What has been your greatest satisfaction from working in the ELT industry?

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The on-line magazine ELTNEWS interviews Catherine Walter and Michael Swan, co-authors of several books and courses designed to teach English as a Foreign Language

ELTNEWS

How has the ELT (English Language Teaching) scene changed since you started in the profession?

Catherine

Mostly in terms of the materials available, I think. When I began teaching, classroom materials were thin on the ground, and creating materials for classes took up a lot more of teachers’ time than it does now. This gives today’s teachers a great start - they can see lots of examples of good practice and look at how to build on it. In fact, in many cases, good materials have led professional developments. For example, the growth of interest in learner independence would not have taken off as it has without the excellent self-study books, CDs, readers and so on that are available today. […]

Michael

Things have changed enormously. […] Textbooks were pretty unattractive. Applied Linguistics was in its infancy. The buzz-words from the research front were ‘structural syllabus’, ‘audio-visual’ and ‘language laboratory’. Professional associations scarcely existed. All this has changed, mostly for the better. There is excellent professional training. We have a wealth of good textbooks. Applied Linguistics is a long-established and productive field of research. We are supported by several very professional professional associations. Language teaching now has so many components that it’s difficult to list them all.

One thing that worries me, though, is that language itself (especially grammar and pronunciation) has tended to disappear from language teaching, at least in the UK-based orthodoxy of the last twenty years. Learning a foreign language centrally involves learning the key structures, phonology and vocabulary of that language, and no amount of activity-based fluency practice can compensate if that is neglected.

ELTNEWS

How should one respond to a teacher who says that fluency in English is more important than knowing the rules?

Michael

Boots might be more important than socks, but most people find it useful to have both. Fluency and accuracy are not alternatives - students need to be fluent in reasonably good English, not in a highly deviant interlanguage. And knowledge of rules can help with this. We believe that, in ways that are not completely understood, declarative knowledge can often aid the development of procedural knowledge - so that knowing some grammar rules can help some students to learn English. […] Unpopular as it may have been recently, practice of forms is important for the development of fluency in a foreign language. We seem to accept that if musicians are good they must have practiced scales. We also know that learner drivers have to practice coordinating the different pedals, but there is a certain resistance to language learners’ needing to practice forms.

ELTNEWS

Dictionaries are being made available over the Internet and students can now practice their English from a variety of interactive English-learning Web sites. What role can technology play in the teaching and study of foreign languages?

Catherine

Anything that can make practice of forms more attractive will help learners to develop fluency more readily. Some people are more willing to spend time on a game-like activity on a computer than in a classroom; for these people, technology can be a real boom.

As interactive sites get more sophisticated, it should be possible for individual learners to take the path that suits them towards mastery of forms - perhaps not the same path for each form or each learner. […]

ELTNEWS

What has been your greatest satisfaction from working in the ELT industry?

Catherine

Can I have two? One would be the pleasure of putting people in touch with one another: teachers from Russia with teachers from the UK; people teaching refugees from Ethiopia in Israel with people teaching East Asian refugees in Thailand; the Literacy Strategy team of the UK’s Department for Education and Employment with EFL grammar experts.

And the other would be the buzz that I get when a teacher comes up after a presentation and says “I’ve been teaching for a long time. But I really learned how to teach from the teacher’s books to your courses.” We put a lot of time and effort into those teacher’s books, trying to think carefully how to make them useful to teachers in different situations, and I think it has made a small difference to the profession.

Michael

And three for me. Firstly, the fascination of working with language, such a complex cognition that [A] is exclusively human. Secondly, the privilege of being able to work with and for so many different kinds of people, with such multifarious [B] and endlessly engaging ways [C] of thinking and being. And thirdly, the satisfaction that comes from building bridges between people – and from finding ways of helping people to succeed in the most defying of all [D] enterprises: learning to communicate [E] well in a foreign language.

Available at: <http://www.eltnews com/features/interviews/2001/06/ interview_with_michael_swan_an.html>. Retrieved on: 27 Oct. 2011. Adapted.

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