Multimodality and modals

My attention was recently drawn (thanks to Grzegorz Śpiewak) to a recent free publication from OUP. It’s called ‘Multimodality in ELT: Communication skills for today’s generation’ (Donaghy et al., 2023) and it’s what OUP likes to call a ‘position paper’: it offers ‘evidence-based recommendations to support educators and learners in their future success’. Its topic is multimodal (or multimedia) literacy, a term used to describe the importance for learners of being able ‘not just to understand but to create multimedia messages, integrating text with images, sounds and video to suit a variety of communicative purposes and reach a range of target audiences’ (Dudeney et al., 2013: 13).

Grzegorz noted the author of this paper’s ‘positively charged, unhedged language to describe what is arguably a most complex problem area’. As an example, he takes the summary of the first section and circles questionable and / or unsubstantiated claims. It’s just one example from a text that reads more like a ‘manifesto’ than a balanced piece of evidence-reporting. The verb ‘need’ (in the sense of ‘must’, as in ‘teachers / learners / students need to …’) appears no less than 57 times. The modal ‘should’ (as in ‘teachers / learners / students should …’) clocks up 27 appearances.

What is it then that we all need to do? Essentially, the argument is that English language teachers need to develop their students’ multimodal literacy by incorporating more multimodal texts and tasks (videos and images) in all their lessons. The main reason for this appears to be that, in today’s digital age, communication is more often multimodal than not (i.e. monomodal written or spoken text). As an addendum, we are told that multimodal classroom practices are a ‘fundamental part of inclusive teaching’ in classes with ‘learners with learning difficulties and disabilities’. In case you thought it was ironic that such an argument would be put forward in a flat monomodal pdf, OUP also offers the same content through a multimodal ‘course’ with text, video and interactive tasks.

It might all be pretty persuasive, if it weren’t so overstated. Here are a few of the complex problem areas.

What exactly is multimodal literacy?

We are told in the paper that there are five modes of communication: linguistic, visual, aural, gestural and spatial. Multimodal literacy consists, apparently, of the ability

• to ‘view’ multimodal texts (noticing the different modes, and, for basic literacy, responding to the text on an emotional level, and, for more advanced literacy, respond to it critically)
• to ‘represent’ ideas and information in a multimodal way (posters, storyboards, memes, etc.)

I find this frustratingly imprecise. First: ‘viewing’. Noticing modes and reacting emotionally to a multimedia artefact do not take anyone very far on the path towards multimodal literacy, even if they are necessary first steps. It is only when we move towards a critical response (understanding the relative significance of different modes and problematizing our initial emotional response) that we can really talk about literacy (see the ‘critical literacy’ of Pegrum et al., 2018). We’re basically talking about critical thinking, a concept as vague and contested as any out there. Responding to a multimedia artefact ‘critically’ can mean more or less anything and everything.

Next: ‘representing’. What is the relative importance of ‘viewing’ and ‘representing’? What kinds of representations (artefacts) are important, and which are not? Presumably, they are not all of equal importance. And, whichever artefact is chosen as the focus, a whole range of technical skills will be needed to produce the artefact in question. So, precisely what kind of representing are we talking about?

Priorities in the ELT classroom

The Oxford authors write that ‘the main focus as English language teachers should obviously be on language’. I take this to mean that the ‘linguistic mode’ of communication should be our priority. This seems reasonable, since it’s hard to imagine any kind of digital literacy without some reading skills preceding it. But, again, the question of relative importance rears its ugly head. The time available for language leaning and teaching is always limited. Time that is devoted to the visual, aural, gestural or spatial modes of communication is time that is not devoted to the linguistic mode.

There are, too, presumably, some language teaching contexts (I’m thinking in particular about some adult, professional contexts) where the teaching of multimodal literacy would be completely inappropriate.

Multimodal literacy is a form of digital literacy. Writers about digital literacies like to say things like ‘digital literacies are as important to language learning as […] reading and writing skills’ or it is ‘crucial for language teaching to […] encompass the digital literacies which are increasingly central to learners’ […] lives’ (Pegrum et al, 2022). The question then arises: how important, in relative terms, are the various digital literacies? Where does multimodal literacy stand?

The Oxford authors summarise their view as follows:

There is a need for a greater presence of images, videos, and other multimodal texts in ELT coursebooks and a greater focus on using them as a starting point for analysis, evaluation, debate, and discussion.

My question to them is: greater than what? Typical contemporary courseware is already a whizzbang multimodal jamboree. There seem to me to be more pressing concerns with most courseware than supplementing it with visuals or clickables.

Evidence

The Oxford authors’ main interest is unquestionably in the use of video. They recommend extensive video viewing outside the classroom and digital story-telling activities inside. I’m fine with that, so long as classroom time isn’t wasted on getting to grips with a particular digital tool (e.g. a video editor, which, a year from now, will have been replaced by another video editor).

I’m fine with this because it involves learners doing meaningful things with language, and there is ample evidence to indicate that a good way to acquire language is to do meaningful things with it. However, I am less than convinced by the authors’ claim that such activities will strengthen ‘active and critical viewing, and effective and creative representing’. My scepticism derives firstly from my unease about the vagueness of the terms ‘viewing’ and ‘representing’, but I have bigger reservations.

There is much debate about the extent to which general critical thinking can be taught. General critical viewing has the same problems. I can apply critical viewing skills to some topics, because I have reasonable domain knowledge. In my case, it’s domain knowledge that activates my critical awareness of rhetorical devices, layout, choice of images and pull-out quotes, multimodal add-ons and so on. But without the domain knowledge, my critical viewing skills are likely to remain uncritical.

Perhaps most importantly of all, there is a lack of reliable research about ‘the extent to which language instructors should prioritize multimodality in the classroom’ (Kessler, 2022: 552). There are those, like the authors of this paper, who advocate for a ‘strong version’ of multimodality. Others go for a ‘weak version’ ‘in which non-linguistic modes should only minimally support or supplement linguistic instruction’ (Kessler, 2022: 552). And there are others who argue that multimodal activities may actually detract from or stifle L2 development (e.g. Manchón, 2017). In the circumstances, all the talk of ‘needs to’ and ‘should’ is more than a little premature.

Assessment

The authors of this Oxford paper rightly note that, if we are to adopt a multimodal approach, ‘it is important that assessment requirements take into account the multimodal nature of contemporary communication’. The trouble is that there are no widely used assessments (to my knowledge) that do this (including Oxford’s own tests). English language reading tests (like the Oxford Test of English) measure the comprehension of flat printed texts, as a proxy for reading skills. This is not the place to question the validity of such reading tests. Suffice to say that ‘little consensus exists as to what [the ability to read another language] entails, how it develops, and how progress in development can be monitored and fostered’ (Koda, 2021).

No doubt there are many people beavering away at trying to figure out how to assess multimodal literacy, but the challenges they face are not negligible. Twenty-first century digital (multimodal) literacy includes such things as knowing how to change the language of an online text to your own (and vice versa), how to bring up subtitles, how to convert written text to speech, how to generate audio scripts. All such skills may well be very valuable in this digital age, and all of them limit the need to learn another language.

Final thoughts

I can’t help but wonder why Oxford University Press should bring out a ‘position paper’ that is so at odds with their own publishing and assessing practices, and so at odds with the paper recently published in their flagship journal, ELT Journal. There must be some serious disconnect between the Marketing Department, which commissions papers such as these, and other departments within the company. Why did they allow such overstatement, when it is well known that many ELT practitioners (i.e. their customers) have the view that ‘linguistically based forms are (and should be) the only legitimate form of literacy’ (Choi & Yi, 2016)? Was it, perhaps, the second part of the title of this paper that appealed to the marketing people (‘Communication Skills for Today’s Generation’) and they just thought that ‘multimodality’ had a cool, contemporary ring to it? Or does the use of ‘multimodality’ help the marketing of courses like Headway and English File with additional multimedia bells and whistles? As I say, I can’t help but wonder.

If you want to find out more, I’d recommend the ELT Journal article, which you can access freely without giving your details to the marketing people.

Finally, it is perhaps time to question the logical connection between the fact that much reading these days is multimodal and the idea that multimodal literacy should be taught in a language classroom. Much reading that takes place online, especially with multimodal texts, could be called ‘hyper reading’, characterised as ‘sort of a brew of skimming and scanning on steroids’ (Baron, 2021: 12). Is this the kind of reading that should be promoted with language learners? Baron (2021) argues that the answer to this question depends on the level of reading skills of the learner. The lower the level, the less beneficial it is likely to be. But for ‘accomplished readers with high levels of prior knowledge about the topic’, hyper-reading may be a valuable approach. For many language learners, monomodal deep reading, which demands ‘slower, time-demanding cognitive and reflective functions’ (Baron, 2021: x – xi) may well be much more conducive to learning.

References

Baron, N. S. (2021) How We Read Now. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Choi, J. & Yi, Y. (2016) Teachers’ Integration of Multimodality into Classroom Practices for English Language Learners’ TESOL Journal, 7 (2): 3-4 – 327

Donaghy, K. (author), Karastathi, S. (consultant), Peachey, N. (consultant), (2023). Multimodality in ELT: Communication skills for today’s generation [PDF]. Oxford University Press. https://elt.oup.com/feature/global/expert/multimodality (registration needed)

Dudeney, G., Hockly, N. & Pegrum, M. (2013) Digital Literacies. Harlow: Pearson Education

Kessler, M. (2022) Multimodality. ELT Journal, 76 (4): 551 – 554

Koda, K. (2021) Assessment of Reading. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0051.pub2

Manchón, R. M. (2017) The Potential Impact of Multimodal Composition on Language Learning. Journal of Second Language Writing, 38: 94 – 95

Pegrum, M., Dudeney, G. & Hockly, N. (2018) Digital Literacies Revisited. The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL, 7 (2): 3 – 24

Pegrum, M., Hockly, N. & Dudeney, G. (2022) Digital Literacies 2nd Edition. New York: Routledge

Mobile learning revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

Design thinking and ELT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edtech and sustainability

Last September, Cambridge published a ‘Sustainability Framework for ELT’, which attempts to bring together environmental, social and economic sustainability. It’s a kind of 21^st century skills framework and is designed to help teachers ‘to integrate sustainability skills development’ into their lessons. Among the sub-skills that are listed, a handful grabbed my attention:

• Identifying and understanding obstacles to sustainability
• Broadening discussion and including underrepresented voices
• Understanding observable and hidden consequences
• Critically evaluating sustainability claims
• Understanding the bigger picture

Hoping to brush up my skills in these areas, I decided to take a look at the upcoming BETT show in London, which describes itself as ‘the biggest Education Technology exhibition in the world’. BETT and its parent company, Hyve, ‘are committed to redefining sustainability within the event industry and within education’. They are doing this by reducing their ‘onsite printing and collateral’. (‘Event collateral’ is an interesting event-industry term that refers to all the crap that is put into delegate bags, intended to ‘enhance their experience of the event’.) BETT and Hyve are encouraging all sponsors to go paperless, too, ‘switching from seat-drop collateral to QR codes’, and delegate bags will no longer be offered. They are partnering with various charities to donate ‘surplus food and furniture’ to local community projects, they are donating to other food charities that support families in need, and they are recycling all of the aisle banners into tote bags. Keynote speakers will include people like Sally Uren, CEO of ‘Forum for the Future’, who will talk about ‘Transforming carbon neutral education for a just and regenerative future’.

BETT and Hyve want us to take their corporate and social responsibility very seriously. All of these initiatives are very commendable, even though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they will redefine sustainability within the event industry and education. But there is a problem – and it’s not that the world is already over-saturated with recycled tote bags. As the biggest jamboree of this kind in the world, the show attracts over 600 vendors and over 30,000 visitors, with over 120 countries represented. Quite apart from all the collateral and surplus furniture, the carbon and material footprint of the event cannot be negligible. Think of all those start-up solution-providers flying and driving into town, AirB’n’B-ing for the duration, and Ubering around town after hours, for a start.

But this is not really the problem, either. Much as the event likes to talk about ‘driving impact and improving outcomes for teachers and learners’, the clear and only purpose of the event is to sell stuff. It is to enable the investors in the 600+ edtech solution-providers in the exhibition area to move towards making a return on their investment. If we wanted to talk seriously about sustainability, the question that needs to be asked is: to what extent does all the hardware and software on sale contribute in any positive and sustainable way to education? Is there any meaningful social benefit to be derived from all this hardware and software, or is it all primarily just a part of a speculative, financial game? Is the corporate social responsibility of BETT / Hyve a form of green-washing to disguise the stimulation of more production and consumption? Is it all just a kind of environmentalism of the rich’ (Dauvergne, 2016).

Edtech is not the most pressing of environmental problems – indeed, there are examples of edtech that are likely more sustainable than the non-tech alternatives – but the sustainability question remains. There are at least four environmental costs to edtech:

• The energy-greedy data infrastructures that lie behind digital transactions
• The raw ingredients of digital devices
• The environmentally destructive manufacture and production of digital devices
• The environmental cost of dismantling and disposing digital hardware (Selwyn, 2018)

Some forms of edtech are more environmentally costly than others. First, we might consider the material costs. Going back to pre-internet days, think of the countless tonnes of audio cassettes, VCR tapes, DVDs and CD-ROMs. Think of the discarded playback devices, language laboratories and IWBs. None of these are easily recyclable and most have ended up in landfill, mostly in countries that never used these products. These days the hardware that is used for edtech is more often a device that serves other non-educational purposes, but the planned obsolescence of our phones, tablets and laptops is a huge problem for sustainability.

More important now are probably the energy costs of edtech. Audio and video streaming might seem more environmentally friendly than CDs and DVDs, but, depending on how often the CD or DVD is used, the energy cost of streaming (especially high quality video) can be much higher than using the physical format. AI ups the ante significantly (Brevini, 2022). Five years ago, a standard ‘AI training model in linguistics emit more than 284 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent’ (Strubell et al., 2019). With exponentially greater volumes of data now being used, the environmental cost is much, much higher. Whilst VR vendors will tout the environmental benefits of cutting down on travel, getting learners together in a physical room may well have a much lower carbon footprint than meeting in the Metaverse.

When doing the calculus of edtech, we need to evaluate the use-value of the technology. Does the tech actually have any clear educational (or other social) benefit, or is its value primarily in terms of its exchange-value?

To illustrate the difference between use-value and exchange-value, I’d like to return again to the beginnings of modern edtech in ELT. As the global market for ELT materials mushroomed in the 1990s, coursebook publishers realised that, for a relatively small investment, they could boost their sales by bringing out ‘new editions’ of best-selling titles. This meant a new cover, replacing a few texts and topics, making minor modifications to other content, and, crucially, adding extra features. As the years went by, these extra features became digital: CD-ROMs, DVDs, online workbooks and downloadables of various kinds. The publishers knew that sales depended on the existence of these shiny new things, even if many buyers made minimal use or zero use of them. But they gave the marketing departments and sales reps a pitch, and justified an increase in unit price. Did these enhanced coursebooks actually represent any increase in use-value? Did learners make better or faster progress in English as a result? On the whole, the answer has to be an unsurprising and resounding no. We should not be surprised if hundreds of megabytes of drag-and-drop grammar practice fail to have much positive impact on learning outcomes. From the start, it was the impact on the exchange-value (sales and profits) of these products that was the driving force.

Edtech vendors have always wanted to position themselves to potential buyers as ‘solution providers’, trumpeting the use-value of what they are selling. When it comes to attracting investors, it’s a different story, one that is all about minimum viable products, scalability and return on investment.

There are plenty of technologies that have undisputed educational use-value in language learning and teaching. Google Docs, Word, Zoom and YouTube come immediately to mind. Not coincidentally, they are not technologies that were designed for educational purposes. But when you look at specifically educational technology, It becomes much harder (though not impossible) to identify unambiguous gains in use-value. Most commonly, the technology holds out the promise of improved learning, but evidence that it has actually achieved this is extremely rare. Sure, a bells-and-whistles LMS offers exciting possibilities for flipped or blended learning, but research that demonstrates the effectiveness of these approaches in the real world is sadly lacking. Sure, VR might seem to offer a glimpse of motivated learners interacting meaningfully in the Metaverse, but I wouldn’t advise you to bet on it.

And betting is what most edtech is all about. An eye-watering $16.1 billion of venture capital was invested in global edtech in 2020. What matters is not that any of these products or services have any use-value, but that they are perceived to have a use-value. Central to this investment is the further commercialisation and privatisation of education (William & Hogan 2020). BETT is a part of this.

Returning to the development of my sustainability skills, I still need to consider the bigger picture. I’ve suggested that it is difficult to separate edtech from a consideration of capitalism, a system that needs to manufacture consumption, to expand production and markets in order to survive (Dauvergne, 2016: 48). Economic growth is the sine qua non of this system, and it is this that makes the British government (and others) so keen on BETT. Education and edtech in particular are rapidly growing markets. But growth is only sustainable, in environmental terms, if it is premised on things that we actually need, rather than things which are less necessary and ecologically destructive (Hickel, 2020). At the very least, as Selwyn (2021) noted, we need more diverse thinking: ‘What if environmental instability cannot be ‘solved’ simply through the expanded application of digital technologies but is actually exacerbated through increased technology use?’

References

Brevini, B. (2022) Is AI Good for the Planet? Cambridge: Polity Press

Dauvergne, P. (2016) Environmentalism of the Rich. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Hickel, J. (2020) Less Is More. London: William Heinemann

Selwyn, N. (2018) EdTech is killing us all: facing up to the environmental consequences of digital education. EduResearch Matters 22 October, 2018. https://www.aare.edu.au/blog/?p=3293

Selwyn, N. (2021) Ed-Tech Within Limits: Anticipating educational technology in times of environmental crisis. E-Learning and Digital Media, 18 (5): 496 – 510. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/20427530211022951

Strubell, E., Ganesh, A. & McCallum, A. (2019) Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP. Cornell University: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.02243.pdf

Williamson, B. & Hogan, A. (2020) Commercialisation and privatisation in / of education in the context of Covid-19. Education International

AI and teacher training

Who can tell where a blog post might lead? Over six years ago I wrote about adaptive professional development for teachers. I imagined the possibility of bite-sized, personalized CPD material. Now my vision is becoming real.

For the last two years, I have been working with a start-up that has been using AI to generate text using GPT-3 large language models. GPT-3 has recently been in the news because of the phenomenal success of the newly released ChatGPT. The technology certainly has a wow factor, but it has been around for a while now. ChatGPT can generate texts of various genres on any topic (with a few exceptions like current affairs) and the results are impressive. Imagine, then, how much more impressive the results can be when the kind of text is limited by genre and topic, allowing the software to be trained much more reliably.

This is what we have been working on. We took as our training corpus a huge collection of English language teaching teacher development texts that we could access online: blogs from all the major publishers, personal blogs, transcriptions from recorded conference presentations and webinars, magazine articles directed at teachers, along with books from publishers such as DELTA and Pavilion ELT, etc. We identified topics that seemed to be of current interest and asked our AI to generate blog posts. Later, we were able to get suggestions of topics from the software itself.

We then contacted a number of teachers and trainers who contribute to the publishers’ blogs and contracted them, first, to act as human trainers for the software, and, second, to agree to their names being used as the ‘authors’ of the blog posts we generated. In one or two cases, the authors thought that they had actually written the posts themselves! Next we submitted these posts to the marketing departments of the publishers (who run the blogs). Over twenty were submitted in this way, including:

• What do teachers need to know about teaching 21^st century skills in the English classroom?
• 5 top ways of improving the well-being of English teachers
• Teaching leadership skills in the primary English classroom
• How can we promote eco-literacy in the English classroom?
• My 10 favourite apps for English language learners

We couldn’t, of course, tell the companies that AI had been used to write the copy, but once we were sure that nobody had ever spotted the true authorship of this material, we were ready to move to the next stage of the project. We approached the marketing executives of two publishers and showed how we could generate teacher development material at a fraction of the current cost and in a fraction of the time. Partnerships were quickly signed.

Blog posts were just the beginning. We knew that we could use the same technology to produce webinar scripts, using learning design insights to optimise the webinars. The challenge we faced was that webinars need a presenter. We experimented with using animations, but feedback indicated that participants like to see a face. This is eminently doable, using our contracted authors and deep fake technology, but costs are still prohibitive. It remains cheaper and easier to use our authors delivering the scripts we have generated. This will no doubt change before too long.

The next obvious step was to personalize the development material. Large publishers collect huge amounts of data about visitors to their sites using embedded pixels. It is also relatively cheap and easy to triangulate this data with information from the customer databases and from activity on social media (especially Facebook). We know what kinds of classes people teach, and we know which aspects of teacher development they are interested in.

Publishers have long been interested in personalizing marketing material, and the possibility of extending this to the delivery of real development content is clearly exciting. (See below an email I received this week from the good folks at OUP marketing.)

Earlier this year one of our publishing partners began sending links to personalized materials of the kind we were able to produce with AI. The experiment was such a success that we have already taken it one stage further.

One of the most important clients of our main publishing partner employs hundreds of teachers to deliver online English classes using courseware that has been tailored to the needs of the institution. With so many freelance teachers working for them, along with high turnover of staff, there is inevitably a pressing need for teacher training to ensure optimal delivery. Since the classes are all online, it is possible to capture precisely what is going on. Using an AI-driven tool that was inspired by the Visible Classroom app (informed by the work of John Hattie), we can identify the developmental needs of the teachers. What kinds of activities are they using? How well do they exploit the functionalities of the platform? What can be said about the quality of their teacher talk? We combine this data with everything else and our proprietary algorithms determine what kinds of training materials each teacher receives. It doesn’t stop there. We can also now evaluate the effectiveness of these materials by analysing the learning outcomes of the students.

Teaching efficacy can by massively increased, whilst the training budget of the institution can be slashed. If all goes well, there will be no further need for teacher trainers at all. We won’t be stopping there. If results such as these can be achieved in teacher training, there’s no reason why the same technology cannot be leveraged for the teaching itself. Most of our partner’s teaching and testing materials are now quickly and very cheaply generated using GPT-3.5. If you want to see how this is done, check out the work of edugo.AI (a free trial is available) which can generate gapfills and comprehension test questions in a flash. As for replacing the teachers, we’re getting there. For the time being, though, it’s more cost-effective to use freelancers and to train them up.

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

Lifelong learnings

Always learning

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

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

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

Lifelong learning, democracy and human capital

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

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

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

Lifelong learning and English language teaching

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

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

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

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

Lifelong learning and CPD

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

ELT slogans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connecting teachers, empowering learners (BBELT)

Innovating changes: a world of diversity (TESOL Spain)

Translanguaging and multilingualism in language teaching (TESOL Arabia)

Inspiring collaboration (BELTA)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VR – the next big thing in ELT

The VR experience is nothing if it is not immersive, and in language learning, the value of immersion in VR is seen to be the way in which it can lead to what we might call ‘engagement’ or ‘flow’. Fully immersed in a VR world, learning can be maximized, or so the thinking goes (Lan, 2020; Chen & Hsu, 2020). ‘By blocking out visual and auditory distractions in the classroom, VR has the potential to help students deeply connect with the material’ (Gadelha, 2018). ‘There are no distracting classroom windows to stare out of when students are directly immersed into the topic they are investigating’ (Bonner & Reinders, 2018: 36). Such is the allure of immersion that it is no surprise to find the word in the names of VR language learning products like Immerse and ImmerseMe (although the nod to bilingual immersion progammes (such as those in Canada) is an added bonus).

There is, however, immersion and immersion. A common categorisation of VR is into:

• non-immersive (e.g. a desktop game with a 2D screen and avatars)
• semi-immersive (e.g. high-end arcade games and flight simulators with large projections)
• fully immersive (e.g. with a head-mounted display, headphones, body sensors)

Taking things a little further is the possibility of directly inducing responses in the nervous system with molecular nanotechnology. We’re some way off that, but, fear not, people are working on it. At this point, it’s worth noting that this hierarchy of immersivity is driven by technological considerations: more tech = more immersion.

In ELT, the most common VR applications are currently at the low end of this scale. Probably the most talked about currently is the use of 360⁰ photography and a very simple headset like Google Cardboard, along with headphones, to take students on virtual field trips – anywhere from a museum or a Disney castle to a coral reef or outer space. See Raquel Ribeiro’s blog post for CUP for more ideas. Then, there are self-study packages, like Velawoods, which is a sort of combination of the SIMS with interaction made possible through speech recognition. The syllabus will be familiar to anyone used to using a contemporary coursebooks.

And, now, up a technological notch or two, is Immerse, which requires an Oculus headset. It appears to be a sort of Second Life where language learners can interact with each other and a trainer in a number of role plays, set in, for example, a garden barbecue, a pool bar, a conference or a deserted island. In addition to interacting with each other, students can interact with virtual objects, picking up darts and throw them at questions they want to focus on, for example. ‘Total physical engagement with the environment’ is how this is described by Immerse’s Chief Product Office. You can find out more in this promotional video.

Paul Driver has suggested that the evolution of VR can be ‘traced back through time as a constant struggle to create more immersive experiences. From the intricate scrolls of twelfth-century China, the huge panoramic paintings of the nineteenth century and early experiments in stereoscopic photography, to the promising but over-hyped 1990s arcade machines (which raised hopes and then dashed expectations for a whole generation), the history of virtual reality has been a meandering march forward, punctuated with long periods of stagnation’. Immerse may be fairly sophisticated as a VR language learning platform, but it has a long way to go as an immersive environment in comparison to games like Meeting Rembrandt: Master of Reality or Project VR Fishing. Its animations are crude and clunky, its scenarios short of detail.

But however ‘lifelike’ games like these are, their immersive potential is extremely limited if you have no interest in Rembrandt or fishing. VR is only as immersive as the intrinsic interest of (1) the ‘real world’ it is attempting to replicate, and (2) what you can do in it. The novelty factor may hold attention for a while, but not for long.

With simpler 360⁰ Google Cardboard versions of VR, you can’t actually do anything in the VR world besides watch, listen and marvel, so the intrinsic interest of the content is even more important. I quite like exploring the Okavango Delta, but I have no interest in rollercoasters or parachute jumps. But, to be immersed, I don’t actually need the 360⁰ experience at all, if the quality of the video is good enough. In many ways, I prefer an old-fashioned screen where my hands are not tied up with holding the phone into the Cardboard and the Cardboard to my nose.

360⁰ videos are usually short, and I can see how they can be used in a language class as a springboard for other work. But as a language learning tool, old-fashioned screens (with good content) may offer more potential than headsets (whether Cardboard or Oculus) because we can do other things (like communicate with other people, use a dictionary or take notes) at the same time.

VR technology in language learning cannot, therefore, (whatever its claims) generate immersion or engagement on its own. For the time being, it can, for some, captivate initial curiosity. For others, already used to high-end Oculus games, programmes like Immerse are more likely to generate a resounding ‘meh’. Engagement in learning is a highly complex phenomenon. Mercer and Dörnyei (2020: 102 ff.) argue that engaging learning materials must be designed for particular groups of learners (in terms of level and interests, for example) and they must get learners emotionally invested. Improvements in VR technology won’t really change anything.

VR is already well established and successful in some forms of education: military, healthcare and engineering, especially. Virtual reality is obviously a good place to learn how to defuse a bomb or carry out keyhole surgery. In other areas, such as soft skills training in corporate contexts, its use is growing, but its effectiveness is much less clear. In language learning, the purported advantages of VR (see, for example, Alizadeh, 2019, which has a useful bibliography, or Lloyd et al., 2017) are not convincing. There is no problem in language learning for which VR is the solution. This doesn’t mean that VR does not have a place in language learning / teaching. VR field trips may offer occasional moments of variety. Conversation in VR worlds like Facebook Spaces may be welcomed by some. And there will be markets for dedicated platforms like Velawoods, Mondly or Immerse.

Predictions about edtech are often thinly disguised attempts to accelerate a predicted future. Four years ago I went to a conference presentation by Saul Nassé, Chief Executive of Cambridge Assessment. All the participants were given a Cambridge branded Google Cardboard. At the time, Nassé wrote the following:

‘The technology is only going to get better and cheaper. In two or three years it will be wireless and cost less than a smart phone. That’s the point when you’ll see whole classrooms equipped with VR. And I like to think we’ll find a way of Cambridge English content being used in those classrooms, with people learning English in a whole new way. It may have been a long time coming, but I think the VR revolution is now truly here to stay’.

The message was echoed in Lloyd et al (2017), all three of whom worked for Cambridge Assessment, and amplified in a series of blog posts and conference presentations around that time. Since then, it has all gone rather quiet. There are still people out there (including the investors who have just pumped $1.5 million into Immerse in Series A funding), who believe that VR will be the next big thing in language learning. But edtech investors have a long track record of turning a blind eye to history. VR, as Saul Nassé observed, ‘has been the next big thing for thirty years’. And maybe for the next thirty years, too.

REFERENCES

Alizadeh, M. (2019). Augmented/virtual reality promises for ELT practitioners. In Clements, P., Krause, A. & Bennett, P. (Eds.), Diversity and inclusion. Tokyo: JALT. https://jalt-publications.org/sites/default/files/pdf-article/jalt2018-pcp-048.pdf

Bonner, E., & Reinders, H. (2018). Augmented and virtual reality in the language classroom: Practical ideas. Teaching English with Technology, 18 (3), pp. 33-53. Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1186392.pdf

Chen, Y. L. & Hsu, C. C. (2020). Self-regulated mobile game-based English learning in a virtual reality environment. Computers and Education, 154 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360131520301093?dgcid=rss_sd_all

Gadelha, R. (2018). Revolutionizing Education: The promise of virtual reality. Childhood Education, 94 (1), pp. 40-43. doi:10.1080/00094056.2018.1420362

Lan, Y. J. (2020). Immersion, interaction and experience-oriented learning: Bringing virtual reality into FL learning. Language Learning & Technology, 24(1), pp. 1–15. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/44704

Lloyd, A., Rogerson, S. & Stead, G. (2017). Imagining the potential for using Virtual Reality technologies in language learning. In Carrier, M., Damerow, R. M. & Bailey, K. M. (Eds.) Digital Language Learning and Teaching. New York: Routledge. pp. 222 – 234

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