CLT & EFL in East Asian: Goals and benefits of language learning

The dilemma of teachers wanting to promote communicative competence in the L2 is that students’ and parents’ goals may not agree with this. In fact, the whole system may be resisting this. So how can teachers press on with their desired goal? We don’t have to sacrifice this goal, but we can cast this into a larger cognitive framework, which includes: [1] cognitive rationales for language learning, and [2] cognitively oriented goals in language learning that can supplement the goal of communicative competence. I will come back to rationales later as a selling point for CLT, especially a cognitively oriented CLT. In this post, I will say more about other valid goals that teachers can invoke, that will complement and enhance the competence goal. Even if students are not interested in competence, these other goals can help promote competence, motivation, or other important life skills.

College and career preparation. If students understand that they need English for college courses and for on-the-job purposes in their future careers, this might help them to engage in English learning. This has to be presented not in a condescending or preachy manner, but through activities that pertain to college contexts, their major fields of study, or future job and workplace situations.

Developing learning strategies. Students have often been taught English poorly here, and need to learn better learning strategies, not only for English but for other skill areas as well. They need to understand that a heavy emphasis on brute-force rote memorization of vocabulary and grammar rules will not work. The Oxford inventory (by Rebecca Oxford) of L2 learning styles can be a good start for discussion. Teachers need not administer it, but use this as the basis for discussion of better learning strategies. This leads to the next point.

Empowering learners to learn independently. Many learners are still dependent on college or hagwon classes (private cram schools or language schools in Korea) for learning, when they can learn more on their own; and they still depend on commercially produced textbooks, grammar books, or vocab books that are boring and that rely on ALM, PPP, or GTM approaches. From intermediate levels, they should start learning on their own, outside of the classroom. At intermediate and especially at advanced levels, they can learn more outside of class than in class. This involves teaching them to learn on their own by exposing themselves and engaging with authentic materials, such as books, online videos, popular music, and TV shows. This can be far more motivating than classroom learning. Some of the strategies in Oxford’s inventory pertain to independent learning. This is especially helpful in places like Korea where English is entirely a foreign language.

Critical thinking skills. Students can be taught about critical thinking skills in the L2, and the fact that they gain important academic and life skills like this, I would surmise, will in the long run help their motivation or appreciation for English. This can include understanding logical fallacies, constructing persuasive and logical arguments in writing and in presentations, reading between the lines and inferencing skills, constructing counter-arguments, and being responsible citizens who possess (I think Carl Sagan coined this term) “baloney detectors” to detect bogus arguments in politics or elsewhere. Likewise, students can be taught to question assumptions, e.g., learning to recognize and question sexist influences and messages in advertising that objectify men and women (I once did this in an ESL writing class in the US).

The above points lead to matters of social and cultural awareness, which I will discuss next time. These are selling points to students, which can help them appreciate their English classes, and these types of lessons can get them more into communicating in English, when the lessons deal with interesting issues and skills that generalize to their lives outside of the classroom.

CLT & ELT in East Asia (part 2)

This is a follow-up on my previous post on the role of CLT (communicative language teaching) in East Asia.

The CLT/TBLT paradigm has encountered resistance here – perhaps not so much direct opposition, as far as I know, from the government, educators, or the public, but probably more of simply ignorance and apathy about it, and a resistance to change. Parents, private academies, and others just assume that the traditional methods (ALM and GTM) are okay, since they are mainly concerned with test scores and grades, rather than meaningful learning. If a teacher gets a TESOL certificate and learns about CLT, but then gets a job at a private academy or cram school (hagwon), their supervisors will insist that they teach using ALM/PPP and/or GTM. The parents seem to expect that, too, since the parents want their kids to get good scores, so they can enter the better universities and get good jobs. A very sad situation.

However, increasingly the realities of life crash against this mechanical process. More college courses are taught in English, and the kids are not ready for that, despite all the years of cramming English and behavioristic learning. Increasingly, they will have to speak and write English on the job, at least in some fields. But this is not true for all fields. Some may realistically not have to write or communicate much in English, but will need passive skills — reading and maybe listening to English at times in their fields.

So the first challenge is how to sell the benefits of CLT to the public, to the Education Ministry, to educators, and to students. (I’m using CLT as an umbrella term for CLT in its various forms, and for TBLT). The second challenge is meeting the needs of students who really are not going to need higher communicative skills in English. Their motivations and needs are different. Teachers trained in CLT naturally aim for communicative competence, but honestly, some students will not be interested in it, or may not have such a strong need for it. Those who are interested may have other valid reasons for learning English, like needing to comprehend English materials, learning content area knowledge in English (e.g., in college courses), and such. Others are not interested, simply because the system has killed their motivation — this poses a third challenge for CLT here.

That is why I think it will help to situate CLT within a larger cognitive framework. A cognitive framework can provide important rationales and methods for communicative learning, even for those who sense no need for communicative competence. It can provide learning rationales and goals for teaching and learning English in addition to communicative competence. And it might help reach those who have been burned by the system, by addressing their motivational problems within the framework of social-personality psychology.

Let me just outline some of these cognitive rationales here, and talk more about them in future blog posts. In brief, some reasons for CLT in an EFL context like this are:

1. Even for just reading, listening and speaking ability are important for effective L2 reading skills. Reading depends on phonological and processing skills, and so learning in the speaking and listening modalities is important.
2. For learning grammar meaningfully, using English in these different modalities is necessary.
3. Test scores are not effective measures of English ability.
4. To do better on tests, interactive learning in the long run will be more effective and efficient — as well as for classroom college English, and English in the student’s future jobs.

In brief, some additional cognitive goals for learning as follows:

1. Awareness and understanding of foreign cultures – not just Anglophone cultures, but world culture.
2. A better understanding of oneself and one’s culture through the lens of L2 and global culture
3. Awareness of important social issues
4. The cognitive advantages of simply knowing a second language
5. Greater self-awareness and emotional intelligence
6. Overcoming demotivation toward learning (especially toward the L2), and related self-esteem issues

A cognitively oriented approach to CLT could help us to realize these kinds of goals and rationales. I will expand on these ideas and talk about the above points more specifically in some future blog posts.

English and CLT in the EFL context of East Asia

A criticism that I have heard of communicative language teaching [CLT] is that it does not apply well in East Asia (in my case, Korea). A couple of reasons for this are given or implied. I would like to address these criticisms here.

One type of reasoning that I think was underlying the criticism I heard from one teacher at a previous workplace is that it is foreign to the educational culture here. The middle school, high school, and college culture emphasize passive student learning from lectures, deductive transmission of knowledge from teachers to students, and non-interactive learning. However, to imply that East Asian students cannot learn and benefit from inductive and interactive learning methods due to cultural constraints is wrong. In fact, it seems to insult the intelligence of East Asian students, who are cognitively no different than we are, just because of cultural constraints. I have seen my students embrace interactive learning in my university classrooms. They have found it to be a refreshing change from their previous classroom experiences, and they have adjusted quickly and learned well. Some have commented on how much they appreciated the approach – either in final course evaluations, or unsolicited comments in the classroom.

The second argument is a more sound and valid one, which I heard from a conference talk by a well known applied linguist. At the recent KATE conference (Korean Assoc. of Teachers of English), Eli Hinkel noted that a problem of CLT in Korea is the EFL context (English as a foreign language – a totally foreign language in the environment / country and not used naturally outside the classroom). This would, I assume the argument would go, work against teachers’ attempts to have students learn communicative English in the classroom, when there are few opportunities for meaningful communicative use of English outside the classroom. One way of answering that is to adjust the goals and expectations of language teaching, even in CLT, to the EFL context, which I will talk about in a future blog post.

Korean students today will sometimes use English in certain contexts – when they deal with non-Koreans in Korea, at work, or when travelling or studying abroad. Most of all, they will have to deal with real English at the university in Korea. In Korea and other East Asian countries, there is an increasing trend toward English-medium instruction [EMI] in college classrooms, that is, regular courses taught in English. At Korea University, for example, about 45% of undergraduate courses in various majors are taught in English. This is also a trend at other Korean universities, and in other nations. For Koreans, in their academic or professional lives, they will have to deal with English as the global language of their professions. So in CLT/TBLT classrooms, the tasks and activities could be more tailored to the actual situations where they will use English in their lives – e.g., classroom situations, and various professional contexts. These could include college and graduate school class lectures and activities, business meetings, business travel situations, team projects, and others.

In my next post (in c. one week or so), I will talk about realistic goals for CLT instruction in an EFL environment like in East Asia.

Poem for teaching the long /ei/ sound

Here’s a little rhyme I wrote for practicing the /ei/ sound as in ‘late’ /leit/  (or /ey/ or whatever symbol you like). This vowel in English must be glided; it is not like the pure /e/ sound of German, Spanish, French, or most other languages. It is like /e/ + /i/ – think of /e/ in the German ‘reden’ or French ‘fete’ plus /i/ as in German ‘Miete’ or Spanish ‘hijo’. Or Korean 에+이. It must be glided, or otherwise, English speakers may hear the sound as a short <e> as in ‘bed’ or some other sound. Only those with a thick Scottish accent might pronounce a pure unglided /e/.

Anyway, this is a geeky poem for academic English contexts, or for geeks in general.

If you’re looking for alien planets in space

If you’re looking for alien planets in space,
Finding a livable one is quite a chase.

You want a place that life can sustain,
You want a place that can would be humane.
In the air, not too much propane or methane,
Not an atmosphere too painfully insane,
Not where poison falls as rain,
Where from breathing you would have to abstain.
Naturally, in the star’s habitable zone is great;
Too near and it’ll bake, which is not a good fate;
Too far and the planet’s just a lifeless deadweight.

On the surface, you want some good terrain,
And plate tectonics would be a big gain –
Unlike Venus, where the ancient plains
Every half billion years awake from their refrain,
To erupt and melt and destroy that surface once mundane.

Better to have tectonics and a few earthquakes;
Otherwise evolving life there would just bring heartaches.
Besides carbon, a surface with water and silicates and perchlorates
Make things more fun, and you’ll need some way to aerate.

So many things necessary for life to awaken,
One little mishap and all hope is shaken.

When can we go to such a place, I just can’t wait.
And what would the aliens there think of an earthling primate?

Periodic elements poem / song

I once wrote a little poem for the elements of the periodic table. I wrote it, hoping to use it with non-native English-speaking professors who needed practice with scientific or academic English. I never found a suitable audience to try this on, though, so I might as well put it out here. This was inspired by Tom Lehrer’s song, ‘The Elements,’ and if sung, should be sung to his melody (actually, I know nothing about music, but his tune seems apropos). Unlike his song, this poem arranges them in order of the periodic table. Feel free to use this for scientists to practice their chemistry pronunciation, or for just geeky fun. A more entertaining song of the elements in correct order is available here.

For academic English teachers, songs or poems like this would be useful for English stress patterns and consonant assimilation (blending) patterns. I recently revised this a bit after two of the newer elements were given permanent names.

There are 118 elements in the periodic chart – we’ll see if we can tell them apart.

We’ll sing this song to help you remember, maybe you’ll get them down by next December.

Well, there’s hydrogen, helium, lithium, and beryllium,

boron, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen,

Nasty old fluorine and pretty neon, and sodium, which in Latin is called natrium.

There’s magnesium and aluminum, which the Brits call aluminium,

silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, chlorine, and argon,

And potassium, which in Latin is called kalium.

There’s calcium, scandium, titanium, vanadium and chromium and manganese

And we have the magnetic elements of iron (or ferrum in Latin), and cobalt and nickel.

We have copper and zinc and gallium and germanium

and arsenic, which can make you quite sick

and selenium, bromine, krypton, rubidium and strontium,

and yttrium, zirconium, niobium, molybdenum and technetium,

ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, silver and cadmium,

and indium, tin, ántimony, tellurium, iodine and xenon.

And after cesium and barium we have the lanthanide or rare earth series:

lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium and promethium;

Our friend samarium makes our speaker magnets, and the rest are a bit humdrum –

europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, and holmium

erbium, thulium, ytterbium, and lutetium – that concludes the lanthanides.

And through the rest we continue our ride,

With hafnium, tantalum, tungsten, rhenium and osmium and iridium;

Our friends platinum, gold, and mercury;

Then thallium, lead, bismuth, and polonium

and astatine, radon, francium, and radium

Next we have the actinides, they’re pretty exotic, radioactive, or quixotic –

There’s actinium, thorium, protactinium, and uranium,

neptunium, plutonium, americium, and curium,

berkelium, californium, einsteinium and fermium,

mendelevium, nobelium, lawrencium and rutherfordium,

dubnium, seaborgium, bohrium, and hassium,

meitnerium, darmstadtium, roentgenium, and copernicium.

How about a couple more? They’ve added flerovium and livermorium.

Had a mouthful? There’s more, with longer names in store

Newly synthesized ones with names provisional, made by means quite collisional –

ununtrium and ununpentium, ununseptium and ununoctium.

That’s what we have so far, 118 elements that we’ve made or discovered.

Check back later, more will be added or uncovered.

Maybe they’ll find unobtainium, or an island of stability

But for now I think 118 are plenty for you and me.

(Kent Lee, Oct. 2013)