TESOL Scotland 21st Annual Conference Proceedings

15th November 2003, University of Abertay Dundee

"Englishes - Whose English?"

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Concurrent Sessions 1

Canadian Immersion Programmes: New ideas for bilingual learners, inclusion for all

Ewan McIntosh (Musselburgh Grammar School, East Lothian)

The TESOL Scotland conference provided an initial platform for discoveries made during a nine-day LECT-funded [1] trip to examine bilingual policy and practice in New Brunswick, Canada.

The presentation set out to inspire teachers of English to use a project and experience-based learning approach fit for all mono- and bilingual pupils with basic levels of English, in a mainstream environment.

Systems in Scotland and New Brunswick are very similar, in terms of provision for the bilingual learner and incorporation of an inclusion policy. Mainstreaming takes a different meaning to the way it is used in Scotland: separate bilingual education is provided for all those wishing to undertake it, but this separate provision is open to all. This is therefore seen as mainstreamed bilingual education.

This grand project is aided by an official policy of bilingualism, since 1969, encouraging diversity, rather than the melting pot we see in Canada's neighbours, the USA. This culminates in two Education Departments: Anglophone and Francophone. Its aims are politically driven, ambitious and, above all, realistic: 40% of NB citizens are already bilingual, and 70% will be deemed bilingual in 2013.

The importance of offering varied and flexible systems was greatly underlined; immersion can take many forms. However, the importance of a suitable pedagogy was also stressed. The New Brunswick pedagogy of 'experiential' learning was introduced briefly. The most fundamental of learning principles - that we learn best when the language belongs to us and helps us survive - underpins the whole pedagogy of immersion education:

• Language is never learned for language's sake;
• The teacher is seen as the guide rather than the fount of knowledge;
• If a task does not contribute towards the completion of a 5-6 week class project, the task does not happen;
• The aim is to do things, not to know things (savoir-faire).

It was proposed that this project-based learning, incorporating as many subjects as possible in a communal project to create a final product, might be a possibility to make bilingual learners feel more responsible for their learning, and give them ownership of it.

These suggestions are not immediately applicable to a Scottish system, where bilingual pupils do not necessarily arrive at the beginning of a school year. But EAL/EFL teachers could use the flexibility of this more open-ended pedagogy to their advantage.

Further findings at: www.multilangs.co.uk

E-mail: ewan.mcintosh@blueyonder.co.uk

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Our Mumbling is Rumbled: learning to listen to fast spontaneous speech

Richard Cauldwell (speechinaction, Birmingham)

Learners complain that we teach them one model for pronunciation (isolated dictionary forms), and then speak using another model (fast spontaneous) which we 'refuse' to teach them. This leads to learner frustration: they cannot understand fast spontaneous speech, and they have difficulty matching its fluency. There are two reasons for this. First, listening is twinned with reading ('receptive skills') resulting in impoverished teaching. Second, academic phonology provides insufficient information about the variability of everyday speech, and the way in which words are de-familiarised in speech.

Published software - Streaming Speech: Listening and Pronunciation for Advanced Learners of English - brings together the teaching of pronunciation and listening.

In the listening component of Streaming Speech, comprehension questions focus the learner's attention on hotspots in the recordings. Hotspots are either the fastest meaning-bearing stretches of speech, or those stretches of speech which exemplify patterns of the stream of speech. These intonational/rhythmic patterns (speech-units) have structures which pull words out of shape - changing them, often drastically - from their dictionary forms. Learners are guided into noticing the features of the stream of speech that are distorting the sound-shapes of words, they are then asked to observe for themselves these same features in other stretches of speech. There is constant attention to the relationship between citation forms and streamed forms of words - learners see, click, hear, and compare slow and fast forms.

In the pronunciation component, the learners have a four-stage task: listen, imitate, record, and compare. Speech units (up to 2 seconds in length) taken from the original recordings are presented: each containing a target sound (short or long vowel, consonant or consonant cluster). The learner has to go for accuracy with the target sound, and to imitate the flowing (fluent) stream which precedes and follows it. They listen, they imitate, they record themselves, and then compare their version to the original.

Some of the speech-units go at over 400 words per minute, and many students will not want to speak at this speed - perhaps for personality reasons. My contention is that if they practice producing speech of this speed with their oral mechanisms, it is more likely than any other procedure I know to result in improved aural perception. The benefit of the pronunciation component of Streaming Speech is therefore twofold: improved fluency of pronunciation, and improved perception in listening to normal, spontaneous speech.

References

Cauldwell, R. (2002). Streaming Speech: Listening and Pronunciation for Advanced Learners of English. [CD-ROM & online]. Birmingham, UK: speechinaction

Cauldwell, R. (2003). Streaming Speech: Listening and Pronunciation for Advanced Learners of English. [Student's Book]. Birmingham, UK: speechinaction

E-mail: rtc@blueyonder.co.uk

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One-to-One ELT

Vesna Vyroubal (Veleuciliste u Karlovcu, Karlovac, Croatia)

Even though one-to-one (121) ELT must be historically the first method of teaching and is very widely practised throughout the world today, very little has been written about it. That gap in knowledge was the main motivation for this piece of research.

The status of 121 is odd as well. Most native-speaking teachers of English (NS) generally start their careers with 121 teaching and as they gain experience graduate to class-teaching while most non-native-speaking teachers of English (NNS), follow the opposite path, starting with class-teaching and only when more experienced, taking up 121 but with the important caveat that by and large they take 121 students as a form of "moonlighting". Perhaps that is why both groups have not considered 121 teaching as worthy of academic research, the former because it is what they do when they are inexperienced, the latter because it is what they do as a "spare-time" occupation.

The first stage of the research consisted of creating a questionnaire which would answer focussed questions and various hands had a part in this stage. The results we got were not totally unexpected although some of them were quite surprising. It became clear that NS teachers themselves had two separate working modes: working in a non-English speaking country and working in an English-speaking country.

The questions themselves fell into four main categories: a) the Students; b) the Physical Environment; c) Materials; d) the Psychological.

As far as the Students are concerned, NS tended to devote most of their time to the Upper-Intermediate and Intermediate levels whilst at Elementary level NNS taught 3 times more students than NS. NS and NNS both agreed that their preferred levels were Intermediate and upwards. NS revealed an unexpected, masochistic side to their natures by opting for Elementary and Lower Intermediate as the levels most likely to benefit from 121 teaching.

Questions on the Physical Environment included questions on time of day/week and year. These questions merely underlined the tendency for NNS to teach 121 as a "spare-time", "after work" activity and certainly not done during the summer months, whilst, for NS, 121 teaching is very much a full-time job.

Probably most teachers are interested in where materials can be obtained. The survey, however, didn't throw up any surprises although there were some interesting tendencies which became clear. In answer to the question asking if teachers used commercially-produced materials, 61% of NNS admitted to using these materials "always" or "usually" to only 36% of NS.

This piece of research only proved how much there is still in 121 teaching to be investigated.

E-mail: vesna.vyroubal@ka.tel.hr

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Learning Our Language: helping learners decipher Dundonian

David Catterick (CALS, University of Dundee)

Introduction

How many times have we heard our students comment that they thought their English was okay until they arrived in Scotland only to discover they didn't understand the local accent? Until recently, my answer even as a foreigner in Scotland myself, would have been to say "just persevere and you'll get used to it". This paper shows why I now think such a comment compromises our role as linguistic facilitators.

The facts

According to Trudgill (1979) only 3% of the UK population speak Received Pronunciation (RP). In contrast, census data show that no less than 30% of the population of Scotland speak Scots. The growing political status of Scots has recently been evidenced by the publication in Scots of a new Scottish Parliament document "Makkin yer voice heard in the Scottish Parliament". Coupled with the gradual regionalisation of British media over the past 25 years, we might expect more representation of non-standard English in the language classroom.

Current practice

In a survey of 15 popular EFL textbooks I identified only two that featured non-standard English. Both textbooks presented the non-standard English as a general awareness-raising task rather than tackling the phonological and/or lexical features in a systematic way. All this leaves the learner with is what I term the osmotic approach, a self-directed regime of gradual tuning to the distinct phonological features of an accent. Given the global nature of modern publishing, I do not realistically expect EFL publishers to regionalise their textbooks. I do, however, believe that our media-rich environment provides us with access to language data that we can use in the classroom.

A systematic approach

Last year, I taught a Clinical and Cultural Communication Skills course for Malaysian medical students at Dundee's Ninewells hospital. A major goal of the course was to assist the medical students (most of whom had been educated in English) in understanding their patients on the ward rounds. Although Scots varies enormously in its written form, I presented an Oor Wullie comic strip to the students as "language data". The students were asked to first decipher it, then convert the non-standard Dundonian forms into Standard English, all the while looking for patterns within the data. (Fig. 1)

Together, we came up with a list of rules for deciphering the linguistic code (Fig. 2):

There are three main aspects of Dundonian that make it different from standard English:

But reading Scots is a far cry from understanding it when you hear it from patients in a hospital. When the Ninewells course was commissioned, I negotiated access to the Faculty of Medicine's simulated patients for the creation of video materials to be used on the course. A simulated patient is a member of the public who is paid to take on the role of a patient to test students' diagnostic skills. One of the doctor-patient dialogues we recorded was of a heavily-accented Dundonian patient speaking with the doctor in a clinical setting.

Students were challenged to use their newly-acquired code-breaking skills to decipher the details of the patient's presenting complaint before completing a gap-fill task where all the Dundonian language had been removed.

Conclusion

I believe that as linguistic facilitators we can and should present what is the dominant local variety of language in a more systematic way.

Email: d.catterick@dundee.ac.uk

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World English - as seen from below

Marnie Holborow (Dublin City University)

A critique of World English has taken root within ELT. Phillipson's linguistic imperialism highlighted the role of US and British agencies in the promotion of English and their preference for native speakers. More recently Bloch and Cameron have drawn attention to dominant frames of communication - McCommunication - whose conversation styles imitate the selling process. Both analyses underline how global capitalism has shaped the teaching styles and content of ELT.

The paper showed how ELT is a globalised industry in itself and how TESOL in the University has become a key way of attracting private funding. The quest for overseas students, who pay high fees, has become an integral part of the neo-liberal project in universities. Examples of this in an Irish university were given and academics' negative response to this privatisation brief.

But World English cannot only be seen as something imposed on speakers. Even the term 'linguistic imperialism' robs language of its creative qualities and the intervention of its speakers. In reality, top-down analyses of World English tell only half the story. We need also to analyse English language from the point of view from its actual speakers, native and non-native, and look at the ways in which World English it does not fit into the models prescribed for it.

The paper examined three ways in which speakers of World English defy dominant frames. The first example was that of the Internet, which is widely used for resistance to global capitalism and dominant market models. English was to be found alongside many other languages and forms of English were often not standard forms. The Internet examples were shown not to fit into the confines of the linguistic imperialism concept.

The second example of 'English from below' was taken from the call centre context, in which thousands of English speakers worldwide are carefully trained to follow the McCommunication model. Speakers from one Indian call centre, however, expressed anger at the alienating process of being the global salesperson and in language very different to the models they had been taught.

In spite of the dominance of World English the persistence and expansion of local varieties continues apace. Non-native speakers quickly reproduce these local varieties and they become an integral part of their speech repertoires; Irish English instances of these constituted the third example of 'English from below'.

E-mail: marnie.holborow@dcu.ie

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Taking up Time

A. Douglas Mcfarlane (Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Dundee)

According to Lewis (Implementing the Lexical Approach, LTP 1997) take is a de-lexicalised verb. Put, make, have, keep, call and others are similar in this way. Take seems to have one fully lexicalised use (take = transport); a number of uses where take has little or no meaning; and numerous ones where it is part of multi-word idioms, many of which are frequently described as phrasal verbs.

It is my impression, though it has not been scientifically tested, that these de-lexicalised verbs tend to be under-used by learners of English. This may well be due to them not being given prominence in teaching programmes. In order to be able to 'teach' a word we need to know what it means and when it is used. This workshop investigated the uses of take in order to begin to organize an approach to presenting the uses and providing suitable practice activities.

According to Lewis (ibid) an approach to developing knowledge of a lexical item and eventually leading to the learner acquiring mastery would look something like this. The item should first appear in carefully controlled spoken or written texts. The teacher will then draw the students' attention to the target language. This first step is intended to create an awareness of the item. Following this initial contact the magic number seems to be seven. Lewis states that, "many researchers … suggest you are likely to have acquired a word after meeting it seven times." So seven different activities (Lewis also suggests repeating activities) highlighting different uses are required to install some idea of how take functions in the learners' long-term memory.

The workshop presented twenty examples of 'real' uses of take from the Cobuild corpus. The sentences were modified to make them more accessible while retaining the same context and form of take. The participants put the sentences into groups with the same meaning of take. Variations were then discussed to discover whether agreement could be reached or at least agreement to disagree. Wide disagreement and no consensus being reached this would tell us that the meanings of take cannot be easily arrived at. The implications of this for teaching were then discussed.

The session ended with a short discussion and suggestions on approaches to teaching take and suitable activities to expose the students to the delexicalised and content-bearing uses of take.

E-mail: a.d.b.mcfarlane@dundee.ac.uk

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Englishes - Whose English? Teacher training Implications

Sally Macpherson (Trinity College London)

The speaker looked at the implications of Global English on teacher training, with specific reference to the LTCL Diploma TESOL. She pointed out the importance of research over recent years in the globalisation of English, resulting in focused awareness-raising workshops of related issues in teaching and learning at all training institutions e.g. 'Englishes -Whose English', 'English as an International Language', and 'international varieties of native-speaker English' The effects are wide-reaching, both nationally and internationally, not only affecting the professional awareness of Diploma candidates themselves, but also the trainers, external examiners and markers, internal assessors, classroom learners and TESOL staff, all of whom now reflect, discuss, prepare, practise and evaluate their work with growing focus on the ownership of English.

The speaker gave examples from the four Parts of the examining process. In Parts 1 and 2, the written papers of the Original Syllabus, candidates have answered a compulsory question on Global English. The Revised Syllabus, the only one from January 2004, would continue to provide the opportunity to reflect and answer on English as a global language, and its impact on e.g. cultural issues in teaching and learning. Part 3 consists of a 30-minute interview between the examiner and candidate, where examiners are standardised to elicit the candidate's views, at segmental and suprasegmental levels, on how remedial tasks can be effective for their international learners. Through an exercise on phonemic transcription, the candidate discusses the varieties and idosyncracies of connected speech, diverse accents and international intelligibility. In Part 4, classroom teaching, candidates are encouraged to plan their lessons more holistically, identifying not only the linguistic needs of their learners, but also the social and cultural backgrounds, thus enabling them to focus more easily on sensitivities concerning mutual intelligibility and accommodating and respecting each others' differences in the continuing diverse and fascinating learning processes.

The expanding field of e-learning and training, distance programmes and the benefits of these to candidates from Sheffield to Shanghai were included in the talk, and highlighted how collaboration and synchronisation of thought across the world inevitably develop in the best possible ways where issues of the international use of English are concerned.

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Footnotes:

[1] League for the Exchange of Commonwealth Teachers (back to text)

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