Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 5; September 2001

China employs 400,000 people to teach the "window on the world" language to her secondary school population, according to a British Council report in the mid 90's, put together by Alan Maley. A country like Italy, which , were it in China would be a middling to large sized province, counts around 38,000 teachers in Scuola Media Inferiore and Superiore ( Junior and Senior High )

So when we speak of EFL teachers we are talking of a population of maybe some 4,000,000 people, across our huge globe. These people are teaching a foreign linguistic code., for sure, but they are teaching much more than that. They are teaching the language, the culture and the mental structures of the World's dominant power, the USA.^* They are teaching a skill that, in many countries, is part of climbing up into the lower middle class. They are teaching a skill that in many countries is the sine qua non for well paid work, by local standards, for the new unofficial government of the world, the large Trans-national Corporations. They are teaching the code needed to access most of the mass of ever changing information on the Web. Without English , people are seriously disenfranchised today.

So much for the size of our profession and its importance round the world. But this tells us little about how an EFL teacher operates within the social environment and culture of each country. In the rest of this article I am going to take a handful of countries and look at how the role of the EFL teacher is defined in each, defined largely by the nature of the local society. Let us start in the far North.

The Greenlandic EFL teacher.

A small settlement, up beyond the Arctic Circle, several hours from Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, a town of 15,000 inhabitants. There are a handful of families in the settlement and the teacher is one of half a dozen Danish people in the hamlet, that in these frozen wastes, is called a municipality. This is mainly an Inuit settlement. The EFL teacher speaks little of the Inuit language- she has been trying to learn for 8 years but….. Her pupils have a shaky grasp of Danish. Yet the EFL teacher is teaching these Inuit speakers English from the assumptions a Dane makes learning English. She only has a handful of pupils and knows them and their families inside out. The intimacy of the settlement is not quite the same as the intimacy within an igloo but it is about as far from the careless coldness of the great city as you can imagine. The Danish EFL teacher is part of the financially generous and paternalistically well-meaning system of Danish imperialism that has shattered and perverted the values of Inuit society. The results of Danish "Daddy-knows-best" paternalism are to be seen in the incidence among the Inuit of alcoholism and child abuse. Mostly the Danish EFL teacher in Greenland is some sort of oddball, a person who felt marginal in Copenhagen and had discovered a purpose in life as far as possible from home.

In Greenland the EFL teacher is typically a well-intentioned foreigner, in flight from her own society.

The German Gymnasium ( Grammar School ) EFL teacher.

He has studied for many years to achieve his position. A five year language and linguistics course followed by two teacher training years. He has adequate social status and is a full civil servant ( Beamter) with full tenure- he is virtually unsackable. He will typically teach less than twenty 50-minute hours per week but will take piles of marking home. Marking and correcting tests bulk large in the mind of this teacher and he tends to be scrupulously linguistically fair to the pupils sometimes to the point of absurdity. He has a wide and deep awareness of the language, literature and cultures of the USA and UK. Typically he is teaching in the same town or area where he himself grew up. He is a pillar of local society. He is relatively well-paid

I write "he" advisedly, as more than 60% of German Gymnasium teachers of English are male. Grammar School language conferences in German are typically two thirds male while in, say, Portugal in a gathering of 1000 secondary teachers of English, there will be 50 males, if that.

The German Gymnasium EFL teacher is a well-respected pillar of local society who has awesome knowledge of and fluency in the target language. Like most pillars, this teacher is relatively static.

Italian EFL Teachers

These fall into two distinct groups: Secondary and primary.
Secondary school teachers are not well-paid and yet you will marvel at how well-dressed they are. In Italy the typical Secondary School EFL teacher has married a judge, an engineer or a doctor and brings the professional prestige of the class she has married to her job. Curiously, she endows her calling with borrowed prestige.
The Italian EFL teacher works in the regal isolation of her own "aula", where she is queen and no one dares to enter. She can have a quite lonely professional life.
Typically she will be willing to spend a lot of personal time on self-training and will pay for such training from her own pocket, quite frequently, something that few German or UK state teachers would accept to do.
The Italian secondary school teacher is the "bride class" for men in the top professions and she brings her bourgeois sense of well being to the job. She does not derive her sense of well-being from the job, mostly.

The Italian primary EFL teacher is a very different kettle of fish. She went through teacher training college and not University. She will often come from a socially lower background than the secondary school teacher. She will rarely be married to a man in the top professional classes. She has normally had little training in English and it is only in the last five years that she has been required to teach it. She has often done a crash language course in English, but learning a language at 45 years of age is not easy, even when you really try. She is often an instinctively better teacher than the secondary colleague- she really cares about the children as whole people.

The Italian primary school EFL teacher is sociologically much closer to the mass of her pupils than the secondary school teacher. While often a good teacher, she typically feels insecure about her command of English.

The private sector EFL teacher in London

She is in her mid-twenties and earns about half the national average wage- this is in the context of a country that is not high in the European income tables: Switzerland at $29.000 per capita, Germany at $24,000 with Britain on $18,500. She works a 25 hour week and is amassing experience on the way to getting a better paid job outside UK. She is keen, cheerful and full of enthusiasm for her students and their amazing ways

Though EFL is one of the leading UK export industries the young EFL teacher has very low status and any serious career prospects lie outside UK. Some people put up with the absurdly low wages because it allows them to defer beginning to pay off their university loans. ( they do not have to start paying off the money until their income reaches a certain threshold )

This teacher knows the language she is teaching in depth but she knows hugely little about the languages and cultures of the students she is teaching.

The Junior High School teacher of English in Japan

She has 40-45 children in her English class. Her typical lesson is a checking ritual rather than a time for learning new things. Half her class attend Jiuku, or Cram School and have learnt the content of today's text book unit in small classes of 10-15 students. The kids who don't go to Jiuku will have studied the unit as homework sometimes with help from their mother.
In class the teacher is firm, strong, monotonous and ritualistic, a kind of priestess.
One or two kids will be asleep, quietly, at the back to the room.

In the afternoons she runs an " English club". Like all teachers in club hours, she is friendly, relaxed and really warm with the kids. The kids who come have chosen to come and they seem quite different from in class.

Though on paper she has European length holidays she never takes more than two or three weeks away from school in a year. One week-end in two she will take students on excursions or do sports coaching at school. This is when she really gets to know them.

And then there is the matter of her homeroom class. If there are kids who cannot drag themselves to school on time in the morning she may drop by and pick them up. If any of the boys are caught misbehaving in town the police will report their behaviour first to the school and only later to the parents. The homeroom teacher is held responsible for the child's behaviour outside school. If some kids leave at 16 years old, it is up to the homeroom teacher to write them references, get them job interviews and groom them for these interviews.

In Japan the teacher meets her students in every role situation from intensely formal to hugely loving and caring. The in-depth influence the teachers have on the students is massive. It is very hard for us "part-time" European teachers to really have any idea of the demands Japanese society makes on its secondary teachers.

Sharing a linguistic skill is not central to the Japanese EFL teacher's work. Sometimes her own skill in the oral areas of language is lacking. She is, among other things a priestess, a friend, a counsellor, a policewoman, a sports coach and a mother-elder sister to her students.

Above I give a few examples of what an EFL teacher can be in the context of different cultures. I have mentioned half a dozen places and there are more than 200 countries across the world.. The diversity of roles an EFL teacher may need to assume is mind-boggling and renders any attempt at describing trends in World EFL pretty well meaningless.
And there are people like me who sincerely want to offer these 4,000,000 teachers good, new ideas to use in their classrooms! When you think about it, us Western methodologists must be ostriches with our heads buried in the sand when we propose ideas for classrooms whose sociological and psychological dimensions of we have no idea of.
Perhaps we secretly believe that the only way to dare continue our work is to avoid finding out too much?

• there are serious, large exceptions to this generalisation. In India, English, that used to be the language of the oppressive British Raj, has now become the lingua franca of the middle classes and seen as a bulwark against the domination of Hindi and of Dehli In South Africa the main language of Apartheid was Afrikaans, with English seen as the common language of the resistance to Apartheid and Boer domination. It is clearly the language of the majority-rule regime.