There was another point from Mr. Bal Krishna Sharma’s article on which I wanted to comment. He writes:

“Nevertheless, there is no doubt that in second/foreign language teaching, acquisition of pedagogical skills and knowledge plays an important role to meet the goals of language teaching programs. It is also not contested that one way to acquire the pedagogical knowledge by the teachers is to learn from the people who know more about the field, have more years of research and teaching experience and can articulate their theoretical and practical knowledge in research publications. Reviewing the literature, however, history of English language teaching profession shows that English language teaching principles, methods and techniques were researched and theorized in the Western countries, and they were exported to other countries where English is taught as a second or a foreign language, and those who applied these theories took very little attention to the socio-cultural realities and constraints of the contexts where the language was actually being taught.”

One of the buzzwords in use today is student-centered “constructivism.” This concept largely relies on the resourcefulness of students in pursuing answers to questions and solving problems posed by the teacher. It is my understanding that “student-centered” learning in the field of EFL grew out of adult classrooms in Eastern Europe following the collapse of Communism. The schools were extremely resource poor, and the students could ill afford textbooks. Some way had to found to provide learning materials for the class as a whole. As the students were professionals in many fields they were asked to instruct the other students in the vocabulary of their own fields of study. The concept worked because there was a diversity of interests and knowledge that could profitably be shared with others.

Try to apply that concept to a language class in Asia and it simply will not work. There is too much uniformity of knowledge among high school and university students to enable any learning to come out of it. Certainly, this is true in Japan, where curriculum is mandated, and I suspect it is true in China and Korea where the focus of the teaching is on passing entrance exams as well.

One of the best books I have read on teaching is Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach. The book lays to waste much of the teaching methodology practiced by those who are desperate, perhaps, to improve on how they teach, as if method were problem, not the teacher’s knowledge and skill at passing it on to his students.

Basically, Palmer’s argument is that it matters not what methods one uses, but the knowledge, passion and conviction behind whatever methods are used. Method is a poor substitute for subject expertise, good rapport, and a positive learning environment.

There is no “right way” to teach EFL that works in every context. The context has to be considered, along with the students’ needs and interests. Where resources are plentiful there should be no demand that students attempt to instruct each other to make up for a lack of resources. When students have limited exposure to the topics proscribed by the learning materials, most of which are for ESL, I find it is often a good idea to ask the students what topics would be interesting and challenging to them.

But again, experience tells me I cannot assume that students will be ready or able instruct each other. The guidance and appropriate materials must come from me.

In Problematizing Language Teaching Methods Bal Krishna Sharma writes:

“The notion that there exist universal principles and theories of English language teaching that are applicable to all the settings in the world has been questioned and criticized by a number of scholars in applied linguistics and TESOL (Canagarajah, 2005; Kumaravadivelu, 2006; Holliday, 1994; Pennycook, 1989). Theories and methods of English language teaching in the past have largely failed to address the realities that actually take place in the classroom (Johnson, 2006). There are also concerns that the theorized body of knowledge in second language teacher education in the West (e.g. in North America and United Kingdom) have little bearing on actual classroom teaching environments in the countries of the periphery (Kumarvedevalu, 2006; Canagarajah, 2005). Rajagopalan (2005), for example, argues that expert knowledge that is produced by a bulk of research studies fails to take account of the “specificities as well as the diversities of local environments” (p. 100) of language teaching. The English language teaching methods, for example audiolingualism and communicative language teaching, are the concepts first produced and practiced in the West. English teachers, therefore, have had a challenge to implement them in the Asian countries like Japan, Korea and Nepal because these methodologies were invented without necessarily knowing the diverse classroom situations in different contexts (Holliday, 1994). Pennycook (1989) eloquently argues that knowledge is always political in nature and it attempts to protect and represent the interest of a certain social group. In other words, knowledge construction and distribution “represents the particular view of the world and it is articulated in the interests of unequal power relations” (pp. 589—590).”

I could not be more in agreement with that. I teach in Japan, where it would seem that most English teaching material takes little account of local culture. Where it does, the examples are so obvious and superficial that students won’t even go through the motions for the purpose of an English lesson.

Moreover Japanese English learners are largely confined to the study of “Communicative English.” Granted, these words are most frequently used by native speakers in everyday conversation. One can’t build a sentence without them. But seldom are they the key words in the utterances of anyone with a high school education.

The focus “Communicative English” has resulted in an adult population with a kindergarten child’s grasp of the language. “Communicative English” is an Anglo-Saxon ghetto, and while it may be a necessary tool for survival, such as ordering a burger and fries at MacDonalds, it is not sufficient for adults in a professional or business setting.

The tragedy is that no one has sought to investigate the actual similarities that exist between the two languages. These commonalities make the abstract language even easier to learn than “communicative” English. The Latin and Greek base of the abstract language is very similar in structure to abstract Japanese. Like Japanese, Latin and Greek words have an agglutinative morpheme structure of semantic roots and affixes. Thus they are read in much the same way as abstract Japanese, and can easily be grasped by Japanese students when shown the equivalent morpheme structures represented in their own writing system.

Even those locals with Phds don’t appreciate this simple fact and cannot read these words themselves with much appreciation of their meaning or etymology. All that is generally known is the supposed Japanese “equivalent.” Thus they translate “education” as 教育 (doctrine & raise) rather than the etymological “process of leading out.” The Japanese equivalent is an entirely different concept, more like indoctrination or instruction, rather than finding what is best in the student and bringing those qualities forth from within.

In the West, with our shared Roman alphabet and Indo-European cognates, we tend to take lexical knowledge for granted and don’t consider it a necessary skill, on par with the four basic language skills. But we do expect students to understand words in “context.” Context is both cultural and lexical and is largely irrelevant without some knowledge of lexis.

More awareness of the local language and the common semantic base that ultimately makes it translatable, coupled with a less Eurocentric focus on what is needed to learn a language would greatly enhance the teaching of English throughout Asia.

The younger, the better

Today, I looked in on a couple of sites, Renshuu.org and the iKnow app at smart.fm. Both, sites are very beneficial for learning simple vocabulary and individual Kanji. I liked liked the fact that I was expected to learn some real Japanese, unlike the approach at Kanji Koohii, which I reviewed in a previous post. Both sites offer a straight forward, easily understood learning platform.

Renshuu focuses on practice material for some popular Japanese coursebooks and the Japanese Language Proficiency Tests. They show you a list of words to remember, and a stroke order video, then quiz you on the the list using multiple choice questions. It goes fairly fast and smoothly and you can feel that you learned several words quite quickly. It does just what it says it will do. It gives you a way to practice your textbook Japanese.

Smart.fm is another experience entirely. It’s an e-learning 2.0 site in the best sense of the term, a place where you can build a learning community just as you build social communities on Facebook and MySpace. The IKnow app, for learning Japanese, has a clean and pretty interface, with human sounding voices enunciating the words. A lesson of ten vocabulary words takes twenty minutes to complete, and you have your choice of Romanization, Kana, or full on Kanji. Aurally, the words are learned in the context of sentences which you can accumulate on your profile page and print out for study and, dare I say it, glossing and memorization. Basically, what this site amounts to is slickly packaged rote learning in a social 2.0 context. Same old, same old, updated.

renshuu.org, smart.fm, IKnow, e-learning, Japanese

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As an educator running a small, independent website for the benefit of my students, I have tried a number of open source Learning Management Systems, including Moodle, ATutor, Claroline, Dokeos, Sakai, Interact, and Joomla with a quiz module. Of these ATutor, Dokeos, and Joomla made it into production at one time or another, but finally I decided to stick with ATutor. Why?

I had major problems with Interact, Sakai, and Claroline, all of which lacked functionality I needed, i.e. quiz module, gradebook module (Interact and Claroline), or were simply too slow and cumbersome to even be considered (Sakai.)  Interact hasn’t had an upgrade since 2007, and functions I liked in Dokeos were outmoded by an upgrade of ATutor.

Moodle calls itself open-source, and has the largest installed user base, but to make it work as I wanted, I would have had to purchase Hot Potatoes quiz software. I had the same problem with Joomla, which requires expensive, commercially written modules to work as an LMS. Most of these systems are developed for use in universities, which share the framework with content developers, who distribute their work freely and rely on income from other sources to pay for bandwidth and server space. It seems like a violation of the spirit of the open source movement to demand that users purchase what others provide free of charge.

ATutor gets a regular upgrade every six months. It continues to add functionality and improve over time. In addition to a full range of networking and video conferencing functions, it offers a large number of QTI 1.2 quiz types, including matching, multiple choice, multiple answer, open-ended, true false, and ordering questions. For cloze exercises, it can upload eXe files. There is also an integrated gradebook that keeps track of students quiz scores and permits me to add additional grades from other work. The assignment management function offers individual and group folders, which I can view and comment-on at will.

For my purposes, there is no better choice of LMS than ATutor.

Image via Wikipedia

For anyone seeking to learn Japanese on the web, the place to start is Jim Breen’s wonderful Japanese Page at Monash University in Australia. There you can find the EDict dictionary, as well as hundreds of links to websites offering all manner of instruction in Japanese. Jim is very generous in offering his Kanjidic and EDict dictionaries as an open source product for the MacIntosh. Don’t have a Mac? You can still use the dictionary on the website. Use of Edict and Kanjidict is standard on websites featuring Japanese instruction in English.