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Looking Down from on High

By Mario Rinvolucri, Pilgrims

(This is a modified and shortened version of an article published by Tessa Woodward in The Teacher Trainer, Vol. 8. No.3. P.19, under the title Language Awareness and Professional Hierarchy ) 

I was in a lecture by a person speaking about grammar at an applied linguistics gathering and, after some 10 minutes, I decided to enhance the interest of the contents by taking detailed notes of the speaker’s language. After five minutes’ general observation of the lecturer’s patterns I decided to home in on the way the she referred to language teachers.

These notes tell their own story:

… when I talk to classroom teachers…….

…..I don’t mean you (the people in the lecture theatre), I mean ordinary classroom teachers…….

They (teachers) seem to believe grammar rules…..

I can remember once supervising a teacher……

… it is important for teachers to realise……

….the books used by teachers to broaden their knowledge…..

A lot of teachers want grammar books to be simply arranged….

I think a lot of them are not the least bit analytical, though it is desirable that they should be….

……finding the meaning in structure does not  particularly bother  most teachers.

Basically, they don’t expect to find meaning in grammar, they want rules and exercises…..

A lot of teachers find Leech and Svartnik very difficult……

I find this portrait of the language teacher breath-takingly arrogant. This applied linguistics lecturer was referring to the central professional figure in  the language learning process, the professional to whom all others are subsidiary, be they lexicographers, language lab designers, teacher trainers, pure linguists or applied linguists.

The distancing and disrespect are manifest in utterance after utterance. What a sad (in both the classical meaning and modern teenage UK colloquial meaning) state of mind in a person concerned with helping front line professionals to do their job better.

This lecturer was one of the EFL “gatekeepers”, a person with the power to exclude people from higher qualifications.

It makes you weep.