Letter to a CELTA Graduate

Paul Read, UK

Paul Read cut his teeth teaching in Slovakia and Russia, and now works at a private language school in Plymouth, England, where he is continually amazed by the sheer number of pilots and air traffic controllers he meets.His blog ploughs a lonely furrow on the internet at http://www.paulread.net/ where he writes occasionally about his interests (teaching and falling into swamps on Dartmoor) and where he also curates the Letters to a CELTA Graduate.

My Dear X, Young Celta Graduate,

If I say “vocabulary” to you, what do you think of?

Perhaps you are still troubled by memories of the ‘elicitation’ session during your training course?

Your mission was to show your aptitude at drawing out some obscure lexical item, like ‘guinea pig’ from the intermediate students who had volunteered for this.

You spent all night worrying about it, and then, when time came to pass, you flapped around like a confused heron, drawing strange symbols on the whiteboard and making inappropriate and confusing noises, igniting not a single flame of recognition in the minds of anyone in front of you.

Visibly perspiring, you looked in desperation at the clock, at the stony faces of your tutors, at the pitying expressions of your colleagues. You rightly surmised that this would end badly.

Now that you are older, wiser and don’t have CELTA tutors breathing down your neck you no longer adhere to those methods. It is Google Image search for you, or a quick check in the bilingual dictionary. I can’t say that I disapprove.

But have you ever wondered whether there might be more to teaching vocabulary than this? That, perchance, those “Focus on Lexis” boxes in your course book (which you so egregiously ignore) might not have always been there? That, in fact, they may bear witness to a tale of heroism, courage, villainy and despair?

No? Then you’d better pull up a chair.

In the beginning was the clause

In the days before recorded history began, deep in the murk of lost time, during that period known to archaeologists as “before the 1980s”, there was but one true religion in ELT, and the name of that religion was Grammar.

The central belief of Grammar was that communicative power came from the ability to chant.

At first, one learned simple incantations like “I have this”.

Gradually, acolytes passed through stages of occult knowledge, until they were able utter high-level invocations like “Would that able to have been having it be something that they had had” or “If the having had of it had been that which I would have had, then I would hardly have been able to have unhad it, would I?”, at which point – it was believed –the student exited this mortal realm in a state of bliss, finally ready to talk to the Great Native Speaker in the sky.

Those who were unable to attain such levels of mastery simply had not completed enough gap-fills yet.

Naturally, a complex infrastructure of teachers, grammarians and gap-fill exercise writers existed to support this religion, and they jealously guarded their supremacy over all learning. There are echoes of this infrastructure in today’s civil service, easily recognizable if you’ve ever had to apply for a passport by filling in gaps of ever-increasing complexity.

And, lo, a child was ______ (born / generated / birthed)

One day, into this alien, ancient world, a child was born. Sadly, Wikipedia does not relate the precise astrological conditions at that time, but we can safely assume that they were propitious, because this child grew up to be none other than Michael Lewis, whose Lexical Heresy spread like wildfire across the Near East, from its epicentre in Brighton and Hove.

The hegemony of the grammarians was there to be broken; the age of the chunk had dawned.

Soon the cry of “language consists not of lexicalized grammar, rather grammaticalized lexis!” was being shouted in the marketplaces, stationery supply cupboards and teachers rooms from here to Tel Aviv.

Within a few years, enjoying the thrill of the illicit, teachers began passing handwritten copies of Implementing The Lexical Approach around under the tables at meetings, scratching COBUILD graffiti onto cave walls, and trying out that “get” activity with their students when they weren’t being observed by their patrician, grammarian, DOSes.

A _____ campaign

The grammarians responded forcefully, as everyone knew they must. Catty articles were written in the learned journals, some people got tied to dunking stools and others were cruelly unfriended on Facebook. People muttered and smirked and turned their backs during the eating of vol-au-vents at conferences. The campaign was vicious, bitter and long.

But, as many other monolithic religions have discovered when confronted by a heresy: it is difficult to kill an idea whose time has come. Course book writers, desperate not to alienate their flocks, pretty soon had to add lines about corpora in their blurb, even if they didn’t mean them. “Collocation” became a term that even the most dyed-in-the-wool adherent of the Ancient Ways knew of, even if they said it with disgust.

So, next time you come across a “Focus on lexical chunks” box in your course book, do not immediately skip it in order to play another round of “Paul’s Game” or to give out a sheet from Murphy. Remember the sacrifices that led to it being there.

Remember to teach your verbs with nouns, and vice versa. Hector your students into noticing which adjectives go with what. Always call it “lexis” not “vocabulary”. And above all, be thankful that “guinea pig” is no longer an item in most sane course books.

Until next time,

Y

Please check the Improving English through Humour course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology for Teaching Spoken Grammar and English course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the How to be a Teacher Trainer course at Pilgrims website.