching in high schools around the world) might better be described as public services. ELT, like education more generally, is, nevertheless, often referred to as an ‘industry’.

Education in a neoliberal world

The framing of ELT as an industry is both a reflection of how we understand the term and a force that shapes our understanding. Associated with the idea of ‘industry’ is a constellation of other ideas and words (such as efficacy, productivity, privatization, marketization, consumerization, digitalization and globalization) which become a part of ELT once it is framed as an industry. Repeated often enough, ‘ELT as an industry’ can become a metaphor that we think and live by. Those activities that fall under the ELT umbrella, but which are not industries, become associated with the desirability of industrial practices through such discourse.

The shift from education, seen as a public service, to educational managerialism (where education is seen in industrial terms with a focus on efficiency, free market competition, privatization and a view of students as customers) can be traced to the 1980s and 1990s (Gewirtz, 2001). In 1999, under pressure from developed economies, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) transformed education into a commodity that could be traded like any other in the marketplace (Robertson, 2006). The global industrialisation and privatization of education continues to be promoted by transnational organisations (such as the World Bank and the OECD), well-funded free-market think-tanks (such as the Cato Institute), philanthro-capitalist foundations (such as the Gates Foundation) and educational businesses (such as Pearson) (Ball, 2012).

Efficacy and learning outcomes

Managerialist approaches to education require educational products and services to be measured and compared. In ELT, the most visible manifestation of this requirement is the current ubiquity of learning outcomes. Contemporary coursebooks are full of ‘can-do’ statements, although these are not necessarily of any value to anyone. Examples from one unit of one best-selling course include ‘Now I can understand advice people give about hotels’ and ‘Now I can read an article about unique hotels’ (McCarthy et al. 2014: 74). However, in a world where accountability is paramount, they are deemed indispensable. The problem from a pedagogical perspective is that teaching input does not necessarily equate with learning uptake. Indeed, there is no reason why it should.

Drawing on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) for inspiration, new performance scales have emerged in recent years. These include the Cambridge English Scale and the Pearson Global Scale of English. Moving away from the broad six categories of the CEFR, such scales permit finer-grained measurement and we now see individual vocabulary and grammar items tagged to levels. Whilst such initiatives undoubtedly support measurements of efficacy, the problem from a pedagogical perspective is that they assume that language learning is linear and incremental, as opposed to complex and jagged.

Given the importance accorded to the measurement of language learning (or what might pass for language learning), it is unsurprising that attention is shifting towards the measurement of what is probably the most important factor impacting on learning: the teaching. Teacher competency scales have been developed by Cambridge Assessment, the British Council and EAQUALS (Evaluation and Accreditation of Quality Language Services), among others.

The backwash effects of the deployment of such scales are yet to be fully experienced, but the likely increase in the perception of both language learning and teacher learning as the synthesis of granularised ‘bits of knowledge’ is cause for concern.

Digital technology

Digital technology may offer advantages to both English language teachers and learners, but its rapid growth in language learning is the result, primarily but not exclusively, of the way it has been promoted by those who stand to gain financially. In education, generally, and in English language teaching, more specifically, advocacy of the privatization of education is always accompanied by advocacy of digitalization. The global market for digital English language learning products was reported to be $2.8 billion in 2015 and is predicted to reach $3.8 billion by 2020 (Ambient Insight, 2016).

In tandem with the increased interest in measuring learning outcomes, there is fierce competition in the market for high-stakes examinations, and these are increasingly digitally delivered and marked. In the face of this competition and in a climate of digital disruption, companies like Pearson and Cambridge English are developing business models of vertical integration where they can provide and sell everything from placement testing, to courseware (either print or delivered through an LMS), teaching, assessment and teacher training. Huge investments are being made in pursuit of such models. Pearson, for example, recently bought GlobalEnglish, Wall Street English, and set up a partnership with Busuu, thus covering all aspects of language learning from resources provision and publishing to off- and online training delivery.

As regards assessment, the most recent adult coursebook from Cambridge University Press (in collaboration with Cambridge English Language Assessment), ‘Empower’ (Doff, et. Al, 2015) sells itself on a combination of course material with integrated, validated assessment.

Besides its potential for scalability (and therefore greater profit margins), the appeal (to some) of platform-delivered English language instruction is that it facilitates assessment that is much finer-grained and actionable in real time. Digitization and testing go hand in hand.

Few English language teachers have been unaffected by the move towards digital. In the state sectors, large-scale digitization initiatives (such as the distribution of laptops for educational purposes, the installation of interactive whiteboards, the move towards blended models of instruction or the move away from printed coursebooks) are becoming commonplace. In the private sectors, online (or partially online) language schools are taking market share from the traditional bricks-and-mortar institutions.

These changes have entailed modifications to the skill-sets that teachers need to have. Two announcements at this conference reflect this shift. First of all, Cambridge English launched their ‘Digital Framework for Teachers’, a matrix of six broad competency areas organised into four levels of proficiency. Secondly, Aqueduto, the Association for Quality Education and Training Online, was launched, setting itself up as an accreditation body for online or blended teacher training courses.

Teachers’ pay and conditions

In the United States, and likely soon in the UK, the move towards privatization is accompanied by an overt attack on teachers’ unions, rights, pay and conditions (Selwyn, 2014). As English language teaching in both public and private sectors is commodified and marketized it is no surprise to find that the drive to bring down costs has a negative impact on teachers worldwide. Gwynt (2015), for example, catalogues cuts in funding, large-scale redundancies, a narrowing of the curriculum, intensified workloads (including the need to comply with ‘quality control measures’), the deskilling of teachers, dilapidated buildings, minimal resources and low morale in an ESOL department in one British further education college. In France, a large-scale study by Wickham, Cagnol, Wright and Oldmeadow (Linguaid, 2015; Wright, 2016) found that EFL teachers in the very competitive private sector typically had multiple employers, limited or no job security, limited sick pay and holiday pay, very little training and low hourly rates that were deteriorating. One of the principle drivers of the pressure on salaries is the rise of online training delivery through Skype and other online platforms, using offshore teachers in low-cost countries such as the Philippines. This type of training represents 15% in value and up to 25% in volume of all language training in the French corporate sector and is developing fast in emerging countries. These examples are illustrative of a broad global trend.

Implications

Given the current climate, teachers will benefit from closer networking with fellow professionals in order, not least, to be aware of the rapidly changing landscape. It is likely that they will need to develop and extend their skill sets (especially their online skills and visibility and their specialised knowledge), to differentiate themselves from competitors and to be able to demonstrate that they are in tune with current demands. More generally, it is important to recognise that current trends have yet to run their full course. Conditions for teachers are likely to deteriorate further before they improve. More than ever before, teachers who want to have any kind of influence on the way that marketization and industrialization are shaping their working lives will need to do so collectively.

References

Ambient Insight. 2016. The 2015-2020 Worldwide Digital English Language Learning Market. http://www.ambientinsight.com/Resources/Documents/AmbientInsight_2015-2020_Worldwide_Digital_English_Market_Sample.pdf

Ball, S. J. 2012. Global Education Inc. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge

Doff, A., Thaine, C., Puchta, H., Stranks, J. and P. Lewis-Jones 2015. Empower. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Gewirtz, S. 2001. The Managerial School: Post-welfarism and Social Justice in Education. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge

Gwynt, W. 2015. ‘The effects of policy changes on ESOL’. Language Issues 26 / 2: 58 – 60

McCarthy, M., McCarten, J. and H. Sandiford 2014. Touchstone 2 Student’s Book Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Linguaid, 2015. Le Marché de la Formation Langues à l’Heure de la Mondialisation. Guildford: Linguaid

Robertson, S. L. 2006. ‘Globalisation, GATS and trading in education services.’ published by the Centre for Globalisation, Education and Societies, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1JA, UK at http://www.bris.ac.uk/education/people/academicStaff/edslr/publications/04slr

Selwyn, N. 2014. Distrusting Educational Technology. New York: Routledge

Wright, R. 2016. ‘My teacher is rich … or not!’ English Teaching Professional 103: 54 – 56

 

 

Learning styles – the emperor with no clothes

All aboard …

The point of adaptive learning is that it can personalize learning. When we talk about personalization, mention of learning styles is rarely far away. Jose Ferreira of Knewton (but now ex-CEO Knewton) made his case for learning styles in a blog post that generated a superb and, for Ferreira, embarrassing  discussion in the comments that were subsequently deleted by Knewton. FluentU (which I reviewed here) clearly approves of learning styles, or at least sees them as a useful way to market their product, even though it is unclear how their product caters to different styles. Busuu claims to be ‘personalised to fit your style of learning’. Voxy, Inc. (according to their company overview) ‘operates a language learning platform that creates custom curricula for English language learners based on their interests, routines, goals, and learning styles’. Bliu Bliu (which I reviewed here) recommended, in a recent blog post, that learners should ‘find out their language learner type and use it to their advantage’ and suggests, as a starter, trying out ‘Bliu Bliu, where pretty much any learner can find what suits them best’. Memrise ‘uses clever science to adapt to your personal learning style’.  Duolingo’s learning tree ‘effectively rearranges itself to suit individual learning styles’ according to founder, Louis Von Ahn. This list could go on and on.

Learning styles are thriving in ELT coursebooks, too. Here are just three recent examples for learners of various ages. Today! by Todd, D. & Thompson, T. (Pearson, 2014) ‘shapes learning around individual students with graded difficulty practice for mixed-ability classes’ and ‘makes testing mixed-ability classes easier with tests that you can personalise to students’ abilities’.

Move  it! by Barraclough, C., Beddall, F., Stannett, K., Wildman, J. (Pearson, 2015) offers ‘personalized pathways [which] allow students to optimize their learning outcomes’ and a ‘complete assessment package to monitor students’ learning process’.

Open Mind Elementary (A2) 2nd edition by Rogers, M., Taylor-Knowles, J. & Taylor-Knowles, S. (Macmillan, 2014) has a whole page devoted to learning styles in the ‘Life Skills’ strand of the course. The scope and sequence describes it in the following terms: ‘Thinking about what you like to do to find your learning style and improve how you learn English’. Here’s the relevant section:

Methodology books offer more tips for ways that teachers can cater to different learning styles. Recent examples include Patrycja Kamińska’s  Learning Styles and Second Language Education (Cambridge Scholars, 2014), Tammy Gregersen & Peter D. MacIntyre’s Capitalizing on Language Learners’ Individuality (Multilingual Matters, 2014) and Marjorie Rosenberg’s Spotlight on Learning Styles (Delta Publishing, 2013). Teacher magazines show a continuing interest  in the topic. Humanising Language Teaching and English Teaching Professional are particularly keen. The British Council offers courses about learning styles and its Teaching English website has many articles and lesson plans on the subject (my favourite explains that your students will be more successful if you match your teaching style to their learning styles), as do the websites of all the major publishers. Most ELT conferences will also offer something on the topic.

How about language teaching qualifications and frameworks? The Cambridge English Teaching Framework contains a component entitled ‘Understanding learners’ and this specifies as the first part of the component a knowledge of concepts such as learning styles (e.g., visual, auditory, kinaesthetic), multiple intelligences, learning strategies, special needs, affect. Unsurprisingly, the Cambridge CELTA qualification requires successful candidates to demonstrate an awareness of the different learning styles and preferences that adults bring to learning English. The Cambridge DELTA requires successful candidates to accommodate learners according to their different abilities, motivations, and learning styles. The Eaquals Framework for Language Teacher Training and Development requires teachers at Development Phase 2 t0 have the skill of determining and anticipating learners’ language learning needs and learning styles at a range of levels, selecting appropriate ways of finding out about these.

Outside of ELT, learning styles also continue to thrive. Phil Newton (2015 ‘The learning styles myth is thriving in higher education’ Frontiers in Psychology 6: 1908) carried out a survey of educational publications  (higher education) between 2013 and 2016, and found that an overwhelming majority (89%) implicitly or directly endorse the use of learning styles. He also cites research showing that 93% of UK schoolteachers believe that ‘individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred Learning Style’, with similar figures in other countries. 72% of Higher Education institutions in the US teach ‘learning style theory’ as part of faculty development for online teachers. Advocates of learning styles in English language teaching are not alone.

But, unfortunately, …

In case you weren’t aware of it, there is a rather big problem with learning styles. There is a huge amount of research  which suggests that learning styles (and, in particular, teaching attempts to cater to learning styles) need to be approached with extreme scepticism. Much of this research was published long before the blog posts, advertising copy, books and teaching frameworks (listed above) were written.  What does this research have to tell us?

The first problem concerns learning styles taxonomies. There are three issues here: many people do not fit one particular style, the information used to assign people to styles is often inadequate, and there are so many different styles that it becomes cumbersome to link particular learners to particular styles (Kirschner, P. A. & van Merriënboer, J. J. G. 2013. ‘Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education’ Educational Psychologist, 48 / 3, 169-183). To summarise, given the lack of clarity as to which learning styles actually exist, it may be ‘neither viable nor justified’ for learning styles to form the basis of lesson planning (Hall, G. 2011. Exploring English Language Teaching. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge p.140). More detailed information about these issues can be found in the following sources:

Coffield, F., Moseley, D., Hall, E. & Ecclestone, K. 2004. Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: a systematic and critical review. London: Learning and Skills Research Centre

Dembo, M. H. & Howard, K. 2007. Advice about the use of learning styles: a major myth in education. Journal of College Reading & Learning 37 / 2: 101 – 109

Kirschner, P. A. 2017. Stop propagating the learning styles myth. Computers & Education 106: 166 – 171

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D. & Bjork, E. 2008. Learning styles concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 9 / 3: 105 – 119

Riener, C. & Willingham, D. 2010. The myth of learning styles. Change – The Magazine of Higher Learning

The second problem concerns what Pashler et al refer to as the ‘meshing hypothesis’: the idea that instructional interventions can be effectively tailored to match particular learning styles. Pashler et al concluded that the available taxonomies of student types do not offer any valid help in deciding what kind of instruction to offer each individual. Even in 2008, their finding was not new. Back in 1978, a review of 15 studies that looked at attempts to match learning styles to approaches to first language reading instruction, concluded that modality preference ‘has not been found to interact significantly with the method of teaching’ (Tarver, Sara & M. M. Dawson. 1978. Modality preference and the teaching of reading. Journal of Learning Disabilities 11: 17 – 29). The following year, two other researchers concluded that [the assumption that one can improve instruction by matching materials to children’s modality strengths] appears to lack even minimal empirical support. (Arter, J.A. & Joseph A. Jenkins 1979 ‘Differential diagnosis-prescriptive teaching: A critical appraisal’ Review of Educational Research 49: 517-555). Fast forward 20 years to 1999, and Stahl (Different strokes for different folks?’ American Educator Fall 1999 pp. 1 – 5) was writing the reason researchers roll their eyes at learning styles is the utter failure to find that assessing children’s learning styles and matching to instructional methods has any effect on learning. The area with the most research has been the global and analytic styles […]. Over the past 30 years, the names of these styles have changed – from ‘visual’ to ‘global’ and from ‘auditory’ to ‘analytic’ – but the research results have not changed. For a recent evaluation of the practical applications of learning styles, have a look at Rogowsky, B. A., Calhoun, B. M. & Tallal, P. 2015. ‘Matching Learning Style to Instructional Method: Effects on Comprehension’ Journal of Educational Psychology 107 / 1: 64 – 78. Even David Kolb, the Big Daddy of learning styles, now concedes that there is no strong evidence that teachers should tailor their instruction to their student’s particular learning styles (reported in Glenn, D. 2009. ‘Matching teaching style to learning style may not help students’ The Chronicle of Higher Education). To summarise, the meshing hypothesis is entirely unsupported in the scientific literature. It is a myth (Howard-Jones, P. A. 2014. ‘Neuroscience and education: myths and messages’ Nature Reviews Neuroscience).

This brings me back to the blog posts, advertising blurb, coursebooks, methodology books and so on that continue to tout learning styles. The writers of these texts typically do not acknowledge that there’s a problem of any kind. Are they unaware of the research? Or are they aware of it, but choose not to acknowledge it? I suspect that the former is often the case with the app developers. But if the latter is the case, what  might those reasons be? In the case of teacher training specifications, the reason is probably practical. Changing a syllabus is an expensive and time-consuming operation. But in the case of some of the ELT writers, I suspect that they hang on in there because they so much want to believe.

As Newton (2015: 2) notes, intuitively, there is much that is attractive about the concept of Learning Styles. People are obviously different and Learning Styles appear to offer educators a way to accommodate individual learner differences.  Pashler et al (2009:107) add that another related factor that may play a role in the popularity of the learning-styles approach has to do with responsibility. If a person or a person’s child is not succeeding or excelling in school, it may be more comfortable for the person to think that the educational system, not the person or the child himself or herself, is responsible. That is, rather than attribute one’s lack of success to any lack of ability or effort on one’s part, it may be more appealing to think that the fault lies with instruction being inadequately tailored to one’s learning style. In that respect, there may be linkages to the self-esteem movement that became so influential, internationally, starting in the 1970s. There is no reason to doubt that many of those who espouse learning styles have good intentions.

No one, I think, seriously questions whether learners might not benefit from a wide variety of input styles and learning tasks. People are obviously different. MacIntyre et al (MacIntyre, P.D., Gregersen, T. & Clément, R. 2016. ‘Individual Differences’ in Hall, G. (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of English Language Teaching. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp.310 – 323, p.319) suggest that teachers might consider instructional methods that allow them to capitalise on both variety and choice and also help learners find ways to do this for themselves inside and outside the classroom. Jill Hadfield (2006. ‘Teacher Education and Trainee Learning Style’ RELC Journal 37 / 3: 369 – 388) recommends that we design our learning tasks across the range of learning styles so that our trainees can move across the spectrum, experiencing both the comfort of matching and the challenge produced by mismatching. But this is not the same thing as claiming that identification of a particular learning style can lead to instructional decisions. The value of books like Rosenberg’s Spotlight on Learning Styles lies in the wide range of practical suggestions for varying teaching styles and tasks. They contain ideas of educational value: it is unfortunate that the theoretical background is so thin.

In ELT things are, perhaps, beginning to change. Russ Mayne’s blog post Learning styles: facts and fictions in 2012 got a few heads nodding, and he followed this up 2 years later with a presentation at IATEFL looking at various aspects of ELT, including learning styles, which have little or no scientific credibility. Carol Lethaby and Patricia Harries gave a talk at IATEFL 2016, Changing the way we approach learning styles in teacher education, which was also much discussed and shared online. They also had an article in ELT Journal called Learning styles and teacher training: are we perpetuating neuromyths? (2016 ELTJ 70 / 1: 16 – 27). Even Pearson, in a blog post of November 2016, (Mythbusters: A review of research on learning styles) acknowledges that there is a shocking lack of evidence to support the core learning styles claim that customizing instruction based on students’ preferred learning styles produces better learning than effective universal instruction, concluding that  it is impossible to recommend learning styles as an effective strategy for improving learning outcomes.