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The Teaching of English in Difficult Circumstances: Who Needs a Health Farm When They’re Starving?

By Alan Maley
amaley@globalnet.co.uk

A cursory glance at current periodicals and journals in the field of ELT (or TESL, if you prefer) suggests a thriving community of forward-looking professionals carving out new frontiers in this exciting domain. From a global viewpoint this may be far from the truth.

Let us take as an example a rural secondary school in Country X, 200 kilometres from the capital.  In the Form 4 class, 60 students are crammed into a classroom which would comfortably accommodate 30.  They range in age from 14 to 20. Most of the students have walked at least 5 miles to get to school by 8 am.  Before that, they had helped with household chores, including collecting firewood, bringing water from the village standpipe and caring for younger siblings.  At 9 am the temperature is already 30 degrees centigrade. 

The teacher comes to school on his bicycle, after ensuring that his wife¼s market stall is set up for the day.  His own salary, when it is paid, is insufficient to support his wife and their two young children.  He has a 2 year teacher’s certificate from a rural training college.  His competence in the English language is rudimentary.  He conducts the English class mainly in his mother tongue, which all the students share.

The textbook the students are using is a pirated edition, dog-eared with use.  In this textbook (to spare embarrassment I will not name it) a cast of white characters enact situations in which they shop in malls and supermarkets, watch TV and videos, arrange and go to teenage parties, discuss popular music and movies, go on holidays and so on. 

The teacher has a hard time putting this across, not least because he himself has never experienced anything like the antics engaged in by the characters in the book ~ even when he understands what they are.  The students, when they understand at all, are bemused, not least because they have no idea why they are studying this strange language in the first place. They know that they must pass the examination though. Outside school they rarely encounter this language, except in advertisements for products they cannot afford to buy, or in pop songs, which they learn to mimic without understanding.  One or two of them have relatives who have emigrated to the USA, Canada or Australia.  These mythical people rarely return to visit their home village.

The walls of the classroom are dirty and the plaster is peeling off them. The blackboard is pitted and grey with use.  There is currently no chalk. There are ceiling fans but no electricity to run them.  By 10 am the temperature has risen to 40 degrees centigrade.  In the textbook, the young people are dancing at the barbecue. In the classroom, eyelids are already heavy with fatigue.  Most of the students have not yet eaten today. A caricature?  Sadly not.  With variations, what I have described is the situation in a majority of the world’s English classrooms.  It is far from the ideal world of pedagogical excitement and innovatory teaching we would like to think we inhabit.

This is not, of course, an original observation.  Michael West’s book, The Teaching of English in Difficult Circumstances (Longman 1960), now sadly out of print, was an early attempt to address the facts described above. There have been other cries of distress, including those of Gerry Abbott (The World for Sick Proper in the ELTJ) and most recently Paolo Toledo’s article in IATEFL Issues A Modest Proposal Revisited:  Teaching English in the Real World.  But on the whole, we tend, as a profession, to look the other way.  Excitement does not lie in this direction!

On the more theoretical level, scholars such as Adrian Holliday (1994) have drawn attention to the mismatch between methodologies devised in so called BANA contexts, which are then misapplied in quite different TESEP contexts. (For those readers not familiar with these acronyms, they represent British, Australasian and North American, and Tertiary, Secondary and Primary, respectively.  BANA contexts presuppose small classes of usually multilingual groups of students, taught by highly trained native speaker teachers, in well resourced and pleasant environments, and in an intensive mode.  Teachers are relatively free to plan their own curriculum and to teach it as they prefer.  TESEP contexts are constrained by their institutional setting, so that teachers are highly influenced by the syllabus, the textbook, the examination.  Classes are usually large, monolingual and taught be a relatively untrained teacher who shares the students’ mother tongue and whose command of English is uncertain.  They are often poorly resourced, and classes take place only a few times a week.)

Some critical linguists such as Phillipson (1992) and Pennycook   (1994) have castigated the imperialistic tendencies of English as it spreads its tentacles globally, strangling local cultures and languages along the way. These are important issues, but they do little to address the concrete problems of teaching English in difficult circumstances.  Our teacher in country X referred to above would not thank Robert Phillipson, comfortably ensconced in Denmark, for suggesting that he is an instrument of linguistic imperialism, and would therefore be better employed in sweeping the streets.

So, is the situation in contexts such as I have described hopeless?  Not entirely I think, though it is clear that there are no easy solutions.  If there were, there would be no problem!  Sadly, it is a characteristic of ministries of education (among others) to seek simple solutions to complex problems.  Paraphrasing (I think) Einstein, For every complex problem, there is a solution which is clear and simple ~ and just plain wrong! I recall working in Ghana in the 1960’s, when the government decided that educational television would be the answer, overlooking the inconvenient fact that there were no suitable programmes available, and no electricity supply in many of the places to be supplied with free TV sets.

I think it must also be clear that the answers are not to be found in Applied Linguistics.  Cook and Seidlhofer (1995 p8) confidently assert that, language teaching is an area in need of principles to mediate between linguistic theory and pedaogical (or other) practices, and it must look to applied linguistics to provide them. In situations like those I have described above, this has a somewhat hollow ring.  It expresses, of course, a typically BANA notion.

The answers, which are always bound to be partial, are more likely to be found in the commitment of a few dedicated individuals in highly particular local settings.  The work of David Horsburgh comes to mind.  His school at Neel Bagh, set up in an impoverished rural area in Andhra Pradesh, catered to children of all ages.  He taught not just English, but useful skills such as gardening, motor mechanics, carpentry and needlework ~ to both girls and boys alike.  His was an educational experiment in the broadest sense, and deeply rooted in the local community.  His death in 1980 was a tragedy for rural education in this part of India.  Eleanor Watt’s work in Tamil Nadu was likewise focussed on educational (rather than purely language teaching/linguistic) principles in a very local setting.

Michael West’s solution, arising from his work in West Bengal in the 1930’s, was extensive reading.  Indeed, he is the father of the graded reader, and of all the programmes since then.  Unhappily, there are very few instances of successful programmes of extensive reading.  In Malaysia, for instance, the programmes have tended to fall into disuse and to be eroded by the imposition of exercise materials and examinations, which run counter to the very idea of extensive reading.   Francis Mangubhai’s book boxes experiment in Fiji is one of the few success stories.  There seems no doubt however that extensive reading is the single most effective way of learning a new language. (Day and Bamford 1998)  Perhaps part of the solution is to encourage local writers to write culturally accessible material at an intuitively appropriate level for students, and to fund wide distribution of such titles to schools.  Teacher orientation and support is however an essential element in any such programme.

My own experience in Ghana in the 1960’s, working to train teachers in largely rural areas, also confirms my belief that anything which is to work has to involve the whole educational experience rather than a narrow, ELT approach.  We were able to focus on the students as the main content area: their lives outside school, their interests, their problems, and to build around this activities which were both educational and which fostered language development.  Economic deprivation does not mean that the environment has nothing in it, or that the students are empty shells.  Once we began projects, a whole world of interest opened up.  In one such project, students had to find natural sources of pigments to produce colours for use in posters and pictures in class.  In another, they had to research a local deer hunting festival and to produce collages using pieces of cloth salvaged from the floor in seamstresses’ shops and stuck on to old newspapers.  In yet another, they wrote plays for puppets, then produced the finger puppets themselves, using newspaper and cassava paste and the local pigments. They then produced their plays.

I will cite two further instances: Liz Inman, a VSO teacher in China, found that the textbooks she was working with were culturally and pedagogically unsuitable for her teaching context, so devised her own, working with a Chinese colleague.  The published result is a compromise between traditional and communicative approaches, but is effective.  Her article in the Guardian Weekly of 17~23 May 2001 (Making the
Best of East and West) gives further details.

Jill and Charles Hadfield, having worked in some truly difficult circumstances, including Tibet and Madagscar, concluded that something needed to be done to offer at least some appropriate help to teachers in the sorts of situation described earlier in this article. The result is a series of affordable books in the Oxford Basics series.   These will hardly take the fortresses of academe by storm, but they are already proving their worth in places as far apart as eastern Europe and Laos.

To summarise:

1. A majority of the contexts in which English is being taught in the world are far removed from the ideal situations taken for granted in much of our professional debates.

2. The Applied Linguistics discourse community would seem to have little to offer by way of possible solutions.

3. Neither, it has to be said, do many of our more innovatory methodological ideas.

4. What is more likely to be workable are locally focussed efforts of a more broadly educational, rather than narrowly linguistic, nature.

5. Such efforts cannot be expected to provide blanket solutions.  At best, they offer some hope to those who are currently without it.

6. Resource poor environments can be made to work.  But they can work better with more resources. The current enthusiasm among some BANA professionals for vows of abstinence aired in the pages of IATEFL Issues and elsewhere, are oddly ironical.  Hence my title!

Alan Maley is Professor and Dean of the Institute for English Language Education at Assumption University, Bangkok.  He runs an MA in ELT which focusses on the appropriate training of teachers of English in the southeast Asia region.  Students include teachers from Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines and China, as well as from Japan and Korea, many of whom face teaching in ‘difficult circumstances’.

References:

Gerry Abbot. The World for Sick Proper. ELTJ 

Guy Cook and Barbara Seidlhofer. (eds) 1995. Principles and Practice in Applied linguistics.  OUP.

Richard Day and Julian Bamford.  1998. Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom.  CUP.

Jillian and Charles Hadfield.  The Oxford Basics.  OUP.

Adrian Holliday.  1994.  Appropriate Pedagogy.  CUP.

Alistair Pennycook.  1994. The Cultural Politics of English as a Foreign Language.  Longman

Robert Phillipson.  1992.  Linguistic Imperialism.  OUP.

Paolo Toledo.  A Modest Proposal Revisited: Teaching in the Real World.  In IATEFL Issues. No. 159  Feb/March 2001.

Michael West. 1960.  Teaching English in Difficult Circumstances.  Longman.