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"Bonehead Gatekeepers, Sadists and Other EFL Academics"

By Julian Edge, Aston University, UK

Mario’s invitation, an opportunity for which I’d like to thank him.  I admire Mario’s work and I know that he likes some of mine.  Lately, however, he’s been rubbishing ELT MAs, the people who teach on them, and the people who take them , to such an extent that I’ve come to think that it deserves a response.  It seems most sensible to make that response here, in an environment where it might be least well received.  I guess I see it as another version of the regular challenge to try to speak the truth as you see it to whoever is in power where you are.

The MA world that Mario constructs for his attacks is one in which disillusioned teachers are forced to give in to the demands of the market place and buy themselves an MA meal-ticket.  What they get for their money and pains is a lot of irrelevant so-called theory, taught by cynical applied linguists who delight in using obscure language and practices in order to protect their academic status.  Rather than try to apply these theories, teachers can learn much more in a couple of weeks at Pilgrims, getting what Mario calls, ‘the practical knowledge and tools they need.’  

(Hey, if you think I’m exaggerating, you can read Mario in his own words in, for esample, ‘Fields that feed EFL methodology,’ FOLIO (details needed).  I admit that I’ve taken the accusations of my title from Mario’s unpublished comments on the subject, but I'm using them here only on the understanding that he doesn't mind, or want to dispute their accuracy.)

I have no intention of trying to defend the indefensible, so if you know an ELT MA like the one described above, then I am as much against it as you are.  But I just don’t recognise this scenario.  So, I ‘d like to tell you about a world that I do recognise, because I live in it, teaching on the MSc in TESOL at Aston University.  I’ll describe it from the distance-learning perspective, because that’s how most people experience it.

First of all, each member of our teaching team has come through a background of international ELT.  During which experience, we have found that professional questions have arisen and interests have developed that have led us back to university to do higher degrees ourselves.  It was only at Master’s level (I am embarrassed to admit) that I finally learned to escape the adolescent practice of simply following a course while moaning about it, and learned what a multitude of possibilities for thought and action are available to us if we can summon up the energy for active engagement with what such a course can offer.  For me, and I believe I speak for my colleagues, the experience of doing that degree brought about not only a transformation in my professional practice, but also a liberating broadening of horizons.  After another six years abroad, I wanted to get involved in trying to be a part of a similar emancipatory process for other people.  

The teachers who study with us are overwhelmingly committed to some similar feeling of personal and professional evolution.  I don’t dispute that we all live in a market-constrained environment, but I see our course participants as motivated by aspirations, not drearily pursuing a meal-ticket.  They are already experienced teachers, usually already qualified, and if what they wanted was another set of recipes that someone else had worked out for them, they would have had more sense than to register with a serious university to do a higher degree.

But because we don’t concentrate on offering lists of things to do, that doesn’t mean that we are into lecturing on ‘applied linguistics’.  The whole concept of an ELT Master’s course being ‘applied linguistics’ is outdated, as is the idea of us teaching ‘theories’ which our course participants have to struggle to ‘apply.’  

Our MSc program is based on the principles of action research.  The fundamental criterion used to judge a piece of action research is whether or not the investigation makes the quality of available experience better for those involved in the action.  Our teaching is concerned with showing people how they can explore their professional context in such ways that they can make a positive difference to it, while building their own skills as decision-makers and agents of their own development.  We don’t give them our theories to apply in their practice; we help them theorise their own practice.  And by ‘theorise’ here, I mean an ability to articulate your own understanding of what is going on, why it is the way it is, how it might be changed, to what extent planned changes have succeeded, why (or why not), and what has been learned from the attempt.

And in learning that ability to express yourself, we think that it’s important that you expand your repertoire of expression to include a new dialect — the dialect of professional writing.  We see this as an appropriate language-learning experience for teachers working at master’s level.  People who attack ‘academic’ writing (an easy target in our generally anti-academic culture) seem to me so often to miss the point: you don’t have to lose your roots, your respect for them, or your own personal voice.  As you extend your repertoire, you develop an ability to communicate with more people.  I’m into that.

One of Mario’s complaints is about the way that academic writers tend to weave lots of references to other writers into what they have to say, ending up with a long list of references at the end of their piece.  Well, certainly this is a characteristic that can be taken too far.  If you want to see a beauty of the genre, then check out the lead article in the Summer issue of TESOL Quarterly 1999 (32/2), where the writer finds it fruitful to refer to 120 previous publications (including eleven of his own) in order to express his ideas.  

But what is the actual purpose of the practice when it is used appropriately?  As far as I know, it is to pay respect to fellow professionals — to honour our peers in the only way that they will be honoured, because no one ever made any money out of this kind of writing.  A reference in an article does two things.  First, it pays respect to previous writers, who have made contributions on which we try to build.  Second, it pays respect to the reader, by saying that if you want to see where I got this idea from, or to pursue it yourself, this is my best shot at helping you know where to go.  The claim made by the writer is that they know enough about what has been done and written that you can trust them to give you this type of information.  The suggested relationship with the reader is that the reader is an autonomous professional who will be interested in having these avenues for individual exploration opened up for them.

What claim is being made by the ‘anti-academic’ writer in our field who doesn’t refer to other writers in their work?  Occasionally, there is the case of a truly creative and unique individual who is consistently inspirational to others.  Much more usually, however, it seems to me that we have pretty ordinary human beings like the rest of us.  But by not referring to others, they inevitably present themselves as the independent source of what they have to say.  This shows little respect for the professionals on whose work they draw, and little respect for readers who might want to do their own thinking and interpretation of significance and relevance.  I find this patronising, as if someone is saying to their readers,

‘Don’t worry your practical little heads about where these ideas come from.  You can just keep coming back to me and I’ll keep on telling you what to do.’ 

Another tactic is to cite references from outside ELT in order to present the writer as the intellectual hunter-gatherer of our tribe, while ignoring more accessible sources which have already related these ideas to ELT.  

For as long as these variants on the theme, ‘I am your leader. Follow me’  find a willing audience, I’m sure the approach will prosper.  It is delightfully simple, after all, isn’t it?  And aren’t we all really looking for a strong leader?  

Well, . . . . actually, . . . . no.

I’ve been involved in ELT/TESOL/TEFL in all sorts of roles since 1969 and, in a sense, it’s always been the same buzz: the thrill of seeing people raise their own levels of awareness and ability to new heights, so as to enable themselves to keep moving in the directions that they choose — always acknowledging that all our choices are constrained in one way or another — and seeking to do the same for myself.  That’s very much the buzz I get out of the teaching I do now.  And that’s what I know about ELT Master’s courses from the one that I know best.  If you want to find out more about it, visit us at:  http://www.les.aston.ac.uk/lsu/

Finally, and most of all, I’d like to finish with a plea for us all to respect good-hearted contributions to this broad field that we work in, wherever they come from.  We all have different needs to fill and different contributions to make.  I’m not interested in knocking a style of teacher training because it meets different needs than the aspirations that my own work tries to respond to (even if I am, to my own disappointment, still all too easy to provoke).  I’m pleased that we have the variety of responses available that we do.  Let’s give honour where it’s due, do what we can to make sure that people signing up for courses have thought carefully about what they want, and be sure that they are getting good information about what they are likely to receive.

My thanks to Steve Mann for giving me feedback on an earlier version of this piece.  And good luck to us all.