May 3, 2008
SPEECHES
CONTENTS
Opening Speech (Rene Karam)
From Action to Interaction: The Evolving Role of the Language Teacher (Ann Thomas)
By
Rene Karam
Excellency, Reverends, and Colleagues,
On behalf of ATEL executive committee, it’s my utmost
pleasure to welcome you today to ATEL 11th annual conference –
Action and Interaction. This annual gathering that English language teachers
and the ELT community in
To display and discuss their latest research papers, to have
a look at the latest publications, and here between brackets we thank Pearson
education and Librairie du Liban for their strong support to education to make such
events possible, to kiss and hug one another and say well I haven’t seen you
since last conference. In brief we welcome you to ATEL non political and non
confessional platform for Linking, Developing and Supporting ELT Professionals
nationwide. A big thank you goes to all the personnel who volunteered to make
this event possible.
Excellency, Reverends and Colleagues,
Today we have among us a person whom we called on our
invitation card an honor guest speaker. For the old timers there is no need to
tell you why but for the new generation of teachers it’s important to know why.
A person to whom we owe our presence
here. A person who arrived in this country in 1994 with shiny eyes full
of energy, good will and basic determination. A person I have known for
14 years, who would move within strategic brackets. A person
who taught me how to make things happen. When she arrived in 1994 she
offered me a pin representing the union Jack and the Lebanese flag, a pin that
I carry ever since.
She believed in what we do today, in linking people and
cultural exchange. Today, which happens to be 14 years later, I’m exchanging
roles and I invite her up here to tell her I’ve been faithful in that belief
and offer her the same pin and to tell here on behalf of those we represent
that we still believe in what she set here. It’s an opportunity to say thank
you Ann Malamah Thomas. We love you.
The Evolving Role of the Language Teacher
By
Ann Malamah-Thomas
Changing Perceptions of Language
I have been closely involved with language, in one
way or another, for most of my life. I have taught my own native language, English,
and learned other people’s languages, French, German, Turkish.
I have trained language teachers, written language textbooks, managed English
language teaching operations, and helped overseas governments with their
language policies. I have studied linguistics, pure, applied, psycho- and
socio-, and attended and given papers at language-oriented conferences like
this in many parts of the world. And what I would like to look at first today
is the way in which, over these many years of language-related experiences, I
have seen the perceptions of language, the viewpoints on what language
essentially is, undergo radical change.
Let’s start with my schooldays and typical
experiences of language learning at that time. For my school exams I did two
live languages, French and German, and one dead, Latin. To all intents and
purposes, these were taught in exactly the same way: as tables and lists and
structural patterns to be learned and then strung together in the correct way
to form sentences. Nouns were conjugated, verbs were declined, subjunctives
were mastered, exceptions to rules were memorised. I
could produce beautifully formed sentences, write them to show my endings in
perfect grammatical agreement, enunciate them with a vowel quality to die for,
translate them with dexterity from one language to another. But put me in front
of the “assistant” ( and this was the one thing
differentiating the live language classroom from the dead latin
one, that each year produced a fresh young European native-speaker in our
school to help them with their English and us with our French or German), put
me face to face with the “assistant” and my beautiful sentences would falter
and dry up after an exchange or two. Put me in
For in those days, language was seen as a mechanistic
system, a manufactured product of rigid structures and prescribed patterns, a
means of acting upon the world with well-honed grammatically accurate
utterances. This theme continued into my university days in the sixties. I
studied English language and linguistics at Edinburgh, at a time when the most
exciting theory of the day was Chomsky’s (yes, that Chomsky, known more for his
politics now than for his linguistics) generative grammar, essentially a
proposition that language arises from some great sentence-generating machine
operating deep in the brain, and obeying the principles of a universal grammar
common to all humanity. Most other academic theories of linguistics prevalent
at the time shared this approach to language as a system, a structured series
of patterns, a mechanism for action..
But this mechanistic viewpoint was changing. The
emphasis was slowly moving, to use Saussure’s terms, from langue -
language as an abstract system, to parole - language in particular use. The
seventies saw the rise in linguistics of Hymes’
influential “speech event” theory. This essentially posited that no utterance
takes place in a vacuum, but that the participants, both speaker and hearer;
the setting, as regards place and time; the purpose; the message content; and
the message form, all have to be taken into consideration as important factors
in any real-life contextualised use of language. The
focus shifts from syntactics and semantics, to paradigmatics - language in use in communicative,
interactive, uniquely individual situations. The priority given to the single
utterance as the basic linguistic unit meriting study, gives way to a new
emphasis on discourse, on more sustained, lengthier chunks of communication.
And of course, the language teaching world followed
on. Grammars and vocabularies were replaced by textbooks extolling the virtues
of the functional approach, of situational language learning, of language as
communication. My earlier years in the British Council, when I specialised on the English language teaching side, were
very much taken up with this revolution, enthusiastically exhorting teachers to adopt role-play,
group-work and pair-work, as if no-one could possibly ever learn a language
without exposure to such methods. When I went back to university in the
mid-eighties to do a masters in TESOL at
For the next fifteen to twenty years, my working life
played out more on the management side of the British Council, and I was only
peripherally engaged with the pedagogic content of its language teaching
operations. But I was involved enough to know that the communicative model
still held sway for much of that time. The language teaching field was not
devoid of new ideas. Learning strategies began to occupy as important a place
as teaching techniques. Experiments were carried out in the integration of
language and content, to enable the learning of language through other subject
content. Voices were raised in support of an eclectic, pick’n’mix
approach to teaching methods. And the more eccentric fringes of suggestopedia, sleep learning , counselling language learning and the like, were always
good for an entertaining and somewhat different conference paper. The dominant
model, however, remained that of language as a means of communication, as a
useful tool in the everyday business of human interaction.
But all this time another subtle shift in viewpoint
has been taking place. It has manifested in concerns with the cultural appropriacy of methods and materials. It is revealed in the
debate on the place and role of culture in language teaching. It is behind the
emerging interest in dialogic methods, whereby teacher and learners engage in a
collaborative discourse in order to achieve their purpose, all meanings and
decisions being shared ones in the dialogic classroom. These are all evidence
of the move towards a new focus on language and one which any sociologists
amongst you will immediately recognise.
One of the basic tenets of modern sociology is that
“language creates discourse, and discourse creates society“. I learned this
when I went back to university in my retirement to do a masters in sociology
prior to starting work on a doctorate, and
this new take on language was, for me, a life-long linguist, a
revelation. Language as the glue that holds society together.
Language as the medium whereby we co-create our social
reality. Language as the means we use to collaboratively invent our
ongoing social and national narratives telling the world, and ourselves, who we
think we are. This perception of language moves it from the personal
interaction sphere to the universal, from the mundane to the mystical. This is
language as a creator of realities, a builder of worlds, not just in individual
terms, but on a global level. And this is the twenty first century model of
language, not so much a tool as a creative power, that
I feel we are dealing with for the foreseeable future.
Changing Contexts
These shifting perceptions of language, these
changing focuses, are, of course, completely in accord with the changing nature
of the societies whence these viewpoints arose. I came into my bit of the
western world at the tail-end of the industrial age. The post-second world war
society I grew up in saw machines as the answer to all of life’s problems.
Their manufacture and export was the basis of the economy and provided
necessary jobs. The aeroplane promised a worldwide
access and mobility never before deemed possible. Cars, washing machines,
televisions and vacuum cleaners were objects of desire and aspiration for every
family. Computers beckoned us to a future where the most complex mental
calculations could be carried out at the flick of a switch or press of a
button. Indeed, the vision of a future where ever-improved machines would
perform all the tasks, at home and in the workplace, and citizens would
subsequently have more leisure time on their hands than they knew what to do with,
was a proposition serious enough to warrant lengthy debate in the national
media.
This mania for machines was a natural outcome of the
mechanistic world view, part and parcel of the Age of Reason and of Science
that started with the so-called “Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century. From
the work of Descartes and of
But as the western world’s industrial age gave way to
the beginnings of a post-industrial society in the sixties and seventies, new
influences came to bear on general thinking and attitudes. The rise of
consumerism placed a new emphasis on the individual and on individual choice.
In the consumer society, people achieve identity not through what they do or
what they produce, but rather through what they acquire, what they consume,
what they choose. You are what you have, not what you do. Personal happiness
and social status are seen as directly derived from the consumption of goods
and services. The industrial era’s workers become the post-industrial era’s
consumers; home life and leisure pursuits are all centred
around consumption of one kind or another. The
meta-value of consumer society is choice. The whole concept of consumerism is based
on the premiss that the consumer, the customer, is
king, exerting his free and autonomous choice in any act of consumption that he
undertakes, from choosing a meal in a restaurant to selecting a hospital and
doctor for his heart surgery. And so we have the rise of
individualism, or at least the illusion of it, underpinning consumer society.
And this chimes so well with the communicative
approach to language which has been the dominant model of the last few
decades For in this approach we see the
language user, a unique individual interacting with others in a unique one-off communication situation,
selecting from the various linguistic means at his disposal what language is
appropriate for him in that situation, exercising his choice as he sees fit.
Previously, language had entailed the systematic production of utterances, that could be deemed right or wrong. Now,
language involved a linguistic pick’n’mix operation
that might be judged on its communication merits as effective or ineffective,
appropriate or inappropriate. Much the same process as buying
the right outfit to go for a specific job interview, or purchasing a new car to
fit in with your particular lifestyle requirements.
And what of current trends, of this more recent focus
on language as it works to create social reality? What movements in
contemporary western society might be responsible for this particular shift in
viewpoint? I would hazard a guess that globalisation
is up there with the front-runners. For a globalised world is one in which
we can no longer take our own society and its values for granted. A world in which we are constantly challenged
by the presence of different social values in our communities and on the
television screens in our living rooms. A world where
migration renders all nations increasingly heterogeneous and multicultural.
A world in which the internet permits the formation of new social groupings
based on common interest or opinion across the more traditional boundaries of
nationality, ethnicity, religion, age or gender. This brave new world is one
where the individual is going to have to navigate numerous different social
groups in the course of
an increasingly fragmented and episodic lifetime. And, because of
this, the spotlight is on society, the emphasis is on the group, more than in
any previous period of history.
In addition to this essential characteristic of the globalised
post-modern world, there seems to be an increasing disenchantment with
rationalism .Witness the growing popularity of alternative medicine, the
burgeoning numbers of new age-ers, the
oversubscription to university courses in subjects like media studies at the
expense of physics and mathematics departments. And we also have the beginnings
of a backlash against consumerism .People are discovering that a new car or a
new kitchen won’t necessarily make you happy; that choice is meaningless unless
there is a significant range of difference to choose from; and, with the recent
bursting of the house price bubble, that lifelong debt incurred for an
overpriced pile of bricks and mortar is not a path to happiness or status, but
rather a distinctly modern form of slavery. Along with this theme of the
rejection of materialism goes the desire for a more spiritual, though not
perhaps always traditionally religious, dimension to life, the basic human need
for a bit of mysticism. Put all of these trends together, and I think we can
see where this newer, more magical perception of language, as an empowering force which enables us to
collaborate on the construction of our social reality, comes from. Language
creates discourse, and discourse creates society. We invent our story with and
through language, and then we live that story. In the beginning, as a certain
book says, was the word.
The Role of the Language Teacher
Finally, I want to look at the way in which the role
of the language teacher has had to adapt to these shifting perceptions of
language, to these changes of focus on what exactly it is that we are teaching
in the language classroom. Back in my student days, when the mechanistic, structural
view of language prevailed, the language teacher had to be, first and foremost,
a linguist. A wide vocabulary, a perfect grasp of grammar, and a near
native-speaker pronunciation, were prerequisites of the job. In the classroom,
supported by dictionaries, grammars, and the odd tape-recording, the teacher
was the main actor, taking centre-stage to explain, expound, translate,
illustrate and exemplify. A lesson plan pre-set the purpose of every hour in
the classroom, and a syllabus or textbook laid out the teaching points to be
covered well in advance. In short, the approach to teaching the language was
every bit as mechanical, systematic and structured as the approach to the
language being taught.
Move on a few years to the communicative approach to
language, the focus on
language in use, language as used for real-life interaction
between individuals in specific contexts. The language teacher still has to be
a linguist, though perhaps the standards aimed at are not so rigid. Accurate grammar and perfectly polished
pronunciation now come secondary to communicative competence, the ability to
achieve the intended communicative effect and get the message across. With this
model, the language teacher has to become a bit of a psychologist, with
sufficient understanding of people, their behaviour
and the way their minds work, to successfully develop the communicative skills
of his students. In addition, any focus on individual learning strategies, any
attempts to integrate language with other content learning, any offshoots from
the mainstream such as suggestopedia, all require a
psychological appreciation of the workings of the individual human mind. In the
classroom, there is a looser, less structured approach. Teaching materials and
textbooks are less prescriptive, focussing on the
choices to be made in real-life language use rather than on linguistic
structures. Mock communicative interactions are set up for the students through
role-plays, pair-work and group-work exercises. But although the teacher is no
longer always centre stage, and is seen as an enabler of individual student
progress rather than as a primary provider of linguistic information, he is
still the main actor. He still calls the shots, deciding what is to be taught,
when, and how, acting to provide life-like interaction in the language
classroom.
And lastly, this most recent perception of language
as the medium whereby we collaboratively create our reality, as the glue which
holds our societies together, what implications might this hold for the
language teacher? Well, he still has to be a linguist, and a psychologist, for
all the reasons I have just outlined. Only now I think he has to become a bit
of a sociologist too, in order to deal with the most urgent concerns which this
view of language brings to his classroom tasks. For example, whose English is
going to be taught, which group’s discourse takes priority? American, British,
Internet English? And which sub-groups of these wide-ranging categories? As a
non-native teacher, can you know enough about the society in question in these
fast-changing times in order to teach or learn its language, and, if not, what
resources are available for reliable information ? How, as a language teacher,
can you present, explain, help your students discover and understand what makes
another society tick?
These are exciting and relevant challenges, and
meeting them will require a greater deal of creativity than the teaching
materials and methods in prevalent use over the past half century can provide.
In addition, they will require a classroom where there is genuine collaborative
interaction between students and teacher, where meanings are arrived at through
authentic dialogue and where decisions are shared. A classroom where the
learning reality is co-created by the participants in the teaching/learning
experience in the same way as social reality is co-created by the
language-users in any society.
So, to summarise, we can
see that the role of the language teacher over time has moved from action to
genuine interaction, against a background of shifting viewpoints on the nature
of language, which are themselves dependent on
changing social values. Linguist, psychologist, sociologist.
And, if you take that last one on, even more can be involved in the language
teacher‘s role. For to engage your students with the culture of the language
you are teaching, to whet their interest in another society, to foster a
tolerance and understanding of its values and a respect for its people, to
prepare your students in this way for open, positive and good-willed
participation in “the great conversation of mankind”, that is the role of the
diplomat and the peace-keeper. Linguist, psychologist,
sociologist, diplomat, peacekeeper. A tall order for
any job perhaps. But then you are not just any language teachers. You
are language teachers from