Since I started my hobby/rigorous research pursuit of conducting Google Forms surveys on grammar, I have been thinking about the big one. The one that combines the most assumptions and nuance and the simplest form into a wad of meaning with white dwarf-like density, which is maximally unbalanced in its complexity and the earliness and brevity with which it is treated in grammar textbooks. The big one is, of course, the present simple.
This is going to be a long post.
For some time now I’ve been lucky enough to have a professor of economics as one of my private students, and helping this person put together presentations, papers, and whatnot has exposed me to a field of inquiry that is quite different than SLA. It’s been refreshing and somewhat zen-like to see the extreme quantification of social forces and psychological phenomena and to hear the thoughts of people dedicated to to that enterprise. The following are some thoughts on what I’ve seen over the last year or so.
The stereotype is that economists view people’s loves and lives as “mere” numbers, which has earned economics as a field the nickname “the dismal science”. I never got the feeling, though, that economists view quantification as taking away some quintessential human elán from the thousands or millions of people whose behavior they are analyzing. To the contrary, it seems to be a common understanding of the field that numbers are just the only way to deal with data points that number in the millions; it would be impossible to describe something like a national gender wage gap qualitatively and still be fair to each individual. It’s certainly not true that economists view that number as the inarguable conclusion of a research question; validity and how to test for it are problems that animate much of the literature (it seems). In short, quantification of human behavior is a necessary part of looking at data sets this large and doesn’t “reduce” people if you have an appropriately skeptical attitude toward what the numbers really mean.
A basic assumption of the field which has come under question since the 1980s is that people, when presented with a field of choices, will choose correctly and consistently according to their mostly stable preferences. It would be hard to find a bedrock principle more at odds with either modern psychology or any adult’s lived experience of other adults.
It follows from this ideology that humans make rational choices based on stable preferences that human choice is above reproach, that whatever people decide given a set of options is a priori proof of justice. Any attempt to “nudge” people into a better choice or to force certain choices will produce warped and economically unhealthy outcomes. If people seem to naturally separate themselves into different groups, it must reflect a natural, stable preference within those groups. Such is the explanation often deployed to dismiss the gender pay gap as the result of women’s free will rather than any kind of injustice.
You see the basic logic at play here in many areas of public life – certain politicians seem to see no motivation for human behavior that is not economic, and the main or only purpose of government is to encourage (or at least not punish) good economic decisionmaking. When people, either individually or as a group, seem to display an affinity for factors other than income (e.g. family, conformity, culture, or community) when choosing a career, that choice is accounted for in their reduced income. The last thing the government should do when people make uneconomic choices is to reward them economically with nutritional assistance, hiring quotas, or tax credits.
Luckily, I am at a healthy remove from both the ideologies of free will and the prosperity gospel, and I therefore don’t think people’s choices (particularly economic choices) are self-justifying.
The glass ceiling is probably the most emblematic phenomenon from economics to make it into popular culture. Loosely defined, it is an income gap at the top of the income distribution. In practice, it is often interpreted as a man getting promoted to an upper management position over an equally hard-working woman, who unlike the man is expected to perform childcare and other domestic duties in addition to working full-time.
Of course, I don’t know many men or women in upper management of anything. I do know many men and women in jobs that pay by the hour, and many more who used to have those jobs. Every week when I went shopping at my local MaxValu (Japanese chain supermarket), I would notice the people stocking the shelves, men and women, the cashiers, almost all women, and the mounted pictures of the store managers, all men. There are, obviously, many more people in jobs like this than in jobs like the last paragraph in any developed country. But for some reason, there isn’t a metaphor in common currency to describe the observed income gap at the bottom of the income distribution.
Where it is discussed, it is called a sticky floor. As I understand it, in economics, it is simply a parallel phenomenon to the glass ceiling, but one that concerns vastly larger numbers of people. In my mind, discussions of glass ceilings sometimes have the false-consciousness character of waitstaff on their break debating whether a 39.6% tax on the top bracket is unfairly high. Yes, it matters that Sheryl Sandberg has few peers in the Forbes 500, but it matters more and to more people that men in the bottom 10% of incomes out-earn women in the same bracket (I would include a source here, but it would reveal the identity of my student).
Because all my posts now include mandatory COCA data, The phrase “glass ceiling” occurs 465 times in the corpus, vs. 20 for “sticky floor” (only 3 of which seemed to be about economics rather than literal sticky floors).
This will strike any of you who have formally learned economics before as shockingly ignorant, even if the rest of this post hasn’t. Basically, when things stop growing, it’s not as if they settle into a flat but stable equilibrium. Sometimes, growth makes the system stable.
This graph, drawn for me at least 2 weeks in a row by my student, shows the salary of a worker in the sort of company that hires people for life compared to that worker’s level of contribution to that company (y axes), over the career of that worker (x axis). The salary is in blue and the level of contribution (I believe it was called “human capital”) is in green. There are two periods where these lines are very far apart: at the beginning of the worker’s career, where he/she contributes far more than he/she takes in, and past mid-career, where he/she takes far more than he/she contributes. This graph was drawn for me mostly to explain the phenomenon of mandatory early (sometimes as low as 55) retirement ages, the rationale being that companies want to shorten the length of time that workers can draw more salary than they’re worth. It also helps explain why companies may want more and more recruits every year; it is these recruits who contribute the most to the company. As each cohort ages, larger and larger new cohorts are required to pay for the older cohorts’ increasingly opulent salaries. This is a stable system as long as each cohort is larger than the last.
When the cohorts stop growing, it starts a chain of events that potentially results in the death of the company. First, without the contributions of new workers, the company can no longer afford the salaries of its older workers. Older workers may take early retirement or salary reductions (and grouse mightily about today’s youth). New workers and potential recruits notice that the formerly guaranteed high late-career salary is no longer guaranteed and start to question the benefits of accepting such a low early-career salary. The company therefore has an even more difficult time finding large enough cohorts of new workers.
Call me naïve, but I hadn’t seen this clearly before, nor had I seen the implications for national pension systems. Now that I do, I am even more glad to be in ESL rather than working for Toshiba, and I definitely hope all my students have lots of kids who all pay their Social Security taxes.
Where is the dividing line between “Culture”, the kind we are obliged to respect, and “culture”, the pattern of living that distinguishes communities? Is a kettle Big C Culture if you use it to brew Earl Grey tea served with scones? Is the sound of a Harley Davidson’s engine revving just a shared reference point in a few countries? What if the main character of a TV show syndicated worldwide rides one?
In an effort to tie together somewhat thematically different chapters on “Culture” in a reading book one of my classes is using, I’ve introduced the concepts of “little c” and “Big C” culture and had the students examine the situations outlined in the chapters through that lens. If the terms are new to you, this or this are decent explanations. It’s been interesting, particularly when we’ve had a venn diagram on the whiteboard and the opportunity for students to put their own candidates for little c or Big C culture up for discussion – for example, students consider LGBT (for some reason, they didn’t want the Q) to be Big C because the term has become well-known and, to some, emblematic of first-world liberalism. Contrarily, they consider karaoke to be little c culture because, in their minds, everyone has it and no one considers it to be the legacy of any particular country.
Needless to say (for anyone who’s lived in Japan), students’ opinions about karaoke surprised me quite a bit, as karaoke is regarded in Japan to be a clear example of Japanese culture succeeding and spreading around the world, alongside sushi and anime. This has raised the question in my mind as to whether the little c/Big C dichotomy needs to be amended with consideration for the fact that different cultures have not only different artifacts and practices, but different perceptions of the importance of those artifacts and practices. What is Big C in the country that produced it may not be understood as a national symbol elsewhere, and what is unremarked upon in a country may be considered a national emblem of it elsewhere.
(For the purposes of this discussion, I am flattening and homogenizing countries and cultures. I recognize that no symbol is truly equally and universally shared in any political, ethnic, linguistic, or cultural group.)
Below the jump are my additions to the little c/Big C scheme.
Holliday’s Appropriate Methodology and Social Context has stuck with me mostly in the form of a single anecdote: A PhD teacher in an Egyptian university tries to implement current communicative methods, which to him are the fruits of his advanced degree, but is stymied when students, feeling honored to have a teacher with such a glittering CV, do their utmost to sit and listen to the transmitted wisdom that they feel should be forthcoming.
I have elected to call this the Holliday Trap, not because Holliday himself experienced it (although he probably has, because I think most language teachers have), but just because it appears in his book.
The trap is that teacher education tends to focus more and more on inter-student communication as it gets more advanced, and teachers with more credentials tend to be more immersed in the communicative norms that currently animate ELT. At the same time, students tend to value the class and value the teacher more when the teacher is highly credentialed, and show it by adopting a respectful, deferential student role.
The details of the student role vary from culture from culture, but it rarely aligns with the degree of student-centered, student-led communication that a modern language teacher is likely to believe in. In the country where I taught for 12 years, Japan, the default student posture is silent downward gazing, and the deferential version of that is silent manic scribbling. In the US some degree of speaking is polite and shows interest, but students in foreign language classes still much prefer the abstraction of talking about the TL rather than in it. In neither case does the “student role” coincide with ELT best practices.
To illustrate, let me walk you through some familiar cases. A neophyte, diploma-still-warm teacher in a private language school (eikaiwa, hagwon, etc.) will find plenty of opportunity to apply a communicative curriculum, such as he understands it to be a curriculum at all. He will likely find students who see the teacher as their equal (or inferior) and are willing to converse and engage in meaning-focused communication. Conversely, attempts to break out the grammar terms that he remembers from grade school may be met with some disappointment or bemusement. Meanwhile, a colleague in the middle of her MA may find theoretical justification for much of the classroom give-and-take. She may develop a repertoire of conversation-based activities to scaffold the particular skills that she is becoming more aware of, and find students refreshed by the additional rigor in her classes. She may miss the easy exchange of views and camaraderie when she moves on to college-level EFL, where students are inexperienced with communication, in numbers and in seating that make egalitarian rapport harder, and in thrall to the abstract and academic rather than the applied. She finds that lectures on grammar are the smoothest parts of lessons, as everyone knows what to do or at least pretend to do. Her department head, who occasionally receives complaints that the young lecturers ask students to use grammar without teaching it first, has a PhD and a research focus on “teachability of pragmatics and strategic competence”. She rarely takes non-major courses anymore, preferring to skim the cream by taking upper division electives. She is comfortable lecturing in CLIL-style classes to students capable of benefiting from that class style. She has been frustrated when trying to apply a similar class style in non-major classes.
In ESL, we have many similar rungs of the ladder of prestige I have out outlined above, from private ESL (often perfunctory exchangers of tuition for visas) to Harvard University’s ELP and other programs designed to prepare students for undergraduate and graduate programs. At community colleges, a single classroom may be used for both purposes on the same day: tuition-free, 0-unit adult ESL in the morning followed by academic writing for international or transfer students in the afternoon. At the beginning and intermediate levels, adult ESL and credit ESL may even share most of their student base. Where they differ most significantly within those levels is often in prestige.
(To set the stage more completely, let me say that the teachers in both the non-credit and credit programs have the same minimum qualifications and the two programs often share materials as well. Credit classes, however, cost money, have closed enrollment (students can only add for the first few weeks), and have explicit matriculation goals in their course descriptions. Adult ESL, being free, fills up faster, leading many students to take credit ESL although they do not intend to matriculate.)
Broadly, adult ESL is meant to serve integrative goals and credit ESL to serve instrumental goals, although both purport to be working toward long-term life goals such as employment and acculturation in a broad sense. That said, it’s not unusual for students to take credit ESL to its highest level (or even highest non-writing level) and then stop before transferring, indicating to me at least that not a few see credit ESL at beginning and intermediate levels as a more expensive, more rigorous, “premium” version of adult ESL. This has interesting implications in light of the Holliday Trap.
First, students are more likely to adopt a “traditional” listening-and-notetaking student role in credit ESL. If I am right that they see it as basically a more “serious” version of adult ESL, they will prefer lectures to tasks and tasks to conversation. It has certainly been my experience that it is much easier to get everyone in class to look at a projector screen than to talk amongst themselves, although talking with peers is the more intuitive human activity. Students might expect to “receive” more knowledge rather than explore or co-construct it in a program that they perceive as more prestigious.
Second, students will approach even similar topics a more orthodox way. My experience is that it takes much more prefacing and justification before introducing input-heavy methods in intermediate credit ESL than in either ESL writing (also credit) or especially in eikaiwa. Students quite often see conversation tasks as a break rather than a task, and that is after a first-day PowerPoint and frequent reminders throughout the semester that, as Thornbury put it, “conversation is language at work”. Not 100% of the class rejects communicative or input-focused methods, of course, but some pushback from most students and a lot from a few students is normal.
Third, students will regard the teacher as more of a source of knowledge and less of a peer. I’ve heard students’ opinions on other teachers in the credit program, and they tend to focus on the clarity of their grammar explanations rather than their rapport with the class or the chances for communication that they offer. I’m not sure what students say about adult ESL teachers, but the few times I’ve seen them interact they’ve seemed much more egalitarian than what I’ve seen of credit ESL teachers (I’ve seen many, many more credit ESL teachers, as an assistant, as a sub, and at meetings).
The irony of this increased seriousness is that it doesn’t help credit ESL teachers to achieve their arguably more difficult goals. As the Holliday Trap would imply, teachers tend to adopt more communicative and less pedantic methods as they accrue more education because these methods are supported by research. An adult ESL teacher freed from the expectation to “teach” in the traditional sense is probably a more effective teacher overall as his or her modern methods have to wade through less of the tall grass of student expectations.
I suppose the ideal position is for the students to be in a rigorous, demanding course but not to realize it.
What follows is a long, student-unfriendly version of a 3-paragraph paper (not an essay) on a 30-day challenge that I did with an intermediate integrated skills class. The paper has to have an academic paragraph on the time before, the time during, and the time after the challenge. Originally, the paragraphs had to use the past tense, present tense, and future tense (with any aspect), but I haven’t followed that rule faithfully here.
Getting lost in hectic thought was the default mode of my mind before I started my 30-day challenge. The challenge, which was to meditate 10 minutes a day for 30 days, came at a time when I my mind was almost constantly in a state of emergency. Every thought of grading, making new assignments, or updating a class vocabulary list was a red alert in a long line of red alerts. I would be exhausted at the end of a day of classes, but unable to take a nap without thoughts of all the papers I had to grade rushing in and beating back my attempts at rest. As a result, I was often in a sour mood and was inclined to greet any attempts at contact from colleagues or students as yet another demand on the limited resources of my attention. When I had a minute, or just a desperate need to pretend that I did, I spent it with value-free distractions (the App Store specializes in them), afraid to glance back at the wave of paperwork threatening to crash over me from behind.
Since I started meditating, I haven’t ceased being distracted, but I have been better able to incorporate distraction into my workflow, i.e. to be mindful of distraction. In the interior of my mind, thoughts of work have begun to appear less like photobombing tourists in the lens of my attention, and more like part of the shot. I have become better able to take a long view of my own time and attention and to refuse to devote my full mental resources to every problem, incomplete task, or request that jumped into frame. What is called “mindfulness” is key to this. While I meditate, thoughts still appear, and I still think them, but I am aware of the process, and that awareness prevents me from identifying with them completely. I become something of an observer of my own mental life. I see how this could be described as being “mindful”, as it does in a sense feel like an additional layer of abstraction has been placed between my stream of consciousness and the thoughts that usually occupy it, but in a sense more important to me, something is also taken away. That thing is the formerly irresistable urge to load that thought into the chamber of my executive-function pistol and start manically squeezing the trigger. It is also the need to build a spider’s web around each thought, connected to all my other thoughts, and claim it irrevocably as mine. In these senses I believe “mindlessness” is just as good a term as “mindfulness” for what occurs in and as a result of meditation. In any case, disassociation from my thoughts, most of which are proverbial red circles with white numbers in them, has helped me to control the way that I react (or not) to them.
This brief experiment with meditation has given me a good deal of perspective to take with me into future semesters. I can now see the regular rhythm of the waves of classwork as something other than a renewed threat. Now, they seem more like tides, dangerous if unplanned for but predictable in their rises and falls. Importantly, I also see the high water mark and know that as long as I keep my mind somewhere dry, it will recede without doing much damage. In the future, as long as I refrain from doing something crazy like teaching 20 units, I think I will be able to maintain calm with the help of this perspective. Also, in a more specific sense, I will be better able to resist the call to distract myself from my work. I can recognize the formerly irresistable need to latch onto an interesting task, and this recognition enables me to prevent YouTube or WordPress (except for right now) from hijacking monotonous tasks like grading or… well, mostly grading. Next semester and into the future, I will feel less threatened and better able to deal with inbound masses of schoolwork.
Geoff’s recent post got me thinking about my time in Japan trying to teach against or around a system that saw English as one of many quantified and commodified skills to sell. Like a lot of discussions involving Japan, it triggered some vestigial indignation somewhere in my gut which had to be purged.
The process of quantification of the skill we call “English” for the purpose of rational allocation of workers to jobs has proceeded to an extreme level in Korea and Japan, who may represent the high-water mark among numerous other societies where English skill as represented by a single number or a blank space on a resumé is a matter of life and death for millions of test takers and job seekers.
As you might expect given the overwhelming importance of that blank space, the skill that it is supposed to represent often gets relegated to the background in favor of easily understood and common-currency heuristics like a TOEIC score or a university degree. Tricks for gaming that number or raising it through brute force proliferate. “English teaching” at least in Japan and Korea is widely understood to be synonymous with standardized test preparation, and “washback” with connotations of dutiful responsibility rather than regrettable side effect. Because the blank space for “English skill” is of extreme importance while there are no corresponding spaces for “average hours of sleep” or “happy childhood”, young people spend much of their adolescence in classrooms preparing to give the market what it wants. This video brought back a lot of memories for me, including the sight of bicycles outside cram schools that I passed on my way home from work at 10:30 pm.
Geoff winds up concluding that because English teachers will find themselves serving this inhumane system, they should not go to work in Korea. I disagreed with this point at first, mostly because it’s exactly the countries with these hegemonic, neo-liberal (two words I never thought I’d use after finishing my BA) English testing regimes that seem to have jobs for English teachers without MAs; that is, a lot of good teachers’ careers wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t gone to work in one of these countries in their 20s. Therefore, I thought, these systems actually end up contributing a lot indirectly to global ELT. Also, I believed that good teachers doing honest work within those systems could still have positive effects on students’ lives beyond tests. My conspiratorial brain and my fondly-remembering brain disagree on this point.
A decent metaphor for the role of an anti-establishment English teacher in such a system is Daniel Kaluuya’s character from the 2nd episode of Black Mirror. This character similarly feels righteously indignant and rebellious in an inhuman system, but sees that rebellious energy coopted and ultimately used as a piece of the same system. If you haven’t seen it or don’t remember, Kaluuya’s character Bing has a musically gifted coworker at their grind of a job (hilariously, pedalling stationary bikes) in a vaguely dystopia future society where intrusive attention merchant-style media is omnipresent. This coworker takes a chance at using her genuine, pristine vocal talent to audition for a TV talent show. At her audition, instead of being made a popstar, she is coercively recruited to act in adult films instead, in a grotesque example of matching talent to market. Bing, distraught, returns to the talent show later under the pretense of auditioning, and in the midst of a seeming dance routine he suddenly holds a shard of glass to his own throat and uses the captive TV cameras to deliver a searing, authentically emotional speech into the TV cameras. The judges, suitably moved, declare his performance extraordinary and proceed to give him his own show where he delivers regular similar speeches, always with his signature shard of glass, for a devoted fanbase (still pedalling their bikes). The episode ends with Bing living the high life thanks to having found a market for his talent due to his successful “audition”.
To give my Black Mirror-like take first, even with the most stridently anti-test, integrative, teaching-the-whole-person way it can possibly be practiced, ELT in Japan or Korea ends up feeding the system of commodification, just stuffing it with ever-more-valuable commodities. Any attempts to break out of that single space just end up putting something all the more precious in it, as truly sincere and irreplaceable things are, like Bing’s speech, ultimately just rarer and accordingly more valuable products. Those “genuine articles” in our case can include communicative competence, international perspective, study abroad experience, and above all, a real feel for English not only as an academic subject but as a living tool of communication. All of these signify a truly high-quality English education, and to an HR office, a superior version of an in-demand skill. A sincere and genuine English education also raises the mean on everyone else, making still more inhuman grinding necessary from those not lucky enough to have a truly outstanding, break-the-mold teacher or opportunities for international education. A worldly, proactive, SKY’s-the-limit English learner represents inflation from the perspective of hiring or college admission boards. As Bing’s judges declare, That is, without a doubt, the most heartfelt thing I’ve seen on a resumé since ELT began.
That is what I fear my legacy of 12 years of English school ownership will be: a few former students with outstanding enough scores in a saleable skill to get salaries and bonuses 3% higher alongside hundreds more with only a vague memory that they once went to eikaiwa. Premonitions of this fate were common throughout the life of our school, as some of our star students reliably quit every year to devote more time to Center Test studies (our Suneung), made clear their intentions to drop English after getting into college almost as a rite of passage, or visibly stopped caring about any classroom pursuit that didn’t have a clear test payoff. Mind you, it wasn’t every student who gave us this feeling, and we always had enough students to live, but once 2 or 3 of the students that you’d really been seeing bright things in the future for tell you that they’re quitting because their juku (cram school) teacher told them eikaiwa is a waste of time, a bit of the shine starts to come off of every student. Parents even in some of the best cases tended to cement the impression that everything led back to tests – the most heartfelt thanks we usually got from parents was that they really appreciated how our passion and genuine connection to their kids had helped them increase their test scores. The students themselves sometimes echoed these sentiments, which didn’t please us as much as they seemed to think it would. Trying to beat the test or go above and beyond it only made us more successful at teaching the test.
That’s the dark take, and when I need some reason to feel better about my move to the US, it gives me some comfort, grass-isn’t-greener style. On the other hand, if I need to remove the shadow that that view casts over my time in Japan and the genuinely warm memories I have of my students, I need to accept that not everything that is part of a “system” is inhuman or corrupt. My former students making 3% more money doesn’t stop them from being complete individuals or having the same warm memories that I have. In many other circumstances, I would view the reduction of a complicated construct to a single value to be very useful, given of course that no such value will ever be free from questions of validity. A society-wide preference for quantifiable skills to an extent reflects a need to fairly and quickly evaluate millions of people a year, which isn’t a sin in itself. Maybe what is needed is not an end to commodification but more commodification – a line on college applications for “average time spent on non-school pursuits” to be weighed alongside TOEIC scores.
Whatever a teacher’s job is now, it’s not knowing a bunch of things. Everyone carries a device that immediately connects them to almost all human knowledge in his or her pocket. Given that everyone also knows that this is true, why do people still show up in classes? It may be that hearing a teacher talk vs. reading a Wikipedia page or watching an instructional video may be analogous to seeing a concert vs. watching on on YouTube. I think it is also because listening to a teacher motivates you to do things that you wouldn’t do otherwise, even if they were still available.
In the last post under this title I posited that a major role of language teachers may be facilitating learning by simply stepping into the teacher role and using its authority to make students seek and attend to language input that is already all around them. In this sense it was similar to the ability of judges to coerce (convince? cause? I’m not sure how relevant volition is to this effect) their charges to follow treatment programs, take medications, or enact behaviors that are available without the judge’s involvement but are more likely to be used with it. In this post I mean to look into what exactly might be comprised in a teacher’s black robes, accepting for the sake of argument that we do indeed wear them. What gives us our unique ability to influence students’ actions?
Insider status. A teacher is more intimately acquainted with the culture that speaks the target language, with the school system, and with the educational culture than the students are. If not, he/she knows how to fake it. Seen through a Communities of Practice lens, a teacher is a knowledgeable insider that it behooves outsiders to listen to and adopt the practices of. This overlaps somewhat with a judge’s insider status in the criminal justice system, although it should be said that a teacher’s black robes could depend more on students wanting to join a group that the teacher represents than drug users want to join a clique of criminal justice elites alongside their judge.
Positioning. A judge sits apart and higher from everyone else. A teacher is not usually different in this respect – even if the teacher isn’t always physically in his/her seat, that seat is usually at the front of the room, ready to be occupied. The teacher also has the only desk with a computer provided by the school (sometimes) and the projector controls at his/her fingertips. All of this says to students “we have to listen to this person”. Something about the teacher facing the opposite way as everyone else cements this impression.
Timing. The teacher is often the first and last person that students see on their way in and out of the classroom. More than anyone else, a teacher seems to be a permanent fixture in the classroom. I’m sure many of my students think I pull a futon out of the supply cabinet after they leave. This may enhance the teacher’s ability to represent the institution whose classroom it is and may dovetail with the teacher’s status as a target culture insider.
Age. Some of us are lucky enough to “look the part” naturally. While this certainly isn’t fair and to an extent is a phenomenon that we should actively try to fight, looking like stereotypical conceptions of a “teacher” or just an “authority figure” can help make students listen to you. Much like black robes incline people to listen to a judge, a paternal or matronly appearance might help give a teacher’s words some extra weight. Extra weight itself might also help in this regard.
In the same vein…
Clothes. Teachers may facilitate students’ dedication to studying simply by dressing like someone who is in charge. Like the black robes that a judge’s authority metaphorically and perhaps literally derives from, a teacher’s clothes might give his/her words greater power. Unfortunately, this is not simply a matter of moving a slider of formality more towards the funerary end, but means wearing a costume which may only be available in a Men’s L or XL. Consider how much easier it must have been for Donald Trump to choose clothes that looked authoritative than it was for Hillary Clinton (and how her team but not his might have dwelled on whether “authoritative” was even a good look for her).
I have made recent modifications in my wardrobe partly for pedagogical reasons. Because I used to work in a context where a paramount concern was getting students to relax enough to speak, I deliberately chose shirts and ties that defused any spark of threatening masculinity. Towards the end of my time in Japan you might have termed my style of dress “technicolor dandy” or “waiter at an upscale clown-themed restaurant”. I have muted the colors because, as it turns out, students here could sometimes stand to be a little more respectful of the teacher’s authority.
Being male. Here’s where it gets officially unfair. In ESL or EFL, part of the rich melange of cultures present in the classroom may be some unreformed chauvinism. Students are, broadly speaking, doing a very brave thing by living in a new country with a foreign culture and language, and even those who sometimes express opinions you would politely call “parochial” are clearly open to some new experiences and ideas – they’re here, after all. Still, some resist suggestions, commands, and even assignments from teachers that they somehow don’t feel look the part, and a sizable chunk of looking the part is looking more like their dad than their mom. There are disadvantages to being stereotyped “a male teacher”, sure, but getting students to give weight to your words is not usually one of them.
(Side note: There is an argument sometimes made against the effects of systemic oppression and in favor of individualism that really strong people can always succeed and do as well as anyone else. It goes like this: Sure, life is hard and unfair, but that’s why you gotta tough it out, and if you don’t make it, it’s your own fault. It’s usually true that especially strong people can find success when average people don’t, but the point is that non-oppressed people don’t have to pass that inner strength test or even think about it. As it turns out, having to spend time and energy thinking about whether everyone thinks you’re legitimate creates significant drag. Not having to even entertain the thought that anyone might consider you illegitimate in your position is a privilege.)
Being NS. The conventional argument against native-speakerist hiring practices is that asking NSs to teach their language is like asking a fish to teach you how to swim. That argument is persuasive to many people (mostly other English teachers), but neglects a major reason that students become interested to learn languages in the first place – they have some idea of what the target language community looks like, and they want to be part of it. Failing to match the NS stereotype, even if the stereotype is incorrect or unjust, may make getting them to listen to you harder. Yes, students can be brought around to accepting a NNS teacher, and some of them know the advantages and actively seek them out. The point is, more of them will listen to a NS teacher and not need any convincing to do so.
At least the above is probably true in many contexts. I found that in Japan my authority on what people actually said in English was usually considered more valid than any NNS, no matter how qualified (another example of NS privilege – our mistakes are considered features, examples of real-world usage), although students would be more likely to accept directions to study outside from my NNS peers (of course, both the students and NNS teachers were Japanese, which undoubtedly played a part). I also heard from female teachers that students would accept their directives if they came as “support” rather than instructions. I’ve seen many more female teachers openly disrespected by students than male, and in one case seen one openly accused of incompetence by a male student, who later seemed unable to understand why other people held her in higher authority than him. Most teachers in the US seem not to dress up much, and this doesn’t seem to hurt their authority, while teachers in Japan generally wore formal officewear as part of looking the part (in both university and eikaiwa, although I suspect it served different semiotic functions). I think in my case my demeanor might require some compensatory formality. It is probably safe to say that what makes students take the teacher’s enjoinders to attend to ambient input and take their medicine varies from teacher to teacher and context to context, but the effect is one that it would behoove most teachers to recognize and use.
I didn’t expect such a great metaphor for the ESL/EFL classroom to come from a writer on artificial intelligence.
In his article “There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial Intelligence”, Eliezer Yudkowski uses the metaphor of a fire alarm to explain situations in which people act strangely without it being a faux pas. His version of a fire alarm is a public messaging system that would give people permission to act with what in his opinion is the correct amount of urgency in the face of dangerously advanced and amoral (at least by our standards) AI. A fire alarm, he postulates, is not simply an indication that danger exists (the other main indication being smoke), but a signal that it is acceptable to act as if it does in front of other people. The acceptability comes from the fact that (actual and metaphorical) fire alarms are heard by everyone, and one’s knowledge that others also hear it enables one to take part in behavior like descending the stairs and paying a visit to the parking lot in the middle of a workday knowing that coworkers will not hold it against you. Like many widely-shared messages, a fire alarm turns insane solo behavior into acceptable, even encouraged, group behavior.
(I heard this for the first time on Sam Harris’s podcast. Yudkowski sounds exactly as you might expect someone with his job description to. Incidentally, I have some basic disagreements with a lot of what Harris says, but still enjoy listening to his interviews. I will be more specific in a future post.)
It’s pretty close to universal knowledge that speaking one’s L2 in front of other people is face-threatening behavior. Consider the range of situations where reproach or shame are possible results – besides the obvious ones (sitting alone on the bus), you may be considered rude, stupid, foreign, pretentious, or just strange for suddenly bursting into French at your pâtisserie or watching Chinese soap operas on your phone. Naturally, the number of “safe” contexts to speak your L2 increases if you move to a society where most people speak that language, but it is still not close to 100% of them – at the very least, you will mark yourself as a foreigner by “practicing” in public, and in the worst case, people can just be unbelievable assholes around 2nd language speakers. Of course, there are learners who don’t feel threatened at all by speaking their L2, and maybe those are the same people who would immediately perform a fire drill alone at the first hint of smoke in the air. Most people need acknowledgement that they won’t be judged negatively for trying and often failing to make themselves understood in a new code – they need a public signal that legitimizes it for everyone. Something in the ESL/EFL classroom is necessary to transform society’s gaze from judgmental to facilitative.
This may turn out to be another black robe effect. That is, the teacher might be the variable that turns language practice from face-threatening to the group norm. The inverse is clearly true – teachers can definitely act in ways the discourage open practice or make students ashamed of failed attempts at communication (or worse, ashamed of imperfect grammar). Teachers can also strengthen the norm of practicing English within the class by spelling it out explicitly and practicing it themselves. I suspect though that a lot of the legitimization of language practice is due to the physical edifice of the classroom and the rituals one must go through to join a class – signing up, visiting the bursar’s office, carrying a bookbag, etc. You can test this by walking out of your classroom during a task and secretly observing how much of the communication in your absence is still in English, and compare it to what happens when a waiter who shares an L1 with the cook is done taking your order. As in the experiments that Yudkowski cites to make his case, students’ shared understanding of what behavior is validated is essential for any of that behavior to actually take place. Whatever it is that is acting as a fire alarm in language classes, its effects depend as much on the people as on the signal.
I used to have this fantasy about being able to predict the future by entering all the relevant data about the real world, down to the location of each atom, into a supercomputer and letting that supercomputer simply run a simulation of the world at a rate faster than actual time. My inner materialist loved the idea of every geological force, weather system, human brain and every therefore manifestation of the emergent property we call a “soul” being predicted (something about my needing to take the stuffing out of humanity as a teenager), and I believed that doing this with the power of computing was eminently plausible save for our lack of complete data. I now realize that it is impossible. No, not because I’ve stopped being a materialist.
Any computer used to run a complete simulation of the real world must be at least as big as the system that it will be used to simulate. That is, a complete simulation of an amoeba would require at least an amoeba-sized computer, a complete simulation of a human would require at least a human-sized computer, and a complete simulation of a planet would require a planet-sized computer, etc. This is for a reason that is a “bit” obvious once you come to see it, as I did sometime during my undergrad years (if my memory of conversations over AOL Instant Messenger serves). Data is instantiated in computer memory in chips as 1s and 0s, or bits, which have mathematical operations performed on them which in aggregate give rise to more complex operations, everything from blogging to Microsoft Flight Simulator. At the moment, each of those bits needs at minimum a single atom with a charge to represent its value (the details of the bleeding edge of computer memory are quite fuzzy to me; replace “atom” with “quantum particle” in this argument as you see fit). Any atom in a simulated universe would need great amounts of bits to represent its various properties (number of neutrons, location(s), plum pudding viscosity, etc.), and thus many atoms of real-world silicon would be a minimum to represent a single simulated atom. Because all matter is composed of particles that would need at least that number of particles of computing hardware to simulate them, hardware must always be at least as physically big as the physical system that it simulates. So much for running a predictive version of Grays Sports Almanac on my Windows computer.
But maybe not all that information is needed. Maybe not all aspects of the system need to be accurately represented in the simulation for the result to be close – the number of neutrinos flying through the Milky Way surely can’t have that much to do with whether Leicester beats Arsenal 2-1 or 2-0. But consider that that game takes place in a universe where neutrinos definitely exist and people know and talk about them. Some proportion of viewers, players, or advertisers are surely affected by the existence of scientific research being done in the city (Leicester and London are both home to renowned universities) where they live, even if indirectly – universities are huge employers with large real estate footprints. Seen in the broader picture, the existence of neutrinos seems like a variable actually capable of affecting the outcome of a soccer match. Even a single sporting event isn’t really a closed system – consider how directly they are affected by weather. And of course the types of simulated realities that are en vogue recently thanks to Black Mirror are earth-like or at least have environments capable of fooling complete human simulacra, which means that the humans in them need referents for the things that they talked about when they were still flesh and blood – can you imagine a physicist being confined in a San Junipero happily if the rules of atomic motion are not part of the virtual world? What would you do for fun when the 80s nostalgia wears off?
It’s an open question whether a simulated mind deserves moral consideration even if it has the subatomic workings of its nervous system simplified in order to make it run on a smartphone. The point I mean to make is just that it’s impossible to have a completely simulated anything without building a computer of at least that physical size in the real world.
Many of us agree that teaching “at the point of need” (as I believe Meddings and Thornbury put it) is an ideal context for formal grammar teaching. Students’ trying to communicate something provides clear evidence that they need the grammar that would facilitate communicating it, and depending on how close they come to natural expression, evidence that their internal representation of English is capable of taking on this additional piece of information.
In interlanguage punting, I conjectured that taking a guess at grammar students may need in the future and organizing a lesson around a particular grammar point was justifiable if the lessons you used to introduce that grammar would be memorable long enough for a “point of need” to be found before the lesson was forgotten. At the time, I was teaching weekly 1-hour grammar workshops with rotating groups students at different levels, and as I could not teach reactively I had to justify my grammar-first (formS-focused) approach.
Read on for the last post before the new semester starts.
English Language Teaching
Parisa Mehran
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