I wrote a long post based on a presentation Dellar gave in Astana, Kasakhstan, last year. It’s disappeared and I have no idea how that happened. Here I offer just an excerpt from it.

In his presentation, Dellar suggested that students of English as an L2 suffer from negative transfer from their L1. Dellar suggests that one way to get students to notice errors caused by this L1 transfer is “Two-Way Translation”. You write some English sentences on the whitboard and ask students to write them down. Then you ask them to tranlate the sentences into their L1 on the other side of the page. In the next class youask the students to look at their translations of the sentences they wrote in their L1 , and write the English translation underrneath. Finally you ask them to compare their English translation with the original English sentences. Differences between the English sentence and their version of it will help them notice the differences between their L1 and English.

Dellar then tells this story about Larent, a French speaker wh was studying English in his class.

The exerpt starts at MINUTE 25.10 and ends 4 minutes later.

When he tells the audience what Laurent says, Dellar adopts a caricature of a French accent which some find a bit tasteless. The first exchange between Laurent and Dellar went like this:

Laurent: Er, for me, it is not important for to study the grammar because all the people with whom I’m speaking are telling me that I am comprehensible.

Dellar: You mean you don’t have to study grammar because everybody understands you.

Laurent: This is what I am telling …

Dellar: No, it’s not. What you’re doing is translating directly from French and saying it in English. I’m telling you how to say it in English.

Feeling he was getting nowhere, Dellar then asked the class, including Laurent, to look at the hardly list of sentences he’s put up, and write down the French translation of the example “Hardly a day goes by without hearing one of these stories”. Dellar asks Laurent if he can take the paper with the translated sentence on it, and Laurent agreed.

At the next class, Dellar greets Laurent:  Ah, hi Laurent. I’m sorry, because I know that French and English are exactly the same, I’m sorry to waste your time, and I know you think in English, but maybe you can just help me because I found this sentence in my back pocket and I can’t remember what it means, can you just tell me the English for this.

Dellar hands Laurent his French translation of the “Hardly a day goes by without hearing one of these stories” sentence, and Laurent translates it as follows: Hardly a day is passing without that I hear about hear of one such story”.

Dellar: Are you sure that’s the English?

Laurent: It is equivalent.

So then, Dellar tells us,

I show him the English and he kind of looks at it, and looks at the French, and looks at the English, and looks at me, and kind of goes “Ahhhh!”

Finally, we’re led to believe, Laurent notices that “English is different”. Dellar rounds off the story by saying that from then on Laurent made huge lists of sentences in English and French and he’d test himself all the time, and he sailed through First Certificate.  

Discussion

Dellar tells his audience that his story about Laurent actually happened, and thus we would expect the story to be honest and reasonably accurate But is it? Note that Dellar doesn’t give us the translation into French that Laurent wrote and that Fellar put in his back pocket. Had he done so, I oubt we would have seen the words Hardly a day is passing in French, and I doubt Laurent said these things which Dellar atributes to Laurent:

All the people with whom I’m speaking are telling me that I am comprehensible.

(In reply to a challenge) ,say This is what I am telling.

I am aleady thinking in English.

Hardly a day is passing without that I hear about hear of one such story.

Why? Because French doesn’t have a grammatical present continuous tense like English.  Instead, to express an action happening right now, French typically uses the simple present tense, often with a time phrase like “en ce moment” (at the moment). To strongly emphasize that an action is in progress, they use the phrase “être en train de + infinitive” (to be in the process of + verb). 

In English,the exchange:

Ann: What are you doing? Fred: I’m studying.” is translated in French as: Ann: Que fais-tu? Fred: J’étude.” 

If Fred wanted to stress that he was in the middle of studying he’d say: Je suis en train de étudier.

Everybody I talk to says they understand me would be something like “Toutes les personnes à qui je parle disent qu’elles me comprennent”.

Hardly a day goes by without hearing one of these stories would be something like “Il ne se passe guère un jour sans qu’on n’entende l’une de ces histoires”. 

That’s what I’m saying would be something like “C’est ce que je dis.”

I already think in English woul be somthing like “Je pense déjà en anglais.”

No sign of the present continuous tense! So Dellar’s story simply doesn’t ring true. If Laurent was learning English by translating straight from French, he wouldn’t say what Dellar reports him as saying. I suspect that the errors that Dellar attributes to Laurent are not the result of negative transfer, but rather of Dellar’s scant regard for the truth, French, SLA, and his audience’s knowledge and intelligence.

I’ve been Nicola Prenticed! I unwittingly provoked her, the veil dropped, revealing a more spiteful side to the loveable persona usually on show. “What happened?”, I hear you ask.

Well, I’ve spent some time on Linkedin since I joined last year, and I must say, it’s been a mostly very enjoyable experience. But, a few weeks ago, a bit peeved by all the sales pitches I’d read, I asked why so many people were “super-excited” to announce “game-changing”, “paradigm-shifting”, “mind-blowing” news about products for sale which they insisted just “couldn’t be ignored”. I suggested that it was due to an unfortunate tilt towards money-making, and I asked if this preponderance of over-excited promotional hype was in line with Linkedin’s mission. I carelessly worded my question to everyone like this:  

When I joined Linkedin quite recently, that consummate seller Nicola Prentice quickly suggested that my posts were inappropriate, too academic. I suspect that Nicola’s idea of what Linkedin should be is very different to mine.  How do you see Linkedin? What’s Linkedin for?

Woooops! I’d overstepped the mark, tripped the wire, calling forth the usually well-hidden Noxious Nicola. The reply starts off with the charm and humour one associates with Prentice:

 Super excited indeed to be called a consummate seller, she said. Sales and marketing are skills I’ve only relatively recently learned so to be considered consummate already, well, I blush.

But the blush turns quickly to a snarling sneer, the light, playful prose replaced by this:

I think you actually don’t know what I meant when I said certain commentary styles are not necessary/appropriate on linked in (or anywhere) and that I meant picking people to pieces under the guise of academic debate.

In my original post I made no personal remarks about anybody. And Prentice hadn’t said anything about “certain commentary styles” not being necessary or appropriate on Linkedin; nor had she made any suggestion that I picked innocent people to pieces under the guise of academic debate. So what was all this about? I wrote back, protesting that her criticism was unfounded and challenging her to quote the parts of my post which supported this criticism. She replied:  

you need to know that a lot of people are scared of you, (they’ve told me) scared of coming under fire from you, even have a phrase for it – “being Geoff Jordaned”- and definitely view your style as personal attacks where they might be torn to pieces online. I strongly suggest you get an independent third party to review your posts and comments to see which phrasing and tone is causing that and then, if it’s really truly your intention not to come across that way and not to make people feel afraid, that you write differently. I hope I’ve said this plainly enough because I’ve certainly been too oblique before and you’ve not taken the hint

First, Prentice accuses me of picking people to pieces and now she changes tack and accuses me of deliberately making people afraid. Why would I do that? Pure sadism? Meglomania? Note that the only “evidence” Prentice provides to support her accusations is personal anecdote: “a lot of people” have told her that they’re scared of coming under fire from me. That’s not evidence. For the rest, she relies on bald assertion.My “style” scares people”. I maliciously pick people to pieces in a deliberate attempt to make them feel afraid. I’ve turned a deaf ear to her well-meaning advice and made no effort to change my ways. How does she know all this about my psychological motives? Obviously, she knows nothing about them. What evidence supports these accusations about me? Gossip. What motivates her to make them? Spite.

Prentice ignores the distinction I repeatedly make between personal attacks on people and attacks on the content of published texts. She similarly ignores my repeated claims that I criticise the published work of those in positions of influence and power in ELT who are extremely unlikely to be scared by my criticism. She disregards my request for examples of these serious charges in my Linkedin posts. Rather than make any effort to discuss the issue I raised about the preponderance of sales pitches on Linkedin, she focuses exclusively on a character attack in response to my remarks about her enthusiasm for sales promotion. This smacks to me of a mean spirit, coupled with an arrogant disregard for fair argument.     

As Rasputin was heard to say after they’d poisoned him, shot him and shoved him under the ice “I’m no saint, but this is taking things a bit far”. I’m no saint, but, in contrast to the feigned, faux well-intentioned “advice” from Prentice, my friends and colleagues have told me when I’ve been out of line and there’s plenty of evidence to show that I’ve listened to them. It’s a waste of time, I know, but I repeat my challenge to Prentice: examine the more than 300 texts I’ve posted on Linkedin and find examples of where I pick people to pieces under the guise of academic debate, or make people feel afraid.

 This week there’s a video recording of Prentice on LinkedIn, where she explains why she continues to offer her bargain basement beginners courses in money management for ELT folk, even though she could earn lots more money as a financial advisor. The video begins: “Sometimes people ask me why I don’t train as a financial advisor. I’d certainly make more money and naturally attract high-paying clients”. I can just imagine people sometimes asking her that question; it’s surely indisputable that as a financial advisor she’d naturally attract high-paying clients; and nobody wil be surprised by her answer. The reason Prentice continues with her simple little life is that she’s more interested in helping people than in making big bucks.

So Prentice marches on, her reputation as an honest voice dedicated to the health and prosperity of the ELT community undented. But be warned: if you sign up for one of her “Mind Your Money” courses, be sure to Mind Your Manners. Don’t rub her up the wrong way, don’t trip that wire, because, if you do, instead of her rosy endorsement of your product, or her glowing praise for you as one of the ELT folk who actually does the teaching, you might just get a dose of Noxious Nicola.

In his 2018 article, Li Wei seeks “to develop Translanguaging as a theory of language”. Along the way, he highlights the contributions that Translanguaging makes to debates about the “Language and Thought” and the “Modularity of Mind” hypotheses and tries to bridge “the artificial and ideological divides between the so-called sociocultural and the cognitive approaches to Translanguaging practices.” I’ll summarise the article and then discuss it.

Section 2

After the Introduction, Section 2 outlines the principles which guide his “practical theory of language for Applied Linguistics”. They’re based on Mao’s interpretation of Confucius and Marx’s dialectical materialism. Here are the main points, with short comments:

1 The process of theorization involves a perpetual cycle of practice-theory-practice.

Amen to that.

2 The criterion for assessing rival theories of the same phenomena is “descriptive adequacy”.  The key measures of descriptive adequacy are “richness and depth“.

No definitions of the constructs “richness” or “depth” are offered, no indication is given of how they might be operationalized, and no explanation of this assertion is given.

3 “Accuracy” cannot serve as a criterion for theory assessment: “no one description of an actual practice is necessarily more accurate than another because description is the observer–analyst’s subjective understanding and interpretation of the practice or phenomenon that they are observing“.

No definition is given of the term “accuracy” and no discussion is offered of how theoretical constructs used in practical theory (such as “languaging”, “resemiotization” and “body dynamics”) can be operationalised.

4 Descriptions involve the observer including “all that has been observed, not just selective segments of the data”.

No explanation of how an observer can describe “all that has been observed” is offered. 

5 The main objective of a practical theory is not to offer predictions or solutions but interpretations that can be used to observe, interpret, and understand other practices and phenomena.

No justification for this bizarre assertion is offered.  

6 Questions are formulated on the basis of the description and as part of the observer–analyst’s interpretation process. Since interpretation is experiential and understanding is dialogic, these questions are therefore ideologically and experientially sensitive.

No explanation of what this means is offered.

7 A theory should provide a principled choice between competing interpretations that inform and enhance future practice, and the principles are related to the consequentialities of alternative interpretations.

No explanation of exactly what “principles” are involved is offered, and no indicators for measuring “consequentialties” are mentioned.  

8. An important assessment of the value of a practical theory is the extent to which it can ask new and different questions on both the practice under investigation and other existing theories about the practice. Yes indeed.

Section 3 is headed “The Practice”.

 Li Wei explains that he’s primarily concerned with the language practices of multilingual language users, and goes on to give samples of conversations between multilingual speakers. The analysis of the transcripts is perfunctory and provides little support for the assertion that the speakers are not “mixing languages”, but rather using “New Chinglish” (Li 2016a), which includes

ordinary English utterances being re-appropriated with entirely different meanings for communication between Chinese users of English as well as creations of words and expressions that adhere broadly to the morphological rules of English but with Chinese twists and meanings.

His examples are intended to challenge the “myth of a pure form of a language” and to argue that talking about people having different languages must be replaced by an understanding of a more complex interweaving of languages and language varieties, where boundaries between languages and concepts such as native, foreign, indigenous, minority languages are “constantly reassessed and challenged”.

Section 4 is on Translanguaging

Li Wei starts from Becker’s (1991) notion of Languaging, which suggests that there is no such thing as Language, but rather, only “continual languaging, an activity of human beings in the world “(p. 34). Language should not be regarded ‘as an accomplished fact, but as in the process of being made’ (p. 242). Li Wei also refers to work from ‘ecological psychology’, which seees languaging as ‘an assemblage of diverse material, biological, semiotic and cognitive properties and capacities which languaging agents orchestrate in real-time and across a diversity of timescales’ (Thibault 2017: 82). Such work challenges ‘the code view’ of language, urges us to ‘grant languaging a primacy over what is languaged’, and to see language as ‘a multi-scalar organization of processes that enables the bodily and the situated to interact with situation-transcending cultural-historical dynamics and practices’ (Thibault 2017: 78). The divides between the linguistic, the paralinguistic, and the extralinguistic dimensions of human communication are thus “nonsensical”. So language learning should be viewed not as acquiring language, but rather as a process where novices “adapt their bodies and brains to the languaging activity that surrounds them’, and in doing so, ‘participate in cultural worlds and learn that they can get things done with others in accordance with the culturally promoted norms and values’ (Thibault 2017: 76). Li Wei concludes “For me, language learning is a process of embodied participation and resemiotization (see see also McDermott and Roth 1978; McDermott et al. 1978; Dore and McDermott 1982; and Gallagher and Zahavi 2012)”.

Next, Li Wei explains that he added the Trans prefix to Languaging in order to not only have a term that captures multilingual language users’ fluid and dynamic practices, but also to put forward two further arguments:

1) Multilinguals do not think unilingually in a politically named linguistic entity, even when they are in a ‘monolingual mode’ and producing one namable language only for a specific stretch of speech or text.

2) Human beings think beyond language and thinking requires the use of a variety of cognitive, semiotic, and modal resources of which language in its conventional sense of speech and writing is only one.

The first point refers to Fodor’s (1975) seminal work The Language of Thought. Li Wei offers no summary of Fodor’s “Language of Thought” hypothesis and no discussion of it. So the reader might not know that this language of thought is usually referred to as “Mentalese“, and that very technical, but animated discussions about whether or not Mentalese exists, and if it does, how it works, have been going on for the last 40+ years among philosophers, cognitive scientists and linguists. Without any proper introduction, Li Wei simply states: “there seems to be a confusion between the hypothesis that thinking takes place in a Language of Thought (Fodor 1975) — in other words, thought possesses a language-like or compositional structure — and that we think in the named language we speak. The latter seems more intuitive and commonsensical”. In my opinion, he doesn’t make it clear why the latter view causes a problem, why, that is, “it cannot address the question of how bilingual and multilingual language users think without referencing notions of the L1, ‘native’ or ‘dominant’ language”, and he doesn’t clearly explain how Fodor’s Language of Thought hypothesis solves the problem. All he says is

If we followed the argument that we think in the language we speak, then we think in our own idiolect, not a named language. But the language-of-thought must be independent of these idiolects, and that is the point of Fodor’s theory. We do not think in Arabic, Chinese, English, Russian, or Spanish; we think beyond the artificial boundaries of named languages in the language-of-thought”.

I fail to see how this cursory discussion does anything to support the claim that Translanguaging Theory makes any worthwhile contribution to the debate that has followed Fodor’s Language of thought hypothesis.

As for the second argument, this concerns “the question of what is going on when bilingual and multilingual language users are engaged in multilingual conversations”. Li Wei finds it hard to imagine that they shift their frame of mind so frequently in one conversational episode let alone one utterance. He claims that we do not think in a specific, named language separately, and cites Fodor (1983) to resolve the problem. Li Wei reports Fodor’s Modularity of Mind hypothesis as claiming that the human mind consists of a series of modules which are “encapsulated with distinctive information and for distinct functions”. Language is one of these modules. As Gregg has pointed out to me (see the comment below) “Fodor did not think that the mind is made up of modules; he spent a good deal of time arguing against that idea (see e.g. his “The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way”), the so-called Massive Modularity hypothesis. For Fodor, the mind contains modules; big difference” (my emphases). Worse, Li Wei says that Fodor’s hypothesis “has somehow been understood to mean” something that, in fact, Fodor did not say or imply, namely that “the language and other human cognitive processes are anatomically and/or functionally distinct”. Li Wei does not cite any researcher who somehow came to understand Fodor’s argument about modular mind in that way, but simply asserts that in research design, “the so-called linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive processes” have been assessed separately. He goes on to triumphantly dismantle this obviously erroneous assertion and to claim it as evidence for the usefulness of his theory.

Section 5: Translanguaging Space and Translanguaging Instict

“The act of Translanguaging creates a social space for the language user by bringing to- gether different dimensions of their personal history, experience, and environment; their attitude, belief, and ideology; their cognitive and physical capacity, into one coordinated and meaningful performance  (Li  2011a:  1223)”. This Translanguaging Space has transformative power because “it is forever evolving and combines and generates new identities, values and practices”.  It underscores multilinguals’ creativity, “their abilities to push and break boundaries between named language and between language varieties, and to flout norms of behaviour including linguistic behaviour, and criticality —the ability to use evidence to question, problematize, and articulate views (Li 2011a,b; Li and Zhu 2013)”.

A Translanguaging Space shares elements of the vision of Thirdspace articulated by Soja (1996) as “a space of extraordinary openness, a place of critical exchange where the geographical imagination can be expanded to encompass a multiplicity of perspectives that have heretofore been considered by the epistemological referees to be incompatible and uncombinable”. Soja proposes that it is possible to generate new knowledge and discourses in a Thirdspace. A Translanguaging Space acts as a Thirdspace which does not merely encompass a mixture or hybridity of first and second languages; instead it invigorates languaging with new possibilities from ‘a site of creativity and power’, as bell hooks (1990: 152) says. Going beyond language refers to trans- forming the present, to intervening by reinscribing our human, historical com- monality in the act of Translanguaging” (Li Wei, 2018, p. 24).

As an example of the practical implications of Translanguaging Space, Li Wei cites García and Li’s (2014), vision “where teachers and students can go between and beyond socially constructed language and educational systems, structures and practices to engage diverse multiple meaning-making systems and subjectivities, to generate new configurations of language and education practices, and to challenge and transform old understandings and structures”. Stirring stuff.

Li Wei’s construct of a Translanguaging Instinct (Li 2016b) draws on the arguments for an ‘Interactional Instinct’, a biologically based drive for infants and children to attach, bond, and affiliate with conspecifics in an attempt to become like them (Lee et al. 2009; Joaquin and Schumann 2013).

This natural drive provides neural structures that entrain children acquiring their languages to the faces, voices, and body movements of caregivers. It also determines the relative success of older adolescents and adults in learning additional languages later in life due to the variability of individual aptitude and motivation as well as environmental conditions”.

Le Wei extends this idea in what he calls a Translanguaging Instinct (Li 2016b) “to emphasize the salience of mediated interaction in everyday life in the 21st century, the multisensory and multi- modal process of language learning and language use”. The Translanguaging Instinct drives humans to go beyond narrowly defined linguistic cues and transcend culturally defined language boundaries to achieve effective communication. Li Wei suggests that, pace the Minimalist programme (sic!), a “Principle of Abundance” is in operation in human communication. Human beings draw on as many different sensory, modal, cognitive, and semiotic resources to interpret meaning intentions, and they read these multiple cues in a coordinated manner rather than singularly.

In the meantime, the Translanguaging Instinct highlights the gaps between meaning, what is connected to forms of the language and other signs, and message, what is actually inferred by hearers and readers, and leaves open spaces for all the other cognitive and semiotic systems that interact with linguistic semiosis to come into play (Li Wei, 2018, p. 26).

Li Wei’s discussion of the implications of the idea of the Translanguaging Instinct might have been written by an MA student of psycholinguistics. Below is a summary, mostly consisting of quotes.  

Human beings “rely on different resources differentially during their lives. In first language acquisition, infants naturally draw meaning from a combination of sound, image, and action, and the sound–meaning mapping in word learning crucially involves image and action. The resources needed for literacy acquisition are called upon later”.

“In bilingual first language acquisition, the child additionally learns to associate the target word with a specific context or addressee as well as contexts and addressees where either language is acceptable, giving rise to the possibility of code- switching”.

“In second language acquisition in adolescence and adulthood, some resources become less available, for example resources required for tonal discrimination, while others can be enhanced by experience and become more salient in language learning and use, for example resources required for analysing and comparing syntactic structures and pragmatic functions of specific expressions. As people become more involved in complex communicative tasks and demanding environments, the natural tendency to combine multiple resources drives them to look for more cues and exploit different resources. They will also learn to use different resources for different purposes, resulting in functional differentiation of different linguistic resources (e.g. accent, writing) and between linguistic and other cognitive and semiotic resources. Crucially, the innate capacity to exploit multiple resources will not be diminished over time; in fact it is enhanced with experience. Critical analytic skills are developed in terms of understanding the relationship between the parts (specific sets of skills, such as counting; drawing; singing) and the whole (multi-competence (Cook 1992; Cook and Li 2016) and the capacity for coordination between the skills subsets) to functionally differentiate the different resources required for different tasks“.

One consequence of the Translanguaging perspective on bilingualism and multilingualism research is making the comparison between L1 and L2 acquisition purely in terms of attainment insignificant. Instead, questions should be asked as to what resources are needed, available, and being exploited for specific learning task throughout the lifespan and life course? Why are some resources not available at certain times? What do language users do when some resources become difficult to access? How do language users combine the available resources differentially for specific tasks? In seeking answers to these questions, the multisensory, multimodal, and multilingual nature of human learning and interaction is at the centre of the Translanguaging Instinct idea” (Li Wei, 2018, pp 24-25).

There’s hardly anything I disagree with in all this, apart from the dubious, forced connection made between all this elementary stuff and the “Translangaguing perspective”.

Discussion

So what is the Translanguaging theory of language? Despite endorsing the view that there is no such thing as language, and that the divides between the linguistic, the paralinguistic, and the extralinguistic dimensions of human communication are nonsensical, the theory amounts to the claim that language is a muultilingual, multisemiotic, multisensory, and multimodal resource for sense-and meaning-making.

The appendages about Translanguaging Space and a Translanguaging Instinct have little to do with a theory of language. The first is a blown-up recommendation for promoting language learning outside the classroom, and the second is a claim about language learning itself, to the effect that an innate instinct drives humans to go beyond narrowly defined linguistic cues and transcend culturally defined language boundaries to achieve effective communication. Stripped of its academic obcurantism and the wholly unsatisfactory discussion of Fodor’s Language of Thought and his work on the modularity of mind, both bits of fluff strike me as being as inoffensive as they are unoriginal.  

Theories

What is a theory? I’ve dealt with this in Jordan (2004) and also in many posts. A theory is generally regarded as being an attempt to explain phenomena. Researchers working on a theory use observational data to support and test it. Furthermore, it’s generally recognised that, pace Li Wei, we can’t just observe the world: all observation is “theory-laden”; as Popper (1972) puts it, there’s no way we can talk about something sensed and not interpreted. Even in everyday life we don’t – can’t – just “observe”, and those committed to a scientific approach to language learning recognize that researchers observe guided by a problem they want to solve: research is fundamentally concerned with problem-solving, and it benefits from a clear focus in a well-defined domain. Here’s an example of how this applies to theories of language:  

Chomskian theory claims that, strictly speaking, the mind does not know languages but grammars; ‘the notion “language” itself is derivative and relatively unimportant’ (Chomsky, 1980, p. 126).  “The English Language” or “the French Language” means language as a social phenomenon – a collection of utterances.  What the individual mind knows is not a language in this sense, but a grammar with the parameters set to particular values. Language is another epiphenomenon: the psychological reality is the grammar that a speaker knows, not a language (Cook, 1994: 480).

And here’s Gregg (1996)

… “language” does not refer to a natural kind, and hence does not constitute an object for scientific investigation. The scientific study of language or language acquisition requires the narrowing down of the domain of investigation, a carving of nature at its joints, as Plato put it. From such a perspective, modularity makes eminent sense (Gregg, 1996, p. 1).

 Both Chomsky and Gregg see the need to narrow the domain of any chosen investigation in order to study it more carefully. So they want to go beyond the common-sense view of language as a way of expressing one’s thoughts and feelings (not, most agree, following Fodor, to be confused with thinking itself) and of communicating with others, to a careful description of its core parts and then to an explanation of how we learn them. Now you might disagree, in several ways. You might reject Chomsky’s theory and prefer, for example, Nick Ellis’ usage-based theory (see, for example Ellis, 2002), which embraces the idea of language as a socially constructed epiphenomenon, and claims that it’s learned through social engagement where all sorts of inputs from the environment are processed in the mind by very general learning mechanisms, such as the power law of practice. But Ellis recognises the need to provide some description of what’s learned and I defy most readers to make sense of Ellis’ ongoing efforts to describe a “construction grammar”.  Or you might take a more bottom-up research stance and decide to just feel your way – observe some particular behaviour, turning over and developing ideas and move slowly up to a generalization. But even then, you need SOME idea of what you’re looking for. Gregg (1993) gives a typically eloquent discussion of the futility of attempts to base research on “observation”.    

Or you might, like Li Wei, adopt the following strategy:

1. Skip the tiresome step of offering a coherent definition of the key theoretical construct and content yourself with the repeated vague assertion that language is “a resource for sense-and meaning-making”,

2. Rely on the accepted way of talking about parts of language by those you accuse of reducing language to a code,

3. Focus on attacking the political naming of languages, re-hashing obviously erroneous views about L1s, l2s, etc. and developing the view that language is a muultilingual, multisemiotic, multisensory, and multimodal resource.

 If so, you abandon any serious attempt at theory construction, resort to a string of assertions dressed up in academic clothes and call it a “theory of practice”. Even then, Li Wei doesn’t actually say what he takes a theory of practice to be. He equates theory construction with “knowledge construction”, without saying what he means by “knowledge”. Popper (1972) adopts a realist epistemology and explains what he means by “objective knowledge” (accepting that all observation is theory-laden). In contrast, we have to infer what Li Wei means by knowledge through the reason he gives for dismissing “accuracy” as a criterion for theory assessment, viz., as already quoted above, “no one description of an actual practice is necessarily more accurate than another because description is the observer–analyst’s subjective understanding and interpretation of the practice or phenomenon that they are observing”. This amounts to a relativist epistemology where objective knowledge is jettisoned and “descriptive adequacy” replaces it, to be measured by “richness and depth”, which are nowhere defined.

How do we measure the richness and depth of competing “descriptions”? For example we have (1) Li Wei’s descriptions of conversational exchanges among his research participants, and (2) Schmidt and Frota’s (1986) description of an adult learner of Portuguese. The two descriptions of the learners’ utterances serve different purposes, they don’t amount to competing arguments, but how do we assess the descriptions and the analyses? How about: “I prefer (2) because the description of the weather outside was richer”. Are these two “descriptions” not better assessed by criteria such as their coherence and their success in supporting the hypothesis that informs their observations? Schmidt and Frota are addressing a problem about what separates input from intake (the hypothesis being that “noticing” is required), while Li Wei is addressing the problem of how we interpret code-switching, and his hypothsis is that it’s not a matter of calling on separately stored knowledge about 2 rigidly different named languages. Is Li Wei seriously suggesting that different subjective accounts of the observations of language practice by different observers is best assessed by undefined notions of richness and depth?

The poverty of Li Wei’s criteria for assessing a “practical theory” is compounded by his absurd claim that researchers who act as observers must describe “all that has been observed, not just selective segments of the data”. “All that has been observed”? Really?   

But wait a minute! There’s another criterion! “A theory should provide a principled choice between competing interpretations that inform and enhance future practice, and the principles are related to the consequentialities of alternative interpretations”. As noted, we’re not told what the “principles” are, and no indicators for measuring “consequentialties” are mentioned. Still, it’s more promising that the other criteria. And, of course, it’s taken from a well-respected criterion used by scientists anchored in a realist epistemology: ceteris paribus, the more a theory leads to the practical solution of problems, the better it is.   

There are things we can agree on. ELT practice should recognise that teaching is informed by the monolingual fallacy, the native speaker fallacy and the subtractive fallacy (Phillipson, 2018).  The ways in which English is privileged in education systems is a disgrace, and policies that strengthen linguistic diversity are needed to counteract linguistic imperialism.

References

Cook, V. J. (1993). Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition.  Macmillan.

Ellis, N. (2002). Frequency effects in language processing: A Review with Implications for Theories of Implicit and Explicit Language Acquisition. Studies in SLA, 24,2, 143-188.

Gregg, K.R. (1993). Taking Explanation seriously; or, let a couple of flowers bloom. Applied Linguistics 14, 3, 276-294.

Gregg, K. R. (2004). Explanatory Adequacy and Theories of Second Language Acquisition. Applied Linguistics 25, 4, 538-542.

Jordan, G. (2004). Theory Construction in SLA. Benjamins.

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

Phillipson, R. (2018) Linguistic Imperialism. Downloadable from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/31837620_Linguistic_Imperialism_

Popper, K. R. (1972). Objective Knowledge.  Oxford University Press.

Schmidt, R., & Frota, S. (1986). Developing basic conversational ability in a second language: A case study of an adult learner. In R. Day (Ed.), Talking to learn: Conversation in second language acquisition (pp. 237-369). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

See Li Wei (2018) for the other references.

Introduction

Currently, Marek Kiczkowiak runs TEFL Equity Advocates, the TEFL Equity Academy and Academic English Now, but there are hints of even greater ventures in the pipeline. In a recent video (3 Lessons From Making $70k A Month Teaching English Online), Kiczkowiak boasts of making $70,000 a month from Academic English Now, and announces that he’s ready to share the secrets of his success with teachers everywhere so that they can “start and grow a wildly profitable ELT business that makes you at least $30,000 a month”. (Just by the way, I urge you to watch the “3 lessons” video. It’s a masterclass in slick promotion and the expertese on show contrasts dramatically with the quality of Kiczkowiak’s academic work.) Well, if he himself can make $70,000 a month income, doesn’t that show he’s the man to help EFL teachers make $30,000 a month? Well of course it does. Just phone him for a friendly chat and sign the contract; it’s as simple as that.

Or is it? There are, I think, a few doubts about this rapidly-expanding business endeavour, fuelled by Kiczkowiak’s “one trick pony” academic credentials and his business practices.

History

Kiczkowiak became well-known in ELT circles in 2016 when he gave a presentation at the IATEFL conference calling out employers who used a “Native Speakers Only” policy. He set up a web site called TEFL Equity Advocates to fight the cause of NNESTs, which quickly gained a large following. By the end of the year, promotional material for training courses at his TEFL Equity Academy were being displayed on the front page of his TEFL Equity Advocates web site. I pointed out this conflict of interests on my blog, arguing that Kiczkowiak had developed a powerful brand to promote the cause of fighting discrimination against NNESTs and subsequently used that brand name to promote his own private commercial interests. Kiczkowiak hotly denied the “accusations”, but as Russell Crew-Gee pointed out in the “Comments” section, “the Equity Academy is clearly present as a link on the front page of the TEFL Equity Advocates web page. Hence, Geoff’s premise that the Academy is being promoted directly by the Equity Advocacy website is undeniable, a Factual Reality”.

After making a few changes to his website, Kiczkowiak continued to use the TEFL Equity Advocates brand to promote his own commercial, teacher training courses. I reckon that the goodwill created by the TEFL Equity Advocacy activities definitely benefited Kiczkowiak’s private commercial interests, and his inability to accept this fact makes me question his business ethics.

Metamorphosis

From 2016 on, Kiczkowiak continued to champion both his cause and his courses, but he also did a PhD and published articles in an assortment of journals. Soon, a new persona emerged: Marek Kiczkowiak, the Widely-Puublished-Whiz-Kid-Academic, ready and able to help aspiring academics write dazzling PhD theses and academic articles in not much more time than it takes to transfer a few thousand dollars from your account to his. 

Apart from his PhD (two a penny these days, eh?), what are Kiczkowiak’s credentials? I looked on Google Scholar and found these (the 2 columns on the right give citations and year of publication):  

Native-speakerism and the complexity of personal experience: A duoethnographic study RJ Lowe, M Kiczkowiak Cogent Education 3 (1), 1264171	111	2016
Teaching English as a lingua franca: The journey from EFL to ELF M Kiczkowiak, RJ Lowe(No Title)	63	2018
Seven principles for writing materials for English as a lingua franca M Kiczkowiak ELT Journal 74 (1), 1-9	27	2020
Using awareness raising activities on initial teacher training courses to tackle ‘native-speakerism’ M Kiczkowiak, D Baines, K Krummenacher English Language Teacher Education and Development Journal 19, 45-53	26	2016
Recruiters’ Attitudes to Hiring’Native’and’Non-Native Speaker’Teachers: An International Survey. M Kiczkowiak TESL-EJ 24 (1), n1	24	2020
Students’, teachers’ and recruiters’ perception of teaching effectiveness and the importance of nativeness in ELT M Kiczkowiak Journal of Second Language Teaching & Research 7 (1), 1-25	21	2019
Native-speakerism in English language teaching:‘native speakers’ more likely to be invited as conference plenary speakers M Kiczkowiak, RJ Lowe Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1-16	18	2021
1 CONFRONTING NATIVE SPEAKERISM IN THE ELT CLASSROOM: PRACTICAL AWARENESS-RAISING ACTIVITIES M Kiczkowiak The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL 6 (1), 5-27	18	2017
Native English-speaking teachers: always the right choice M Kiczkowiak British Council Voices Magazine	16	2014
Native speakerism in English language teaching: Voices from Poland M Kiczkowiak University of York	14	2018
Discrimination and discriminatory practices against NNESTs M Kiczkowiak, A Wu The TESOL encyclopedia of English language teaching, 1-7	12	2018
Pronunciation in course books: English as a lingua franca perspectiveM Kiczkowiak ELT Journal 75 (1), 55-66	11	2021
Native speakers only M Kiczkowiak IATEFL Voices 2 (243), 8-9	8	2015
Are most ELT course book writers white ‘native speakers’? A survey of 28 general English course books for adults M Kiczkowiak Language Teaching Research, 13621688221123273	4	2022
Tackling native-speakerism through ELF-aware pedagogy RJ Lowe, M Kiczkowiak World Englishes: Pedagogies 3, 143-156

I’ve rarely seen a list that more strongly indicates a “one trick pony”, a term used in academia to describe a member of staff with an unacceptably narrow range. These days, nobody expects any Leornado de Vinci-like polymaths to fight for one of the diminishing number of tenured postions available in university departments, but nevertheless, there are quite high standards to meet, and Kiczkowiak’s publications just don’t meet them. The one topic he writes about is not just extremely limited, it’s contentious. ”Native speakerism” is the overtly political, obscurantist construct of A. Holliday, a blustering scholar who talks nonsense with all the conviction of a relgious zealot.

A further doubt about Dr. Kiczkowiak arises from an inspection of where his articles were published. IATEFL Voices, University of York, Teacher Education and Development Journal, British Council Voices Magazine, TESL-EJ, and a short entry to an encyclopedia are hardly the journals where all the best academics seek to get published.

Then there’s the content. Native-speakerism and the complexity of personal experience: A duoethnographic study by RJ Lowe and M Kiczkowiak, consists of conversations between the two authors about being native or non-native speaker teachers of English – Lowe’s the NEST and Kiczkowiak is the NNEST. Data from the duoethnographic study (or “chats” as they’re called in plain English) indicate “that the effects of native-speakerism can vary greatly from person to person based on not only their “native” or “non-native” positioning, but also on geography, teaching context and personal disposition”. Who knew!

The article begins:

“Native-speakerism is a term coined and described by Holliday (2003, 2005, 2006), which is used to refer to a widespread ideology in the English Language Teaching (ELT) profession whereby those perceived as “native speakers” of English are considered to be better language models and to embody a superior Western teaching methodology than those perceived as “non-native speakers”. This ideology makes extensive use of an “us” and “them” dichotomy where “non-native speaker” teachers and students are seen as culturally inferior and in need of training in the “correct” Western methods of learning and teaching. Native-speakerism also makes extensive use of what Holliday (2005) calls “cultural disbelief” (see also Holliday, 2013, 2015); a fundamental doubt that “non-native speakers” can make any meaningful contributions to ELT.

Holliday’s initial description of native-speakerism as an ideology that benefits “native speakers” to the detriment of “non-native speakers” has been recently criticised by Houghton and Rivers, who, in their edited volume (Houghton & Rivers (2013) show that “native speakers” can also be affected negatively by the ideology. Consequently, native-speakerism can now be understood as an ideology which, while privileging the knowledge and voices of Western ELT institutions, uses biases and stereotypes to classify people (typically language teachers) as superior or inferior based on their perceived belonging or lack of belonging to the “native speaker” group (Holliday, 2015); Houghton & Rivers, 2013)”.

Now let’s see how the article Confronting Native Speakerism …, written a year later, begins:

“‘Native speakerism’ is a term coined by Holliday (2005, 2006) by which he referred to the belief that the ideals of English Language Teaching (ELT) methodology and practice originate in Western culture, which in turn is embodied by a ‘native speaker’ of English, who is deemed the ideal teacher. Houghton and Rivers (2013, p. 14) reconceptualise this definition to show that both ‘native’ and ‘non-native speakers’ can be negatively impacted by native-speakerism, which is now understood as: a prejudice, stereotyping and/or discrimination, typically by or against foreign language teachers, on the basis of either being or not being perceived and categorized as a native speaker of a particular language. (…) Its endorsement positions individuals from certain language groups as being innately superior to individuals of other language groups”. Do you spot any similarities?

Next, the “article” Teaching English as a lingua franca: The journey from EFL to ELF . Oh, it’s not actually an article published in an academic journal, it’s an extract from a book.

Seven principles for writing materials for English as a lingua franca is a short piece for the ELTJ which gives advice to materials writers such as “use authentic E(LF)nglish rather than ‘native speaker’ corpora” and “use Multilingual E(LF) rather than monolingual ‘native speaker’ language”. The claim is that these “principles” should help to cancel the contribution current coursebooks make to “the entrenchment of what Holliday (2005) has referred to as the ideology of native speakerism”.

Using awareness raising activities on initial teacher training courses to tackle ‘native-speakerism’ begins “Native Speakerism is a term coined by Holliday (2005, 2006) which refers to the belief that the Native English Speaker (NES) is the embodiment of the values and ideals of English Language Teaching (ELT) pedagogy and knowledge”.

Recruiters’ Attitudes to Hiring ‘Native’ and ‘Non-Native Speaker’ Teachers: An International Survey is the only article that has merit, in my opinion. The survey is competently designed and implemented and its findings are clearly and honestly set out.

You’ll have to take my word for it when I say that the rest of the articles are further variations on the same theme, and allow me to deal with just one more: the 2021 article by Kiczkowiak and Lowe, “Native-speakerism in English language teaching: ‘Native speakers’ more likely to be invited as conference plenary speakers”. This is one of the very few Kiczkowiak texts that actually discusses what the terms “native speaker” and “non-native speaker” refer to. The authors begin by explaining why they diasagree with the concepts of ‘native speaker’ and ‘non-native speaker’. These terms have been used in SLA research as “neutral scientific labels” primarily based on early exposure to the language, but Kiczkowiak and Lowe prefer to see them as “social and political constructs”, which “arose in the context of city states attempting to consolidate their power and develop ideas of shared identity among the citizenry (Hackert 2012; Train 2009)”.

The authors then settle into their favorite territory: Holliday land. Any use of the terms NS and NNS labels is “ideological, chauvinistic and divisive” and the continuous use of the labels “routinises and normalises them (Holliday 2013, 2018)”. The authors go on to explain that, despite their enthusiastic endorsement of Holliday’s views, they feel forced to use the terms native speaker and non-native speaker in their analysis, but to partially cover their embarrassment, they follow Holliday (2005) by placing the terms in inverted commas to remind themselves and their readers “of their ideological and subjective nature”. Having apologised for the brevity of their review, the authors move to a report of their study, which found that “out of a total of 416 plenaries, only 25 per cent were given by ‘non-native speakers’ and 0.06 per cent by speakers of colour”.

The discussion of “native speakerism” in the article is entirely inadequate and the poor standard of academic discussion evdent here extends to, indeed pervades, all of Kiczkowiak’s articles. In this article, as in so many others, the authors simply assert this that and the other about the terms native speaker and non-native speaker and the construct of native speakerism without going to the trouble of describing or engaging in any critical evaluation of other views. Below is a quick sketch of one such view.

Native speakerness is a psychological reality.

In the domain of SLA research, native speakers of language X are people for whom language X is the language they learnt through primary socialization in early childhood, as a first language. To paraphrase Long (2007, 2015), the psychological reality of native speakerness is easily demonstrated by the fact that we know one, and who isn’t one, when we meet them, often on the basis of just a few utterances. When English native speakers are presented with recorded stretches of speech by a large pool of NSs and NNSs and asked to say which are which, they distinguish between them with reliability typically well above .9. How do they do this, and why is there so much agreement if, according to Holliday, there’s no such thing as a NS?

For the last 70 years, the term “native speaker” has been used in SLA studies to investigate the failure of the vast majority of post adolescent L2 learners to achieve what Birdsong refers to as “native like attainment”. “On the prevailing view of ultimate attainment in second language acquisition, with few exceptions, native competence cannot be achieved by post pubertal learners “(Birdsong 1992).

The specific claim that very few post adolescent L2 learners attain native like proficiency is supported by a great deal of empirical evidence (see, e.g., reviews by Long 2007, Harley and Wang 1995; Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson 2003). When trying to explain why most L2 learners don’t attain native competence, scholars have investigated various “sensitive periods”. Long (2007) argues that the issue of age differences is fundamental for SLA theory construction. If the evidence from sensitive periods shows that adults are inferior learners because they are qualitatively different from children, then this could provide an explanation for the failure of the vast majority of post adolescent L2 learners to achieve Birdsong’s “native like attainment”. On the other hand, if we want to propose the same theory for child and adult language acquisition, then we’ll have to account for the differences in outcome some other way; for example, by claiming that the same knowledge and abilities produce inferior results due to different initial states in L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition. Either way, the importance of the existence (or not) of sensitive periods for those scholars trying to explain the psychological process of SLA suggests the usefulness of using the native speaker as a measure of the proficiency of adult L2 learners.

Most importantly, using the NS and NNS terms does not, pace Kiczkowiak, entail assuming that native speakers of English are better language models or better teachers than non-native speakers.

Assertions don’t make an argument

Kiczkowiak cites the work of scholars who argue against the view outlined above, including some, like Vivian Cook, who do it very persuasively. The trouble is that Kiczkowiak doesn’t bother to lay out the argument made by these scholars; he simply states their assertions as if their persuasiveness spoke for itself. In the Kiczkowiak and Lowe (2021) article, work by Dewaele, Bak, and Ortega (2021); Hackert (2012); Train (2009); Aboshiha (2015); Amin (1997); Kubota and Fujimoto (2013) Ruecker and Ives (2015); Rampton (1990); Paikeday (1985); Cook (2001); Jenkins (2015); Dewaele (2018); and others are cited, but no attempt is made to present or critically discuss their views. Thus Kiczkowiak makes the elementary mistake made by inexperienced postgrad students: he cites scholars’ assertions as if doing so automatically lends support to his own argument. In any case, the paper, like all the others, is hampered by having to start from Holliday’s assumption that the key terms under discussion don’t actually exist.

Holliday’s “racist native speakerism” and “essentialism”

The most frequently cited source in all Kiczkowiak’s articles about native speakerism is, of course Holliday. As we’ve seen, Kiczkowiak begins quite a few of his articles by giving a summary of Holliday’s construct of native speakerism, a construct which Kiczkowiak never attempts to evaluate, presumeably because he’s so thoroughly convinced of its truth, including Holliday’s assertion that using the acronyms NS and NNS is clear evidence of racism.

In a post on his blog, Holliday says that “In academia the established use of ‘native speaker’ as a sociolinguistic category comes from particular paradigmatic discourses of science and is not fixed beyond critical scrutiny”. This is the kind of bunkum that so often goes unchalleged these days and bad scholars like Kiczkowiak actually emulate such incoherent claims. What does the phrase “particular paradigmatic discourses of science” refer to? Scientific method, that’s what. Holliday asserts that adopting a realist epistemology, and carrying out quantitative research by testing well-articulated hypotheses with empirical evidence and logical argument is part of a “mistaken paradigm”. When one compares the results of adopting this paradigm (visit the Science Museum in South Kensington or browse their website) with the results of adopting Holliday’s approach to research (I don’t know of any important results), one quickly appreciates the proposterousness of that claim. Anyway, since in the field of SLA research there isn’t – and never has been – any general theory of SLA with paradigm status, talk of paradigms (like talk of “imagined objective ‘science’” and labels placed in inverted commas that refer to things that “do not actually exist at all”) belongs only to the topsy-turvy world of post-modern sociology.

Holliday asserts that when we refer to people as ‘non-native speakers’, we imply that they are “culturally deficient”, and that this amounts to “deep and unrecognised racism”. Referring to people as non-native speakers  “defines, confines and reduces” them by referring to their culture in a way that evokes “images of deficiency or superiority – divisive associations with competence, knowledge and race – who can, who can’t, and what sort of people they are”. These sweeping assertions are “supported” by Holliday’s construct of essentialism. At a minor conference held somewhere in England in 2019, Holliday explained:

Essentialism is to do with ‘Us-Them’ discourse. ‘They’ are essentially different to ‘Us’ because of their culture…… There’s no way we can be the same. There’s something absolutely separate about us and them. ……. Culture then becomes a euphemism for race. It’s essentially racist to imagine a group here and a group there who are essentially different to each other. That is the root of racism…….. Any group who is put over there and defined as being different to you, that is the basis of racism. …………… Grand narratives define “us” and “them” by fixity and division. We are different to those people, we have to be in order to survive. .. You brand your nation as being different to those people, in a superior or inferior way.

As evidence for his thesis, Holliday gives the example of a Chinese student who told him he’d turned down a fantastic job in Mexico “because Mexico is not as good as Britain”. Holliday explains: He had a hierarchy in his head. I challenge everybody in this room …. We all position ourselves …There’s no such thing as talking about culture in a neutral way; we just cannot. Everybody is positioning themselves in a hierarchy.

In another meaning-drenched anecdote, Holliday recalls the time he was in Istanbul interviewing colleagues. “We were sitting right on the Bosphorus. And everything that was East was inferior, and everything that was West was superior. This came out, very very clear; very very clear. Even inside Turkey”. The obvious question to ask is: How does Holliday know all this stuff about what people are thinking? How did he know that his Chinese student had a hierarchy in his head, or that his companions in Istanbul made the “essentialist statement” that “‘They’ are essentially different to ‘Us’”? Why should we believe for a second that Holliday has somehow correctly read people’s minds?

Lets suppose we ask a group of scientists, born and raised in France, who all adopt a realist epistemology and carry out quantitative research, to watch a documentary about life in Beijing where the locals are shown working and playing and doing the everyday things they do. Regardless of what they might say, Holliday will insist that the scientists’ “positivist ideology” will make them all think, consciously or not: “Those people are essentially different to us. There’s no way we can be the same. There’s something absolutely separate about us and them”. Holliday will also insist that they’re all racists. If the scientists deny these charges, Holliday will take the approved line of the critical social justice brigade and say they’re blind to their racism. They can’t help themselves: they can’t escape their cultural influences and the consequences of their “positivist ideology”.

In short, “postivists” are bad people. The good people are epistemological relativists like Holliday, those who rely on the interpretation of subjective experiences and who reject the scientific, “positivist paradigm”. To be clear: Holliday’s commitment to a qualitative, ethnographic methodology and to a constructivist, relativist epistemology amounts to abandoning reason. Having done so, Holliday is free to harangue people in his zealous pursuit of racists and all the other bad people whose ideologies he finds so offensive. Holliday limits the scope of his descriptions to a single, preferred interpretation which is not just partial, but also ideologically blinkered. It’s scary.

Kiczkowiak The Scholar

Kiczkowiak leans on Holliday. Holliday’s views provide the theoretical underpinning for Kiczkowiak’s rants against “native speakerism”. Search Kiczkowiak’s narrow little oevre and you’ll find no trace of originality, or valuable insights, or critical acumen, or any appreciation for what academic work is really about. When attempting to deal with other scholar’s work, Kiczkowiak conflates the work of scholars who have little in common, failing to acknowledge the very different views of V. Cook , Holliday and Widdowson, for example, or the important differences between the group that comprises critical applied linguists, including Phillipson, Pennycock, Canagarajah, and Edge. More generally he fails to differentiate between those academics who oppose discrimination against NNESTs (just about everybody) and those who belong to the critical social justice movement, whose views Kiczkowiak manages to simultaneously applaud and misrepresent. In short, Kiczkowiak’s oeuvre gives scant cause for trusting his judgements or advice on writing academic texts.

Current Situation

Kiczkowiak has morphed from teacher, NNEST crusader and teacher trainer in 2016 to CEO of Academic English Now in 2023. Currently, he’s charging “hundreds of students” $1,800 a month for his services and he’s very keen to“grow the business” as they say. My advice to all his potential clients is to look carefully at his credentials, his record and his products before handing over a cent. Read the form below carefully and get detailed information about “What you’re getting” (bottom right).   

• What exactly does the “training program” consist of?
• What are “Group coaching calls”?
• How many attend?
• How long are they?
• What’s the “Private support community”?
• What does the feedback consist of?
• What happens if I’m not satisfied?

An Unsatisfied Customer

I wrote to the person concerned, but I haven’t had a reply, so I won’t name her. I saw her correspondence with Kiczkowiak by going to his profile and looking at “Comments”.

Ms J., as I’ll call her, questions “the integrity of the program” and Kiczkowiak’s “true intentions”. She suggests that the program and the refund policy may prioritize financial gain over the well-being and satisfaction of clients.

In an open letter to Researchers and PhD candidates, Ms. J. shares her personal experience and provides a warning to those considering the PhD Accelerator Program offered by Kiczkowiak and his team. Ms. J says she joined the program out of desperation, without the chance to see any independent reviews which might have “revealed the truth about its actual value and efficacy”. She found the program’s claims of personalized action plans, tailored mentorship, and comprehensive support to be “misleading”, and she felt that the program failed to deliver on its promises, instead preying on the vulnerability and desperation of PhD students. She considers the cost of $2,400 to be “exorbitant” far outweighing the actual value provided, and warns about the difficulties of getting a refund: “the refund policy is designed to protect the program’s financial interests rather than prioritize client satisfaction”.

I understand that there was an exchange of comments between Miss J. and staff of Kiczkowiak’s “Academy”, including this from the boss himself:

Dear ……,

our refund policies are clearly stated on the website: https://academicenglishnow.com/terms-and-conditions The link to the terms is also available on the checkout page, and before purchasing, you have to click that you have read and agreed to the terms. The refund policy is also clearly stated on the right hand side (see the screenshot). Plus, you’re not really coerced to do anything. You can decide whether you want to enrol or not yourself. As I mentioned in my previous emails, we do not issue refunds that do not fit our refund policy, which is clearly disclosed. You also mentioned several times that the mentorship offered on the program was not up to standard. However, it’s important to point out here that you didn’t engage with your coach despite follow-ups from her.

Conclusion

Marek Kiczkowiak brags about selling “hundreds” of PhD candidates products that cost $1,800 a month. Not content with his current $70,000 a month income, he wants to attract a wider customer base, inviting EFL teachers everywhere to pay him a modest few thousand dollars so that he can lead them out of penury towards an annual income of $360,000! Wow! Can you believe it? I, for one, most certainly cannot.

TBLT: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

The fifth run of our online TBLT course starts on 24^th January 2024 and subscription is now open! Our last course was the busiest and best so far and we aim to top it in 2024. It’s a 100-hour, online tutored course aimed at

• classroom teachersurse designers,
• teacher-trainers,
• directors of studies and
• materials writers,

all of whom have an interest in upgrading their knowledge of this evidence-backed communicative approach with an eye to designing and implementing dynamic language courses based on relevant and engaging tasks.

The popularity of TBLT as an approach to language teaching is a response to a growing dissatisfaction among EFL professionals with current ELT practice. As convenient as coursebook-driven courses might be, they frequently fail to deliver the improvement that students hope for. TBLT focuses on meaning-making and engagement with real-world language needs; the courses give experienced teachers fresh opportunities to re-engage with their practice, they offer new teachers a more challenging, much more rewarding framework for their work, and they allow students to learn through scaffolded use of the language (learning by doing), which, as we know from evidence from research, is the best way to learn an L2.

The vibrancy of TBLT is evidenced by animated discussions on social media, by increasing presentations at conferences (including the biennial International Conference on TBLT), by the recently-formed International Association of TBLT (IATBLT), and by the wave of new publications, including thousands of journal articles, special issues in prominent journals, and the new journal specifically dedicated to the topic, TASK: Journal on Task-Based Language Teaching and Learning, the first volume of which appeared in 2021.

The Course

Our SLB course tries to “walk the talk” by working through a series of tasks relating to key aspects of TBLT, from needs analysis through syllabus and material design to classroom delivery and assessment. While we are influenced by Long’s particular version of TBLT, we also explore lighter, more feasible versions of TBLT which can be adopted by smaller schools or individual teachers working with groups with specific needs.

 

Neil McMillan (president of SLF) and myself (both experienced teachers with PhDs) do most of the tutoring, but we are privileged to be assisted by

Roger Gilabert: An expert on TBLT, Roger worked with Mike Long on several projects and has developed a TBLT course for Catalan journalists. His contributions to our four previous courses have been extremely highly rated by participants.

Marta González-Lloret: Marta did her PhD with Mike Long at the University of Hawai’i, is currently book series co-editor of Task-Based Language Teaching. Issues, Research and Practice, Benjamins, and is especially interested in using technology-mediated tasks. Marta has worked with Neil to strengthen Modules 3 & 4 and in this course; she will again give presentations, participate in a videoconferernce, and in the forums. As with Roger, she is a favorite with our participants.

The Modules

The whole course takes 100 hours and consists of five modules. You can choose individual modules or the whole course. If you choose to do one or two individual modules, you’ll have the chance to do further modules in later courses to achieve complete certification.

The 5 modules are:

• Presenting TBLT
• Designing a TBLT Needs Analysis
• Designing a task-based pedagogic unit
• Task-Based Materials:
• Facilitating and evaluating tasks

Each module consists of:

• Background reading.
• A video presentation from the session tutor and/or guest tutors.
• Interactive exercises to explore key concepts.
• An on-going forum discussion with the tutors, guest tutors and fellow course participants.
• An extensive group videoconference session with the tutors and/or guest tutors.
• An assessed task (e.g. short essay, presentation, task analysis etc.).

The key text is Mike Long’s 2015 classic “SLA and Task-Based Language Teaching”. We are greatly indebted to Mike for his help and guidance, and in this course we’ll look closely at his strong version of TBLT, his materials, his ideas about “modified, elaborated texts”, and videos of presentations and videoconferences he made in previous courses.

More Flexible approach to TBLT

Thanks to the truly impressive work of the participants in the four previous courses, we’ve learned a lot about the problems of implementing a full version of Long’s TBLT, and we now better appreciate the need for a flexible case-by-case approach to the design and implementation of any TBLT project.

In the third  and fourth courses, Neil’s careful re-organisation and tweaking of the moules made it increasingly possible for each participant to slowly develop their own TBLT agenda, working on identifying their own target tasks, breaking these down into relevant pedagogic tasks, finding suitable materials, and bringing all this together using the most appropriate pedagogic procedures.

Another gratifying aspect of all the courses is the way participants learn from each other; most of the individual participant’s TBLT models contain common elements which were slowly forged from the forum discussions.

So in this course, we’ll make even more effort to ensure that each participant works in accord with their own teaching context, and at the same time contributes to the pooled knowledge and expertise of the group.

Sneak Preview

To get more information about the course, and try out a “taster” CLICK HERE

Nothing in 2023 compares to Israel’s response to the Hamas-led attack of October 7^th. As of today, according to Euro-Med Monitor, 85% of the population of Gaza (2,2 million) have been displaced, and the total number of Palestinian deaths in the Gaza Strip since 7 October is 21,731, including 8,697 children and 4,410 women as well as those missing and trapped under the rubble who are now presumed dead. Israel has increased the shocking extent of its targeting of civilians since the humanitarian truce collapsed, intensifying its complete destruction of residential areas and targeting schools that house thousands of displaced individuals in an apparent effort to increase the number of civilian victims. On a never-before-seen scale, Israel’s extensive bombing campaign has targeted both displaced civilians and civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, UN-run schools, mosques, churches, bakeries, water tanks, and even ambulances. On average, one child is killed and two are injured every 10 minutes during the war, turning Gaza into a “graveyard for children,” according to the UN Secretary-General. Almost 200 medics, 102 UN staff, 41 journalists, frontline and human rights defenders, have also been killed, while dozens of families over five generations have been wiped out.

“This occurs amidst Israel’s tightening of its 16-year unlawful blockade of Gaza, which has prevented people from escaping and left them without food, water, medicine and fuel for weeks now, despite international appeals to provide access for critical humanitarian aid. As we previously said, intentional starvation amounts to a war crime,” a team of UN experts wrote in a recent communique. They noted that half of the civilian infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed, as well as hospitals, schools, mosques, bakeries, water pipes, sewage and electricity networks, in a way that threatens to make the continuation of Palestinian life in Gaza impossible. “The reality in Gaza, with its unbearable pain and trauma on the survivors, is a catastrophe of enormous proportions,” the experts said.

We must keep pressing for an immediate ceasefire and humanitarian aid. While the Gaza genocide continues, it feels trivial to discuss what’s happened this year in ELT, but here’s my personal take on how the year’s gone.

Evan Frendo: “English for the Workplace”

For me, the best event of 2023 was Evan Frendo’s Plenary, “English for the Workplace” at the IATEFL, 2023 conference. I did a post on it, based on Sandy Millin’s excellent notes (click the highlighted text above to see the post, which includes the video recording of Frendo’s talk), where I suggested that Frendo’s approach to ELT is revolutionary.

One of Frendo’s jobs is to help those who work in Vessel traffic service – the water equivalent of air traffic control. He used this example of “English for the workplace” to describe how he addressed the English needs of workers. What’s so revolutionary is that Frendo – and many of his colleagues – reject just about everything that typifies current ELT practice, at least as represented by IATEFL.

In Frendo’s world of “English for the Workplace”, they focus on “doing things in English”. Getting high marks in tests like IELTS has no place here, and neither do coursebooks. Standard English is replaced in practice by BELF: English as a business language Franca. As Frendo said:

“Conformity with standard English is seen as a fairly irrelevant concept. …. I don’t actually care whether something is correct or incorrect. As long as the meaning is not distorted. …  BELF is perceived as an enabling resource to get the work done. Since it is highly context-bound and situation-specific, it is a moving target defying detailed linguistic description.”

Furthermore, the current CEFR idea of proficiency is challenged. In VTS communication, assessment is carried out by a team consisting of:

• English teacher
• Experienced VTS operator – say whether they’ve done the right thing
• Legal expert- all conversations are recorded, but they can have legal implications

The test criterion is: Can the worker do the job? This chimes perfectly with what we, the advocates of TBLT, suggest.

Here’s the final slide:

Please have a look at my post and click the link to watch Frendo’s extremely well delivered plenary.  It’s fantastic and it speaks of the future! 

I see that Evan Frendo is a plenary speaker at TESOL Spain’s 2004 conference in March, 2024. As with IATEFL, I can’t believe that the TESOL organisation, which is so dominated by commercial interests, is giving the big stage to this eloquent critic of TESOL’s view of ELT. Never mind – let’s hear it for Evan!

ChatGPT (“generative, pre-trained transformer”)

The best laugh I had about all this was with Neil McMillan when he told me at a jolly restaurant dinner about his run-in with ChatGPT4 (he was probably using ChatGPX11Iaqz or something else I know nothing about) over a game of chess. Neil quickly reduced his opponent to gibbering apologies. “You said you knew the Scillian Defence”, says Neil after ChatGPT, playing White, made a beginner-like blunder. “I obviously have much to learn” says the robot. Three moves later Neil says “Now you’re in a right mess; it’s mate in two.” His opponent blurts out more apologies doing a good imitation of a cringing fraudster: “I do not have enough information; this is unlike the model …..”, and all that.  

It’s still relatively easy to make a fool of any program that claims to understand the input they’re given, but obviously, AI is getting better very fast, and it’s going to have a big effect on how we do “education”. There are lots of ways this will play out, but let’s remind ourselves that in language learning, AI is up against one of its toughest problems, because language learning is uniquely complex. This raises the, for me anyway, still unresolved question of whether language learning is a process which is bootstrapped by a particular innate ability for language learning, as Chomsky suggests, or simply a process of using basic, low-level reasoning to use a massively redundant number of linguistic chunks / constructions.

I haven’t kept up with all that’s being done with ChatGPT, but I got off to a good start in February by attending a webinar led by Scott Thornbury where Sam Gravell and Svetlana Kandybovich gave us their well-informed opinions. I recommend it, and I’ve found following Sam Gravell on Linkedin very interesting and informative.      

How to teach grammar

The most interesting book on ELT I’ve read this year is Ionin & Montril’s (2023) Second Language Acquisition: Introducing Intervention Research. It sets out to show how grammatical phenomena can best be taught to second language and bilingual learners by “bringing together second language research, linguistics, pedagogical grammar, and language teaching”. The authors assume a generative approach to language and language learning, and use intervention research methods to determine what kinds of pedagogic procedures are most efficacious. The first chapter gives a refreshingly clear discussion of explicit and implicit knowledge, learning and instruction, while Chapter 2 explains intervention research and grammar teaching. The next nine chapters look at how specific linguistic properties (articles, verb placement and question formation, argument structure, word order, ….) are acquired and have been investigated through intervention studies. To quote the authors:

“When we discuss the nature of the intervention, we will address the question of whether it involves primarily explicit or primarily implicit instruction and/or feedback. When we discuss the tests (pretests and posttests) that are used to measure what learners know before and after the intervention, we will note whether the tests are designed to target primarily implicit or primarily explicit knowledge. We will see that some studies manipulate the nature of the instruction as explicit vs. implicit, while others manipulate the tests in order to get measures of both explicit and implicit knowledge. Lichtman (2016) is an example of a study that did both. Many other intervention studies do not set out to manipulate or test the explicit/implicit distinction but are instead concerned with the efficacy of a particular pedagogical method or with applying linguistic theory to classroom research. Nevertheless, even for studies that do not focus on the explicit/implicit divide, it is important to consider whether the knowledge that the learners gain is primarily explicit or implicit, and whether this knowledge resulted from largely explicit or largely implicit instruction”.

Ionin, T., & Montrul, S. (2023). Second Language Acquisition: Introducing Intervention Research. Cambridge University Press.

Translanguaging

In 2023, multilingualism and translanguaging continued to be a hot topics discussed in many assignments done by students enrolled in the University of Leicester’s MA in Applied Linguistics and TESOL, and maybe this reflects not just the sharp increase in the number of articles on these topics appearing in academic journals, but also discussion among teachers and teacher educators in blogs and the social media in general.

Both multilingualism and translanguaging begin with a questioning of how we define language; in particular, they question the assumption that to learn an additional language is to learn a separate, different “system”, comprising of a separate grammar, vocabulary and so on. They suggest that the “traditional approach” to language conceives of bi/multilingualism as the addition of parallel monolingualisms, and regards the hybrid uses of languages by bilinguals as signs of deviant or deficient language knowledge and use. Moving away from such traditional views, translanguaging theorists embrace Bakhtin’s view that “language is inextricably bound to the context in which it exists and is incapable of neutrality because it emerges from the actions of speakers with certain perspectives and ideological positions”. The move from a view of language as a discrete system to ‘languaging’ as a socially situated action is further developed by the construct of “translanguaging” (see, for example, Garcia & Wei (2014). Translanguaging scholarship began with an analysis of the historic conflict between English and Welsh in Wales; English being the dominant language imposed on Wales by English colonial rule, and Welsh being the indigenous language endangered by the colonial language policy which excluded Welsh from formal education spaces in Wales. It has since been expanded theoretically and practically by linguists and educators globally. Two facets stand out. First, García’s “dynamic bilingualism” (which emerges from her distinction between subtractive and additive bilingualism) insists that bilinguals choose parts from a complex linguistic repertoire depending on contextual, topical, and interactional factors. Translanguaging moves beyond languaging by affirming bilinguals’ fluent languaging practices and by aiming to transcend current boundaries of discourse so as to legitimise these hybrid language uses. Second, Li argues for the generation of translanguaging spaces, that is, spaces that encourage practices which explore the full range of users’ repertoires in creative and transformative ways.

 There is an obviously radical agenda at work here: translanguaging foregrounds students’ multilinguistic knowledge and practices as “assets” and insists that these be fully utilized in classroom communication and in the wider community. Classroom praxis must exemplify the disruption of “subtractive” approaches to language education and “deficit” language policies. García & Wei (2014) emphasise the importance of “criticality, critical pedagogy, social justice and the linguistic human rights agenda” (p. 3), and of alignment with a socio-cultural perspective to applied linguistics.

 “Standardized English” has become the focus of criticism from a wide range of scholars and researchers, and to those mentioned above, we should add Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa (see, for example, Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa & Flores, 2017) and Valentina Migliarini and Chelsea Stinson (see Migliarini & Stinson, 2021). Flores and Rosa argue that standardized linguistic practices are demonstrations of raciolinguistic ideologies, and that language education expects language-minoritized students to model their linguistic practices after the white speaking subject, “despite the fact that the white listening subject continues to perceive their language use in racialized ways” (Flores & Rosa, 2015, p. 149). Migliarini & Stinson (2021) use the Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) solidarity framework “to challenge the deficiency lens through which students at the intersections of race, language, and dis/ability are constantly perceived”, arguing that this has “the potential to create more authentic solidarity with multiply marginalized students” (p. 711). DisCrit solidarity attempts to transform teachers’ understanding of power relations in the classroom “so that they are not steeped in color-evasion and silent on interlocking systems of oppression”. The framework also offers the opportunity to interrogate the ways ableism and linguicism reproduce inequities for students with disabilities. The DisCrit framework embraces translanguaging “as a strategic process (García, 2009b), theory of language (Wei, 2018), and as pedagogy (Garcia, 2009a) which conceptualizes the linguistic practices and mental grammar(s) of multilingual people” (Migliarini & Stinson, 2021, p. 713).

I remain mystified by all this stuff, and I’ve never seen or heard any coherent account of what it all means for the practice of ELT, i.e. a description of the radical, transformative changes which should be made to current syllabuses, materials, pedagogic procedures and assessment tools. And, at a more academic level, while I have no reason to think that any of the sources cited above intended the consequence, it’s a fact that most of the post graduate students I know who are drawn to the views and approaches sketched above are fervent in their commitment to sociolinguistics, and express hostility towards the work of psycholinguists working on cognitive theories of SLA, particularly those who claim to be carrying out scientific research. They frequently refer disparagingly to “positivism”, or to the “positivist paradigm” and express their support for “rebels” like Schumann, Lantolf, Firth & Wagner, and Block who, in the 1990s, tried to rock the positivist boat in which, they suggested, most SLA scholars so smugly sailed. I’ve done posts on this “social turn” during the year, deploring the relativist epistemology in particular and critical social justice in general. It’s particularly sad for me to see Professor Li Wei become Director and Dean of the Institute of Education, where I did my MA and PhD with Prof. Henry Widdowson, Guy Cook, Peter Skehan, and Rob Batstone.

References     

Block, D. (1996). Not so fast: some thoughts on theory culling, relativism, accepted findings and the heart and soul of  SLA.  Applied Linguistics  17,1, 63-83.

Ellis, N. (2019) Essentials of a Theory of Language Cognition. Modern Language Journal. Free Downlad here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/modl.12532,

Firth, A., & Wagner, J. (1997). On discourse, communication, and (some) fundamental concepts in SLA research. Modem Language Journal, 81,3, 285-300.

Firth, A., & Wagner, J. (1998). SLA property: No trespassing! Modem Language Journal, 82, 1, 91-94.

Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education. Harvard Educational Review, 85, 2, 149–171.

Garcia, O. & Wei, L. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism, and Education.  NY: Palgrave MacMillan.

Lantolf, J. P. (1996a). SLA Building: Letting all the flowers bloom.  Language Learning 46, 4, 713-749. 

Lantolf, J. P. (1996b). Second language acquisition theory building?  In Blue, G.  and Mitchell, R. (eds.), Language and education. Clevedon: BAAL/ Multilingual Matters, 16-27.

Lewis, G., Jones, B., & Baker, C. (2012a) Translanguaging: origins and development from school to street and beyond. Educational Research and Evaluation, 18, 7, 641-654.

Lewis, G., Jones, B., & Baker, C. (2012b) Translanguaging: developing its conceptualisation and contextualization. Educational Research and Evaluation, 18, 7, 655 – 670.

Migliarini, V., & Stinson, C. (2021). Disability Critical Race Theory Solidarity Approach to Transform Pedagogy and Classroom Culture in TESOL. TESOL Journal, 55, 3, 708-718.

Phillipson, R. (2018) Linguistic Imperialism. Downloaded 28 Oct. 2021 from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/31837620_Linguistic_Imperialism_R_Phillipson

Rosa, J., & Flores, N. (2017). Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society, 46, 5, 621-647.

Schumann, J. (1983). Art and Science in SLA Research.  Language Learning 33, 49-75.

Books

These are the books I most enjoyed in 2023.

We are electric by Sally Adee

This is the best pop science book I’ve read for years. A “must read” that’s not only important but a real pleasure to read. Here’s the blurb:

You may be familiar with the idea of our body’s biome – the bacterial fauna that populates our gut and can so profoundly affect our health. In We Are Electric we cross the next frontier of scientific understanding: discover your body’s electrome.

Every cell in our bodies – bones, skin, nerves, muscle – has a voltage, like a tiny battery. This bioelectricity is why our brains can send signals to our bodies, why we develop the way we do in the womb and how our bodies know to heal themselves from injury. When bioelectricity goes awry, illness, deformity and cancer can result. But if we can control or correct this bioelectricity, the implications for our health are remarkable: an undo switch for cancer that could flip malignant cells back into healthy ones; the ability to regenerate cells, organs, even limbs; to slow ageing and so much more.

In We Are Electric, award-winning science writer Sally Adee explores the history of bioelectricity: from Galvani’s epic eighteenth-century battle with the inventor of the battery, Alessandro Volta, to the medical charlatans claiming to use electricity to cure pretty much anything, to advances in the field helped along by the unusually massive axons of squid. And finally, she journeys into the future of the discipline, through today’s laboratories where we are starting to see real-world medical applications being developed.

The New Puritans by Andrew Doyle

I don’t know of any really good book that cogently rebuts the theology of critical social justice, but “The New Puritans”, while a bit patchy, not always as well-argued as it could be, and relying on debateable core liberal values, does a good job of describing and evaluating the “religion of Social Justice”. “Cynical Theories” by Pluckrose & Lindsay makes a good companion, but it has an even more informal, clearly one-sided and less rigorous style.

The Wager by David Grann

“A real page turner!” “I couldn’t put it down!” Etc. This is the first David Grann book I’ve read, and now I’ve got the rest lined up. Here’s an Amazon review:  

In the first half of the 18th century, Britain already had the most powerful navy in the world. But financing that navy was a huge burden on the Crown and England had not yet achieved the wealth that the industrial revolution and its own colonization efforts would later bring. The answer: intercept the gold and silver that Spanish ships were bringing home from its New World colonies.

Author David Grann is able to tell not only this larger story but also to resurrect one of the most astonishing seafaring events of the time. A ship named “The Wager” was to be part of a British fleet that would intercept gold-laden Spanish vessels in what was officially-sanctioned piracy. As the book’s cover indicates, what then transpired was shipwreck, mutiny and murder. This is also the story of unexpected survival and efforts in an Admiralty court back in England to establish the truth of what happened.

The Wager survived the perilous passage around the treacherous Cape Horn, only to run aground and break up on the rocks of an uninhabited island off Patagonia. There were no animals or other significant source of food on the island. The crew soon divided into two factions, one supporting Captain Cheap who wanted to build a vessel out of timbers salvaged from the shipwreck and continue up the Pacific coast of South America to engage Spanish ships. The other group was led by Buckeley, who wanted to build a vessel to return to England. The situation was so dire it would seem impossible that either group would survive.

Improbably a few men did make their way back to England to be hailed as heroes. That is, until a second group, including Captain Cheap, also arrived. This forms the final chapter of the story of The Wager and the launch of an inquiry to establish the truth.

Faced by death by hanging if they were found guilty of mutiny or of discipline if they failed their duty, each survivor told his story. “Members of the Admiralty found themselves confounded by competing versions of events,” the author tells us. The result was unexpected, but only if one fails to consider that the leaders of an institution, in this case the Royal Navy, have as their first priority the preservation of that institution and the protection of its reputation.

This is a wonderfully-written book; Grann certainly lives up to his reputation as a masterful story teller.

When we cease to understand by Benjamin Labatut

I’ve been meaning to read this for ages and it didn’t disappoint. Phillip Pullman calls it “a monstrous ad brilliant book”, William Boyd says it’s “mesmerising and revelatory”. It’s a dystopian nonfiction novel set in the present. It asks “Has modern science and its engine, mathematics, in its drive towards “the heart of the heart”, already assured our destruction?” It goes at a truly furious pace and before you know it, you’ve finished it. A few minutes sitting with the book on your lap looking out the window onto a nice rural landscape are recommended.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!     

In my last post, I commented on the first strand of “recent, interesting research” which Penny Ur addressed at the 2023 IATEFL conference. She’s seen above getting a medal from someone who knows even less about SLA research than she does.

Here, I comment on two more strands, drawing again on Leo Sellivan’s report.    

The Use of the L1

The research paper Ur referred to (de la Fuente & Goldenberg, 2022) is a well-written and well-considered report of a well-designed study, and it confirms the already widely-accepted view that using the L1 is often very helpful. But I doubt many of Ur’s audience needed to be persuaded that judicious use of the L1 is a “good thing”. On the other hand, I bet Ur didn’t point out that the school where the study was carried out is committed to a task-based learning approach (Ur dismisses TBLT as “unproven”), and I bet she didn’t refer to this bit at the end of the paper either: 

An important question, and one that this study did not seek to address, is which types of L1 use (by students, by instructors) and which specific functions had a bigger impact on learning. In other words, what within the +L1 condition (principled approach to L1 use) accounts for the significant gains in learning?  (de la Fuente & Goldenberg, 2022, p. 960).

Surely this is what needs discussion. The types of L1 use that work best depend too much on context for research to uncover any reliable, universal patterns. Consequently, we’re talking here about what Long (2015) calls a “pedagogic procedure”, and, as I argued recently in an exchange of views with Phillip Kerr, research into the efficacy of different pedagogic procedures should be carried out by groups of teachers who share the same context. (Ahem: teachers should be paid for this work, and the results should feed into, and hopefully improve, local teaching practice.)

  Oral corrective feedback

Now this is a very, very important part of what teachers do.

Ur began by citing Lyster and Randa’s (1997) seminal study, “which showed that recast was the most common oral error correction technique used by teachers, but the least effective one”.  That’s not a very accurate summary, but anyway, we’ll let it go and focus on the Big Question: Is it better to provide immediate correction, using relatively unobtrusive procedures such as recasts, or to provide more detailed correction after the task has been completed?

Ur cited studies by Li (2017) and Harmer, P. (2015) which concluded that learners prefer to be corrected at the moment they make the mistake. Ur then cited Fu and Li’s (2022) study, which claims the superiority of immediate corrective feedback. “The authors recommend correcting errors immediately after the first exposure to a new language item in order to rectify errors before they are proceduralized in the learner’s interlanguage”.

according to Sellivan, Ur said no more on the matter.

Discussion

In Long’s TBLT, oral corrective feedback is a vital part of the subservient but important role that explicit teaching plays. It’s a key component of “focus on form”, which is Long’s unfortunate name for his counter to a grammar approach that is based on a “focus on forms”.  Long says that the best way to help students learn an L2 is to involve them in tasks where they “learn by doing”. However, since adults are, in Long’s opinion (an opinion which relies on Nick Ellis’ theory of SLA) “partially disabled” language learners, they benefit from a certain type of explicit instruction and intervention by teachers, and recasts are a key component. The gap – chasm! – between Ur’s and Long’s views on oral correction is hard to exaggerate.

Needless to say, Ur’s perfunctory treatment of “recent, interesting research” into oral corrective feedback gave the audience no insight into its significance, and nothing to chew on. In contrast, Leo Selivan went away, looked up the references, read the articles, thought about the issues, and made some interesting comments in his review. Good for him! But who else in the audience did anything similar? Leo could have emailed Ur and got the suggested reading list in 2 minutes, and the rest of the 2,000+ audience could have done something much better with the time they spent listening to Penny Ur smugly sharing her reading list.

The Fu and Li (2022) paper is worth discussion. It’s an excellent report of a study exploring the differential effects of immediate and delayed corrective feedback on the acquisition of the English past tense by 145 seventh-grade EFL students at a private school in Eastern China. The study is in, IMHO, extremely well-designed, well-reported and well-discussed. It includes discussion of two conflicting SLA theories: Long’s Interaction Hypothesis (Long, 2015), and Skill Acquisition Theory (Lyster, 2004). Long’s Interaction Hypothesis claims that feedback in the form of prompts such as recasts are ideal “because they withhold the correct form and encourage self-repairs according to which the optimal time to address linguistic problems is through critical feedback (CF) during negotiated interaction” (Fu & Lu, 2022, p.4).  On the other hand, Skill Acquisition Theory (Lyster, 2004) emphasises the importance of feedback in “activating and proceduralizing the declarative knowledge which has been presented in the first stage of the teaching”.

Obviously, the two theories contradict each other, but there’s some convergence when it comes to the timing of corrective oral feedback. The Interaction Hypothesis insists that immediate feedback is superior, while Skill Acquisition Theory suggests that feedback can be provided during tasks performed immediately after explicit instruction, or postponed until a later time after learners complete some communicative practice. Given the authors’ and the school’s preference for TBLT, there was no explicit instruction phase prior to performance of the communicative task, and the study found that there was a marked advantage for unobtrusive, immediate critical feedback, including recasts. But the question of whether Long’s interaction hypothesis is a better explanation of L2 learning that skills acquisition theory remains. At least one of the two theories is wrong, and teachers would surely benefit from information about their relative merits and support from research findings. Furthermore, there are still scholars, including Rod Ellis and Peter Skehan & Pauline Foster, who argue for the importance of delayed, post-task feedback.

Conclusion

Penny Ur’s 2023 IATEFL talk was a waste of time, typical of what you get at conferences where the organisers blindly rely on “Big Names”. On the other hand, Leo Selivan’s blog post contributes much: he reports on the talk and gives us his considered view of the issues that Ur glided over.

Penny Ur’s session at the IATEFL 2023 conference was on Interesting recent research. It is, in my opinion, a good example of the poor quality of information that those responsible for teacher education provide the profession. Leo Selivan gave a full review of the session, and I rely on his report here.

Selivan says:

After defining what is meant by recent (the last 5-10 years) and what is considered interesting (what she personally finds interesting), in what followed Penny Ur bombarded the audience with highlights of no less than 30 research studies – all in under 25 minutes!

The studies she presented were divided into six strands:

1. Age and language learning
2. L1 in the language classroom
3. Oral corrective feedback
4. Inferencing meaning from context
5. The flipped classroom
6. The use of pictures

I’ll concentrate here on age and language learning. In a second post, I’ll discuss Ur’s hopeless attempts to inform teachers about the other strands.

Age and language learning

The popular belief that children are better foreign language learners has prompted educational policy makers around the world to advocate for an earlier start of foreign language instruction. However, Ur cites Carmen Muñoz’s (2006, therefore not “recent” by Ur’s own definition) Barcelona Age Effect (BAF) project which showed that in the foreign language classrooms of Barcelona’s primary and secondary schools, “age did not afford the same advantages as it does in a naturalistic language learning setting. Contrariwise, older learners (teenagers) may fare better”.

Ur also cites a review of research on the age factor by Muñoz and Singleton (2010, ditto) which argued that other factors contributing to learner success, including motivation, attitudes, affiliation with the L2 and the amount of exposure and quality of input have been largely ignored. Selivan summarises Ur as follows: “The kind of learning child learners are better at – implicit learning – requires vast amounts of exposure. Unfortunately, in a school setting with a couple of classes a week, exposure is woefully insufficient making it difficult for children to leverage implicit learning mechanisms”.

Finally, Ur cites Lightbrown and Spada’s (2020) paper which concludes that “studies in schools settings around the world have failed to find long-term advantages [ultimate attainment] for an early start …..”.

That’s all Ur had to say.

Discussion

What, I wonder, did the audience make of Ur’s treatment of this important issue? The point she hurriedly made was that research findings question the wisdom of educational policy makers who advocate for an earlier start of foreign language instruction. Not surprisingly, given her attempt to get into the Guiness Book of Records for the most research covered in a 25-minute talk, she neglected to attempt any critical evaluation of the cited research. So she neglected to say anything about what the participants in Muñoz’s study were taught.

Muñoz herself says little about the syllabus and teaching methods used in the English courses she reports on in her articles on the BAF project, and you have to read her book to find out that the courses in question were based on synthetic syllabuses which involve treating the target language as an object of study. The teachers involved in the BAF often had a low proficiency in oral communication, they talked for 70%+ of classroom time, frequently in their L1, and the students had few opportunities to use the target language, to engage in communicative tasks, to learn by doing. Thus, students were taught about the target language far more than they were helped to use it and the tests measured what they knew about the language more than how well they could use it for spontaneous communication. Given all this, it’s hardly surprising that the older students learned what they were taught faster and better than the young ones, because, as Carmen herself indicates, young children rely on implicit learning which leads to procedural knowledge and consequent communicative competence, while older students are more receptive to explicit learning which leads to far less useful declarative knowledge.

So “earlier is better” as an educational policy is only mistaken if ELT is based on the sort of ELT you find in Catalan public schools, which is probably a representative model of how it’s taught just about everywhere. Older children are better than younger children at learning about the language, which is not, in my opinion, what – or how – they should be taught.

The still controversial “Critical Period Hypothesis” (which these days is explored in terms of “sensitive periods”) needs explaining to teachers, and its implications for ELT need attention. Teachers need to be involved in discussions about the research which suggests that young children learn additional languages in the same way that they learn their native language or languages: they make sense of the formal aspects of the additional target language for themselves while being exposed to, and interacting with others in that language. Meanwhile, the research suggests that older students learn slightly differently. If we accept (still disputed) research findings of senstive periods, then the putative windows of purely implicit learning of certain features of the additional target language close by the time children reach the age of 14 or so (the window for pronunciation is said to close at around 8 years old!). In which case, they, like adult learners, need more explicit teaching which pays attention to these features.

Ur did precisely nothing to help teachers appreciate the issues involved in research into how age affects SLA, and I doubt that she did anything to make teachers think about its implications. She was given the biggest stage, star billing and, no doubt, all expenses paid. In his review, Selivan waxes lyrical about Ur’s ability to “make research sound sexy”; he applauds her audacity at seeking to cover so much ground; he drools that he was so “fired with enthusiasm” to report on this session that he made it his “only write-up from IATEFL 2023”.  It’s enough to make you weep!

In his recent post, Perspectives on language teaching research, Phillip Kerr argues that attempts to get language teachers more interested in language teaching research are unlikely to succeed. He takes readers on “a little detour” to talk about the philosophy of measurement, which unfortunately consumes most of the text, leaving us with the rather bald and unoriginal claim that researchers are interested in precision, while teachers are interested in more general take-aways that can be easily applied in their lessons. Kerr concludes that it’s hard not to share Widdowson’s skepticism, voiced in a recent webinar (Widdowson & Yazdi-Amirkhiz, 2023), about the practical relevance of SLA research. Surely Widdowson is right to say that all efforts have so far failed to do anything about “‘the tenuous link between research and practice’ (Hwang, 2023) or to bridge the ‘gap between two sharply contrasting kinds of knowledge’ (McIntyre, 2006)”. I would like to challenge this view by briefly summarizing some of the arguments put forward in the first part of Jordan and Long (2023), where SLA research and its implications for English Language Teaching (ELT) are considered.

Before I begin, a quick comment on the following assertion of Kerr’s: “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”. One is tempted to ask where Kerr has been for the last twenty years, but we know he keeps up with research, and indeed his references make it clear that he’s perfectly well aware of the “social turn” that research into language teaching has taken. So he really ought to know that it’s simply false to say that currently there is a clear preference in academia for quantitative empirical research into language teaching.

To the issue, then.  

In the first five chapters of Jordan and Long (2022), a summary of research in SLA is given. In Chapter six, we discuss what we consider to be the most important general implications for ELT.

Interlanguage

We begin by discussing interlanguage, which is an individual learner’s transitional version of the target language. Iinterlanguages share much in common, but each is to some extent idiosyncratic; they are the psycholinguistic equivalent of idiolects, but they differ in being unstable, exhibiting considerable variability, especially in the early stages. The variation is synchronic and diachronic. The learner’s native language (L1) influences many aspects of L2 development, both positively and negatively. Learners make many morphological errors in English as they progress, the result of overgeneralization, overuse, omission, and substitution; rather than something to be avoided through textbook writers and teachers exercising tight control over students’ speaking opportunities, they constitute an inevitable and productive part of the L2 acquisition process. Naturalistic, instructed, and “mixed” learners exhibit somewhat different error patterns as their proficiency increases.

Developmental Sequences

Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that learners follow the same developmental routes. They master the structures in roughly the same manner and order, whether learning in classrooms, on the street, or both. Attempts to make learners skip a developmental stage fail, leading Pienemann to formulate his Processability, Learnability, and Teachability Hypotheses: what is processable by students determines what is learnable, and what is learnable determines what is teachable (Pienemann, 2015). The effectiveness of feedback on error has been shown to be constrained in the same way. Learners analyze the input and come up with their own interim grammars, their progress broadly conforming to the developmental sequences observed in naturalistic settings.

A basic finding from decades of research is that, contrary to what is commonly believed, learners play a more powerful role in their own language learning than either teachers or coursebook writers. Students are not empty vessels waiting for grammatical structures and vocabulary items to be hammered into them one by one in a pre-set, fixed order, through a combination of rules and drills. Nor do they learn one structure or word at a time, moving from ignorance to native-like command of the item in one step, and then moving on to the next, as most commercial coursebooks imply. Language learning is slow and incremental, with many errors, transitional structures, and gradual approximations to correct forms and uses along the way. No matter the L1 or the order or manner in which target language structures are presented to them, however, learners analyze the input and come up with their own transitional IL grammars, development broadly conforming to developmental sequences observed in naturalistic settings.

Rate of Development

In Chapter 3 we discuss seminal findings in SLA research which demonstrate that that instruction can speed up adult second language acquisition. My very brief summary here doesn’t include a description of them or the references. Sorry. The positive effects of instruction on rate of development might, at first glance, seem at odds with its lack of effect on developmental sequences. The two sets of findings can be reconciled, however, when it is remembered that developmental sequences are based on implicit knowledge, subject to universal cognitive constraints. Instruction speeds up that development, without altering the sequences, through devices such as increasing the perceptual salience of and exposure to items that might otherwise take a long time for learners to notice. This draws students’ attention to them sooner, but also when they are psycholinguistically ready.

Ultimate L2 attainment

Contrary to what the robustness of interlanguage processes and developmental sequences might suggest, teaching can have very positive effects on rate of development and, potentially, on ultimate L2 attainment. Long-term advantages for instruction are probably due to (selective, constrained) use of explicit L2 knowledge, the increased perceptual salience that instruction brings to problematic items, and appropriately modified input. Long-term benefits of instruction are hard to demonstrate unambiguously, not least because learners who have achieved very advanced proficiency in an L2 through purely naturalistic learning are rare – or at least (not necessarily the same thing), have rarely figured in SLA research. But the common sequences in which new structures emerge, regardless of the type of instruction learners receive or, indeed, whether they receive instruction at all, show that ultimately, teachers are facilitators, not controllers, of their students’ language learning – partners, not masters, guides, not god.

Cognitive Processes in SLA

The same basic cognitive processes involved in all different kinds of human learning are implicated in language learning. Incidental, intentional, implicit, explicit, and automatized explicit learning are present across the life span, although their relative power and importance varies somewhat according to the learner’s age, as well as with the kind of instruction and kind of L2 exposure he or she experiences. There is an overwhelming consensus among SLA researchers that implicit knowledge is of overriding importance for a functional command of a second language. Implicit knowledge is unconscious knowledge and it results in the ability to use the language to function fast, fluently, and effortlessly. Implicit learning is more basic, more important than explicit learning, and superior. Access to implicit knowledge is automatic and fast; it is what underlies real-time listening comprehension (e.g., attending a university lecture or watching a TV news broadcast), spontaneous speech, and fluency. It is also more durable than explicit knowledge. Two statistical metaanalyses of dozens of studies comparing short-term (immediate post-test) and long-term (delayed post-test) learning from implicit and explicit negative feedback (Goo & Mackey, 2007; Li, 2010) and another of implicit and explicit instruction as a whole (Kang et al, 2018) have found that explicitly induced gains tend to fade fairly quickly, whereas implicitly induced gains mature and increase over time. The reasons for the long-term advantage of implicit knowledge are as yet unclear, but probably reflect the deeper processing and/or the greater number of encounters with target forms and constructions that implicit learning requires. Implicit learning, on the other hand, demands more from the learner – deeper processing. It occurs incidentally, while their primary focus is on meaning, e.g., understanding a story they are listening to and/or reading and/or watching. Probably my most insistent argument over the years has been that implicit learning needs to be prioritized in language teaching to a far greater extent than is typical in traditional, coursebook-driven teaching.

Implications for ELT

SLA research shows that teaching cannot change language-learning processes, which are universal. Nor can it alter the developmental sequences that students follow, i.e., the route of acquisition, which is broadly the same for naturalistic and instructed learners, regardless of their age and L1 background. Nevertheless, while instruction is quite limited in its effects where processes and sequences are concerned, it can be effective in other areas. As we saw, instruction can improve the rate at which learners progress, and probably, the level they eventually achieve in the L2. Both are obviously matters of considerable practical importance to learners and teachers, alike. More generally, we can draw four interrelated implications:

(1) Give priority to incidental and implicit language learning inside and outside the classroom;

2) Use an analytic, not a synthetic, syllabus;

(3) Respect developmental processes, sequences, and learnability; and

(4) Change the structure of classroom discourse.

In Section 2 of the book we discuss specific applications of these generalizations to syllabus design, materials design, classroom pedagogy, and assessment. We argue that coursebook-driven ELT ignores the four implications stated above, and is therefore inefficacious, while the strong version of TBLT described by Long (Long, 2015) takes careful notice of all these implications, and is thus likely to be far more efficacious.

Conclusion

Finally, Kerr is right to say that Widdowson expresses skepticism about the practical relevance of SLA research, but, as usual, it’s not that simple with Widdowson. Here’s part of what he said at the plenary:  

Despite the teachers’ best efforts and all the various methods and approaches that have been proposed over the years, learners still persistently fail to conform. So why is it that learners so often are not persuaded to do what they are taught to do? What is their problem? It clearly hasn’t been solved, or indeed even addressed, by an orthodox competence-based way of thinking which is focused on the teaching objective, and institutional measurement of achievement.

I would suggest that the main problem for learners is essentially one that is pedagogically imposed upon them, because their learning is actually impeded by the very teaching that is meant to promote it (Widdowson & Yazdi-Amirkhiz, 2023, p. 397).   

To what extent, I wonder, does Kerr’s Inside Out coursebook series impede or promote the kind of learning and teaching Widdowson is advocating?  

References

Jordan, G. & Long, M. (2022). English Language Teaching: Now and How it Could Be. Cambridge Scholars.

Pienemann, M. (2015) An Outline of Processability Theory and Its Relationship to Other. Approaches to SLA. Language Learning, 65, 1, 123-151.

Widdowson, H. & Yazdi-Amirkhiz, S.Y. (2023). Webinar on the subject of English and applied linguistics. Language Teaching, 56, 3, 393 – 401.

The Background

JPB Gerald was recently interviewed by Anna Roderick (editor in-chief at Multilingual Matters) about his book “Antisocial Language Teaching” in the “Ask the Author” series. About 19 minutes in, talking about different reactions to his book, Gerald says he wasn’t surprised that a lot of people really liked his book, but that he wasn’t surprised either that some people “were just mad” because “they were always going to be mad”. Then he referred to me.  

The “I’ve told the story so often I now believe it’s true” Version

“There was one guy who followed me round the internet to talk about how bad my work was, mostly because I called him a racist once before this and then he was mad for two years. And I’m like “You’re proving my point, man, you’re proving my point”, although he weirdly said one day “I won’t do this anymore”. I don’t know,… I don’t know, maybe he had a change of heart although I don’t think he had a change of heart, I think he just decided to shut up. Wierd.   

The Facts

During an exchange of emails last December, at 12.38 am on 24/12/2022, Gerald sent me an email which ended:

I will stop mentioning you on twitter if you stop writing about me. A fair truce.

At at 1.11 am on 24/12/2022, I sent Gerald an email which ended:

from today I won’t mention your name on Twitter or any other social media channel again, and I won’t make any further comments on your published work.