Two Examples from the Dark Side of TEFL

Adult
Anonymous

This paper is being written in response to Mario Rinvolucri's editorial "The Cheerful Blandness of our EFL Literature" in Humanising Language Teaching, Year 7, Issue 3. It is intended to raise debate on several issues, including the use of unsuitable teaching materials, the arrogance of (some) course designers, and the Eurocentric assumptions that can underpin both these failings.

Case 1

In the mid-1970's, I worked in British Further education, and did some EFL teaching in a Technical College where the Senior EFL Lecturer was herself unqualified both in EFL and as a teacher. Possibly as a result of her own background, she had no qualms about allowing non-EFL specialist members of the full-time staff to teach whenever they were short of hours on their timetables.

On one occasion, this resulted in an economic historian being unleashed on an unsuspecting class of Malaysian students from the Maths and Science Department, but the results were less than happy. The teacher concerned had been tasked with teaching this group only because her evening-class "A" Level Economic History students had voted, en bloc, with their feet, leaving her short of teaching hours. This happened on an annual basis, but in this instance office politics intervened, and the final decision to entrust her with EFL teaching was taken more to prevent another member of staff from threatening the Senior Lecturer's position than for any pedagogic reason.

Nothing daunted, the historian selected several passages from Boronowski's (1976) The Ascent of Man, and proceeded to use these as scaffolding to develop reading skills. The material, in her opinion, was "the sort of thing they should be interested in". The plan was that the students would read the passages, ask for help with lexical items that they did not understand, and then they would "discuss" the passage i.e. she would lecture about it.

Hardly surprisingly, the students hated this approach. Being enrolled on "A" Level Maths and Science courses, they required a pass in either the Cambridge First certificate or the Joint Matriculation Board's Test in English (Overseas) to enter Higher education. It was quite clear to them that The Ascent of Man was not an adequate textbook for their purposes.

Secondly, and probably more importantly to some of them, was the fact that The Ascent of Man ran counter to everything that they believed. Boronowski's thesis is based on the Darwinian assumption that, as a direct result of the appliance of science, every day in every way, human beings are getting better and better.

The Muslim Malaysians contested this assumption. So far as they were concerned, the human race had had its best chance when the Holy Prophet of Islam ruled in Mecca. Since that time there had been a general degeneration, and secular belief in the powers of science, as opposed to the power of God, was simply hastening the downward spiral.

Eventually the students complained, in a body, to the College Principal, and because a set of poor results would have jeopardized the College's chances of attracting Malaysian students for the next academic year, they were allocated a new, qualified, competent EFL teacher.

Discussion

So what can we learn from this? Firstly, that it is not wise to allocate teachers to classes for reasons unconnected with their ability to do the job. Secondly, that economic history teachers of do not necessarily make good EFL teachers even if they are native speakers of English. Thirdly, that people who teach their own specialist subjects badly are unlikely to each anything else better.

None of those conclusions should cause surprise. The most important conclusion, however, is that it may not be wise for Western educated teachers to impose their own enthusiasms on students who have different cultural values.

At this point, however, it is only fair to point out some other factors.

The case I have discussed took place in the 1970's. We knew far less about cross-cultural concerns in those days. Harrison's (1990) collection of papers lay in the future; the very concept of Linguistic Imperialism (Phillipson 1992) was yet to find expression. Things are much better now. It would be impossible to find a similar case today. Right?

Wrong.

Case 2

At present, in the Sultanate of Oman, military personnel are being taught using an in-house course called SAF Target. This is a prestige project backed by the Royal Air Force of Oman's Directorate of Education and Military Culture. To date, the RAFO Curriculum Development Cell has printed only two levels, with a third level in the development stage, but the programme will eventually consist of six levels, designed to take students up to the Council of Europe's Waystage (KET) and Threshold (PET) levels.

At first sight, the two levels at present in print LOOK wonderful. As befits a prestige project, they are printed on thick, glossy paper, they are lavishly illustrated, and are accompanied by Teachers' Notes that seem to be aimed at making the course "teacher-proof". It is only later that one realizes that the course is a triumph of style over substance, and questions begin to form.

To begin with, why is Oman creating its own course when Mellor and Baker de Altamirano (2004, 2005) have already produced a two-volume course in English for Military Purposes that goes up to PET?

Secondly, do members of the Sultan's Armed Forces actually require the general communicative skills that are tested by KET and PET? Occasionally Omani senior NCO's require Cambridge First Certificate for matriculation purposes. Within the Royal air Force of Oman, personnel on the on-going F-16 and Super-Lynx projects require scores from the American Language Course Placement Test and the Oral Proficiency Interview. Students who enroll at the projected Military Technological College will be rated on the IELTS scale, but the ALCPT and IELTS assessments are oriented towards ESP rather than to general English.

Omani military personnel are young, male Arabs who have already committed themselves to a definite career choice. They need the language that will help them to develop in their chosen professional world. KET and PET, however, are designed to foster communication among teenage Europeans. The materials employed on KET and PET courses revolve around travel/sport/leisure activities, service encounters and "talk about your favourite type of music/clothing/food". These activities have been described as coming from a "soft, fudgy, sub-journalistic world" (Rinvolucri 1999;14) and are only one step short of what Abbott and Wingard ( 1981) have described as TENOR - Teaching of English for No Obvious Reason.

An example of such material comes from Book 2 of SAF Target. Student's Book Unit 4, Pages 57-59 and Workbook Unit 4 P. 52 introduce material about boxing, augmented by a very simple passage about the career of Mohammed Ali. The passage is superimposed on a pointillist, pixilated photograph of the boxer, taken from over his left shoulder, so that most of the face is obscured. As an illustration, it is only helpful if you already know what the man looks like, and in that case, you do not need the illustration.

When these materials were discussed with the Curriculum Development Cell at a meeting in January 2005, the justification for its inclusion was that this material was "aspirational", that "it got the students away from the daily grind", that the father of the principal writer had boxed for the British army, and that, in the opinion of the principal illustrator, Omani servicemen "love Mohammed Ali Clay."

This last statement can be rejected out of hand. SAF Target is being taught to young men aged between 19 and 21. This means that they were born from1983 to 1985. Mohammed Ali retired from boxing in 1980. I would suggest that it is highly unlikely that more than a tiny percentage of SAF Target students are aware of a man whose career ended before they were born, and whose last major public appearance was at the 1986 Atlanta Olympics.

Secondly, Mohammed Ali's appearance at the 1986 Olympics was not calculated to foster enthusiasm for boxing. Even then, he was visibly shaking with Parkinson's Disease, a condition which is widely accepted as having been induced by receiving repeated blows to the head.

Finally, and most importantly, despite the materials writer's filial loyalty to her father's exploits, boxing is not a sport that the Sultan's Armed Forces aspire to introduce. SAF personnel can "get away from the daily grind" (if such a term is applicable to any Armed Forces) by competing in inter-unit and inter-service athletics, football, hockey and swimming tournaments. The Royal Army of Oman shooting team is one of the best in the world. Both the army and the air force have free-fall parachute teams. The Omani navy has the Arab World's only tall ship. In the Omani civilian sector there similar sporting competitions, including national soccer and hockey tournaments, yacht races, equestrian events and cricket matches, but there is NO boxing.

The reason for this is that, among Omanis, boxing is generally regarded as being haram (forbidden under Islam). I have no statistical evidence to back this statement, but while researching this paper, an unscientific sample of my own Omani students was unanimously opposed to the sport. There are numerous hadiths (reported sayings) of the Holy Prophet urging Muslims to love one another, and these sit badly with the spectacle of two men trying to beat each other senseless for the amusement of an audience.

Discussion

So where does all this leave us?

To begin with, it suggests a depressing unwillingness to learn from past mistakes. It shows that instead of tailoring materials to students' interests, wants or needs, at least one group of writers are still following their own personal interests, and the students have to put up with it.

Secondly, it suggests that the cult of celebrity is still alive and well. In 1997 this cult received a severe setback with the almost simultaneous deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Mother Teresa. Immediately, dozens of commercially produced textbooks had their shelf lives drastically curtailed. The difficulty, so far as commercial texts are concerned, is in judging which current celebrities will retain their appeal three, four or five years down the line, but that is no excuse for any writers to keep trotting out the same old faces.

Thirdly, the Omani evidence suggests that some materials writers remain unable to cope with the most basic cultural differences. When dealing with Muslim students it is no longer enough to excise illustrations of women in short skirts, alcohol and pigs. A deeper

understanding of local culture is required, and if Arab nations do not adopt specific aspects of western culture, it is worth considering that they may not want to adopt them.

References