AI and teacher training

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questions about pre-teaching vocabulary (PTV)

‘Pre-teaching’ (of vocabulary) is a widely-used piece of language teaching jargon, but it’s a strange expression. The ‘pre’ indicates that it’s something that comes before something else that is more important, what Chia Suan Chong calls ‘the main event’, which is usually some reading or listening work. The basic idea, it seems, is to lessen the vocabulary load of the subsequent activity. If the focus on vocabulary were the ‘main event’, we might refer to the next activity as ‘post-reading’ or ‘post-listening’ … but we never do.

The term is used in standard training manuals by both Jim Scrivener (2005: 230 – 233) and Jeremy Harmer (2012: 137) and, with a few caveats, the practice is recommended. Now read this from the ELT Nile Glossary:

For many years teachers were recommended to pre-teach vocabulary before working on texts. Nowadays though, some question this, suggesting that the contexts that teachers are able to set up for pre-teaching are rarely meaningful and that pre-teaching in fact prevents learners from developing the attack strategies they need for dealing with challenging texts.

Chia is one of those doing this questioning. She suggests that ‘we cut out pre-teaching altogether and go straight for the main event. After all, if it’s a receptive skills lesson, then shouldn’t the focus be on reading/listening skills and strategies? And most importantly, pre-teaching prevents learners’ from developing a tolerance of ambiguity – a skill that is vital in language learning.’ Scott Thornbury is another who has expressed doubts about the value of PTV, although he is more circumspect in his opinions. He has argued that working out the meaning of vocabulary from context is probably a better approach and that PTV inadequately prepares learners for the real world. If we have to pre-teach, he argues, get it out of the way ‘as quickly and efficiently as possible’ … or ‘try post-teaching instead’.

Both Chia and Scott touch on the alternatives, and guessing the meaning of unknown words from context is one of them. I’ve discussed this area in an earlier post. Not wanting to rehash the content of that post here, the simple summary is this: it’s complicated. We cannot, with any degree of certainty, say that guessing meaning from context leads to more gains in either reading / listening comprehension or vocabulary development than PTV or one of the other alternatives – encouraging / allowing monolingual or bilingual dictionary look up (see this post on the topic), providing a glossary (see this post) or doing post-text vocabulary work.

In attempting to move towards a better understanding, the first problem is that there is very little research into the relationship between PTV and improved reading / listening comprehension. What there is (e.g. Webb, 2009) suggests that pre-teaching can improve comprehension and speed up reading, but there are other things that a teacher can do (e.g. previous presentation of comprehension questions or the provision of pictorial support) that appear to lead to more gains in these areas (Pellicer-Sánchez et al., 2021). It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. There is even less research looking at the relationship between PTV and vocabulary development. What there is (Pellicer-Sánchez et al., 2021) suggests that pre-teaching leads to more vocabulary gains than when learners read without any support. But the reading-only condition is unlikely in most real-world learning contexts, where there is a teacher, dictionary or classmate who can be turned to. A more interesting contrast is perhaps between PTV and during-reading vocabulary instruction, which is a common approach in many classrooms. One study (File & Adams, 2010) looked at precisely this area and found little difference between the approaches in terms of vocabulary gains. The limited research does not provide us with any compelling reasons either for or against PTV.

Another problem is, as usual, that the research findings often imply more than was actually demonstrated. The abstract for the study by Pellicer-Sánchez et al (2021) states that pre‐reading instruction led to more vocabulary learning. But this needs to be considered in the light of the experimental details.

The study involved 87 L2 undergraduates and postgraduates studying at a British university. Their level of English was therefore very high, and we can’t really generalise to other learners at other levels in other conditions. The text that they read contained a number of pseudo-words and was 2,290 words long. The text itself, a narrative, was of no intrinsic interest, so the students reading it would treat it as an object of study and they would notice the pseudo-words, because their level of English was already high, and because they knew that the focus of the research was on ‘new words’. In other words, the students’ behaviour was probably not at all typical of a student in a ‘normal’ classroom. In addition, the pseudo-words were all Anglo-Saxon looking, and not therefore representative of the kinds of unknown items that students would encounter in authentic (or even pedagogical) texts (which would have a high proportion of words with Latin roots). I’m afraid I don’t think that the study tells us anything of value.

Perhaps research into an area like this, with so many variables that need to be controlled, is unlikely ever to provide teachers with clear answers to what appears to be a simple question: is PTV a good idea or not? However, I think we can get closer to something resembling useful advice if we take another tack. For this, I think two additional questions need to be asked. First, what is the intended main learning opportunity (note that I avoid the term ‘learning outcome’!) of the ‘main event’ – the reading or listening. Second, following on from the first question, what is the point of PTV, i.e. in what ways might it contribute to enriching the learning opportunities of the ‘main event’?

To answer the first question, I think it is useful to go back to a distinction made almost forty years ago in a paper by Tim Johns and Florence Davies (1983). They contrasted the Text as a Linguistic Object (TALO) with the Text as a Vehicle for Information (TAVI). The former (TALO) is something that language students study to learn language from in a direct way. It has typically been written or chosen to illustrate and to contextualise bits of grammar, and to provide opportunities for lexical ‘quarrying’. The latter (TAVI) is a text with intrinsic interest, read for information or pleasure, and therefore more appropriately selected by the learner, rather than the teacher. For an interesting discussion on TALO and TAVI, see this 2015 post from Geoff Jordan.

Johns and Davies wrote their article in pre-Headway days when texts in almost all coursebooks were unashamedly TALOs, and when what were called top-down reading skills (reading for gist / detail, etc.) were only just beginning to find their way into language teaching materials. TAVIs were separate, graded readers, for example. In some parts of the world, TALOs and TAVIs are still separate, often with one teacher dealing with the teaching of discrete items of language through TALOs, and another responsible for ‘skills development’ through TAVIs. But, increasingly, under the influence of British publishers and methodologists, attempts have been made to combine TALOs and TAVIs in a single package. The syllabus of most contemporary coursebooks, fundamentally driven by a discrete-item grammar plus vocabulary approach, also offer a ‘skills’ strand which requires texts to be intrinsically interesting, meaningful and relevant to today’s 21^st century learners. The texts are required to carry out two functions.

Recent years have seen an increasingly widespread questioning of this approach. Does the exploitation of reading and listening texts in coursebooks (mostly through comprehension questions) actually lead to gains in reading and listening skills? Is there anything more than testing of comprehension going on? Or do they simply provide practice in strategic approaches to reading / listening, strategies which could probably be transferred from L1? As a result of the work of scholars like William Grabe (reading) and John Field and Richard Cauldwell (listening), there is now little, if any, debate in the world of research about these questions. If we want to develop the reading / listening skills of our students, the approach of most coursebooks is not the way to go about it. For a start, the reading texts are usually too short and the listening texts too long.

Most texts that are found in most contemporary coursebooks are TALOs dressed up to look like TAVIs. Their fundamental purpose is to illustrate and contextualise language that has either been pre-taught or will be explored later. They are first and foremost vehicles for language, and only secondarily vehicles for information. They are written and presented in as interesting a way as possible in order to motivate learners to engage with the TALO. Sometimes, they succeed.

However, there are occasions (even in coursebooks) when texts are TAVIs – used for purely ‘skills’ purposes, language use as opposed to language study. Typically, they (reading or listening texts) are used as springboards for speaking and / or writing practice that follows. It’s the information in the text that matters most.

So, where does all this take us with PTV? Here is my attempt at a break-down of advice.

1 TALOs where the text contains a set of new lexical items which are a core focus of the lesson

If the text is basically a contextualized illustration of a set of lexical items (and, usually, a particular grammatical structure), there is a strong case for PTV. This is, of course, assuming that these items are of sufficiently high frequency to be suitable candidates for direct vocabulary instruction. If this is so, there is also a strong case to be made for the PTV to be what has been called ‘rich instruction’, which ‘involves (1) spending time on the word; (2) explicitly exploring several aspects of what is involved in knowing a word; and (3) involving learners in thoughtfully and actively processing the word’ (Nation, 2013: 117). In instances like this, PTV is something of a misnomer. It’s just plain teaching, and is likely to need as much, or more, time than exploration of the text (which may be viewed as further practice of / exposure to the lexis).

If the text is primarily intended as lexical input, there is also a good case to be made for making the target items it contains more salient by, for example, highlighting them or putting them in bold (Choi, 2017). At the same time, if ‘PTV’ is to lead to lexical gains, these are likely to be augmented by post-reading tasks which also focus explicitly on the target items (Sonbul & Schmitt, 2010).

2 TALOs which contain a set of lexical items that are necessary for comprehension of the text, but not a core focus of the lesson (e.g. because they are low-frequency)

PTV is often time-consuming, and necessarily so if the instruction is rich. If it is largely restricted to matching items to meanings (e.g. through translation), it is likely to have little impact on vocabulary development, and its short-term impact on comprehension appears to be limited. Research suggests that the use of a glossary is more efficient, since learners will only refer to it when they need to (whereas PTV is likely to devote some time to some items that are known to some learners, and this takes place before the knowledge is required … and may therefore be forgotten in the interim). Glossaries lead to better comprehension (Alessi & Dwyer, 2008).

3 TAVIs

I don’t have any principled objection to the occasional use of texts as TALOs, but it seems fairly clear that a healthy textual diet for language learners will contain substantially more TAVIs than TALOs, substantially more extensive reading than intensive reading of the kind found in most coursebooks. If we focused less often on direct instruction of grammar (a change of emphasis which is long overdue), there would be less need for TALOs, anyway. With TAVIs, there seems to be no good reason for PTV: glossaries or digital dictionary look-up will do just fine.

However, one alternative justification and use of PTV is offered by Scott Thornbury. He suggests identifying a relatively small number of keywords from a text that will be needed for global understanding. Some of them may be unknown to the learners, and for these, learners use dictionaries to check meaning. Then, looking at the list of key words learners predict what the text will be about. The rationale here is that if learners engage with these words before encountering them in the text, it ‘may be an effective way of activating a learner’s schema for the text, and this may help to support comprehension’ (Ballance, 2018). However, as Ballance notes, describing this kind of activity as PTV would be something of a misnomer: it is a useful addition to a teacher’s repertoire of schema-activation activities (which might be used with both TAVIs and TALOs).

In short …

The big question about PTV, then, is not one of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. It’s about the point of the activity. Balance (2018) offers a good summary:

‘In sum, for teachers to use PTV effectively, it is essential that they clearly identify a rationale for including PTV within a lesson, select the words to be taught in conjunction with this rationale and also design the vocabulary learning or development exercise in a manner that is commensurate with this rationale. The rationale should be the determining factor in the design of a PTV component within a lesson, and different rationales for using PTV naturally lead to markedly different selections of vocabulary items to be studied and different exercise designs.’

REFERENCES

Alessi, S. & Dwyer, A. (2008). Vocabulary assistance before and during reading. Reading in a Foreign Language, 20 (2): pp. 246 – 263

Ballance, O. J. (2018). Strategies for pre-teaching vocabulary in context. In The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching (pp. 1-7). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0732

Choi, S. (2017). Processing and learning of enhanced English collocations: An eye movement study. Language Teaching Research, 21, 403–426. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168816653271

File, K. A. & Adams, R. (2010). Should vocabulary instruction be integrated or isolated? TESOL Quarterly, 24, 222–249.

Harmer, J. (2012). Essential Teacher Knowledge. Harlow: Pearson

Johns, T. & Davies, F. (1983). Text as a vehicle for information: the classroom use of written texts in teaching reading in a foreign language. Reading in a Foreign Language, 1 (1): pp. 1 – 19

Nation, I. S. P. (2013). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language 2^nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Pellicer-Sánchez, A., Conklin, K. & Vilkaitė-Lozdienė, L. (2021). The effect of pre-reading instruction on vocabulary learning: An investigation of L1 and L2 readers’ eye movements. Language Learning, 0 (0), 0-0. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/lang.12430

Scrivener, J. (2005). Learning Teaching 2^nd Edition. Oxford: Macmillan

Sonbul, S. & Schmitt, N. (2010). Direct teaching of vocabulary after reading: is it worth the effort? ELT Journal 64 (3): pp.253 – 260

Webb, S. (2009). The effects of pre‐learning vocabulary on reading comprehension and writing. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 65 (3): pp. 441–470.

Unpacking ‘the new normal’ in ELT

What is the ‘new normal’?

Among the many words and phrases that have been coined or gained new currency since COVID-19 first struck, I find ‘the new normal’ particularly interesting. In the educational world, its meaning is so obvious that it doesn’t need spelling out. But in case you’re unclear about what I’m referring to, the title of this webinar, run by GENTEFL, the Global Educators Network Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (an affiliate of IATEFL), will give you a hint.

Teaching in a VLE may be overstating it a bit, but you get the picture. ‘The new normal’ is the shift away from face-to-face teaching in bricks-and-mortar institutions, towards online teaching of one kind or another. The Malaysian New Straits Times refers to it as ‘E-learning, new way forward in new norm’. The TEFL Academy says that ‘digital learning is the new normal’, and the New Indian Express prefers the term ‘tech education’.

I’ll come back to these sources in a little while.

Whose new normal?

There is, indeed, a strong possibility that online learning and teaching may become ‘the new normal’ for many people working in education. In corporate training and in higher education, ‘tech education’ will likely become increasingly common. Many universities, especially but not only in the US, Britain and Australia, have been relying on ‘international students’ (almost half a million in the UK in 2018/ 2019), in particular Chinese, to fill their coffers. With uncertainty about how and when these universities will reopen for the next academic year, a successful transition to online is a matter of survival – a challenge that a number of universities will probably not be able to rise to. The core of ELT, private TEFL schools in Inner Circle countries, likewise dependent on visitors from other countries, has also been hard hit. It is not easy for them to transition to online, since the heart of their appeal lies in their physical location.

But elsewhere, the picture is rather different. A recent Reddit discussion began as follows: ‘In Vietnam, [English language] schools have reopened and things have returned to normal almost overnight. There’s actually a teacher shortage at the moment as so many left and interest in online learning is minimal, although most schools are still offering it as an option’. The consensus in the discussion that follows is that bricks-and-mortar schools will take a hit, especially with adult (but not kids’) groups, but that ‘teaching online will not be the new normal’.

By far the greatest number of students studying English around the world are in primary and secondary schools. It is highly unlikely that online study will be the ‘new normal’ for most of these students (although we may expect to see attempts to move towards more blended approaches). There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most glaringly obvious is that the function of schools is not exclusively educational: child-care, allowing parents to go to work, is the first among these.

We can expect some exceptions. In New York, for example, current plans include a ‘hybrid model’ (a sexed-up term for blended learning), in which students are in schools for part of the time and continue learning remotely for the rest. The idea emerged after Governor Andrew Cuomo ‘convened a committee with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to reimagine education for students when school goes back in session in the fall’. How exactly this will pan out remains to be seen, but, in much of the rest of the world, where the influence of the Gates Foundation is less strong, ‘hybrid schooling’ is likely to be seen as even more unpalatable and unworkable than it is by many in New York.

In short, the ‘new normal’ will affect some sectors of English language teaching much more than others. For some, perhaps the majority, little change can be expected once state schools reopen. Smaller classes, maybe, more blended, but not a wholesale shift to ‘tech education’.

Not so new anyway!

Scott Galloway, a New York professor of marketing and author of the best-selling ‘The Four’ (an analysis of the Big Four tech firms), began a recent blog post as follows:

After COVID-19, nothing will be the same. The previous sentence is bullsh*t. On the contrary, things will never be more the same, just accelerated.

He elaborates his point by pointing out that many universities were already in deep trouble before COVID. Big tech had already moved massively into education and healthcare, which are ‘the only two sectors, other than government, that offer the margin dollars required to sate investors’ growth expectations’ (from another recent post by Galloway). Education start-ups have long been attracting cheap capital: COVID has simply sped the process up.

Coming from a very different perspective, Audrey Watters gave a conference presentation over three years ago entitled ‘Education Technology as ‘The New Normal’’. I have been writing about the normalization of digital tools in language teaching for over six years. What is new is the speed, rather than the nature, of the change.

Galloway draws an interesting parallel with the SARS virus, which, he says, ‘was huge for e-commerce in Asia, and it helped Alibaba break out into the consumer space. COVID-19 could be to education in the United States what SARS was to e-commerce in Asia’.

‘The new normal’ as a marketing tool

Earlier in this post, I mentioned three articles that discussed the ‘new normal’ in education. The first of these, from the New Straits Times, looks like a news article, but features extensive quotes from Shereen Chee, chief operating officer of Sunago Education, a Malaysian vendor of online English classes. The article is basically an advert for Sunago: one section includes the following:

Sunago combines digitisation and the human touch to create a personalised learning experience. […] Chee said now is a great time for employers to take advantage of the scheme and equip their team with enhanced English skills, so they can hit the ground running once the Covid-19 slump is over.

The second reference about ‘digital learning is the new normal’ comes from The TEFL Academy, which sells online training courses, particularly targeting prospective teachers who want to work online. The third reference, from the New Indian Express, was written by Ananth Koppar, the founder of Kshema Technologies Pvt Ltd, India’s first venture-funded software company. Koppar is hardly a neutral reporter.

Other examples abound. For example, a similar piece called ‘The ‘New Normal’ in Education’ can be found in FE News (10 June 2020). This was written by Simon Carter, Marketing and Propositions Director of RM Education, an EdTech vendor in the UK. EdTech has a long history of promoting its wares through sponsored content and adverts masquerading as reportage.

It is, therefore, a good idea, whenever you come across the phrase, ‘the new normal’, to adopt a sceptical stance from the outset. I’ll give two more examples to illustrate my point.

A recent article (1 April 2020) in the ELTABB (English Language Teachers Association Berlin Brandenburg) journal is introduced as follows:

With online language teaching being the new normal in ELT, coaching principles can help teachers and students share responsibility for the learning process.

Putting aside, for the moment, my reservations about whether online teaching is, in fact, the new normal in ‘ELT’, I’m happy to accept that coaching principles may be helpful in online teaching. But I can’t help noticing that the article was written by a self-described edupreneur and co-founder of the International Language Coaching Association (€50 annual subscription) which runs three-day training courses (€400).

My second example is a Macmillan webinar by Thom Kiddle called ‘Professional Development for teachers in the ‘new normal’. It’s a good webinar, a very good one in my opinion, but you’ll notice a NILE poster tacked to the wall behind Thom as he speaks. NILE, a highly reputed provider of teacher education courses in the UK, has invested significantly in online teacher education in recent years and is well-positioned to deal with the ‘new normal’. It’s also worth noting that the webinar host, Macmillan, is in a commercial partnership with NILE, the purpose of which is to ‘develop and promote quality teacher education programmes worldwide’. As good as the webinar is, it is also clearly, in part, an advertisement.

The use of the phrase ‘the new normal’ as a marketing hook is not new. Although its first recorded use dates back to the first part of the 20^th century, it became more widespread at the start of the 21^st. One populariser of the phrase was Roger McNamee, a venture capitalist and early investor in technology, including Facebook, who wrote a book called ‘The New Normal: Great Opportunities in a Time of Great Risk’ (2004). Since then, the phrase has been used extensively to refer to the state of the business world after the financial crisis of 2018. (For more about the history of the phrase, see here.) More often than not, users of the phrase are selling the idea (and sometimes a product) that we need to get used to a new configuration of the world, one in which technology plays a greater role.

Normalizing ‘the new normal’

Of all the most unlikely sources for a critique of ‘the new normal’, the World Economic Forum has the following to offer in a blog post entitled ‘There’s nothing new about the ‘new normal’. Here’s why’:

The language of a ‘new normal’ is being deployed almost as a way to quell any uncertainty ushered in by the coronavirus. With no cure in sight, everyone from politicians and the media to friends and family has perpetuated this rhetoric as they imagine settling into life under this ‘new normal’. This framing is inviting: it contends that things will never be the same as they were before — so welcome to a new world order. By using this language, we reimagine where we were previously relative to where we are now, appropriating our present as the standard. As we weigh our personal and political responses to this pandemic, the language we employ matters. It helps to shape and reinforce our understanding of the world and the ways in which we choose to approach it. The analytic frame embodied by the persistent discussion of the ‘new normal’ helps bring order to our current turbulence, but it should not be the lens through which we examine today’s crisis.

We can’t expect the World Economic Forum to become too critical of the ‘new normal’ of digital learning, since they have been pushing for it so hard for so long. But the quote from their blog above may usefully be read in conjunction with an article by Jun Yu and Nick Couldry, called ‘Education as a domain of natural data extraction: analysing corporate discourse about educational tracking’ (Information, Communication and Society, 2020, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2020.1764604). The article explores the general discursive framing by which the use of big data in education has come to seem normal. The authors looked at the public discourse of eight major vendors of educational platforms that use big data (including Macmillan, Pearson, Knewton and Blackboard). They found that ‘the most fundamental move in today’s dominant commercial discourse is to promote the idea that data and its growth are natural’. In this way, ‘software systems, not teachers, [are] central to education’. Yu and Couldry’s main interest is in the way that discourse shapes the normalization of dataveillance, but, in a more general sense, the phrase, ‘the new normal’, is contributing to the normalization of digital education. If you think that’s fine, I suggest you dip into some of the books I listed in my last blog post.

Pedagogy before technology, OK?

Unconditional calls for language teachers to incorporate digital technology into their teaching are common. The reasons that are given are many and typically include the fact that (1) our students are ‘digital natives’ and expect technology to be integrated into their learning, (2) and digital technology is ubiquitous and has so many affordances for learning. Writing on the topic is almost invariably enthusiastic and the general conclusion is that the integration of technology is necessary and essential. Here’s a fairly typical example: digital technology is ‘an essential multisensory extension to the textbook’ (Torben Schmidt and Thomas Strasser in Surkamp & Viebrock, 2018: 221).

 

Teachers who are reluctant or fail to embrace technology are often ‘characterised as technophobic, or too traditional in their teaching style, or reluctant to adopt change’ (Watson, 2001: 253). (It’s those pesky teachers again.)

Claims for the importance of digital technology are often backed up by vague references to research. Michael Carrier, for example, in his introductory chapter to ‘Digital Language Learning and Teaching’ (Carrier et al. 2017: 3) writes that ‘research results […] seem to show conclusively that the use of educational technology adds certain degrees of richness to the learning and teaching process […] at the very least, digital learning seems to provide enhanced motivation for learners’.

Unfortunately, this is simply not true. Neither in language learning / teaching, nor in education more generally, is there any clear evidence of the necessary benefits of introducing educational technology. In the broader context, the ‘PISA analysis of the impact of Information Communication Technology (ICT) on reading, mathematics, and science (OECD, 2015: 3) in countries heavily invested in educational technology showed mixed effects and “no appreciable improvements”’ (Herodotou et al., 2019). Educational technology can or might  ‘add certain degrees of richness’ or ‘provide enhanced motivation’, but that is not the same as saying that it does or will. The shift from can to will, a piece of modal legerdemain used to advocate for educational technology, is neatly illustrated in a quote from the MIT’s Office of Digital Learning, whose remit is to improve learning and teaching across the university via digital learning: ‘Digital Learning technologies can enable students to grasp concepts more quickly [etc….] Digital technologies will enable this in new and better ways and create possibilities beyond the limits of our current imagination’ (quoted by Carrier, 2017: 1).

Before moving on, here’s another example. The introduction to Li Li’s ‘New Technologies and Language Learning’ (Li, 2017: x) states, with a cautious can, that one of the objectives of the book is ‘to provide examples of how technologies can be used in assisting language education’. In the next paragraph, however, caution is thrown to the wind and we are told, unequivocally, that ‘technology is beneficial for language learning’.

Pedagogy before technology

Examples of gratuitous technology use are not hard to find. Mark Warschauer (who, as the founding director of the Digital Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine, could be fairly described as an edtech enthusiast) describes one example: ‘I remember observing a beginners’ French class a number of years ago, the teacher bragged about how engaged the learners were in creating multimedia in French. However, the students were spending most of their time and energy talking with each other in English about how to make PowerPoints, when, as beginning learners, they really needed to be spending time hearing as much French as possible’ (quoted in the Guardian, May 2014).

As a result, no doubt, of having similar experiences, it seems that many people are becoming a little more circumspect in their enthusiasm for edtech. In the same Guardian article as Warschauer’s recollections, Russell Stannard ‘says the trick is to put the pedagogy first, not the technology. “You’ve got to know why you’re using it. Teachers do need to learn to use new technology, but the driving force should always be the pedagogy behind it’. Nicky Hockly, Gavin Dudeney and Mark Pegrum (Hockly et al., 2013: 45) concur: ‘Content and pedagogy come before technology. We must decide on our content and pedagogical aims before determining whether our students should use pens or keyboards, write essays or blogs, or design posters or videos’. And Graham Stanley (2013: 1) in the introduction to his ‘Language Learning With Technology’ states that his ‘book makes a point of putting pedagogy at the forefront of the lesson, which is why content has been organised around specific learning content goals rather than specific technologies’.

But, Axel Krommer, of the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, has argued that the principle of ‘pedagogy before technology’ is ‘trivial at best’. In a piece for the Goethe Institute he writes ‘a theory with which everyone agrees and whose opposite no-one believes true is meaningless’, although he adds that it may be useful as ‘an admonitory wake-up call when educational institutions risk being blinded by technological possibilities that cause them to neglect pedagogical principles that should really be taken for granted’. It was this piece that set me thinking more about ‘pedagogy before technology’.

Pedagogy before technology (on condition that there is technology)

Another person to lament the placing of technology before pedagogy is Nik Peachey. In an opinion piece for the Guardian, entitled ‘Technology can sometimes be wasted on English language teaching’, he complains about how teachers are left to sort out how to use technology ‘in a pedagogically effective way, often with very little training or support’. He appears to take it as given that technology is a positive force, and argues that it shouldn’t be wasted. The issue, he says, is that better teacher training is needed so that teachers’ ‘digital literacies’ are improved and to ensure that technological potential is fulfilled.

His position, therefore, cannot really be said to be one of ‘pedagogy before technology’. Like the other writers mentioned above, he comes to the pedagogy through and after an interest in the technology. The educational use of digital technology per se is never seriously questioned. The same holds true for almost the entirety of the world of CALL research.

A Canadian conference ‘Pedagogy b4 Technology’ illustrates my point beautifully.

There are occasional exceptions. A recent example which I found interesting was an article by Herodotou et al (2019), in which the authors take as their starting point a set of OECD educational goals (quality of life, including health, civic engagement, social connections, education, security, life satisfaction and the environment), and then investigate the extent to which a variety of learning approaches (formative analytics, teachback, place-based learning, learning with robots, learning with drones, citizen inquiry) – not all of which involve technology – might contribute to the realisation of these goals.

Technology before pedagogy as policy

Some of the high school English teachers I work with have to use tablets in one lesson a week. Some welcome it, some accept it (they can catch up with other duties while the kids are busy with exercises on the tablet), others just roll their eyes at the mention of this policy. In the same school system, English language learning materials can only be bought if they come in digital versions (even if it is the paper versions that are actually used). The digital versions are mostly used for projecting pages onto the IWBs. Meanwhile, budgets and the time available for in-service training have been cut.

Elsewhere, a chain of universities decides that a certain proportion of all courses must be taught online. English language courses, being less prestigious than major subjects, are one of the first to be migrated to platforms. The staff, few of whom have tenure or time to spare, cope as best as they can, with some support from a department head. Training is provided in the mechanics of operating the platform, and, hopefully before too long, more training will become available to optimize the use of the platform for pedagogical purposes. An adequate budget has yet to be agreed.

The reasons why so many educational authorities introduce such policies are, at best, only superficially related to pedagogy. There is a belief, widely held, that technology cannot fail to make things better. In the words of Tony Blair: ‘Technology has revolutionised the way we work and is now set to transform education. Children cannot be effective in tomorrow’s world if they are trained in yesterday’s skills’. But there is also the potential of education technology to scale education up (i.e. increase student numbers), to reduce long-term costs, to facilitate accountability, to increase productivity, to restrict the power of teachers (and their unions), and so on.

In such circumstances, which are not uncommon, it seems to me that there are more pressing things to worry about than teachers who are not sufficiently thinking about the pedagogical uses to which they put the technology that they have to use. Working conditions, pay and hours, are all affected by the digitalisation of education. These things do get talked about (see, for example, Walsh, 2019), but only rarely.

Technology as pedagogy

Blended learning, described by Pete Sharma in 2010 as a ‘buzz word’ in ELT, remains a popular pedagogical approach. In a recent article (2019), he enthuses about the possibilities of blended learning, suggesting that teachers should use it all the time: ‘teaching in this new digital age should use the technologies which students meet in their everyday lives, such as the Internet, laptop, smartphone and tablet’. It’s also, he claims, time-efficient, but other pedagogical justifications are scant: ‘some language areas are really suited to be studied outside the classroom. Extensive reading and practising difficult phonemes, for instance’.

Blended learning and digital technology are inseparable. Hockley (2018) explains the spread of blended learning in ELT as being driven primarily by ‘the twin drivers of economics (i.e. lower costs) and increasingly accessible and affordable hardware and software’. It might be nice to believe that ‘it is pedagogy, rather than technology, that should underpin the design of blended learning programmes’ (McCarthy, 2016, back cover), but the technology is the pedagogy here. Precisely how it is used is almost inevitably an afterthought.

Which pedagogy, anyway?

We can talk about putting pedagogy before technology, but this raises the question of which particular pedagogy we want to put in the driving seat. Presumably not all pedagogies are of equal value.

One of the most common uses of digital technology that has been designed specifically for language learning is the IWB- or platform-delivered coursebook and its accompanying digital workbook. We know that a majority of teachers using online coursebook packages direct their students more readily to tasks with clear right / wrong answers (e.g. drag-and-drop or gap-fill grammar exercises) than they do to the forum facilities where communicative language use is possible. Here, technology is merely replicating and, perhaps (because of its ease of use), encouraging established pedagogical practices. The pedagogy precedes the technology, but it’s probably not the best pedagogy in the world. Nor does it make best use of the technology’s potential. Would the affordances of the technology make a better starting point for course design?

Graham Stanley’s book (2013) offers suggestions for using technology for a variety of purposes, ranging from deliberate practice of grammar and vocabulary to ways of facilitating opportunities for skills practice. It’s an eclectic mix, similar to the range of activities on offer in the average coursebook for adults or teenagers. It is pedagogy-neutral in the sense that it does not offer a set of principles of language learning or teaching, and from these derive a set of practices for using the technology. It is a recipe book for using technological tools and, like all recipe books, prioritises activities over principles. I like the book and I don’t intend these comments as criticism. My point is simply that it’s not easy to take pedagogical principles as a starting point. Does the world of ELT even have generally agreed pedagogical principles?

And what is it that we’re teaching?

One final thought … If we consider how learners are likely to be using the English they are learning in their real-world futures, technology will not be far away: reading online, listening to / watching online material, writing and speaking with messaging apps, writing with text, email or Google Docs … If, in designing pedagogical approaches, we wish to include features of authentic language use, it’s hard to see how we can avoid placing technology fairly near the centre of the stage. Technologically-mediated language use is inseparable from pedagogy: one does not precede the other.

Similarly, if we believe that it is part of the English teacher’s job to develop the digital literacy (e.g. Hockly et al., 2013), visual literacy (e.g. Donaghy, 2015) or multimodal literacy of their students – not, incidentally, a belief that I share – then, again, technology cannot be separated from pedagogy.

Pedagogy before technology, OK??

So, I ask myself what precisely it is that people mean when they say that pedagogy should come before technology. The locutionary force, or referential meaning, usually remains unclear: in the absence of a particular pedagogy and particular contexts, what exactly is being said? The illocutionary force, likewise, is difficult to understand in the absence of a particular addressee: is the message only intended for teachers suffering from Everest Syndrome? And the perlocutionary force is equally intriguing: how are people who make the statement positioning themselves, and in relation to which addressee? Along the lines of green-washing and woke-washing, are we sometimes seeing cases of pedagogy-washing?

REFERENCES

Carrier, M., Damerow, R. M. & Bailey, K. M. (2017) Digital Language Learning and Teaching: Research, theory, and practice. New York: Routledge

Donaghy, K. (2015) Film in Action. Peaslake, Surrey: DELTA Publishing

Herodotou, C., Sharples, M., Gaved, M., Kukulska-Hulme, A., Rienties, B., Scanlon, E. & Whitelock, D. (2019) Innovative Pedagogies of the Future: An Evidence-Based Selection. Frontiers in Education, 4 (113)

Hockly, N. (2018) Blended Learning. ELT Journal 72 (1): pp. 97 – 101

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

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

McCarthy, M. (Ed.) (2016) The Cambridge Guide to Blended Learning for Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

OECD (2015) Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection, PISA. Paris: OECD Publishing

Sharma, P. (2010) Blended Learning. ELT Journal, 64 (4): pp. 456 – 458

Sharma, P. (2019) The Complete Guide to Running a Blended Learning Course. Oxford University Press English Language Teaching Global Blog 17 October 2019. Available at: https://oupeltglobalblog.com/2019/10/17/complete-guidagogyde-blended-learning/

Stanley, G. (2013) Language Learning with Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Surkamp, C. & Viebrock, B. (Eds.) (2018) Teaching English as a Foreign Language: An Introduction. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler

Walsh, P. (2019) Precarity. ELT Journal, 73 (4): pp. 459–462

Watson, D. M. (2001) Pedagogy before Technology: Re-thinking the Relationship between ICT and Teaching. Education and Information Technologies 6:4: pp.251–26

Self-paced language learning

Introduction

Allowing learners to determine the amount of time they spend studying, and, therefore (in theory at least) the speed of their progress is a key feature of most personalized learning programs. In cases where learners follow a linear path of pre-determined learning items, it is often the only element of personalization that the programs offer. In the Duolingo program that I am using, there are basically only two things that can be personalized: the amount of time I spend studying each day, and the possibility of jumping a number of learning items by ‘testing out’.

Self-regulated learning or self-pacing, as this is commonly referred to, has enormous intuitive appeal. It is clear that different people learn different things at different rates. We’ve known for a long time that ‘the developmental stages of child growth and the individual differences among learners make it impossible to impose a single and ‘correct’ sequence on all curricula’ (Stern, 1983: 439). It therefore follows that it makes even less sense for a group of students (typically determined by age) to be obliged to follow the same curriculum at the same pace in a one-size-fits-all approach. We have probably all experienced, as students, the frustration of being behind, or ahead of, the rest of our colleagues in a class. One student who suffered from the lockstep approach was Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy. He has described how he was fed up with having to follow an educational path dictated by his age and how, as a result, individual pacing became an important element in his educational approach (Ferster, 2014: 132-133). As teachers, we have all experienced the challenges of teaching a piece of material that is too hard or too easy for many of the students in the class.

Historical attempts to facilitate self-paced learning

An interest in self-paced learning can be traced back to the growth of mass schooling and age-graded classes in the 19^th century. In fact, the ‘factory model’ of education has never existed without critics who saw the inherent problems of imposing uniformity on groups of individuals. These critics were not marginal characters. Charles Eliot (president of Harvard from 1869 – 1909), for example, described uniformity as ‘the curse of American schools’ and argued that ‘the process of instructing students in large groups is a quite sufficient school evil without clinging to its twin evil, an inflexible program of studies’ (Grittner, 1975: 324).

Attempts to develop practical solutions were not uncommon and these are reasonably well-documented. One of the earliest, which ran from 1884 to 1894, was launched in Pueblo, Colorado and was ‘a self-paced plan that required each student to complete a sequence of lessons on an individual basis’ (Januszewski, 2001: 58-59). More ambitious was the Burk Plan (at its peak between 1912 and 1915), named after Frederick Burk of the San Francisco State Normal School, which aimed to allow students to progress through materials (including language instruction materials) at their own pace with only a limited amount of teacher presentations (Januszewski, ibid.). Then, there was the Winnetka Plan (1920s), developed by Carlton Washburne, an associate of Frederick Burk and the superintendent of public schools in Winnetka, Illinois, which also ‘allowed learners to proceed at different rates, but also recognised that learners proceed at different rates in different subjects’ (Saettler, 1990: 65). The Winnetka Plan is especially interesting in the way it presaged contemporary attempts to facilitate individualized, self-paced learning. It was described by its developers in the following terms:

A general technique [consisting] of (a) breaking up the common essentials curriculum into very definite units of achievement, (b) using complete diagnostic tests to determine whether a child has mastered each of these units, and, if not, just where his difficulties lie and, (c) the full use of self-instructive, self corrective practice materials. (Washburne, C., Vogel, M. & W.S. Gray. 1926. A Survey of the Winnetka Public Schools. Bloomington, IL: Public School Press)

Not dissimilar was the Dalton (Massachusetts) Plan in the 1920s which also used a self-paced program to accommodate the different ability levels of the children and deployed contractual agreements between students and teachers (something that remains common educational practice around the world). There were many others, both in the U.S. and other parts of the world.

The personalization of learning through self-pacing was not, therefore, a minor interest. Between 1910 and 1924, nearly 500 articles can be documented on the subject of individualization (Grittner, 1975: 328). In just three years (1929 – 1932) of one publication, The Education Digest, there were fifty-one articles dealing with individual instruction and sixty-three entries treating individual differences (Chastain, 1975: 334). Foreign language teaching did not feature significantly in these early attempts to facilitate self-pacing, but see the Burk Plan described above. Only a handful of references to language learning and self-pacing appeared in articles between 1916 and 1924 (Grittner, 1975: 328).

Disappointingly, none of these initiatives lasted long. Both costs and management issues had been significantly underestimated. Plans such as those described above were seen as progress, but not the hoped-for solution. Problems included the fact that the materials themselves were not individualized and instructional methods were too rigid (Pendleton, 1930: 199). However, concomitant with the interest in individualization (mostly, self-pacing), came the advent of educational technology.

Sidney L. Pressey, the inventor of what was arguably the first teaching machine, was inspired by his experiences with schoolchildren in rural Indiana in the 1920s where he ‘was struck by the tremendous variation in their academic abilities and how they were forced to progress together at a slow, lockstep pace that did not serve all students well’ (Ferster, 2014: 52). Although Pressey failed in his attempts to promote his teaching machines, he laid the foundation stones in the synthesizing of individualization and technology.

Pressey may be seen as the direct precursor of programmed instruction, now closely associated with B. F. Skinner (see my post on Behaviourism and Adaptive Learning). It is a quintessentially self-paced approach and is described by John Hattie as follows:

Programmed instruction is a teaching method of presenting new subject matter to students in graded sequence of controlled steps. A book version, for example, presents a problem or issue, then, depending on the student’s answer to a question about the material, the student chooses from optional answers which refers them to particular pages of the book to find out why they were correct or incorrect – and then proceed to the next part of the problem or issue. (Hattie, 2009: 231)

Programmed instruction was mostly used for the teaching of mathematics, but it is estimated that 4% of programmed instruction programs were for foreign languages (Saettler, 1990: 297). It flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, but even by 1968 foreign language instructors were sceptical (Valdman, 1968). A survey carried out by the Center for Applied Linguistics revealed then that only about 10% of foreign language teachers at college and university reported the use of programmed materials in their departments. (Valdman, 1968: 1).

Research studies had failed to demonstrate the effectiveness of programmed instruction (Saettler, 1990: 303). Teachers were often resistant and students were often bored, finding ‘ingenious ways to circumvent the program, including the destruction of their teaching machines!’ (Saettler, ibid.).

In the case of language learning, there were other problems. For programmed instruction to have any chance of working, it was necessary to specify rigorously the initial and terminal behaviours of the learner so that the intermediate steps leading from the former to the latter could be programmed. As Valdman (1968: 4) pointed out, this is highly problematic when it comes to languages (a point that I have made repeatedly in this blog). In addition, students missed the personal interaction that conventional instruction offered, got bored and lacked motivation (Valdman, 1968: 10).

Programmed instruction worked best when teachers were very enthusiastic, but perhaps the most significant lesson to be learned from the experiments was that it was ‘a difficult, time-consuming task to introduce programmed instruction’ (Saettler, 1990: 299). It entailed changes to well-established practices and attitudes, and for such changes to succeed there must be consideration of the social, political, and economic contexts. As Saettler (1990: 306), notes, ‘without the support of the community and the entire teaching staff, sustained innovation is unlikely’. In this light, Hattie’s research finding that ‘when comparisons are made between many methods, programmed instruction often comes near the bottom’ (Hattie, 2009: 231) comes as no great surprise.

Just as programmed instruction was in its death throes, the world of language teaching discovered individualization. Launched as a deliberate movement in the early 1970s at the Stanford Conference (Altman & Politzer, 1971), it was a ‘systematic attempt to allow for individual differences in language learning’ (Stern, 1983: 387). Inspired, in part, by the work of Carl Rogers, this ‘humanistic turn’ was a recognition that ‘each learner is unique in personality, abilities, and needs. Education must be personalized to fit the individual; the individual must not be dehumanized in order to meet the needs of an impersonal school system’ (Disick, 1975:38). In ELT, this movement found many adherents and remains extremely influential to this day.

In language teaching more generally, the movement lost impetus after a few years, ‘probably because its advocates had underestimated the magnitude of the task they had set themselves in trying to match individual learner characteristics with appropriate teaching techniques’ (Stern, 1983: 387). What precisely was meant by individualization was never adequately defined or agreed (a problem that remains to the present time). What was left was self-pacing. In 1975, it was reported that ‘to date the majority of the programs in second-language education have been characterized by a self-pacing format […]. Practice seems to indicate that ‘individualized’ instruction is being defined in the class room as students studying individually’ (Chastain, 1975: 344).

Lessons to be learned

This brief account shows that historical attempts to facilitate self-pacing have largely been characterised by failure. The starting point of all these attempts remains as valid as ever, but it is clear that practical solutions are less than simple. To avoid the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, we should perhaps try to learn from the past.

One of the greatest challenges that teachers face is dealing with different levels of ability in their classes. In any blended scenario where the online component has an element of self-pacing, the challenge will be magnified as ability differentials are likely to grow rather than decrease as a result of the self-pacing. Bart Simpson hit the nail on the head in a memorable line: ‘Let me get this straight. We’re behind the rest of the class and we’re going to catch up to them by going slower than they are? Coo coo!’ Self-pacing runs into immediate difficulties when it comes up against standardised tests and national or state curriculum requirements. As Ferster observes, ‘the notion of individual pacing [remains] antithetical to […] a graded classroom system, which has been the model of schools for the past century. Schools are just not equipped to deal with students who do not learn in age-processed groups, even if this system is clearly one that consistently fails its students (Ferster, 2014: 90-91).

Ability differences are less problematic if the teacher focusses primarily on communicative tasks in F2F time (as opposed to more teaching of language items), but this is a big ‘if’. Many teachers are unsure of how to move towards a more communicative style of teaching, not least in large classes in compulsory schooling. Since there are strong arguments that students would benefit from a more communicative, less transmission-oriented approach anyway, it makes sense to focus institutional resources on equipping teachers with the necessary skills, as well as providing support, before a shift to a blended, more self-paced approach is implemented.

Such issues are less important in private institutions, which are not age-graded, and in self-study contexts. However, even here there may be reasons to proceed cautiously before buying into self-paced approaches. Self-pacing is closely tied to autonomous goal-setting (which I will look at in more detail in another post). Both require a degree of self-awareness at a cognitive and emotional level (McMahon & Oliver, 2001), but not all students have such self-awareness (Magill, 2008). If students do not have the appropriate self-regulatory strategies and are simply left to pace themselves, there is a chance that they will ‘misregulate their learning, exerting control in a misguided or counterproductive fashion and not achieving the desired result’ (Kirschner & van Merriënboer, 2013: 177). Before launching students on a path of self-paced language study, ‘thought needs to be given to the process involved in users becoming aware of themselves and their own understandings’ (McMahon & Oliver, 2001: 1304). Without training and support provided both before and during the self-paced study, the chances of dropping out are high (as we see from the very high attrition rate in language apps).

However well-intentioned, many past attempts to facilitate self-pacing have also suffered from the poor quality of the learning materials. The focus was more on the technology of delivery, and this remains the case today, as many posts on this blog illustrate. Contemporary companies offering language learning programmes show relatively little interest in the content of the learning (take Duolingo as an example). Few app developers show signs of investing in experienced curriculum specialists or materials writers. Glossy photos, contemporary videos, good UX and clever gamification, all of which become dull and repetitive after a while, do not compensate for poorly designed materials.

Over forty years ago, a review of self-paced learning concluded that the evidence on its benefits was inconclusive (Allison, 1975: 5). Nothing has changed since. For some people, in some contexts, for some of the time, self-paced learning may work. Claims that go beyond that cannot be substantiated.

References

Allison, E. 1975. ‘Self-Paced Instruction: A Review’ The Journal of Economic Education 7 / 1: 5 – 12

Altman, H.B. & Politzer, R.L. (eds.) 1971. Individualizing Foreign Language Instruction: Proceedings of the Stanford Conference, May 6 – 8, 1971. Washington, D.C.: Office of Education, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare

Chastain, K. 1975. ‘An Examination of the Basic Assumptions of “Individualized” Instruction’ The Modern Language Journal 59 / 7: 334 – 344

Disick, R.S. 1975 Individualizing Language Instruction: Strategies and Methods. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Ferster, B. 2014. Teaching Machines. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press

Grittner, F. M. 1975. ‘Individualized Instruction: An Historical Perspective’ The Modern Language Journal 59 / 7: 323 – 333

Hattie, J. 2009. Visible Learning. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge

Januszewski, A. 2001. Educational Technology: The Development of a Concept. Englewood, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited

Kirschner, P. A. & van Merriënboer, J. J. G. 2013. ‘Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education’ Educational Psychologist, 48:3, 169-183

Magill, D. S. 2008. ‘What Part of Self-Paced Don’t You Understand?’ University of Wisconsin 24th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning Conference Proceedings.

McMahon, M. & Oliver, R. 2001. ‘Promoting self-regulated learning in an on-line environment’ in C. Montgomerie & J. Viteli (eds.), Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2001 (pp. 1299-1305). Chesapeake, VA: AACE

Pendleton, C. S. 1930. ‘Personalizing English Teaching’ Peabody Journal of Education 7 / 4: 195 – 200

Saettler, P. 1990. The Evolution of American Educational Technology. Denver: Libraries Unlimited

Stern, H.H. 1983. Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Valdman, A. 1968. ‘Programmed Instruction versus Guided Learning in Foreign Language Acquisition’ Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German 1 / 2: 1 – 14

 

Adaptive learning markets: talking Turkey

It’s a good time to be in Turkey if you have digital ELT products to sell. Not so good if you happen to be an English language learner. This post takes a look at both sides of the Turkish lira.

OUP, probably the most significant of the big ELT publishers in Turkey, recorded ‘an outstanding performance’ in the country in the last financial year, making it their 5^th largest ELT market. OUP’s annual report for 2013 – 2014 describes the particularly strong demand for digital products and services, a demand which is now influencing OUP’s global strategy for digital resources. When asked about the future of ELT, Peter Marshall , Managing Director of OUP’s ELT Division, suggested that Turkey was a country that could point us in the direction of an answer to the question. Marshall and OUP will be hoping that OUP’s recently launched Digital Learning Platform (DLP) ‘for the global distribution of adult and secondary ELT materials’ will be an important part of that future, in Turkey and elsewhere. I can’t think of any good reason for doubting their belief.

OUP aren’t the only ones eagerly checking the pound-lira exchange rates. For the last year, CUP also reported ‘significant sales successes’ in Turkey in their annual report . For CUP, too, it was a year in which digital development has been ‘a top priority’. CUP’s Turkish success story has been primarily driven by a deal with Anadolu University (more about this below) to provide ‘a print and online solution to train 1.7 million students’ using their Touchstone course. This was the biggest single sale in CUP’s history and has inspired publishers, both within CUP and outside, to attempt to emulate the deal. The new blended products will, of course, be adaptive.

Just how big is the Turkish digital ELT pie? According to a 2014 report from Ambient Insight , revenues from digital ELT products reached $32.0 million in 2013. They are forecast to more than double to $72.6 million in 2018. This is a growth rate of 17.8%, a rate which is practically unbeatable in any large economy, and Turkey is the 17^th largest economy in the world, according to World Bank statistics .

So, what makes Turkey special?

• Turkey has a large and young population that is growing by about 1.4% each year, which is equivalent to approximately 1 million people. According to the Turkish Ministry of Education, there are currently about 5.5 million students enrolled in upper-secondary schools. Significant growth in numbers is certain.
• Turkey is currently in the middle of a government-sponsored $990 million project to increase the level of English proficiency in schools. The government’s target is to position the country as one of the top ten global economies by 2023, the centenary of the Turkish Republic, and it believes that this position will be more reachable if it has a population with the requisite foreign language (i.e. English) skills. As part of this project, the government has begun to introduce English in the 1^st grade (previously it was in the 4^th grade).
• The level of English in Turkey is famously low and has been described as a ‘national weakness’. In October/November 2011, the Turkish research institute SETA and the Turkish Ministry for Youth and Sports conducted a large survey across Turkey of 10,174 young citizens, aged 15 to 29. The result was sobering: 59 per cent of the young people said they “did not know any foreign language.” A recent British Council report (2013) found the competence level in English of most (90+%) students across Turkey was evidenced as rudimentary – even after 1000+ hours (estimated at end of Grade 12) of English classes. This is, of course, good news for vendors of English language learning / teaching materials.
• Turkey has launched one of the world’s largest educational technology projects: the FATIH Project (The Movement to Enhance Opportunities and Improve Technology). One of its objectives is to provide tablets for every student between grades 5 and 12. At the same time, according to the Ambient report , the intention is to ‘replace all print-based textbooks with digital content (both eTextbooks and online courses).’
• Purchasing power in Turkey is concentrated in a relatively small number of hands, with the government as the most important player. Institutions are often very large. Anadolu University, for example, is the second largest university in the world, with over 2 million students, most of whom are studying in virtual classrooms. There are two important consequences of this. Firstly, it makes scalable, big-data-driven LMS-delivered courses with adaptive software a more attractive proposition to purchasers. Secondly, it facilitates the B2B sales model that is now preferred by vendors (including the big ELT publishers).
• Turkey also has a ‘burgeoning private education sector’, according to Peter Marshall, and a thriving English language school industry. According to Ambient ‘commercial English language learning in Turkey is a $400 million industry with over 600 private schools across the country’. Many of these are grouped into large chains (see the bullet point above).
• Turkey is also ‘in the vanguard of the adoption of educational technology in ELT’, according to Peter Marshall. With 36 million internet users, the 5^th largest internet population in Europe, and the 3^rd highest online engagement in Europe, measured by time spent online, (reported by Sina Afra ), the country’s enthusiasm for educational technology is not surprising. Ambient reports that ‘the growth rate for mobile English educational apps is 27.3%’. This enthusiasm is reflected in Turkey’s thriving ELT conference scene. The most popular conference themes and conference presentations are concerned with edtech. A keynote speech by Esat Uğurlu at the ISTEK schools 3^rd international ELT conference at Yeditepe in April 2013 gives a flavour of the current interests. The talk was entitled ‘E-Learning: There is nothing to be afraid of and plenty to discover’.

All of the above makes Turkey a good place to be if you’re selling digital ELT products, even though the competition is pretty fierce. If your product isn’t adaptive, personalized and gamified, you may as well not bother.

What impact will all this have on Turkey’s English language learners? A report co-produced by TEPAV (the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey) and the British Council in November 2013 suggests some of the answers, at least in the school population. The report  is entitled ‘Turkey National Needs Assessment of State School English Language Teaching’ and its Executive Summary is brutally frank in its analysis of the low achievements in English language learning in the country. It states:

The teaching of English as a subject and not a language of communication was observed in all schools visited. This grammar-based approach was identified as the first of five main factors that, in the opinion of this report, lead to the failure of Turkish students to speak/ understand English on graduation from High School, despite having received an estimated 1000+ hours of classroom instruction.

In all classes observed, students fail to learn how to communicate and function independently in English. Instead, the present teacher-centric, classroom practice focuses on students learning how to answer teachers’ questions (where there is only one, textbook-type ‘right’ answer), how to complete written exercises in a textbook, and how to pass a grammar-based test. Thus grammar-based exams/grammar tests (with right/wrong answers) drive the teaching and learning process from Grade 4 onwards. This type of classroom practice dominates all English lessons and is presented as the second causal factor with respect to the failure of Turkish students to speak/understand English.

The problem, in other words, is the curriculum and the teaching. In its recommendations, the report makes this crystal clear. Priority needs to be given to developing a revised curriculum and ‘a comprehensive and sustainable system of in-service teacher training for English teachers’. Curriculum renewal and programmes of teacher training / development are the necessary prerequisites for the successful implementation of a programme of educational digitalization. Unfortunately, research has shown again and again that these take a long time and outcomes are difficult to predict in advance.

By going for digitalization first, Turkey is taking a huge risk. What LMSs, adaptive software and most apps do best is the teaching of language knowledge (grammar and vocabulary), not the provision of opportunities for communicative practice (for which there is currently no shortage of opportunity … it is just that these opportunities are not being taken). There is a real danger, therefore, that the technology will push learning priorities in precisely the opposite direction to that which is needed. Without significant investments in curriculum reform and teacher training, how likely is it that the transmission-oriented culture of English language teaching and learning will change?

Even if the money for curriculum reform and teacher training were found, it is also highly unlikely that effective country-wide approaches to blended learning for English would develop before the current generation of tablets and their accompanying content become obsolete.

Sadly, the probability is, once more, that educational technology will be a problem-changer, even a problem-magnifier, rather than a problem-solver. I’d love to be wrong.

Part 7: The next 4 to 5 years of adaptive learning in ELT – 10 predictions

Given what we know, it is possible to make some predictions about what the next generation of adult ELT materials will be like when they emerge a few years from now. Making predictions is always a hazardous game, but there are a number of reasonable certainties that can be identified, based on the statements and claims of the major publishers and software providers.

1 Major publishers will move gradually away from traditional coursebooks (whether in print or ebook format) towards the delivery of learning content on learning platforms. At its most limited, this will be in the form of workbook-style material with an adaptive element. At its most developed, this will be in the form of courses that can be delivered entirely without traditional coursebooks. These will allow teachers or institutions to decide the extent to which they wish to blend online and face-to-face instruction.

2 The adaptive elements of these courses will focus primarily or exclusively on discrete item grammar, vocabulary, functional language and phonology, since these lend themselves most readily to the software. These courses will be targeted mainly at lower level (B1 and below) learners.

3 The methodological approach of these courses will be significantly influenced by the expectations of the markets where they are predicted to be most popular and most profitable: South and Central America, the Arabian Gulf and Asia.

4 These courses will permit multiple modifications to suit local requirements. They will also allow additional content to be uploaded.

5 Assessment will play an important role in the design of all these courses. Things like discrete item grammar, vocabulary, functional language and phonology, which lend themselves most readily to assessment, will be prioritized over language skills, which are harder to assess.

6 The discrete items of language that are presented will be tagged to level descriptors, using scales like the Common European Framework or English Profile.

7 Language skills work will be included, but only in the more sophisticated (and better-funded) projects will these components be closely tied to the adaptive software.

8 Because of technological differences between different parts of the world, adaptive courses will co-exist with closely related, more traditional print (or ebook) courses.

9 Training for teachers (especially concerning blended learning) will become an increasingly important part of the package sold by the major publishers.

10 These courses will be more than ever driven by the publishers’ perceptions of what the market wants. There will be a concomitant decrease in the extent to which individual authors, or author teams, influence the material.