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.’

Perspectives on language teaching research

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

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

The map and the territory

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

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

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

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

The map of language

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

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

A load of Ballungs

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

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

Language teaching research

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

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

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

Finding the right map

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital literacies literacy

You could be forgiven for wondering what, precisely, digital literacies are. In the first edition of ‘Digital Literacies’, Dudeney et al. (2013:2) define the term as ‘the individual and social skills needed to effectively interpret, manage, share and create meaning in the growing range of digital communication channels’. This is pretty broad, and would seem to encompass more or less anything that people do with digital technology, including the advanced arts of trolling and scamming. Nine years later, in the new edition of this book (Pegrum et al., 2022:5), the authors modify their definition a little: ‘the individual and social skills needed to effectively manage meaning in an era of digitally networked, often blended, communication’. This is broader still. In the intervening years there has been a massive proliferation of ways of describing specific digital literacies, as well as more frameworks of digital literacies than anyone (bar people writing about the topic) could possibly want. Of course, there is much in common between all these descriptive and taxonomic efforts, but there is also much that differs. What, precisely, ‘digital literacies’ means changes over both time and space. It carries different meanings in Australia, Sweden and Argentina, and, perhaps, it only makes sense to have a local conceptualisation of the term (Pangrazio et al., 2020). By the time you have figured out what these differences are, things will have moved on. Being ‘digitally-literate’ literate is an ongoing task.

What, precisely, ‘digital literacies’ are only really matters when we are told that it is vital to teach them. It’s easy to agree that digital skills are quite handy in this networked world, but, unless we have a very clear idea of what they are, it’s not going to be easy to know which ones to teach or how to teach them. Before we get caught up in the practical pedagogical details, it might be useful to address three big questions:

• How useful it is to talk about digital literacies?
• Can digital literacies be taught?
• Should digital literacies be taught as part of the English language curriculum?

How useful is it to talk about digital literacies?

Let’s take one example of a framework: the Cambridge Life Competencies Framework (CLC). The CLC lists six key competencies (creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, learning to learn, and social responsibilities). Underpinning and informing these six competencies are three ‘foundation layers’: ‘emotional development’, ‘discipline knowledge’ and ‘digital literacy’. Digital literacy is broken down as follows:

It’s a curious amalgam of relatively straightforward skills and much more complex combinations of skills with knowledge, attitudes and dispositions. In the former category (see the first box in the chart above), we would find things like the ability to use tags, hashtags, search engines, and filters. In the latter (see the second box in the chart above), we would find things like the ability to recognise fake news or to understand how and why personally targeted advertising is such a money-spinner.

Another example, this one, from Pegrum et al (2018), is more complex and significantly more detailed. On the more technical side, we see references to the ability to navigate within multimodal gaming, VR and AR environments, or the ability to write and modify computer code. And for more complex combinations of skills, knowledge, attitudes and dispositions, we have things like the ability to develop a reputation and exert influence within online networks, or ‘the ability to exert a positive influence (online) by adopting a stance of intellectual humility and ethical pluralism’.

This is all a far remove from only seven years ago when ‘digital literacies’ were described as ‘the practices of reading, writing and communication made possible by digital media’ (Hafner et al., 2015) and the kinds of skills required were almost all closely connected to reading and writing. The digital world has changed, and so has our understanding of what it means to operate effectively within that world. Perhaps it is time, too, to change our terminology: ‘literacies’ is still with us, but it seems almost wilfully misleading. ‘Abilities’ or ‘competencies’ would seem to be much more appropriate terms to refer to what we are discussing in these frameworks, but ‘abilities’ probably isn’t sciency enough, and ‘competencies’ has already been done to death.

The problem with lumping all these things together under a single superordinate is that it seems to imply that there is some sort of equivalence between all the subordinate labels, that there is some categorial similarity. Pegrum et al (2022) acknowledge that there are differences of complexity between these ‘literacies’ – they use a star system to indicate degree of complexity. But I think that there is no sufficiently strong reason to put some of these things together in the first place. Dudeney at al (2013: 14) note that some of their literacies are ‘macroliteracies’ – ‘in other words, a literacy which draws on numerous other literacies – and involves linguistic, multimedia, spatial, kinaesthetic and other skills’. Why, then, call them ‘literacies’ at all? The only connection between knowing how to generate a LOLcat post and knowing how to ‘remain non-judgemental towards new perspectives, multiple viewpoints, and shifting contexts’ is that both are related to our use of digital technology. But since there is very little in our lives that is not now related in some way to digital technology, is this good enough reason to bracket these two abilities together?

Pegrum et al (2022) found that they needed to expand their list of digital literacies in the new edition of their book, and they will no doubt need to do so again nine years from now. But is the fact that something could be included in a taxonomy a good reason for actually including it? ‘Code literacy’, for example, seems rather less urgent now than it did nine years ago. I have never been convinced by gaming literacy or remix literacy. Are these really worth listing alongside the others in the table? Even if they are, nobody (including Pegrum et al.) would disagree that some prioritisation is necessary. However, when we refer to ‘digital literacies’ and how vital it is to teach them, we typically don’t specify a particular literacy and not another. We risk committing the logical error of assuming that something that holds true for a group or category, also holds true for all the members of the group or subordinates of the category.

Can digital literacies be taught?

There is clearly no particular problem in teaching and learning some digital literacies, especially the more technical ones. Unfortunately, the more specific and technical we are (e.g. when we mention a particular digital tool), the more likely it is that its shelf-life will be limited. Hardware comes and goes (I haven’t had to format a floppy disc for a while), as do apps and software. To the risk of wasting time teaching a skill that may soon be worthless, we may add the risk of not including literacies that have not yet found their way into the taxonomies. Examples include knowing how to avoid plagiarism detectors (as opposed to avoiding plagiarism) or how to use GPT-3 (and soon GPT-4) text generators. Handy for students.

The choice of digital tools is crucial when one of the key pieces of advice for teaching digital literacy is to integrate the use of digital tools into lessons (e.g. in the Cambridge Life Competencies Digital Literacy booklet). This advice skates over the key questions of which tool, and which literacy is being targeted (and why). Watching TikTok videos, using Mentimeter in class, or having a go with a VR headset may serve various educational purposes, but it would be stretching a point to argue that these activities will do much for anyone’s digital literacy. Encouraging teachers to integrate technology into their lessons (government policy in some countries) makes absolutely no sense unless the desired outcome – digital literacy – is precisely defined in advance. It rarely is. See here for further discussion.

Encouragement to include technology, any old technology, in lessons is almost never grounded in claims that a particular technical skill (e.g. navigating TikTok) has any pressing value. Rather, the justification usually comes from reference to what might be called ‘higher-order’ skills, like critical thinking: what I referred to earlier as curious amalgams of relatively straightforward skills and much more complex combinations of skills with knowledge, attitudes and dispositions.

The problem here is that it remains very uncertain whether things like ethical literacy or critical digital literacy are likely to be learnt through instruction. They can certainly be practised, and Pegrum et al (2022) have some very nice activities. The aims of these activities is typically described using a vague ‘raise awareness of’ formula, but whether they will lead, for example, to any improved ability ‘to exert a positive influence (online) by adopting a stance of intellectual humility and ethical pluralism’ is debatable. Much as the world might be a better place if classroom activities of this kind did actually work, research evidence is sadly lacking. For a more detailed look at the problems of trying to teach critical digital literacy / media information literacy, see here.

Should digital literacies be part of the English language curriculum?

So, is it ‘crucial for language teaching to […] encompass the digital literacies which are increasingly central to learners’ […] lives’ (Pegrum et al, 2022)? Well, it all depends on which digital literacies we are talking about. It also depends on what kind of learners in what kinds of learning contexts. And it depends on both institutional objectives and the personal objectives of the learners themselves. So, ‘crucial’, no, but we’ll put the choice of adjective down to rhetorical flourish.

Is it true that ‘digital literacies are as important to language learning as […] reading and writing skills […]’ (Pegrum et al., 2022: 1)? Clearly not. Since it’s hard to imagine any kind of digital literacy without some reading skills preceding it, the claim that they are comparable in importance is also best understood as rhetorical flourish.

A modicum of critical (digital) literacy is helpful when it comes to reading literature on digital literacies.

References

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

Hafner, C.A., Chik, A. & Jones, R. H. (2015) Digital Literacies and Language Learning, Language Learning & Technology, 19 (3): 1-  7

Pangrazio, L., Godhe, A.-L., & Ledesma, A. G. L. (2020) What is digital literacy? A comparative review of publications across three language contexts. E-Learning and Digital Media, 17(6), 442–459. https://doi.org/10.1177/204275302094629

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

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

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

Grit and marshmallows

You have probably heard of the marshmallow experiment, one of the most famous and widely cited studies in social psychology. In the experiments, led by Walter Mischel at Stanford University in 1972, pre-school children were offered a choice between an immediate small reward (such as a marshmallow) or a significantly larger reward if they could wait long enough (a few minutes) to receive it. A series of follow-up studies, beginning in 1988, found that those children who had been able to delay gratification in the original experiments had better educational achievements at school and in college than those who had less self-control.

The idea that character traits like self-control could have an important impact on educational outcomes clearly resonated with many people at the time. The studies inspired further research into what is now called socio-emotional learning, and helped to popularise many educational interventions across the world that sought to teach ‘character and resilience’ in schools. In Britain alone, £5 million was pledged for a programme in 2015 to promote what the government called ‘character work’, an initiative that saw rugby coaches being used to instil the values of respect, teamwork, enjoyment, and discipline in school children.

One person who was massively influenced by the marshmallow experiment (and who, in turn, massively influenced the character-building interventions in schools), was Angela Duckworth (Duckworth et al., 2013), who worked at Stanford between 2014 and 2015. Shortly after her studies into delay of gratification, Duckworth gave a TED talk called ‘Grit: the power of passion and perseverance’ which has now had almost 10 million views. A few years later, her book with the same title (Duckworth, 2016) was published. An instant best-seller, ‘grit’ became a ‘hot topic’ in education, and, according to the editors of a special issue of The Journal for the Psychology of Language Learning (MacIntyre & Khajavy, 2021), ‘interest appears to be rapidly expanding’. Duckworth has argued that self-control and grit are different and unrelated, but a number of studies have contradicted this view (Oxford & Khajafy, 2021), and the relationship between the two is clear in Duckworth’s intellectual and publishing trajectory.

This continued and expanding interest in grit is a little surprising. In a previous (June, 2020) blog post , I looked at the problems with the concept of ‘grit’, drawing on the work of Marcus Credé (2017; 2018) that questioned whether it made sense to talk about ‘grit’ as a unitary construct, noted the difficulty of measuring ‘grit’ and the lack of evidence in support of educational interventions to promote ‘grit’ (despite the millions and millions that have been spent). In a more recent article, Credé and his collaborator, Michael Tynan (Credé & Tynan, 2021), double-down on their criticisms, observing that ‘meta-analytic syntheses of the grit literature have shown that grit is a poor predictor of performance and success in its own right, and that it predicts success in academic and work settings far more poorly than other well-known predictors’. One of these other well-known predictors is the socio-economic status of students’ families. Credé and Tynan remain ‘deeply skeptical of the claim that grit, as a unitary construct formed by combining scores on perseverance and passion, holds much value for researchers focused on SLA—or any other domain’.

In the same journal issue as the Credé and Tynan article, Rebecca Oxford and Gholam Khajavy (2021) sound further notes of caution about work on ‘grit’. They suggest that researchers need to avoid confusing grit with other constructs like self-control – a suggestion that may be hard or impossible to follow if, in fact these constructs are not clearly separable (as Oxford and Khajavy note). They argue, too, that much more attention needs to be paid to socio-economic contexts, that structural barriers to achievement must be given fuller consideration if ‘grit’ is to contribute anything positive to social justice. Whether the other papers in this special edition of the Journal for the Psychology of Language Learning that is devoted to ‘grit’ heed the cautionary advice of Credé and Tynan, Oxford and Khajavy is, I think, open to debate. Perhaps the idea of a whole edition of a journal devoted to ‘grit’ is a problematic starting point. Since there is no shortage of reasons to believe that ‘grit’ isn’t actually a ‘thing’, why take ‘grit’ as a starting point for scholarly enquiry?

It might be instructive to go back to how ‘grit’ became a ‘thing’ in the first place. It’s an approach that the contributors to the special issue of the Journal for the Psychology of Language Learning have not adopted. This brings me back to the marshmallow test. At the time that ‘grit’ was getting going, Alfie Kohn brought out a book called ‘The Myth of the Spoiled Child’ (Kohn, 2014) that included a chapter ‘Why Self-Discipline Is Overrated: A Closer Look at Grit, Marshmallows, and Control from Within’. Kohn argued that educational ideas about ‘grit’ had misrepresented the findings of the marshmallow test and its follow-up studies. He argued that setting was more important than individual self-control, and that deferral of gratification was likely an effect, not a cause of anything. His ideas were supported by some of the original researchers, including Mischel himself. Another, Yuichi Shoda, a co-author of a key paper that linked delay of gratification to SAT scores, has observed that ‘Our paper does not mention anything about interventions or policies’ – many other factors would need to be controlled to validate the causal relationship between self-control and academic achievement (Resnick, 2018).

Interest in recent years in replicating experiments in social psychology has led to confirmation that something was seriously wrong with the follow-ups to the marshmallow experiment. Studies (e.g. Watts et al., 2018) with more representative and larger groups of children have found that correlations between academic achievement and self-control almost vanished when controlled for factors like family background and intelligence. Even if you can teach a child to delay gratification, it won’t necessarily lead to any benefits later on.

Self-control and ‘grit’ may or may not be different things, but one thing they clearly have in common is their correlation with socio-economic differences. It is distinctly possible that attention to ‘grit’, in language learning and in other fields, is a distraction from more pressing concerns. Pity the poor researchers who have hitched themselves to the ‘grit’ bandwagon … As Angela Duckworth has said, research into grit is itself ‘a delay of gratification test’ (Duckworth, 2013). You have to be really passionate about grit and show sustained persistence if you want to keep on publishing on the subject, despite all that we now know. She hopes ‘that as a field we follow through on our intentions to forgo more immediately rewarding temptations to instead do what is best for science in the long-run’. How about forgoing the immediately rewarding temptation of publishing yet more stuff on this topic?

References

Credé, M. (2018) What shall we do about grit? A critical review of what we know and what we don’t know. Educational Researcher, 47 (9), 606-611.

Credé, M. & Tynan, M. C. (2021) Should Language Acquisition Researchers Study “Grit”? A Cautionary Note and Some Suggestions. Journal for the Psychology of Language Learning, 3 (2), 37 – 44

Credé, M., Tynan, M. C. & Harms, P. D. (2017) Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113 (3)

Duckworth, A. L. (2013) Is It Really Self-control: A Critical Analysis of the “Marshmallow Test” Society of Personality and Social Psychology Connections November 10, 2013 https://spsptalks.wordpress.com/2013/11/10/is-it-really-self-control-a-critical-analysis-of-the-marshmallow-test/

Duckworth, A. L., Tsukayama, E. & Kirby, T. A. (2013) Is it really self-control? Examining the predictive power of the delay of gratification response. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39, 843-855.

Duckworth, A. (2016) Grit: the power of passion and perseverance. New York: Scribner

Kohn, A. (2014) The Myth of the Spoiled Child. Boston: Da Capo Press

MacIntyre, P. & Khajavy, G. H. (2021) Grit in Second Language Learning and Teaching: Introduction to the Special Issue. Journal for the Psychology of Language Learning, 3 (2), 1-6. http://www.jpll.org/index.php/journal/article/view/86

Oxford, R. & Khajafy, G. H. (2021) Exploring Grit: “Grit Linguistics” and Research on Domain-General Grit and L2 Grit. Journal for the Psychology of Language Learning, 3 (2), 7 – 35

Resnick, B. (2018) The “marshmallow test” said patience was a key to success. A new replication tells us s’more. Vox, June 6, 2018. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/6/6/17413000/marshmallow-test-replication-mischel-psychology

Watts, T.W., Duncan, G.J. & Quan, H. (2018) Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links Between Early Delay of Gratification and Later Outcomes. Psychological Science 29 (7): 1159-1177.

Doing critical thinking to others

There’s a video on YouTube from Oxford University Press in which the presenter, the author of a coursebook for primary English language learners (‘Oxford Discover’), describes an activity where students have a short time to write some sentences about a picture they have been shown. Then, working in pairs, they read aloud their partner’s sentences and award themselves points, with more points being given for sentences that others have not come up with. For lower level, young learners, it’s not a bad activity. It provides opportunities for varied skills practice of a limited kind and, if it works, may be quite fun and motivating. However, what I found interesting about the video is that it is entitled ‘How to teach critical thinking skills: speaking’ and the book that is being promoted claims to develop ‘21st Century Skills in critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity’. The presenter says that the activity achieves its critical thinking goals by promoting ‘both noticing and giving opinions, […] two very important critical thinking skills.’

Noticing (or observation) and giving opinions are often included in lists of critical thinking skills, but, for this to be the case, they must presumably be exercised in a critical way – some sort of reasoning must be involved. This is not the case here, so only the most uncritical understanding of critical thinking could consider this activity to have any connection to critical thinking. Whatever other benefits might accrue from it, it seems highly unlikely that the students’ ability to notice or express opinions will be developed.

My scepticism is not shared by many users of the book. Oxford University Press carried out a scientific-sounding ‘impact study’: this consisted of a questionnaire (n = 198) in which ‘97% of teachers reported that using Oxford Discover helps their students to improve in the full range of 21st century skills, with critical thinking and communication scoring the highest’.

Enthusiasm for critical thinking activities is extremely widespread. In 2018, TALIS, the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (with more than 4000 respondents) found that ‘over 80% of teachers feel confident in their ability to vary instructional strategies in their classroom and help students think critically’ and almost 60% ‘frequently or always’ ‘give students tasks that require students to think critically.’ Like the Oxford ‘impact study’, it’s worth remembering that these are self-reporting figures.

This enthusiasm is shared in the world of English language teaching, reflected in at least 17 presentations at the 2021 IATEFL conference that discussed practical ideas for promoting critical thinking. These ranged from the more familiar (e.g. textual analysis in EAP) to the more original – developing critical thinking through the use of reading reaction journals, multicultural literature, fables, creative arts performances, self-expression, escape rooms, and dice games.

In most cases, it would appear that the precise nature of the critical thinking that was ostensibly being developed was left fairly vague. This vagueness is not surprising. Practically the only thing that writers about critical thinking in education can agree on is that there is no general agreement about what, precisely, critical thinking is. Lai (2011) offers an accessible summary of a range of possible meanings, but points out that, in educational contexts, its meaning is often rather vague and encompasses other concepts (such as higher order thinking skills) which also lack clarity. Paul Dummett and John Hughes (2019: 4) plump for ‘a mindset that involves thinking reflectively, rationally and reasonably’ – a vague definition which leaves unanswered two key questions: to what extent is it a skill set or a disposition? Are these skills generic or domain specific?

When ‘critical thinking’ is left undefined, it is impossible to evaluate the claims that a particular classroom activity will contribute to the development of critical thinking. However, irrespective of the definition, there are good reasons to be sceptical about the ability of educational activities to have a positive impact on the generic critical thinking skills of learners in English language classes. There can only be critical-thinking value in the activity described at the beginning of this post if learners somehow transfer the skills they practise in the activity to other domains of their lives. This is, of course, possible, but, if we approach the question with a critical disposition, we have to conclude that it is unlikely. We may continue to believe the opposite, but this would be an uncritical act of faith.

The research evidence on the efficacy of teaching generic critical thinking is not terribly encouraging (Tricot & Sweller, 2014). There’s no shortage of anecdotal support for classroom critical thinking, but ‘education researchers have spent over a century searching for, and failing to find evidence of, transfer to unrelated domains by the use of generic-cognitive skills’ (Sweller, 2022). One recent meta-analysis (Huber & Kuncel, 2016) found insufficient evidence to justify the explicit teaching of generic critical thinking skills at college level. In an earlier blog post https://adaptivelearninginelt.wordpress.com/2020/10/16/fake-news-and-critical-thinking-in-elt/ looking at the impact of critical thinking activities on our susceptibility to fake news, I noted that research was unable to find much evidence of the value of media literacy training. When considerable time is devoted to generic critical thinking training and little or no impact is found, how likely is it that the kind of occasional, brief one-off activity in the ELT classroom will have the desired impact? Without going as far as to say that critical thinking activities in the ELT classroom have no critical-thinking value, it is uncontentious to say that we still do not know how to define critical thinking, how to assess evidence of it, or how to effectively practise and execute it (Gay & Clark, 2021).

It is ironic that there is so little critical thinking about critical thinking in the world of English language teaching, but it should not be particularly surprising. Teachers are no more immune to fads than anyone else (Fuertes-Prieto et al., 2020). Despite a complete lack of robust evidence to support them, learning styles and multiple intelligences influenced language teaching for many years. Mindfulness, growth mindsets, grit are more contemporary influences and, like critical thinking, will go the way of learning styles when the commercial and institutional forces that currently promote them find the lack of empirical supporting evidence problematic.

Critical thinking is an educational aim shared by educational authorities around the world, promoted by intergovernmental bodies like the OECD, the World Bank, the EU, and the United Nations. In Japan, for example, the ‘Ministry of Education (MEXT) puts critical thinking (CT) at the forefront of its ‘global jinzai’ (human capital for a global society) directive’ (Gay & Clark, 2021). It is taught as an academic discipline in some universities in Russia (Ivlev et al, 2021) and plans are underway to introduce it into schools in Saudi Arabia. https://www.arabnews.com/node/1764601/saudi-arabia I suspect that it doesn’t mean quite the same thing in all these places.

Critical thinking is also an educational aim that most teachers can share. Few like to think of themselves as Gradgrinds, bashing facts into their pupils’ heads: turning children into critical thinkers is what education is supposed to be all about. It holds an intuitive appeal, and even if we (20% of teachers in the TALIS survey) lack confidence in our ability to promote critical thinking in the classroom, few of us doubt the importance of trying to do so. Like learning styles, multiple intelligences and growth mindsets, it seems possible that, with critical thinking, we are pushing the wrong thing, but for the right reasons. But just how much evidence, or lack of evidence, do we need before we start getting critical about critical thinking?

References

Dummett, P. & Hughes, J. (2019) Critical Thinking in ELT. Boston: National Geographic Learning

Fuertes-Prieto, M.Á., Andrés-Sánchez, S., Corrochano-Fernández, D. et al. (2020) Pre-service Teachers’ False Beliefs in Superstitions and Pseudosciences in Relation to Science and Technology. Science & Education 29, 1235–1254 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-020-00140-8

Gay, S. & Clark, G. (2021) Revisiting Critical Thinking Constructs and What This Means for ELT. Critical Thinking and Language Learning, 8 (1): pp. 110 – 147

Huber, C.R. & Kuncel, N.R. (2016) Does College Teach Critical Thinking? A Meta-Analysis. Review of Educational Research. 2016: 86 (2) pp.:431-468. doi:10.3102/0034654315605917

Ivlev, V. Y., Pozdnyakov, M. V., Inozemtsez, V. A. & Chernyak, A. Z. (2021) Critical Thinking in the Structure of Educational Programs in Russian Universities. Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 555: pp. 121 -128

Lai, E.R. 2011. Critical Thinking: A Literature Review. Pearson. http://images.pearsonassessments.com/images/tmrs/CriticalThinkingReviewFINAL.pdf

Sweller, J. (2022) Some Critical Thoughts about Critical and Creative Thinking. Sydney: The Centre for Independent Studies Analysis Paper 32

Tricot, A., & Sweller, J. (2014) Domain-specific knowledge and why teaching generic skills does not work. Educational Psychology Review, 26, 265- 283.

Social robots for English language teaching

In May of last year, EL Gazette had a story entitled ‘Your new English language teacher is a robot’ that was accompanied by a stock photo of a humanoid robot, Pepper (built by SoftBank Robotics). The story was pure clickbait and the picture had nothing to do with it. The article actually concerned a chatbot (EAP Talk) to practise EAP currently under development at a Chinese university. There’s nothing especially new about chatbots: I last blogged about them in 2016 and interest in them, both research and practical, dates back to the 1970s (Lee et al., 2020). There’s nothing, as far as I can see, especially new about the Chinese EAP chatbot project either. The article concludes by saying that the academic behind the project ‘does not believe that AI can ever replace a human teacher’, but that chatbots might offer some useful benefits.

The benefits are, however, limited – a point that is acknowledged even by chatbot enthusiasts like Lee et al (2020). We are some way from having chatbots that we can actually have meaningful conversations with, but they do appear to have some potential as ‘intelligent tutoring systems’ to provide practice of and feedback on pre-designated bits of language (especially vocabulary and phrases). The main benefit that is usually given, as in the EL Gazette article, is that they are non-judgemental and may, therefore, be appropriate for shy or insecure learners.

Social robots, of the kind used in the illustration for the EL Gazette story, are, of course, not the same as chatbots. Chatbots, like EAP Talk, can be incorporated into all sorts of devices (notably phones, tablets and laptops) and all sorts of applications. If social robots are to be used for language learning, they will clearly need to incorporate chatbots, but in what ways could the other features of robots facilitate language acquisition? Pepper (the robot in the picture) has ‘touch sensors, LEDs and microphones for multimodal interactions’, along with ‘infrared sensors, bumpers, an inertial unit, 2D and 3D cameras, and sonars for omnidirectional and autonomous navigation’. How could these features help language acquisition?

Lee and Lee (2022) attempt to provide an answer to this question. Here’s what they have come up with:

By virtue of their physical embodiment, social robots have been suggested to provide language learners with direct and physical interactions, which is considered one of the basic ingredients for language learning. In addition, as social robots are generally humanoids or anthropomorphized animal shapes, they have been valued for their ability to serve as familiar conversational partners, having potential to lower the affective filter of language learners.

Is there any research evidence to back up these claims? The short answer is no. Motivation and engagement may sometimes be positively impacted, but we can’t say any more than that. As far as learning is concerned, Lee and Lee (2022: 121) write: involving social robots led to statistically similar or even higher [English language learning] outcomes compared with traditional ELT contexts (i.e. no social robot). In other words, social robots did not, on the whole, have a negative impact on learning outcomes. Hardly grounds for wild enthusiasm … Still, Lee and Lee, in the next line, refer to the ‘positive effectiveness of social robots in English teaching’ before proceeding to enumerate the ways in which these robots could be used in English language learning. Doesn’t ELT Journal have editors to pick up on this kind of thing?

So, how could these robots be used? Lee and Lee suggest (for younger learners) one-on-one vocabulary tutoring, dialogue practice, more vocabulary teaching, and personalized feedback. That’s it. It’s worth noting that all of these functions could equally well be carried out by chatbots as by social robots.

Lee and Lee discuss and describe the social robot, NAO6, also built by SoftBank Robotics. It’s a smaller and cheaper cousin of the Pepper robot that illustrates the EL Gazette article. Among Lee and Lee’s reasons for using social robots is that they ‘have become more accessible due to ever-lower costs’: NAO6 costs around £350 a month to rent. Buying it outright is also an option. Eduporium (‘Empowering the future with technology’) has one on offer for $12,990.00. According to the blurb, it helps ‘teach coding, brings literature to life, enhances special education, and allows for training simulations. Plus, its educational solutions include an intuitive interface, remote learning, and various applications for accessibility!’

It’s easy enough to understand why EL Gazette uses clickbait from time to time. I’m less clear about why ELT Journal would print this kind of nonsense. According to Lee and Lee, further research into social robots ‘would initiate a new era of language learning’ in which the robots will become ‘an important addition to the ELT arsenal’. Yeah, right …

References

Lee, H. & Lee, J. H. (2022) Social robots for English language teaching. ELT Journal 76 (1): 119 – 124

Lee, J. H., Yang, H., Shin D. & Kim, H. (2020) Chatbots. ELT Journal 74 (3): 338 – 3444

We need to talk

In 1994, in a well-known TESOL Quarterly article entitled ‘The dysfunctions of theory/practice discourse’, Mark A. Clarke explored the imbalance in the relationship between TESOL researchers and English language teachers, and the way in which the former typically frame the latter as being less expert than themselves. In the last 25 years, the topic has regularly resurfaced, most recently with the latest issue of the Modern Language Journal, a special issue devoted entirely to ‘the Research-Practice Dialogue in Second Language Learning and Teaching’ (Sato & Loewen, 2022). At the heart of the matter is the fact that most teachers are just not terribly interested in research and rarely, if ever, read it (Borg, 2009). Much has been written on whether or not this matters, but that is not my concern here.

Sato and Loewen’s introductory article reviews the reasons behind the lack of dialogue between researchers and teachers, and, in an unintentionally comic meta move, argue that more research is needed into teachers’ lack of interest in research. This is funny because one of the reasons for a lack of dialogue between researchers and teachers is that ‘teachers have been researched too much ON and not enough WITH’ (Farrell, 2016): most research has not been carried out ‘for the teacher’s benefit and needs’, with the consequence being that ‘the result is purely academic’. Sato and Loewen’s primary focus in the article is on ‘classroom teachers’, with whom they would like to see more ‘dialogue’, but, as they acknowledge, they publish in a research journal whose ‘most likely readers are researchers’. They do not appear to have read Alan Maley’s ‘‘More Research is Needed’ – A Mantra Too Far?’ (Maley, 2016). Perhaps the article (and the Humanising Language Teaching magazine it is from) passed under their radar because it’s written for teachers (not researchers), it’s free and does not have an impact factor?

I wasn’t entirely convinced by the argument that more research about research is needed, not least because Sato and Loewen provide a fairly detailed analysis of the obstacles that exist to dialogue between researchers and teachers. They divide these into two categories:

Epistemological obstacles: the framing of researchers as generators of knowledge and teachers as consumers of knowledge; teachers’ scepticism about the relevance of some research findings to real-world teaching situations; the different discourse communities inhabited by researchers and teachers, as evidenced by the academic language choices of the former.

Practical obstacles: institutional expectations for researchers to publish in academic journals and a lack of time for researchers to engage in dialogue with teachers; teachers’ lack of time and lack of access to research.

Nothing new here, nothing contentious, either. Nothing new, either, in their argument that more dialogue between researchers and teachers would be of mutual benefit. They acknowledge that ‘In the current status of the research-practice relationship, it is researchers who are concerned about transferability of their findings to classrooms. Practitioners may not have burning motivation or urgent needs to reach out to researchers’. Consequently, it is researchers who should ‘shoulder the lion’s share of responsibility in this initiative’. This implies that, while the benefit could be mutual, it is not mutually proportionate, since researchers have both more to lose and more to gain.

They argue that it would be helpful to scrutinize closely the relationship between researchers and teachers (they prefer to use the word ‘practitioners’) and that researchers need to reflect on their own beliefs and practices, in particular the way that researchers are stake-holders in the research-practice relationship. I was disappointed that they didn’t go into more detail here and would like to suggest one angle of the ‘cui bono’ question worth exploring. The work of TESOL researchers is mostly funded by TESOL teaching. It is funded, in other words, by selling a commodity – TESOL – to a group of consumers … who are teachers. If we frame researchers as vendors and teachers as (potential) clients, [1] a rather different light is shone on pleas for more dialogue.

The first step, Sato and Loewen claim, towards achieving such a dialogue would be ‘nurturing a collaborative mindset in both researchers and teachers’. And the last of four steps to removing the obstacles to dialogue would be ‘institutional support’ for both teachers and researchers. But without institutional support, mindsets are unlikely to become more collaborative, and the suggestions for institutional support (e.g. time release and financial support for teachers) are just pie in the sky. Perhaps sensing this, Sato and Loewen conclude the article by asking whether their desire to see a more collaborative mindset (and, therefore, more dialogue) is just a dream. Back in 1994, Mark Clarke had this to say:

The only real solution to the problems I have identified would be to turn the hierarchy on its head, putting teachers on the top and arraying others-pundits, professors, administrators, researchers, and so forth-below them. This would require a major change in our thinking and in our behavior and, however reasonable it may appear to be, I do not see this happening. (Clarke, 1994: 18)

In 2017, ELT Journal published an entertaining piece of trolling by Péter Medgyes, ‘The (ir)relevance of academic research for the language teacher’, in which he refers to the expert status of researchers as related to the ‘orthodox and mistaken belief that by virtue of having churned out tons of academic papers and books, they must be performing an essential service for language education’. It is not hard to imagine the twinkle in his eye as he wrote it. In the same volume, Amos Paran (2017) picks up the bait, arguing for more dialogue between researchers and teachers. In response to Paran’s plea, Medgyes points out that there is an irony in preaching the importance of dialogue in a top-down manner. ‘As long as the playing field is uneven, it is absurd to talk about dialogue, if a dialogue is at all necessary’, he writes. The same holds true for Sato and Loewen. They acknowledge (Sato & Loewen, 2018) that ‘researchers’ top-down attitudes will not facilitate the dialogue’, but, try as they might, their own mindset is seemingly inescapable. In one article that was attempting to reach out to teachers (Sato, Loewen & Kim, 2021), they managed to make one teacher trainer, Sandy Millin, feel that teachers were being unfairly attacked.

The phrase ‘We need to talk’ has been described as, perhaps, the most dreaded four words in the English language. When you hear it, you know (1) that someone wants to talk to you (and not the other way round), (2) that, whether you want to talk or not, the other person will have their say, (3) that the discussion will almost certainly involve some criticism of you, and this may be merited, and (4) whatever happens next, it is unlikely that your relationship will improve.

References

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

Clarke, M. (1994). The dysfunctions of theory/practice discourse. TESOL Quarterly, 28: 9-26.

Farrell, T. (2016). Reflection, reflection, reflection. Responses to the Chapter:  More Research is Needed – A Mantra Too Far? Humanising Language Teaching, 18 (3) http://old.hltmag.co.uk/jun16/mart.htm

Maley, A. (2016). ‘More Research is Needed’ – A Mantra Too Far? Humanising Language Teaching, 18 (3) http://old.hltmag.co.uk/jun16/mart.htm

Medgyes, P. (2017). The (ir)relevance of academic research for the language teacher. ELT Journal, 71 (4): 491–498

Paran, A. (2017). ‘Only connect’: researchers and teachers in dialogue. ELT Journal, 71 (4): 499 – 508

Sato, M., & Loewen, S. (2022). The research-practice dialogue in second language learning and teaching: Past, present, and future. The Modern Language Journal, 106 (3)

Sato, M. & Loewen, S. (Eds.) (2019) Evidence-Based Second Language Pedagogy. New York: Routledge

Sato, M. & Loewen, S. (2018). Do teachers care about research? The research–pedagogy dialogue. ELT Journal 73 (1): 1 – 10

Sato, M., Loewen, S. & Kim, Y. J. (2021) The role and value of researchers for teachers: five principles for mutual benefit. TESOL AL Forum September 2021. http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolalis/issues/2021-08-30/email.html#4

---

[1] I am actually a direct customer of Sato and Loewen, having bought for £35 last year a copy of their edited volume ‘Evidence-Based Second Language Pedagogy’. According to the back cover, it is a ‘cutting-edge collection of empirical research [which closes] the gap between research and practice’. In reality, it’s a fairly random collection of articles of very mixed quality, many of which are co-authored by ‘top scholars’ and the PhD students they are supervising. It does nothing to close any gaps between research and practice and I struggle to see how it could be of any conceivable benefit to teachers.

What has neuroscience ever done for us (in ELT)?

Five years ago, in 2016, there was an interesting debate in the pages of the journal ‘Psychological Review’. It began with an article by Jeffrey Bowers (2016a), a psychologist at the University of Bristol, who argued that neuroscience (as opposed to psychology) has little, or nothing, to offer us, and is unlikely ever to be able to do so, in terms of improving classroom instruction. He wasn’t the first to question the relevance of neuroscience to education (see, for example, Willingham, 2009), but this was a full-frontal attack. Bowers argued that ‘neuroscience rarely offers insights into instruction above and beyond psychology’ and that neuroscientific evidence that the brain changes in response to instruction are irrelevant. His article was followed by two counter-arguments (Gabrieli, 2016; Howard-Jones, et al., 2016), which took him to task for too narrowly limiting the scope of education to classroom instruction (neglecting, for example, educational policy), for ignoring the predictive power of neuroimaging on neurodevelopmental differences (and, therefore, its potential value in individualising curricula), and for failing to take account of the progress that neuroscience, in collaboration with educators, has already made. Bowers’ main argument, that educational neuroscience had little to tell us about teaching, was not really addressed in the counter-arguments, and Bowers (2016b) came back with a counter-counter-rebuttal.

The brain responding to seductive details

In some ways, the debate, like so many of the kind, suffered from the different priorities of the participants. For Gabriele and Howard-Jones et al., Bowers had certainly overstated his case, but they weren’t entirely in disagreement with him. Paul Howard-Jones has been quoted by André Hedlund as saying that ‘all neuroscience can do is confirm what we’ve been doing all along and give us new insights into a couple of new things’. One of Howard-Jones’ co-authors, Usha Goswami, director of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education at the University of Cambridge, has said that ‘there is a gulf between current science and classroom applications’ (Goswami, 2006).

For teachers, though, it is the classroom applications that are of interest. Claims for the relevance of neuroscience to ELT have been made by many. We [in ESL / EFL] need it, writes Curtis Kelly (2017). Insights from neuroscience can, apparently, make textbooks more ‘brain friendly’ (Helgesen & Kelly, 2015). Herbert Puchta’s books are advertised by Cambridge University Press as ‘based on the latest insights into how the brain works fresh from the field of neuroscience’. You can watch a British Council talk by Rachael Roberts, entitled ‘Using your brain: what neuroscience can teach us about learning’. And, in the year following the Bowers debate, Carol Lethaby and Patricia Harries gave a presentation at IATEFL Glasgow (Lethaby & Harries, 2018) entitled ‘Research and teaching: What has neuroscience ever done for us?’ – a title that I have lifted for this blog post. Lethaby and Harries provide a useful short summary of the relevance of neuroscience to ELT, and I will begin my discussion with that. They expand on this in their recent book (Lethaby, Mayne & Harries, 2021), a book I highly recommend.

So what, precisely, does neuroscience have to tell English language teachers? Lethaby and Harries put forward three main arguments. Firstly, neuroscience can help us to bust neuromyths (the examples they give are right / left brain dominance and learning styles). Secondly, it can provide information that informs teaching (the examples given are the importance of prior knowledge and the value of translation). Finally, it can validate existing best practice (the example given is the importance of prior knowledge). Let’s take a closer look.

I have always enjoyed a bit of neuromyth busting and I wrote about ‘Left brains and right brains in English language teaching’ a long time ago. It is certainly true that neuroscience has helped to dispel this myth: it is ‘simplistic at best and utter hogwash at worst’ (Dörnyei, 2009: 49). However, we did not need neuroscience to rubbish the practical teaching applications of this myth, which found their most common expression in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Brain Gym. Neuroscience simply banged in the final nail in the coffin of these trends. The same is true for learning styles and the meshing hypothesis. It’s also worth noting that, despite the neuroscientific evidence, such myths are taking a long time to die … a point I will return to at the end of this post.

Lethaby and Harries’s second and third arguments are essentially the same, unless, in their second point they are arguing that neuroscience can provide new information. I struggle, however, to see anything that is new. Neuroimaging apparently shows that the medial prefrontal cortex is activated when prior knowledge is accessed, but we have long known (since Vygotsky, at least!) that effective learning builds on previous knowledge. Similarly, the amygdala (known to be associated with the processing of emotions) may play an important role in learning, but we don’t need to know about the amygdala to understand the role of affect in learning. Lastly, the neuroscientific finding that different languages are not ‘stored’ in separate parts of the brain (Spivey & Hirsch, 2003) is useful to substantiate arguments that translation can have a positive role to play in learning another language, but convincing arguments predate findings such as these by many, many years. This would all seem to back up Howard-Jones’s observation about confirming what we’ve been doing and giving us new insights into a couple of new things. It isn’t the most compelling case for the relevance of neuroscience to ELT.

Chapter 2 of Carol Lethaby’s new book, ‘An Introduction to Evidence-based Teaching in the English Language Classroom’ is devoted to ‘Science and neuroscience’. The next chapter is called ‘Psychology and cognitive science’ and practically all the evidence for language teaching approaches in the rest of the book is drawn from cognitive (rather than neuro-) science. I think the same is true for the work of Kelly, Helgesen, Roberts and Puchta that I mentioned earlier.

It is perhaps the case these days that educationalists prefer to refer to ‘Mind, Brain, and Education Science’ (MBE) – the ‘intersection of neuroscience, education, and psychology’ – rather than educational neuroscience, but, looking at the literature of MBE, there’s a lot more education and psychology than there is neuroscience (although the latter always gets a mention). Probably the most comprehensive and well-known volume of practical ideas deriving from MBE is ‘Making Classrooms Better’ (Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2014). Of the 50 practical applications listed, most are either inspired by the work of John Hattie (2009) or the work of cognitive psychologists. Neuroscience hardly gets a look in.

To wrap up, I’d like to return to the question of neuroscience’s role in busting neuromyths. References to neuroscience, especially when accompanied by fMRI images, have a seductive appeal to many: they confer a sense of ‘scientific’ authority. Many teachers, it seems, are keen to hear about neuroscience (Pickering & Howard-Jones, 2007). Even when the discourse contains irrelevant neuroscientific information (diagrams of myelination come to mind), it seems that many of us find this satisfying (Weisberg et al., 2015; Weisberg et al., 2008). It gives an illusion of explanatory depth (Rozenblit & Keil, 2002), the so-called ‘seductive details effect’. You are far more likely to see conference presentations, blog posts and magazine articles extolling the virtues of neuroscientific findings than you are to come across things like I am writing here. But is it possible that the much-touted idea that neuroscience can bust neuromyths is itself a myth?

Sadly, we have learnt in recent times that scientific explanations have only very limited impact on the beliefs of large swathes of the population (including teachers, of course). Think of climate change and COVID. Why should neuroscience be any different? It probably isn’t. Scurich & Shniderman (2014) found that ‘neuroscience is more likely to be accepted and credited when it confirms prior beliefs’. We are more likely to accept neuroscientific findings because we ‘find them intuitively satisfying, not because they are accurate’ (Weisberg, et al. 2008). Teaching teachers about educational neuroscience may not make much, if any, difference (Tham et al., 2019). I think there is a danger in using educational neuroscience, seductive details and all, to validate what we already do (as opposed to questioning what we do). And for those who don’t already do these things, they’ll probably ignore such findings as there are, anyway.

References

Bowers, J. (2016a) The practical and principled problems with educational Neuroscience. Psychological Review 123 (5) 600 – 612

Bowers, J.S. (2016b) Psychology, not educational neuroscience, is the way forward for improving educational outcomes for all children: Reply to Gabrieli (2016) and Howard-Jones et al. (2016). Psychological Review. 123 (5):628-35.

Dörnyei, Z. (2009) The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Gabrieli, J.D. (2016) The promise of educational neuroscience: Comment on Bowers (2016). Psychological Review. 123 (5):613-9

Goswami , U. (2006). Neuroscience and education: From research to practice? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7: 406 – 413

Hattie, J. (2009) Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. London: Routledge

Helgesen, M. & Kelly, C. (2015) Do-it-yourself: Ways to make your textbook more brain-friendly’ SPELT Quarterly, 30 (3): 32 – 37

Howard-Jones, P.A., Varma. S., Ansari, D., Butterworth, B., De Smedt, B., Goswami, U., Laurillard, D. & Thomas, M. S. (2016) The principles and practices of educational neuroscience: Comment on Bowers (2016). Psychological Review. 123 (5):620-7

Kelly, C. (2017) The Brain Studies Boom: Using Neuroscience in ESL/EFL Teacher Training. In Gregersen, T. S. & MacIntyre, P. D. (Eds.) Innovative Practices in Language Teacher Education pp.79-99 Springer

Lethaby, C. & Harries, P. (2018) Research and teaching: What has neuroscience ever done for us?’ in Pattison, T. (Ed.) IATEFL Glasgow Conference Selections 2017. Faversham, Kent, UK: IATEFL  p. 36- 37

Lethaby, C., Mayne, R. & Harries, P. (2021) An Introduction to Evidence-Based Teaching in the English Language Classroom. Shoreham-by-Sea: Pavilion Publishing

McCabe, D.P. & Castel, A.D. (2008) Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning. Cognition 107: 343–352.

Pickering, S. J. & Howard-Jones, P. (2007) Educators’ views on the role of neuroscience in education: findings from a study of UK and international perspectives. Mind Brain Education 1: 109–113.

Rozenblit, L., & Keil, F. (2002). The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth. Cognitive science, 26(5), 521–562.

Scurich, N., & Shniderman, A. (2014) The selective allure of neuroscientific explanations. PLOS One, 9 (9), e107529. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone. 0107529.

Spivey, M. V. & Hirsch, J. (2003) ‘Shared and separate systems in bilingual language processing: Converging evidence from eyetracking and brain imaging’ Brain and Language, 86: 70 – 82

Tham, R., Walker, Z., Tan, S.H.D., Low, L.T. & Annabel Chan, S.H. (2019) Translating educational neuroscience for teachers. Learning: Research and Practice, 5 (2): 149-173 Singapore: National Institute of Education

Tokuhama-Espinosa, T. (2014) Making Classrooms Better. New York: Norton

Weisberg, D. S., Taylor, J. C. V. & Hopkins, E.J. (2015) Deconstructing the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations. Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 5, September 2015, pp. 429–441

Weisberg, D. S., Keil, F. C., Goodstein, J., Rawson, E., & Gray, J. R. (2008). The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 20 (3): 470–477.

Willingham, D. T. (2009). Three problems in the marriage of neuroscience and education. Cortex, 45: 54-55.