http://www.erfoundation.org/erf/

http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/

Keep in mind that these ‘graded readers’ (I’ve always thought calling a book a ‘reader’ was total butchery of English, by the way…) are all part of the commercial TEFL wheel that sells not only to students but to us teachers.

Here’s an experiment – go on ESLcafe and decry ‘readers’, textbooks or any other commercial materials and see the responses you get.

What makes you a good teacher in mainstream TEFL is not your ability to instil into students the ability to use English fluently, but your obedience of the global commercial giants and their slightly eccentric ideas about learning. Because of course you aren’t a proper teacher if you’re not using the latest edition of Headway, are you?

Actually I don’t really see the point of rigorously limiting a student’s exposure to real language except at beginner level. It entirely defeats the purpose of what we’re supposed to be doing. With Russian we were thrown in the deep end as soon as we had (or were supposed to have) mastered the basics of grammar. It was a shock to the system, but…

1. We immediately saw with our own boggling eyes just what was going to be expected of us in terms of reading comprehension and we knew more-or-less exactly what we needed to achieve.

2. We took a paragraph at a time (per lesson) – most often a short summary taken from a news site, and the teacher patiently took us through it word-by-word. Each word was a mini-adventure of nuances, anecdotes and fond memories of sabbaticals in the Motherland. We divided and conquered and came out feeling smarter than if we had been reading the Famous Five with all the simple words replaced with even simpler words.

3. I don’t believe in giving students an easy time. Global ELT methodology seems to be geared towards a slow and gradual climb to somewhere tantalisingly near to the top, and then a switch to continual ‘practice’ to keep you there in the false belief that this ‘practice’ of what you already know actually makes you smarter, or a switch to some weird conceptual pseudo-learning stuff.

4. Can I justify applying the standard ELT wisdoms to some poor soul who has been given six months to go from (in our terms) somewhere between false beginner and early elementary up to decent pre-int or face the bread line? I doubt he would have the patience.

5. By his mid-teens a decent (Russian) student who is inquisitive and digs around in English texts in his own time has cottoned on to the fact that words don’t only have one meaning and is ready to learn that drawing the curtains doesn’t necessarily mean taking out a pencil and paper.

6. Russian adults who learned Soviet English are often appalled and visibly upset (throbbing veins on foreheads are typical) when they discover that even though a word is familiar, those pesky capitalists have gone and changed the meaning while nobody was looking. A bit like the goblins in Labyrinth moving the walls around.

7. I’ve done lessons for the analytic adult types based entirely on a plain old list of common words in English. Not so much with a view to learning all the possible meanings of daft words like ‘set’, but more to familiarise with the concept of alternate meanings and to prepare for real-world lexical usage and misusage. Nobody went to sleep, just in case any jaded ESLcafe flies are snooping and want to give me a hard time for not being a proper English teacher

I *think* this helps people to prepare for real-world dialect and slang. I’ve never proven this conclusively but I’ve had good reports. One problem is that if you don’t make it clear to students that alternate meanings are everywhere, then you aren’t preparing them for slang or dialects, or just ordinary alternate meanings or even plain old sloppy use of English.

Teaching slang and dialects is pointless, especially if you don’t know them yourself and have to make deductions on the spot when you hear it in order to understand. Better to learn how to work out meaning from context. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, etc.

If a Russian student has learned that ‘draw’ definitely means to make a picture of something, there is a good chance he come back from his 2-week homestay in Yorkshire and tell all his mates that the British are crazy and don’t know their own language and keep asking him to make pictures of curtains when the sun is shining or when the wind’s blowing in. Which is daft because each time either the light’s wrong or the bloody things keep moving.

8. I always teach ‘thingmy’ and its friends. Time after time I see students huddle together, furrowing brows over a familiar word that seems to have strayed into a sentence where it doesn’t belong. I almost get the impression that, given David Bowie and a bouncing crystal orb, they would go in there with a 12-gauge and order the trespasser to go back where it belongs and stop confusing them.

For some people it works – using the draw curtains example, I can explain to students that if someone says, “Masha, can you fgrjgjrgjiu the curtains,” then they can make some simple conclusions about what fgrjgjrgjiu means:

a) curtains are largely binary, i.e. they are mostly open or closed.

b) ergo if they are closed, then fgrjgjrgjiu most probably means “open”

c) ergo if they are open, then fgrjgjrgjiu most probably means “close”

Of course you can only go so far with simple deduction and it might one day get you in trouble, but if you don’t use it at all you are in for a hard time. For example, fgrjgjrgjiu might mean something like “dismantle” or “set fire to”, although highly unlikely. I should add that most of my students have been programmers and mathematician-types, but this also works fine for bored housewives and accountants.

The point of this rant?

Limiting exposure to real language (as happens if you stick to textbooks and rewritten original texts) results in students having a rigid template set for understanding English. Anything that isn’t an exact fit for an already-learned template is either wrong or just something they can’t and won’t understand until they are taught how to.

It’s a pet hate of mine and I really resent the fact that ELT always seems to confuse practice with learning. You don’t become an Olympic champion high-jumper if you don’t keep raising the bar – you just become a really well-trained low-jumper.