DELTA Diaries Week 0 - Overview and Anticipation

As is mentioned in my first introductory post "Cutting The Ribbon", I have been working as an English teacher since 2008 and initially trained for my CELTA (Cambridge Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults) in 2010 at Teaching House New York. This is when I first learned about International House World Organization and the amount of teacher training that goes on at these schools around the world.

After a few years of working in France, I came to Prague to work for AKCENT International House Prague largely because of these opportunities for teacher training and continuing development. My goal was to gain experience working within the IH network while also taking training courses to develop in other aspects of ELT (I have completed the IH Certificate in Teaching Young Learners and Teenagers, as well as the IH Language Awareness Course).

In one week I will be starting my Delta Modules 1 & 2 (formerly the Cambridge Diploma in English Language Teaching to Adults) at IH Prague. For those who don't know this is an advanced certification in English Language Teaching generally required for ELT management positions as well as teacher trainer roles at most language schools. The full Delta consists of three modules:

Module One
This is a written exam which falls under Cambridge English Language Assessments (along with Cambridge First (FCE), Cambridge Advanced (CAE), etc....) and tests a teacher's knowledge of:

• Second Language Acquisition Theories
• Language Teaching Methodologies
• Language Systems (Grammar, Vocabulary)
• Language Skills (Reading, Listening)
• Potential Learner Difficulties
• Language Resources and Materials
• Assessment Methodologies

Because I have already completed half the coursework for an MA in Teaching English as a Second/Foreign Language, many of these are concepts which I have already studied and written papers about. However, the focus of the Delta Modules is more practical than my MA, and so there will still be quite a bit of work to do to prepare for the Module One exam.

Module Two
This module will be the main challenge to overcome this summer, and as such the main focus of these blog posts. Module two is the practical teaching-focused portion of the Delta Modules which includes the following tasks:

Four Language Systems/Skills Assignments (LSAs)
Throughout the summer I will be team teaching two groups of students at different levels. I will regularly teach them in part to get to know them better because they will also be the students who I teach for my four official observed lessons, which are part of each LSA.

LSAs are divided into Systems (grammar points, lexical sets, and other language-structure focused lessons) and Skills (speaking, reading, listening and writing). During Module Two, I will need to teach two systems lessons and two skills lessons of 45-60 minutes which will be officially observed and marked for every minute detail of the lesson from lesson aims, lesson cohesion, techniques used, etc...

Additionally, I will need to write a research paper for each lesson focusing on the details of the system or skill I will be teaching (think: 2,500 words on phrasal verbs, on listening, on perfect aspects, on affixes, etc). The purpose of these papers is to learn the language point I will be teaching inside and out, backwards and forwards and to apply this knowledge to the anticipated needs and problems of the learners I am teaching. This research should all build towards the observed lesson and factors into the overall mark for these LSAs.

Additionally, the final LSA will be observed and marked by an external assessor - someone not teaching my course who I will have never met, and this final LSA is a requirement of passing the whole Delta Module 2. 

Professional Development Assignment (PDA) Part A - Reflection and Action
This assignment begins with a diagnostic observation at the beginning of the course (prior to the LSAs) performed by an official Delta course tutor. This observation is unassessed, but feedback is given on a 45-60 minute lesson. After the observation the candidate must write an assignment of 1,000 words maximum detailing teaching beliefs and practices, strengths and weaknesses, as well as an action plan including approaches, methods and resources to work on.

Later, after the first two Language Systems/Skills Assignments (LSAs) have been completed, another paper is written of 750 words maximum detailing the progress made since the initial assignment, and further plans of action.

Another 750 word paper is submitted at the end of all four LSAs at the end of the course detailing the progress made in teaching beliefs and practices, and listing plans for continuing development beyond the course.


Professional Development Assignment (PDA) Part B - Experimental Practice
The second part of the PDA is one I am looking forward to, and actually one I have presented on before for TESOL Greece - Experimental Practice. For this assignment the candidate needs to select a methodology or technique that is commonly known and used (currently or historically) in ELT and use it to plan and teach a lesson. The catch is that this technique must be one they have never used before. Some commonly used ones are Dogme, The Lexical Approach, and Task-Based Learning; but any technique could potentially be used.

The experimental lesson is analyzed and evaluated by the candidate for effectiveness and for benefits brought on by the central aspects of the technique. This results in a 2,000-2,500 page paper not including the lesson plans.

This portion of the PDA appeals to me, but because I have played around with aspects of so many different techniques, I will need to either do something archaic (Audio-Lingual? Silent Way?) or a bit off the wall (suggestopedia?) to meet the "have never used it before" criterion.

Module Three
The final module of the DELTA is an extended research assignment which I will not be completing right away due to work commitments. I will write more on that when it comes around.

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So there it is. I expect this summer will be a ton of work, but I am also really looking forward to having nothing to do for 8 weeks but work on my own development as a teacher and learn the observation/evaluation skills that I will need in my new position with IH Beirut. I will do my best to post weekly updates and summaries of my thoughts and reflections on the course. I hope these will serve as a way for me to organize my thoughts and synthesize a ton of info down to the most important take-home messages. If so, then hopefully it can serve as a sort of guide to future DELTA trainees who stumble across my blog. Wish me luck!

ELT Forum Plenary - Maggie Kubanyiová "Motivating Language Teachers Through Vision"

The closing plenary session for ELT Forum was given by Maggie Kubanyiová. 

Her bio and description are shown above but briefly: she is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Birmingham (where I am doing my MA TEFL/TESL) who focuses on learner motivation. She recently co-authored the book Motivating Learners, Motivating Teachers for the Cambridge Language Teaching Library Collection with Zoltán Dörnyei. Her talk promises to share some of the best kept secrets to inspirational language teaching which take advantage of teachers' inherent personalities, knowledge and skill sets. 

She begins her talk by thanking the conference organizers and commenting on how fantastic all the ideas and activities that have been shared at the conference are. She then brings up a problem that she had heard discussed at many of these talks....motivating learners. 

She shares a quote from a secondary school teacher who struggled with this very issue. 

Essentially, although we embrace the ideas on motivation, the evidence doesn't come through in the classroom. The reason being that it makes sense and seems wonderful in the training session, but once you're back at home and back at work it just seems more comfortable and clearer to do things the old way. 

This happens to varying degrees to most of us, and her question was to find out why this was. Her answer draws inspiration from T.S. Eliot. 

So, the question is how do we take these ideas from training sessions and make them ours; make them personal and real for our own lives?

She refers to second language acquisition (SLA) research questions posed by Rod Ellis:

She focuses primarily on the green question in her own research. Seeking to find how what teachers already know and do affect the theories in SLA. To seek a connection between research and classroom practice. 

For a bit of background she defines "language teacher cognition" as the following collection of issues. 

The collection if things which inform our teaching and what we see as best practice. It comes down to how we see ourselves and what vision we have of ourselves in the future. As we realize this we start to make more conscious decisions about the future. 

Another definition she gives for "ideal language teacherselves" which is who we would like to become. The reality we want to create for ourselves as developing professionals. 

An ideal self is not something simple like "I would like to be a good teacher", but something vivid and real with details about all the variety of factors that affect our motivation and actions. 

An example she gives relates directly to our situation as conference attendees. She says that what we pay attention to and what we ignore, that is, the way we engage with the ideas at this conference - that is how we see our future selves. 

In actual practice we look at some specific questions:

Who are we? Why do we do this? and What is the image we have of our future selves?

Starting with "Who are we?", she gives the example of Benjamin Zander, the famous orchestral conductor. 

She tells us "the conductor of the orchestra doesn't make a sound". He is on the cover of the CD and yet we never hear him make a sound. 

We as teachers act in much the same way. When we're doing our job at its best, we simply direct and guide our students, and it is what comes out of their mouths and pens that matters in the end. 

This is how she sees her own teaching. If her students' eyes are not shining, then what she as the teacher is doing hasn't connect with them. 

She shares the above Palmer quote to drive the message home that it is really "WHO am I being" that matters for this motivational factor, with teaching ability and technique a requisite, but not standalone factor.

She draws our attention to the first activity on the handout (to be attached via scribd later) which focuses on finding our own gifts and passions; the things we are good at. She gives examples of colleagues who juggle in class, discuss music, dance - whatever impassions them and drives the inspirational aspect to their teaching. 

The next part if her talk asks us to think of a teacher who inspired us. We work in pairs to describe who it was (for me, it was my biology teacher Mr. Campbell who I thought of because of his offhand and sarcastic style which made him much more authentic as a person than other teachers I had at the time). 

Her follow up task was to think about what it was about us (not the teacher) that made this teacher inspirational. In this case I can look back at 15 year old me and remember the fact that I appreciated being treated like an adult and so I responded to Mr. Campbell's style because it came across as genuine, friendly and at times mocking, which seemed a much more genuine interaction than other teachers I had at the time. I look back at other teachers I remember as being important to me at the time: Mrs. Ralston (French), Mr. Hohl (Math), Mr. Dober (Physics) and I realize that though they were vastly different from each other, all of them stick out in my mind as being good teachers, and as being adults who treated me as an adult at a time when other teachers still treated me like a child. 

She asks us to look at these inspirational teachers and not seek lessons on how to teach like them, but rather to look at what that experience says about us. 

The next question she asks is the why. That is, why we think language is important. 

The above response was given to Kubanyiová at the end of a training on motivating students. She found it useful because it made her realize this idea of motivation is not always an obvious or easy thing to train. 

She then talks about what things language teachers need to know. Basing it on the "Golden Circle" for language teachers. 

Knowing the "What"s like: present perfect, articles, conditionals isn't enough. 

Knowing the "How"s like: how to set up a listening task, how to get students speaking isn't enough. 

Knowing the "why"s of our teaching are also necessary when we look for motivation. Why are we doing this? Why is this important? 

She gives an example dialogue from a communicative teaching methodologies session. T is the teacher and S is the student. 

The issue here is why did we do the first task? Students did this, and in the end what students came up with was of no value to the teacher because it was irrelevant to the task. So why do this task? We need to consider the tasks we ask of our students and what they mean to our learners and how they connect to other elements of class. Most importantly, remembering to acknowledge student ideas and contributions so they have a purpose. 

Her final section deals with the image. 

We are asked to close our eyes and imagine a big yellow lemon, smell it, we have a knife in our hand and we want to cut that lemon in half. Now we can smell it even more clearly. We can bring it up to our face and lick it. We can taste the tartness of the juice in our mouth. 

We come back and realize that many of us are salivating and that imagination is actually quote powerful. 

This is how image and imagination factor into teaching and professional development in motivation. 

She gives and example then of a successful athlete who has been quoted as saying that imagining herself walking into the Olympic stadium was the image that got her up for 5 a.m. trainings and through grueling drills and practice. Images like these give us the power to overcome all sorts of obstacles in our professional lives. They give us direction and inspiration. 

The task then is to imagine and take a tour around our ideal classroom. Look around and see what is happening and think about getting ourselves there. I missed the change to grab a picture of the slide (too busy typing the previous sentence), but it was full of wonderful images of smiling students and teachers, round table discussions, etc etc.

She concludes her talk with a story:

A little boy was watching this man in the middle of the square. There was sweltering heat and this man was working very hard and chopping away with a chisel at a piece of large stone. The boy looked at the man and wondered what he was doing. "Why are you doing that? It doesn't make any sense." And Michaelanglo said this "See little boy, there's an angel inside and I want to make him free. 

ELT Forum Plenary - Gabi Lobjová "More Enjoyable, More Effective, and More Focused on the Learner"

Gabi Lobjová starts off Saturday morning with a plenary on motivation and learner centeredness which goes through the fundamentals of what learner centered teaching means and what it brings to our students. Something the majority of us are aware of, but can always use a reminder of. 

Lobjová's plenary starts with a summary of what it means to have a leaner centered curriculum and delves into the issues found in the Slovakian educational system. These are issues that I found myself in France and I have heard from many teachers in other state run educational programs in Poland, Greece, The Czech Republic, Italy and the US (and so on). The issues at the basic level involve how it is perceived by state inspectors and how it fits into the state curriculum. 

Lobjová then discusses the difficulty that teacher find understanding what it means to adapt to student needs. "Yes! If they need to use the restroom I let them!" is not the right idea. 

The differences between learner centered and traditional teaching is highlighted with the above slide that shows that in "Traditional Teaching" the teacher is powerful, the center of attention and students are meant to passively learn the material that is fed to them. 

On the other hand "Learner-Centered" teaching focuses on learner discovery and active learning. They generate meaning and understanding; working through problem solving, participation, experimental activities and doing things actively. 

The research on children and learning shows that we are hard wired to learn by activity and interaction. The human brain is not designed to sit quietly and absorb information that is presented and outlined. This is why in a lecture type setting we so often find students who are tired, distracted or bored. Many teachers use the excuse that kids are lazy, but if we look at their life outside of the lesson we see that they are not lazy at all, but require more active education. 

She moves on to talk about this next slide regarding the role of knowledge. 

She talks about the useless accumulation of knowledge that students stow away and put aside. Students who are taught vocabulary based on a syllabus and not on their interests. She gives the example of a girls only class who are taught about football even though they never talk about football and have no interest in football (she clearly hasn't met my sister, who can talk circles around me on the topic of football). 

For learning centered teaching, the idea is to seek meaningful and relevant vocabulary. These meaningful associations have been shown by cognitive science research to be better retained in long term memory because personalized and meaningful examples stick in the memory of self perception. The same applies to using everyday lives for speaking activities. Again, this builds associations that connect to life outside the classroom. 

We have the advantage as language teachers that we can talk about anything we want. Science teachers have to talk about science, math teachers about math, but language teachers develop communicative competence and we can talk about anything we want (or, more importantly, anything our students want) in our lessons to transmit language points and skill development. 

Adapting lessons, adapting materials and personalizing our class materials is a central role we can play as facilitators to our students' learning. It requires flexibility and willingness to adapt on our behalf but it allows us to be more effective than we would be if we came in presenting grammar explicitly in a completely non-relatable context. 

Having our learners bring in materials themselves makes this even easier. We ensure that the material fits their interests and elicits so much more engagement on behalf of the students. 

Her next point brings up the issue of cognitive involvement. The use of memorization and rules for traditional teaching and the use of affective factors to motivate and involve learners. 

An example she gives is watching a film in a foreign language. When you are making an effort as an observer to watch a film in a foreign language and the film is not very interesting, it is likely you will switch it off, whereas you may have sat through it in your native language. When the film is interesting, it fits into your personal context and touches you at an emotional level, you forget you're listening to a foreign language and the effort of understanding the language becomes secondary to the story and your interest in it. 

She moves on to talk about individual differences and acceptance of different personalities and attitudes in a class. Approaching them as individuals rather than "the good kids" and "the bad kids"

Focusing on positive sides of learning instead of negative aspects helps increase motivation. So many systems (the French educational system comes to mind) focus only on mistakes and never focus on successes and progress. These systems just beat the weaker students down and destroy any chance they may have had to be drawn into future lessons. It also does much to affect their self image which is a crucial developmental factor at early stages through adolescence. 

The above two slides focus on the lack of individualization in evaluation. A common issue when there is any sort of standardized system or national exams. 

She then moves on to talk about the issue of mistrust, fear and shame in classrooms. The development of affective filters due to an uncomfortable negative atmosphere. This is something which also diminishes self confidence and risk-taking. We can do more for our learners by creating a positive and safe environment in our lessons where learners are encouraged and feel comfortable taking risks with language which is an inherent part of language acquisition. 

The final section discusses the role of the teacher in both lesson types. Is a teacher meant to be a facilitator or a director of learning?

By taking the role of facilitator we help our students take charge of their own learning. Sort of that old "you can lead a horse to water..." idea. 

Small changes like asking students to answer each others' questions or to discuss the solution to class issues helps them feel their knowledge is relevant and useful which will help promote their autonomy.

She ends with this slide to sum up her presentation. 

The Necessity of Needs Analyses - ELT Forum Conference Talk

 Earlier today I gave this presentation and workshop at TESOL France in Paris (this post is carried over from my talk in ELT forum Slovakia). 

This blog post will serve as notes on the talk for those who attended, as well as those who could not make it this time.

The Necessity of Needs Analyses from Federico Espinosa

The workshop started with participants working in small groups to come up with fictional stories for the two people pictured on slides 2 and 3. Encouraged to use their imagination and think of smaller details such as hobbies, pets, and so on. We then looked at these invented characters and thought about what their specific needs may be in an ELT classroom, and what their motivation for learning English could be.

I then shared a nicely succinct definition found on TEFLPedia defining needs analyses and rationalizing the motivation behind them (slides 5 and 6), followed by an outline describing the stages in the needs analysis and feedback process for a class (slide 7).

Step One - Make Basic Decisions

There are no slides on the first stage of a needs analysis because this stage is highly individual, and often depends more on institutional requirements than teacher or student decisions. These decisions can include, but are not limited to:

• Class Size
• Level of Students
• Course Frequency
• Coursebook Choice
• Classroom Layout
• Evaluation Rubric
• Topics to Cover
• Etc.

More often than not, we as teachers have no say in these choices and cannot be flexible about them. Alternatively, we may feel strongly that one particular choice is the correct one and are not willing to compromise with students on the matter (even if we have the freedom at our institution to do so). Either way, these are the foundations of the course - the stable base that the rest of the needs analysis must be built around and accomodate. It is important that the teacher know what these are going into the first lesson so that it can be made clear to students what is up for discussion and what is set in stone. 

Step Two - Gathering Information

The main portion of the slide deals with gathering information in the form of various communicative tasks. We spoke briefly about the type of information that could be useful (slide 8) and then launched into the first activity. 

Personal Information Icebreaker (slides 10-13)

The personal information icebreaker is usually the first thing I ever do with a class. It is a fun and quick way for students to get to know who I am besides just their English teacher, and allows me to learn a lot about the students myself. In a nutshell, I write five numbers on the board that relate somehow to my life, and students shout out questions trying to have the answer to their question be one of those numbers. I generally write information such as my age, how long I've been in a country, how long I've been teaching, how many sisters I have, how many dogs I have (0 - I really want one though!), and so on - keeping it comfortably professional. Even if a student's question is not a correct guess for one of the numbers, I still answer their questions as a way of introduction. 

During this activity, I am able to learn quite a bit about the class right away. I see who are the students who speak out loud easily and comfortably, I see who is more shy, I usually find the class clown, I see how comfortable students are with question forms and how many different types and structures they are able to use, I get a glimpse of their sense of humor and so on.

The final portion of the activity has students work in pairs to do the task with each other. Again, here I get to monitor and learn a bit about each individual student (and, because I have them write their name as well, I start figuring out who is who). Students also launch into a pairwork speaking within 15 minutes of entering the class, and if they do not already know each other they get to learn a bit about one of their classmates. This works well with studetns who know each other well too, because they find out new information about each other. 

Class Discussion Mingle (slides 14-17)

The class discussion mingle was the next activity demonstrated. Participants were given the slips of paper with the statements and were asked to speak to their near neighbors and find out if they agreed or disagreed with the statement on the card. After a short mingle we checked what people thought of a few of these statements, then participatns mingled again - but this time they were playing devil's advocate - convincing the people they spoke to to change their mind. If they agreed, they were urged to disagree, if they already disagreed then they were persuaded to agree. At this point in a classroom setting we would do a full class feedback of the ideas stated on the slips of paper and make notes on what statements students felt strongly about in the class.

Needs Analysis Discussion Slips

Some advantages and disadvantages to this activity were discussed - advantages were namely the generative and communicative nature of the task along with the need to see both sides of each argument, while disadvantages dealt with the size dynamics of the task as well as the perceived expectation of student responses. 

"Enjoy and Need" Tables (slides 18-21)

The next activity discussed inovolves students filling in a table containing the boxes "I like", "I don't like", "I need/find useful", "I don't need/find useful" with any information they think is relevant to lagnauge courses. For the first portion of the table fill they work off their own ideas and only unfold their paper to expose the teacher's suggestions once they have written at least one or two items per box. 

This is then discussed through pyramid feedback so that two students fill in a new table with a compromise between their two ideas - and then two pairs fill in a new table with a compromise of those, and so on until a final class table is filled out on an A3 sized sheet of paper. This final table is filled in with the teacher's basic decisions in mind, and would then serve as a poster in the class to be referred to and modified throughout the year. 

Needs Analysis Tables

Feedback for Large Groups

The next section of the talk proposed other means of getting student feedback for information gathering that could be applied to larger classes. As it is not always possible to do a full class mingle or pyramid, these could work for lecture hall or even distance courses. 

Using Physical Movement (slide 23)

In lecture hall settings where students can't really move around without creating massive traffic jams, there are a few options available which still get students up and moving (and awake).

Students can be surveyed quickly through a series of Caesar-esque "Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down" questions, or "Sit Down/Stand Up" for a larger visual cue. We can also get more fine tuned information by having a ranking scale using fingers (five fingers for fully agree, one finger (hopefully not the middle one) for completely disagree). 

However, an activity I find more useful (which I picked up from Colin Mackenzie at the TESOL France Colloquium in 2013) is one where students turn left if they disagree, and turn right if they agree. This makes for a clearaer visual clue, and leads nicely into students discussing why they disagree if they end up facing each other. 

Using Sticky Notes (slide 24)

Another solution for large classes is using sticky notes to get feedback. These are usually easy to find, cheap, and can easily be distruibuted to large groups with the aid of a few volunteers. 

One I like (and the one I used to get feedback on the session) is the three colors for feedback. Each participant received a green, a yellow and a pink sticky note and had to write something they liked on the green one, something they didn't like on the pink one, and any other suggestinos or comments on the yellow one. At the end they simply passed these to the end of the row and I picked them up at the end. 

An alternative to this is having each student get one sticky note which they place on the whiteboard along a spectrum. Placing the note at one extreme of the line indicates "Disagree Completely" and the other end "Fully Agree". They are able to write a brief justification for their choice on the note itself and then they come up to the board and place the note where they think it belongs. The advantage of this type is that it creates a clear visual plot of what the class opinions is, and allows the teacher to read out select student comments to discuss the idea.

For "5 votes, 4 categories" students a set number of sticky notes to use as "votes" for an unequal number of categories. They then go up to the board and place their votes on some part of the board (with justifications written on the paper if they want). It can be a good way to see what skill students find most useful (i.e. - there are four boxes on the board: "Speaking", "Listening", "Reading", and "Writing", and students must distruibute their votes in areas they want to work on most. Once complete, the results and reasons can be discussed in groups. 

Ranking Stations allows the teacher to place a set of ideas or statements on sticky notes at key places around the room. Student groups can congregate around one and debate what the ideal ranking of these should be (the most important or best ideas at the top, the least important at the bottom). Once their rankings have been decided they can swap with another team and evaluate the decisions that team made with the same statements. 

Using Technology (slide 25)

Last, but certainly not least, is the use of technology to collect student feedback. With particularly large groups, this has the advantage or automatically organizing data, and often of creating graphs or tables with the class results. 

I list four options for data collection, but in reality the options are endless. For a more detailed look at ways to incorporate technology into the classroom, the slides to my talk on technology can be found here: http://tinyURL.com/techyteachertools  

Survey Monkey, Google Docs and Doodle are all online tools that allow basic surveys to be conducted either in class or outside of class. Survey Monkey and Google Docs are best for logner more detailed surveys, while Doodle allows for basic "Yes/No/If Need Be" questions to be proposed. 

Socrative has the advantage of giving immediate feedback if your students are equipped with smartphones, tablets or wifi-connected laptops in the classroom. With this app, students enter the teacher's "classroom" space, and then any question or survey the teacher sends out pops up immediately on their screen, and as soon as the votes are in, the results are tabulated and displayed for everyone. In classes where only some students are equipped with the requisite technology, small groups can be set up to discuss the idea and vote together through one device. 

Apply and Modify

This last section of the presentation dealt with how to apply the needs analysis, and discussed ways of revisiting and evaluating the course throughout its duration.

The first, and easiest method is to revisit the original plan at key intervals during the course (slide 27). Go back to the original "Enjoy" and "Need" table and modify it as a class once in a while. Look at the original online survey data and then ask the same questions to see how results have changed, etc.

Petitions (slides 28-30) 

One idea that can bring in completely new changes mid-course and which gets students involved in the plan is having students write petitions. They write one or two sentences describing a change they would like to see in the course, and then mingle with each other to seek signatures. This way the petitions with the most signatures get discussed these changes can be made to the course structure.

Conclusion 

To finish the talk I summarized the main points to a successful needs analysis which are:

• Know what you're not willing to compromise on
• Collect student opinions and preferences
• Design a course around these
• Adapt and change as the course progresses. 

ELT Forum Keynote - David Crystal "The Future of Englishes"

I am in Slovakia for the Annual ELT Forum (ELTForum.sk) at the Economics University of Bratislava. The theme this year is Building Blocks of ELT – Language, Learner, Vision.  It is a phenomenally well-attended event with over 400 participants this year and some fantastic plenary speakers.

The keynote speaker this year is none other than Professor David Crystal, author of over 100 books, the Cambridge Encyclopedia of English and innumerable blurbs, commentaries and notes on the English Language.

He begins his talk with a quick introduction and transitions into an anecdote on the title of his talk. “The Future of Englishes” is apparently often misspelled. I guess language teachers just can’t handle the unusual form of the word, but fortunately the organizers of ELT Forum managed to get it right.

He comments that ELT Forum is an organization that “refreshes the parts that other organizations do not reach” and then launches into an analysis of the phrase, which it turns out is an old Heineken slogan from the 1970’s in England (Heineken’s original version was “Heineken refreshes the parts that other beers do not reach”). This was a fantastically well-known slogan that took a life of its own and is currently still recognizable, as it has entered popular culture beyond the scope of Heineken advertising.

Apparently, Heineken’s slogan’s success is due to the humor of the ads, using great situational comedy ads where lawn mowers came to life and mowed the lawn themselves (in one example) thereby saving the day. Later however, Heineken started playing with the words of the slogan making it “Heineken refreshes the p------s that other beers do not reach”, replacing “parts” with other words.

The example he gives to illustrate this point is an advertisement where Long John Silver becomes more and more ragged by his life on the high seas, until he is saved by a beer, replacing the slogan with  “Heineken refreshes the PIRATES other beers do not reach”. 

In a later ad, Long John Silver’s bird is the one rescued by the beer “Heineken refreshes the PARROTS other beers do not reach”. 

Still another ad portrayed a man in his car trying to describe a situation and struggling to express himself – and suddenly he has a beer and a beautiful string of poetry comes out of his mouth “Heineken refreshes the POETS other beers do not reach”, and so on and so forth.

So what’s the point of this slogan with regard to the topic of Englishes? For this, Prof. Crystal tells the story of walking around with Japanese visitors in England looking for “authentic English” examples and running into the “Heineken refreshes the PARROTS other beers do not reach” slogan. His visitors, understandably, became quite confused.

“Heineken refresh parrot? What does it mean?!”

Suddenly the importance of cultural background rears its head in the process of English education. Even with all the language skills available to us, we need the context of culture to make sense of it. Something that I, as an American, completely understand as I have been confused by British humor in the past as well. It’s not a native/non-native distinction, but rather a cultural issue.

This is how we have the issue of “Englishes”, the various cultural forms of English that exist around the world. 

So how do we keep track of this in a world where language isn’t carefully monitored and recorded with statistics everywhere (or anywhere!) it’s spoken?

The best guesses we have vary wildly, but 350 million to 450 million seems to be about right for native speakers of English, varying based on all the pidgin forms of English around the world. As for the statistic of English as a Second Language (where you are non-native, but live in a country where English is the dominant language) there seem to be somewhere between 500 million to over 1 billion. There is no way to know. How do we count English speakers in places like India, Nigeria, and so on? How much English fluency do you need to be counted?  70%? 45%? Then we come to English as a Foreign Language (where English has no official nor unofficial status in the country you live in – most countries fall into this category) – this again is completely unknown 400 million? 500 million? How do we count English speakers in China? Brazil? 

But in the end, it seems to shake out to at least 2 billion English speakers of varying fluency somewhere in the world.

So, does this make English the current Lingua Franca? For how long? Latin has come and gone, French has come and gone, and will English do the same? Will technology replace the need for language skills? Probably, but Prof. Crystal says not for 1,000 years or so (note: I disagree, in a world where applications like Word Lens exist already, I’d say we’re 100 years or less away from functional simultaneous-language-translating hearing-aid type devices).

Either way, there are many English speakers out there, but native speakers are outnumbered. By quite a bit actually – there are roughly 6 non-native speakers of English for every native.

So then who owns English in this world? England? The USA? Everybody? Nobody? It seems that with globalization we’re increasingly seeing people’s English being modified and changed by their experiences either abroad or through online social media. Just as English colonials to the “New World” began to use Americanisms such as “wigwam” and so on, currently we are all adding and changing our own lexical and grammatical sets (I, for example, regularly use “on holiday” now, and I no longer recoil at the expression “at the weekend”, something completely alien to my American English upbringing).

In modern society where international couples are having children and raising them in their common language of English, these children are growing up learning “English as a Foreign Language” as their native language. What will that do to the language?

So then we enter the discussion of why is English a global language? According to interviews Prof. Crystal conducted for a radio show, answers completely vary from “because it’s beautiful”, to "because it doesn’t have grammar”, and “because it’s obvious”.

It may not have much in the way of morphology (word endings), but then we have syntax (word order) coming out the wazoo and making a mess for our learners. So is it really so obvious a choice?

Power ultimately determines the use of language. For a while, military power and the British Empire was the reason. Then came invention, science and technology with England and the US leading scientific discovery in the 1800’s. Currently, 80% of scientific articles are still published in English. In the 1900s it came down to economic power and the banking systems of Europe. Lastly comes cultural power, in a world where, in most parts of the world, pop music on the radio is in English, the majority of the internet is in English, and 85% of all the films in the world are in English.

In 1600, only 4 million people spoke English, most of them (not surprisingly) in England. Back then it was ridiculed and disregarded as an international language. There wasn’t even much of a literary history – other than Chaucer who it seems was difficult to understand even in 1600.

And then suddenly in 1592, English crosses the Atlantic and sets up shop in what is now the USA. Also, in the 1590s Shakespeare started writing poems and plays. Suddenly, not long after 1600, England had launched its literary tradition, which continued and branched, and 400 years later 4 million became 2 billion.

But anyway, the question of this keynote talk is on the future of English. Sorry David, Englishes. So what will happen with all the various Englishes around the world?

The United Nations has half a dozen official languages (English, Spanish, French, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic) and yet English is the one most commonly used to communicate in the corridors around the place. The world has united around the language and adopted it as the political, business and cultural language.

What about places like Nigeria, where English is the unifying language of 450 ethnic and language groups? At the end of colonial rule it was deemed best to keep English (or French, or Portuguese…) as an official language in many such countries for stability to avoid political tensions between ethnic groups which had arbitrarily been thrown into sovereignty together. Yet, in an effort to move away from “colonial English” new forms of English developed. Liberian English (it can be fine-o), Ghanaian English, Guinean French, and many others emerged to express the culture of the newly formed nations. New culturally relevant words emerged and 50 years or 60 years later the language is a whole different creature. 10,000 words only used in the South Africa region. 15,000 words only used in Jamaican and surrounding islands, and that's just two of these Englishes!

How does cultural knowledge work here? How do we, as non-South-African English speakers interpret signs such as “Robots Ahead”? Would we picture an Isaac Asimov novel, or correctly guess that there is a stoplight (traffic light) ahead?

It turns out about 80% of English does not relate lexically to the original Anglo-Saxon roots. As a vacuum cleaner language, it has sucked up words from every language it has ever touched. This is how we find familiar cognates in many other (primarily European). Lexis varies greatly, though grammar tends to stay the same across Englishes. There are a few exceptions (Indian English incorporates continuous forms “-ing” on traditionally stative verbs (I am thinking, I am knowing, I am wanting…etc). Even McDonald’s has entered the game with its “I’m loving it” slogan that should prescriptively be “I love it”.

Accents are equally mixed nowadays. The BBC, The British Council, Language Schools, etc. no longer stick to Received Pronunciation (that accent you think of when you think of a classical British accent from the 1960’s) but rather represent any number of mixtures of accents. 

As for cultural knowledge, even in non-English speaking countries we run into new phrases and culturally relevant examples that do not cross borders. Czech English certainly has this with phrases such as “the nature” to describe the notion of the countryside/the outdoors/forest/woods/mountains/mushroom hunting/bird watching, all rolled into one. Names of political parties, names of local landmarks, local foods get peppered into English and even with perfect grammar, perfect syntax, perfect morphology, a non-Czech English speaker could still get lost at the phrase "Let's meet up at Jiřího z Poděbrad and get a beer and some hermelin at Riegrovy Sady, then check out the new Černy exhibit at DOX".  

So how does this affect English teaching?

When it comes to production, we can’t help but teach our own accent and language set to our students. However, for receptive skills it is necessary that students be trained to identify and understand other varieties of English, and develop the cognitive skills to eke out meaning from context for unfamiliar or unnaturally used words. They are likely to find some forms of English by traveling or getting on the Internet, so it is important to work on these. Authentic English sources of non-native speaker English are readily available online and one source he listed was IDEA (International Dialect English Archive).

The remainder of the talk was scheduled for a question and answer session.

The first question was about ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) the idea of teaching a form of English that is intentionally neutral and consolidated to form a general dialect that transcends individual language differences. 

Prof. Crystal criticized the ELF movement as being premature, trying to promote a language that has not been thoroughly researched and found. It overgeneralizes and breaks down language in a way that makes it easier to learn. An example is the loss of countable/uncountable distinctions that ELF proponents claim do not exist in many international forms of English. This is a decision, among others, that corpus data and research simply do not support.

The second question had to do with intergenerational modifications to language. For example “gay”, “wicked”, and other words that have changed meaning significantly in our lifetimes.

David gives examples of some issues he has with these words as well as with pronunciation within his family: “schedule” (UK starting with “shed”, US starting with “sked”) being pronounced different depending on if he’s speaking with his wife or his children. However, he states that the Internet has changed things in such a way that the impact of generational differences are being lost as  standard definitions and pronunciations more quickly reach the general audience.

The third question asked if we would reach a point where within English we would have such drastically different pronunciations that we would not understand each other. Prof. Crystal says that we are already there and it happens daily with current English. This is nothing new.

The final question brought up the issue of non-native teachers being discriminated by educational institutions around the world.

Prof. Crystal agreed that this is an absurd distinction to draw, and that many examining boards and schools are changing mentalities nowadays. He has done research in the past on non-native proficiency levels and found that many of the higher level non-native speakers still spoke quite a bit better than even native speakers (I can attest to this, having picked up a few key vocabulary words including "hendiadys" from my proficiency level students). The only areas that non-natives seem to really be at a deficit are apparently nursery rhymes and making love – hardly high frequency in a standard EFL classroom.